mbreese (u/mbreese) - Readit News

mbreese commented on The Java Ring: A Wearable Computer (1998) nngroup.com/articles/java... · Posted by u/cromulent

jasongill · 3 days ago

I had one of these as well as a handful of iButtons. I think I still have them in my box of "maybe this will be useful some day" electronic junk that will never be useful. I got them, as well as some iButton readers of different shapes and sizes, as free samples from Dallas Semiconductor back in 1999 just because I thought they were neat. Never found a use for them, but it was fun to have a "class ring"-size ring that contained some favorite bookmarks.

I have only seen iButton's "in the wild" in one use case - for tracking the nightly rounds of security guards in commercial buildings/industrial complexes. You've probably seem small round discs on the wall in office buildings (normally a round disc with a concentric ring); those are iButton terminals. The guards each have a keychain with an iButton, and as they do their rounds they press it on the terminal to record proof that they went to each terminal at the proper time. Obviously this is a use-case for NFC or a variety of other technologies but for some reason I've seen the iButton-based systems used in a half dozen buildings.

mbreese · 3 days ago

Same. I know I have a couple someplace in a bin. That and another embedded card from the era, but I think it had something like a DIMM footprint. I thought it was also Dallas semi, but I can’t find it or remember what it is though…

I remember thinking that some of the tracking features (temperature) of the button would be helpful in some situations. But the ring was the crazy model. Between these and smart cards, authentication was starting to look futuristic. I even remember getting a smart card reader from my credit card company. They thought it would make for more secure web transactions.

I’ve still seen some iButtons in the wild in odd places. Most recently, I saw them tracking car keys at dealerships. The last car I test drove had a key attached to a fob with an iButton. I was more excited by the iButton tracker than the car.

But I thought of it as an example of how long lasting some design decisions can really be. I’m sure someone designed this system 20-25 years ago and it is still in service today. I’m sure today it would be NFC. But now I’m thinking about what the iButton of 2050 will look like.

mbreese commented on Go Proposal: Secret Mode antonz.org/accepted/runti... · Posted by u/enz

compsciphd · 5 days ago

I could imagine code that did something like this for primatives

  secretStash := NewSecretStash()
  pString := secretStash.NewString()
  ....
  ....
  secretStash.Thrash()

yes, you now have to deal in pointers, but that's not too ugly, and everything is stored in secretStash so can iterate over all the types it supports and thrash them to make them unusable, even without the gc running.

mbreese · 5 days ago

I used to see this is bash scripts all the time. It’s somewhat gone out of favor (along with using long bash scripts).

If you had to prompt a user for a password, you’d read it in, use it, then thrash the value.

    read -p “Password: “ PASSWD
    # do something with $PASSWD
    PASSWD=“XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”

It’s not pretty, but a similar concept. (I also don't know how helpful it actually is, but that's another question...)

mbreese commented on CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/speckx

geerlingguy · 6 days ago

From my discussions with Raspberry Pi, and with a few companies who integrated CM4/5 into their products, the board to board connectors were a massive pain to automate in a production line (not necessarily soldering the connectors, but in inserting Compute Modules.

It's surprising how good human fingers can be at getting the alignment, the push, and the slight 'pop' and the feedback required to know when it's seated properly.

That, mixed with requiring extra standoffs and screws to secure the CM to boards for any kind of vibration/mobile use cases probably informed the decision to go to castellated / solder-on.

It's not as friendly for quick swaps or upgrades, but it also reduces the total board height when it's all put together.

mbreese · 5 days ago

I wonder how robust the solder joints are for castellated boards. I’d still imagine that to be a weak point vibration-wise. Definitely easier to automate, but would it be that much more robust?

Thinking about those CM sockets and I think the answer is yes - a castellated solder joint (is that the right term?) would be stronger. But other sockets might be more robust than the CM0.

mbreese commented on OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

kelchm · 5 days ago

Are you really making the argument that human flight hasn’t been effectively achieved at this point?

I actually kind of love this comparison — it demonstrates the point that just like “human flight”, “true AGI” isn’t a single point in time, it’s a many-decade (multi-century?) process of refinement and evolution.

Scholars a millennia from now will be debating about when each of these were actually “truly” achieved.

mbreese · 5 days ago

I’ve never heard it described this way: AGI as similar to human flight. I think it’s subtle and clever - my two most favorite properties.

To me, we have both achieved and not human flight. Can humans themselves fly? No. Can people fly in planes across continents. Yes.

But, does it really matter if it counts as “human flight” if we can get from point A to point B faster? You’re right - this is an argument that will last ages.

It’s a great turn of phrase to describe AGI.

mbreese commented on Show HN: tomcp.org – Turn any URL into an MCP server github.com/Ami3466/tomcp... · Posted by u/ami3466

ami3466 · 6 days ago

The simplicity is a feature. I avoided headless Chrome because standard fetch tools (and raw DOM dumps) pollute the context with navbars and scripts, wasting tokens. This parser converts to clean Markdown for maximum density.

Also, by treating this as an MCP Resource rather than a Tool, the docs are pinned permanently instead of relying on the model to "decide" to fetch them.

