blincoln (u/blincoln)

blincoln commented on DARPA’s new X-76 darpa.mil/news/2026/darpa... · Posted by u/newer_vienna

I think they just show what it can be seen, like any country with advance military developments.

They won't show you everything.

Have you ever heard about those sound/sonic (or something similar) weapons the US used in Maduro's kidnap operation? Venezuelan soldiers said (pero some publications on the internet) that they never saw anything alike, leaving them completely disoriented and helpless?

Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales, and the same time, bacome invisibles.

It's more than sci-fi.

blincoln · 3 days ago

> Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales

I have a thermal imager. They can't see through walls in the sense you're imagining. If there's an electric heating element inside a wall or a ceiling, you could get an image of that. If there's a camera or other active electronics hidden in a wall or object, you can see the heat from that.

You wouldn't be able to see a person in an adjacent room through the wall between the two rooms, unless the wall was made specifically of thermally-transparent material.

I've heard rumours of "see through walls" equipment in the US military before. If they really have something like that, it would have to be using technology other than thermal imaging.

blincoln commented on How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? usatoday.com/story/life/h... · Posted by u/brandonb

bell-cot · a month ago

> Lets say someone has lower urinary tract symptoms. And is 60 years old. An MRI could visualize as well as ...

Not a doctor - but maybe start with some quick & cheap tests of their blood & urine, polite questions about their sexual partners, and possibly an ultrasound peek at things?

At least in America, high-tech scans are treated as a cash cow. And cheap & reasonable tests, if done, are merely an afterthought - after the patient has been milked for all the scan-bucks that their insurance will pay out.

Source: Bitter personal experience.

blincoln · a month ago

> At least in America, high-tech scans are treated as a cash cow. And cheap & reasonable tests, if done, are merely an afterthought - after the patient has been milked for all the scan-bucks that their insurance will pay out.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but that hasn't been my experience. I've had one MRI and one CT scan in the 25+ years that I've been a full-time employed adult with insurance.

I'd have been happy to sign up for more so I could have proactive health information and the raw data to use for hobby projects.

blincoln commented on The wonder of modern drywall worksinprogress.news/p/th... · Posted by u/jger15

enobrev · a month ago

For sure. I've wired my old house with speakers in every ceiling, and cat-6 in every room. I've had a small pipe burst and a couple leaks behind a bathroom.

I've patched quite a bit of drywall, and I'm about mediocre at it. But it seems so silly and unnecessary to me.

Everything else in this world that requires maintenance comes with access panels and other means of easy access. In our living spaces, some of which should ideally last tens of years (mine is from the 1890s), we seal it all away.

blincoln · a month ago

If I ever have a house built to my own specs, I want to get the best of both worlds by using drywall, but with most/all of the interior walls being maintenance corridors accessible via concealed doorways. A modern version of the way the dormitory in Real Genius was constructed.

Just make the house itself ~10% larger than it would be otherwise, so the usable floorspace is the same.

Adding/repairing wiring and plumbing would be easy. Every wall could have two layers of thermal/sound insulation. And who doesn't love secret passages?

blincoln commented on The wonder of modern drywall worksinprogress.news/p/th... · Posted by u/jger15

kevin_thibedeau · a month ago

Thermal Master P3: 25fps, 256x192, manual focus

blincoln · a month ago

Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon.

Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.

blincoln commented on GLSL Web CRT Shader blog.gingerbeardman.com/2... · Posted by u/msephton

pezezin · 2 months ago

That only applies to TV sets, computer monitors operated at much higher frequencies outside the human hearing range.

blincoln · 2 months ago

They weren't that high frequency. I could hear computer monitors into my twenties at least. I'd guess somewhere around 20 - 22 kHz. CRTs were largely replaced by LCDs by my late 20s/early 30s, so I don't have a good sense of when I stopped being able to hear frequencies that high.

blincoln commented on Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations nhmu.utah.edu/articles/ex... · Posted by u/astronads

johnea · 2 months ago

We should've asked Terence McKenna...

