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mysteria

Wouldn't it be possible to have two tiers of servers here? Like have one that's accessible to everyone with a possibly increased risk of cheating and one restricted to Windows users.

I remember in the old days some games had optional anticheat and there were servers with and without it.

Re:Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux on Sunday August 30, 2026 @12:00PM (#49499865)
I'm not the OP but I pretty much run a Windows VM solely for iTunes backups and to run a few Windows-only apps. I don't trust Windows much and that VM is firewalled off from the rest of the network.

I use Linux exclusively for my computers but for my phone I have no choice but to use either Apple or Android because of banking/government/etc. apps that don't work on custom roms. Yes there are workarounds but I've gotten app breakage or account suspensions for that. And yeah I trust Apple more than Google in terms of privacy so I end up choosing the lesser of two evils.

Otherwise I self-host everything and stay off the cloud whenever possible.

Re:Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @03:18PM (#48822375)
Are you talking about this post [1]? I don't see anything in the complaint alluding to a VPN license (for all we know he could have used an open source OpenVPN or Wireguard client to connect to the VPN), and the police seem to have gotten everything directly from Microsoft rather than from the VPN provider.

While this is Google and not Microsoft it's worth noting that Chrome literally has a telemetry option which sends URLs to Google [2].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818984

2. https://ibb.co/k61WKSSB

Re:Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @10:32AM (#48818441)
From reading the official criminal complaint [1] it looks like Microsoft literally logs all web requests along with the GDID and sends it over as "telemetry". It basically associates the URL, the client's IP, and the GDID together.

Or I suppose it's possible that it only sends the domain and not the full URL, but that's enough for the police to go to the hoster and demand logs containing the full URL for said IP.

1. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/media/1450651/dl?inline

Re:New satellites from years to weeks, days, or hours on Friday June 26, 2026 @12:43PM (#48688750)
They published an official press release on this on the 22nd.

https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/victus-haze/

From my experience it works fine if it's one class that's doing it. If multiple classes are doing it then like you said it's literally a couple extra hours a day watching lectures and most students end up skipping them, forcing the instructor to end up teaching during class time anyways.
Personally I have a lot of DDR3 RDIMMS laying around that I got for cheap/free and have thought of getting a used workstation to put them in (4 channels of DDR3 will still net you ~60 GB/s of bandwidth) but the only Xeons that support it are Sandy/Ivy. Everything Haswell and newer with AVX2 and rebar/etc. use DDR4.
Considering the unethical practices done in the name of money I wouldn't be surprised that some companies would make use of slaves if it was legal to do so.
Re:They See Your Photos on Monday April 13, 2026 @09:57AM (#47752061)
> If you knew which bike model I was googling yesterday, almost all of these guesses might have been more accurate.

I think this sort of guessing is intended to be combined with additional data the marketers already have, like purchase history, location, social media posts, and so on. Basically the VLM output is treated as another data point rather than the sole source, or the existing data could be fed into the model's prompt before reading the image.

IMO they should sell appropriately priced licenses that allow the use of more VMs. Make the licenses expensive enough so that it doesn't eat into hardware sales, or explicitly prohibit VDI/virtual seats in the license agreement.

Currently services like Github Actions painfully and inefficiently rack thousands of Mac Minis and run 2 VMs on each to stay within the limits. They probably wouldn't mind paying a fee to run more VMs on Mac Studios instead.

Another +1 for this one as this is what turns this tool from a toy environment with basic sketches into something that's actually useful for larger projects with a full toolchain, libraries, and so forth.
I've had reasonably good results digitizing VHSC home video with a composite to HDMI converter/scaler followed by an HDMI capture card. The converter does TBC and deinterlacing and I find the resulting footage to be much more clear and stable than what you get out of a regular composite to USB dongle.

If you have an AVR with composite or s-video in and HDMI out that could also work in place of the converter. In either case you'll downscale the footage back to 640x480 before encoding.

You have to monitor the process start to finish if the tapes are bad, there's nothing around that.

For MiniDV and Digital8 you should straight up get a lossless copy using a cheap Firewire card.