Cloudflare Workers handle this perfectly for free (100k reqs/day) without the overhead of managing a dockerized browser instance.

mbreese · 6 days ago

I like the idea of exposing this as a resource. That’s a good idea so you don’t have to wait for a tool call. Is using a resource faster though? Doesn’t the LLM still have to make a request to the MCP server in both cases? Is the idea being that because it is pinned a priori, you’ve already retrieved and processed the HTML, so the response will be faster?

But I do think the lack of a JavaScript loader will be a problem for many sites. In my case, I still run the innerHTML through a Markdown converter to get rid of the extra cruft. You’re right that this helps a lot. Even better if you can choose which #id element to load. Wikipedia has a lot of extra info that surrounds the main article that even with MD conversion adds extra fluff. But without the JS loading, you’re still going to not be able to process a lot of sites in the wild.

Now, I would personally argue that’s an issue with those sites. I’m not a big fan of dynamic JS loaded pages. Sadly, I think that that ship has sailed…

mbreese commented on Show HN: tomcp.org – Turn any URL into an MCP server github.com/Ami3466/tomcp... · Posted by u/ami3466

_pdp_ · 6 days ago

Fun idea although I thought the industry is leaning towards using llms.txt.

mbreese · 6 days ago

Isn’t that for scraping? I think this is for injecting (or making that possible) to add an MCP front end to a site.

Different use cases, I think.

mbreese commented on Show HN: tomcp.org – Turn any URL into an MCP server github.com/Ami3466/tomcp... · Posted by u/ami3466

mbreese · 6 days ago

I think this is a good idea in general, but perhaps a bit too simple. It looks like this only works for static sites, right? It then performs a JS fetch to pull in the html code and then converts it (in a quick and dirty manner) to markdown.

I know this is pointing to the GH repo, but I’d love to know more about why the author chose to build it this way. I suspect it keeps costs low/free. But why CF workers? How much processing can you get done for free here?

I’m not sure how you could do much more in a CF worker, but this might be too simple to be useful on many sites.

Example: I had to pull in a docs site that was built for a project I’m working on. We wanted an LLM to be able to use the docs in their responses. However, the site was based on VitePress. I didn’t have access to the source markdown files, so I wrote an MCP fetcher that uses a dockerized headless chrome instance to load the page. I then pull the innerHTML directly from the processed DOM. It’s probably overkill, but an example of when this tool might not work.

But — if you have a static site, this tool could be a very simple way to configure MCP access. It’s a nice idea!

mbreese commented on Show HN: tomcp.org – Turn any URL into an MCP server github.com/Ami3466/tomcp... · Posted by u/ami3466

bakies · 6 days ago

I thought this is what the web_fetch tools already did? Tools are configured through MCP also, right? So why am I prepending a URL, and not just using the web_fetch tool that already works?

Does this skirt the robots.txt by chance? Not being to fetch any web page is really bugging me and I'm hoping to use a better web_fetch that isn't censored. I'm just going to copy/paste the content anyway.

mbreese · 6 days ago

I think the idea here is that the web_fetch is restricted to the target site. I might want to include my documentation in an MCP server (from docs.example.com), but that doesn’t mean I want the full web available.

mbreese commented on Deprecate like you mean it entropicthoughts.com/depr... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

nisegami · 7 days ago

It sounds like you're imagining open source whereas the comment you're replying to is imagining more intra-company dependencies.

mbreese · 7 days ago

I think deprecation in intra-company code is a completely different beast. You either have a business case for the code or not. And if something is deprecated and a downstream project needs it, it should probably have the budget to support it (or code around the deprecation).

In many ways, the decision is easier because it should be based on a business use case or budget reason.

mbreese commented on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora openai.com/index/disney-s... · Posted by u/inesranzo

afavour · 7 days ago

When I became a parent I was really surprised at how much crap Disney puts out. My previous exposure had just been their blockbuster movies which showed a close attention to detail. But you scratch under the surface and it's an endless pile of awful quality clothing, crappy lunchboxes, that kind of thing. To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.

And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved.

Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.

mbreese · 7 days ago

> Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling

I think it’s important to remember that you probably aren’t their target audience. Their audience expects to see simple characters with simple stories. The CG doesn’t need to be advanced, so having it fast to produce is the goal. It has to hold the interest of a toddler for 25 min without annoying the parents too much. Shiny and simple rendering is probably what they are going for. You can certainly argue about the educational qualities of the show, but I think entertaining was their primary goal for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Also, this show hasn’t been made for years, has it? You’re looking at a show that was produced from 2006-2016. The oldest shows would be almost 20 year old CG. The newest is still nearly 10 years old. At the time it was fresh, the CG was pretty good, compared to similar kids shows.

My kids were young right in this window, and we watched a lot of Disney.

Disney definitely hit a CG valley though that you can see with some of their shows that switched from a 2D look to a more 3D rendering. Thankfully we aged out of those shows around 2015, so it has been a while. Disney has always been a content shop where quantity has its own quality, so I’m sure I’d have similar opinions as you if I was looking at the shows now. But at the time, it wasn’t bad.

I’m not sure how the OpenAI integration will work. I can see all sorts of red flags here.