It could be a subspecies of the "machine elves"...

blincoln · 2 months ago

This was my first thought as well. I've always been fascinated by written accounts of DMT triggering such oddly specific effects for users.

blincoln commented on Researchers develop a camera that can focus on different distances at once engineering.cmu.edu/news-... · Posted by u/gnabgib

dale_glass · 2 months ago

I don't think it was quite too early, it just makes tradeoffs that are undesirable.

Lytro as I understand it, trades a huge amount of resolution for the focusing capability. Some ridiculous amount, like the user gets to see just 1/8th of the pixels on the sensor.

In a way, I'd say rather than too early it was too late. Because autofocus was already quite good and getting better. You don't need to sacrifice all that resolution when you can just have good AF to start with. Refocusing in post is a very rare need if you got the focus right initially.

And time has only made that even worse. Modern autofocus is darn near magic, and people love their high resolution photos.

blincoln · 2 months ago

I find it very useful for wildlife photos. Autofocus never seems to work well for me on e.g. birds in flight.

It's also possible to generate a depth map from a single shot, to use as a starting point for a 3D model.

They're pretty neat cameras. The relatively low output resolution is the main downside. They would also have greatly benefited from consulting with more photographers on the UI of the hardware and software. There's way too much dependency on using the touchscreen instead of dedicated physical controls.

blincoln commented on Lotusbail npm package found to be harvesting WhatsApp messages and contacts koi.ai/blog/npm-package-w... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

bigfatkitten · 3 months ago

Doesn't even require that many people. The analysis can mostly be automated, and the request process can be handled via peer review. Having one or two people for every 100-200 developers who can give sensible advice, provide some general oversight of what's going on, and step in to say 'no' occasionally does help though.

Also means you can put an end to a popular antipattern that has grown in recent years: letting your production infrastructure talk to whatever it likes to download whatever it likes from the Internet.

blincoln · 3 months ago

I'd be curious how many of today's automatic package validation tools or peer review processes would have caught the lotusbail package discussed in the article. The malicious aspects were heavily obfuscated, and it worked as advertised.

blincoln commented on Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/saubeidl

sylware · 3 months ago

Doing such "customizations" (which are actually crypto 101) will break all attacks designed specifically for a crypto algo in mind. Even better if you lie on the crypto algorithm.

Ofc, that must be encrypted on systems which "cannot connect" (and you can go overkill with EM protection with a very good faraday cage).

If you are making such a technical pain for attackers, they will switch to social engineering anyway.

blincoln · 3 months ago

Algorithms like AES-GCM are standards because - when used according to best practices - there are no known practical attacks against them.

If someone has an attack that would defeat the cryptographic protection in a particular piece of software, the software is likely doing one or more of the following:

* Not using a modern, well-tested algorithm (e.g. using DES, a hokey custom XOR stream cipher, AES-ECB, etc.).

* Not following general cryptographic best practices (e.g. hardcoded or predictable key/IV/nonce, insecure storage of keys).

* Not following best practices for the specific algorithm (e.g. using AES-GCM, but reusing a key/nonce combination; using AES-CBC without applying an integrity-protection mechanism).

* The software is doing something that doesn't make sense, cryptographically (e.g. using symmetric encryption to encrypt sensitive data, but the data and the keys are necessarily accessible to the same set of users/service accounts, so there's no net change in security).

If such an attack fails because a developer has made changes to the cryptographic algorithm, a motivated attacker is likely just going to look at the code in Ghidra, x64dbg, etc. and figure out how to account for the changes. It's not a strong security control. I've been decrypting content stored using that kind of software for something like 20 years.

The correct approach is to verify that the use of a particular type of cryptography makes sense in the first place, then use a well-tested modern algorithm and follow the current best practices. i.e. using code from years-old forum posts will likely result in an insecure product.