Re:Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi on Thursday March 26, 2026 @10:14PM (#47538397)
I'd heard a few horror stories about people doing it on Windows and Mac, with bad compatibility and annoying software. With dvgrab it's super simple.
Re:Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi on Thursday March 26, 2026 @05:51PM (#47536270)
I archived all my MiniDV tapes using a cheap firewire card and dvgrab on Linux, it can be set to automatically split noncontinous clips into different files for easy viewing. It's very straightforward to use and can be done unattended.
This isn't really what you're asking for but is virtualization possible on the client side? Either through direct virtualization on the client PC or using VDI. Basically IE and Windows with admin rights would run in a restricted VM devoted solely to that app, with the VM restricted from network access outside of connections to the legacy server and any management/etc. requirements.

This would incur an added cost in licensing and possibly hardware but this would also be the cleanest way to do it. Also on the security side this would be safer than escalating a legacy ActiveX app on the secure client.

Having multiple instances of IE running remotely on Windows Server and then served using Citrix or something similar should work as well if you don't need full VM isolation between clients, and I've seen this used in real companies with legacy apps that can't run on the standard employee machines. Again though this has a licensing cost.

Re:Study: 'Security Fatigue' May Weaken Digital Defenses on Monday March 23, 2026 @11:40AM (#47491034)
I remember a case where a company decided to assign employees random 16 character passwords with symbols and rotated them every 90 days or so. They were unchangeable and the idea was that everyone would be forced to use a secure password that changed regularly.

You can probably guess what happened, and that was that no one remembered their passwords and people wrote it down on their pads or sticky notes instead.

I mean the writing's on the wall, they just don't want to do it all at once to avoid backlash. I wouldn't be surprised if they kill sideloading completely several years down the road.
DCLS actually makes sense for this scenario as the fault tolerance gained from having three processors isn't needed here. The system can halt when there's a mismatch, it doesn't have to perform a vote and continue running if 2 of 3 are getting the same result.

Also I just thought of this but it should be possible to design a chip where the second processor runs a couple cycles behind the first one, with all the inputs and outputs stashed in fifos. This would basically make any power glitches affect the two CPUs differently and any disrepancies would be easily detected.

Thanks for this writeup as I haven't had time to review the video yet :)

So, the only way to manipulate it is to actually screw with the internals of the CPU itself by "glitching", meaning tampering with the power supply to the chip at exactly the right moment to corrupt the state of the internal electronics. Glitching a processor has semi-random effects and you don't control what happens exactly, but sometimes you can get lucky and the CPU will skip instructions. By creating a device that reboots the machine over and over again, glitching each time, you can wait until one of those attempts gets lucky and makes a tiny mistake in the execution process.

Considering that the PSP is a small ARM processor that presumably takes up little die space, would it make sense for it to them employ TMR with three units in lockstep to detect these glitches? I really doubt that power supply tampering would cause the exact same effect in all three processors (especially if there are differences in their power circuitry to make this harder) and any disrepancies would be caught by the system.

Piezo mics are pretty cheap, and if wired up to the microphone input of a computer or phone you could probably get better accuracy as well if you used the same signal processing techniques.

Seems some people have done this already with a PC app: https://timeandtidewatches.com/how-to-make-your-own-timegrap...

The astounding thing about Goliath wasn’t that is was a huge leap in performance, it was that the damn thing functioned at all. To this day, I still don’t understand why this didn’t raise more eyebrows.

This wasn't something I really dug into in great detail but I remember my surprise back then at how all those merged models and those "expanded" models like Goliath still generated coherent output. IMO those were more community models made by small creators for entertainment rather than work, and only really of interest to the local LLM groups on Reddit, 4chan, and Discord. People might briefly discuss it on the board and say "that's cool" but papers aren't being written and it's less likely for academics or corpo researchers to notice it.

That being said I wonder if it's possible to combine the layers of completely different models like say a Llama and a Qwen and still get it to work.

Even with math probes, I hit unexpected problems. LLMs fail arithmetic in weird ways. They don’t get the answer wrong so much as get it almost right but forget to write the last digit, as if it got bored mid-number. Or they transpose two digits in the middle. Or they output the correct number with a trailing character that breaks the parser.

