DavidPeiffer (u/DavidPeiffer)

DavidPeiffer commented on Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-... · Posted by u/riffraff

BLKNSLVR · a month ago

> It is to do with link handling:

Notepad? Link handling?

That's like my pencil having a CVE that's to do with how it loads the ink. That old saying about 'if Microsoft built a car' is more true now than it was then: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-balk/

DavidPeiffer · a month ago

I was really hoping this CVE would have been caused by the Copilot integration into Notepad.

Calculator hasn't been infiltrated by Copilot yet, but I'm sure the day is coming.

DavidPeiffer commented on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs pdfa.org/a-case-study-in-... · Posted by u/DuffJohnson

culi · a month ago

There was a post on here about a project in stylometry that analyzed HN users comment history. The tool helped find accounts that had an extremely similar writing style to a given account. The site was soon removed due to privacy concerns but many users with multiple account attested to its accuracy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me

DavidPeiffer · a month ago

>It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me

The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?

DavidPeiffer commented on Microtonal Spiral Piano shih1.github.io/spiral/... · Posted by u/phoenix_ashes

DavidPeiffer · 2 months ago

This reminds me of a neat piece of computer keyboard -> audio software I found on what had to be an "old internet" site 15-20 years ago. For lack of a better phrase, it was relative tone keyboard. I've looked but have not been able to find the software, not remembering any hint of the name, but it was fun to play with.

It worked one of two ways, I'm not positive which.

--------

You stared with musical note C. One note could be played at a time. G would go down a half note, H up a half note. F down a whole note, J up a whole note. Repeatedly pressing G would go down the chromatic scale. Playing a Diatonic scale up would be a combination of pressing H and J.

--------

Pretend the keyboard letter G is the base note, mapped to C in music. F would give a half note lower, H a half note higher, and so on across the home row of the keyboard. Then you could adjust the base note (perhaps T to go down a half note, Y to go up a half note).

In essence, you could transpose a song from the key of C to D by doing a modifier, and your fingers could complete the exact same sequence. In a jazz application, something on Spiral Synth like "FSA, GDS, HFD, K" might have been

DavidPeiffer commented on Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video] youtube.com/watch?v=TK2N9... · Posted by u/zdw

magicalhippo · 3 months ago

Sadly there was an ongoing eruption when me and my SO visited the Big Island, so the entire park was closed. Was a bit bummed out, on the other hand people lost their homes so keeping it in perspective.

That said, I second visiting the Big Island and visit various sites. Driving less than an hour and going from barren volcanic landscapes to lush rainforests was something else, and watching the sunset from Mauna Kea was magical. And lots of great beaches, and most that weren't next to a resort had very few people.

While the island is big relative to the other Hawaiian islands, its small enough that you can drive around it in a day.

I'd recommend staying on the Kona side, which is the dry and somewhat barren side. The Hilo side has rainforests for a reason.

DavidPeiffer · 3 months ago

What struck me about the big island is that it has 8 of the 13 climate zones, and you can go around the perimeter of the island in about 5 hours.

I loved going up Mauna Kea visitor center and stargazing. At ~11,000 feet, it's one of the best places in the world for naked eye stargazing. You're literally above the clouds, the island has strict rules about exterior lights at night to minimize light pollution, and you're above the thickest air. I wasn't expecting to see the Milky Way so easily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#/media/File:Milky_Wa...

DavidPeiffer commented on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung pcworld.com/article/29989... · Posted by u/sethops1

jsheard · 3 months ago

To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same device.

DavidPeiffer · 3 months ago

I worked with some supply chain consultants who mentioned "internal suppliers are often worse suppliers than external".

Their point was that service levels are often not as stringently tracked, SLA's become internal money shuffling, but the company as a whole paid the price in lower output/profit. The internal partner being the default allows an amount of complacency, and if you shopped around for a comparable level of service to what's being provided, you can often find it for a better price.

DavidPeiffer commented on Statistical Process Control in Python timothyfraser.com/sigma/s... · Posted by u/lifeisstillgood

auxiliarymoose · 3 months ago

Super cool, thanks for sharing!

This is one of the reasons I am so skeptical of the current AI hype cycle. There are boring, well-behaved classical solutions for many of the use-cases where fancy ML is pushed today.

You'd think that rational businesses would take the low-risk snooze-fest high-margin option any day instead of unintelligible and unreliable options that demand a lot of resources, and yet...

DavidPeiffer · 3 months ago

>This is one of the reasons I am so skeptical of the current AI hype cycle. There are boring, well-behaved classical solutions for many of the use-cases where fancy ML is pushed today.

In 2013 my statistics professor warned that once we are in the real world, "people will come up to you trying to sell fancy machine learning models for big money, though the simple truth is that many problems can be solved better by applying straightforward statistical methods".

There has always been the ML hype, but the last couple years are a whole different level.

DavidPeiffer commented on Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams sherwood.news/tech/meta-p... · Posted by u/donohoe

macNchz · 4 months ago

I don’t use Android, but I understand uBlock Origin works with Firefox on it, which is kind of the gold standard on desktop, given the other browsers now restrict extensions in ways that make ad blockers less effective.

DavidPeiffer · 4 months ago

Yes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a default block list is so much better than using the internet without any ad blocking.

DavidPeiffer commented on IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products ikea.com/global/en/newsro... · Posted by u/lemoine0461

ssl-3 · 4 months ago

Neither Matter nor Matter-over-Thread require Internet access.

We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.

(Historically, IP wins in these conundrums anyway. IP has been succession of grand successes for decades.

Resistance is futile. We should work to prepare for the eventually of what is to come.)

DavidPeiffer · 4 months ago

>We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.

What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?

I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.

DavidPeiffer commented on NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again gothamist.com/news/ny-sma... · Posted by u/hrldcpr

kevinfiol · 4 months ago

As a millennial, the concept of public school lunch not being loud is weird to me! I always remember the constant chatter of school lunch. Definitely had my share of hearty shared laughs, and heated conversations during lunchtime.

DavidPeiffer · 4 months ago

I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.

The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.

DavidPeiffer commented on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else? · Posted by u/urnicus

vablings · 4 months ago

Also, Costco uses AS/400. Applications that are pure function over form are amazing

DavidPeiffer · 4 months ago

I'm not positive whether Target's system from ~15 years ago was a TUI, but a friend worked there in college. He mentioned the process for tax exempt purchases was a bit challenging/not the most common. There were some frequent shoppers who had heard the assistance from the manager enough times, they could walk an employee through what buttons to press to get it setup correctly.