Would using grammar parsing help here by forcing the LLM to only output the expected tokens (i.e. numbers)? Or maybe on the scoring side you could look at the actual probabilities per token to see how far the correct digit is.

Re:Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @02:57PM (#46696963)
That's going to tank the stock price though as that's a much smaller market than AI, though it's not going to kill the company. Hence why I'm talking about something like robotics which has a lot of opportunity to grow and make use of all those chips and datacenters they're building.

Now there's one thing with AR/VR that might need this kind of infrastructure though and that's basically AI driven games or Holodeck like stuff. Basically have the frames be generated rather than modeled and rendered traditionally.

Re:Meta's Legal Team Abandoned Its Ethical Duties on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @01:30PM (#46695832)
I mean from a privacy perspective alone its clear that Meta throws its ethics out the door in that regard. There's the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the more recent incident with Instagram bypassing Android OS restrictions for more tracking, and many many other examples.

Their apps also regularly nag you to allow access to stuff like contacts and the photo gallery when you've already said no the first time.

And for a personal anecdote: I was recently helping a senior setup Whatsapp Desktop on her Windows computer. It could chat fine but refused to join calls, displaying an error that said there was no microphone connected. I mean, there is a mic connected and it could record voice notes fine. Turns out that error actually meant that there was no webcam connected, and a webcam is required to join calls. I think it's the same way in the mobile app where you need to give it the camera permission to join a video call even if you turn the video off. Meanwhile Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others allow you to join any call without a mic or camera.

As she didn't have a webcam I first tried the OBS virtual camera but Whatsapp refused to recognize that despite all other apps working fine with it. Somehow Droidcam with no phone connected worked fine, displaying a black screen in the virtual camera feed, and that got Whatsapp to join the call successfully. Absolutely ridiculous and it's clear to me how desperately they want that camera access and that sweet data.

Re:Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @12:34PM (#46694961)
Personally I wonder even if the LLM hype dies down we'll get a new boom in terms of AI for robotics and the "digital twin" technology Nvidia has been hyping up to train them. That's going to need GPUs for both the ML component as well as 3D visualization. Robots haven't yet had their SD 1.1 or GPT-3 moment and we're still in the early days of Pythia, GPT-J, AI Dungeon, etc. in LLM speak.
Re:2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple services on Monday January 12, 2026 @11:14AM (#46590443)
I feel that the push will not be towards a general computing device though, but rather to a curated computing device sort of like the iPhone or iPad. Basically general in theory but actually vendor restricted inside a walled garden.

With improved cellular and possibly future satellite connectivity I feel that this would also be more of a thin client than a local first device, since companies want that recurring cloud subscription revenue over a single lump sum.

Re:Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever on Saturday January 03, 2026 @07:46PM (#46483532)
After I got my server going I transferred all my photos over and ran a utility overnight to check them for corruption, the name escapes me but it was an open source cli program. A small number of images were corrupted and the majority were replaced with thankfully pristine backup copies. The rest were restored with minor visual glitches.
Re:Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever on Saturday January 03, 2026 @05:36PM (#46482445)
Keep in mind bitrot is a real thing if you roll your own storage. While most cloud storage solutions store multiple copies of your data I'm not sure if all of them have a system that checks for and fixes bitrot.

I love my ZFS server as it handles all that transparently but that's really not an option for everyone.

Re:GitHub Is Having Issues on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @04:07PM (#45972088)
Cloudflare this morning, and now this. A bunch of work isn't getting done today.

Maybe this will push more places towards self-hosting?

Re:How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element from Scratch on Sunday October 19, 2025 @04:28PM (#45637662)
I see. They should make it more obvious.
Re:How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element from Scratch on Sunday October 19, 2025 @11:31AM (#45634922)
That's fine for the main article but I think there should be a way to get higher quality images should the reader request them. If power is a concern those can be hosted elsewhere.

I think it's acceptable for the drawings to be compressed this way but the photographs are very unclear.

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