soneil (u/soneil) - Readit News

soneil commented on Modern Walkmans walkman.land/modern... · Posted by u/classichasclass

latexr · 8 days ago

“The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience”

https://cartoonstockart.com/featured/the-two-things-that-rea...

soneil · 8 days ago

The sad thing is that's pretty accurate.

I do value the inconvenience. When I put an album on, I put an album on. I don't hit next, random, go wandering off down rabbitholes. I put the album on.

And I do see the cost as a feature, somewhat. It feels like I got something for my money, in a way that paying for a zip doesn't.

soneil commented on Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image bbc.com/news/articles/cwy... · Posted by u/josephcsible

delusional · 10 days ago

In my opinion, this isn't a problem of AI. the people who get deceived by this are willing participants in the lie. When proven wrong, they will fall back to the echo chamber and rely on it to give them more false facts. They won't seek information outside of their own circle. They cannot be understood as merely passively misinformed. They are actively lying to themselves.

soneil · 10 days ago

What you'll tend to notice with "willing participants" is that they're not looking for truth, they're looking for confirmation. No-one asks for proof when you tell them what they want to hear.

soneil commented on Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image bbc.com/news/articles/cwy... · Posted by u/josephcsible

ineedasername · 11 days ago

So far, I see the most concern about this sort of thing from people who came of age around or after Web 2.0 hit, at a time when even a good photoshop wasn’t too hard to place as fake.

Those I know who lived through this issue when digital editing really became cheap seem to be more sanguine about it, while the younger generation on the opposite side side is some combination “whatever” or frustrated but accept that yet another of countless weird things has invade a reality that was never quite right to begin with.

The folks in between, I’d say about the 20 years from age 20 to 40, are the most annoyed though. The eye of the storm on the way to proving that cyberpunk lacked the required imagination to properly calibrate our sense of when things were going to really get insane.

soneil · 10 days ago

In my family it's the other way around - it's the people that used to tell us not to talk to strangers on the internet, and not to believe everything we see on the internet, who are now doing precisely that.

soneil commented on Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright bbc.com/news/articles/c1j... · Posted by u/YeGoblynQueenne

pipes · a month ago

I might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying.

I was in a mates car recently and it scared the hell out of me, he was tail gating for most of a 3 hour journey. Eventually we got to a bit with chevrons and he wasn't obeying the rule staying N chevrons away from the car in front. I told him and he replied "nonsense, my car beeps if I'm too close to the car in front" I didn't have the energy to point out that is a collision warning not a safe distance measurer type device.

soneil · a month ago

Isn't it great being able to rely on tech that isn't doing what we think it's doing.

I don't even need to keep an eye on my cooking anymore, the smoke alarm beeps when I get too close.

soneil commented on RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet ackreq.github.io/posts/wh... · Posted by u/ackreq

jibal · 2 months ago

Steve Crocker hired me as a junior coder when I was a freshman at UCLA, Charley Kline who made the first ARPANET remote login (to SRI) mentioned in the article was my supervisor, Vint Cerf (aka "godfather of the Internet" and co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols) was a cow orker, and Jon Postel (aka "god of the Internet" -- it's downright criminal that the article doesn't mention him as the RFC editor--RFCs would not have been successful without him) shared a cubicle wall with me. I managed to get a mention in RFC 57. Those were the days.

P.S.

"The goal was to create a reliable, distributed communication system that could continue operating even if parts of it were damaged by a nuclear attack."

This is a myth. The ARPANET was not hardened; quite the opposite. ARPA's goal was for their researchers located across the country to easily share their work ... initially it was just used to share papers, before Ray Tomlinson invented email. Beyond that, JCR Licklider who laid the conceptual foundations was looking toward something along the lines of today's Internet + AI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%E2%80%93Computer_Symbiosis

P.P.S. Steve Crocker's MIT PhD thesis was on man-machine symbiosis. I know this because he mentioned it to me when I met him in the UCLA Computer Club which he came to because he wanted to teach an informal class on LISP and Theorem Proving, and the club organized such classes. We got to talking about his thesis, he posed some challenges to me that I got lucky in solving, and he immediately offered me a job (he was the head of the ARPANET project at UCLA, under Leonard Kleinrock) that shaped the rest of my life--I'm greatly indebted to him.

Y.A.P.S. Steve Crocker received the Jonathan B. Postel Award (created by Vint Cerf) last year.

soneil · 2 months ago

My understanding is that the "nugget of truth" that birthed the "routing around nuclear attack" myth, is that it was a consideration in Paul Baran's packet-switching work at RAND.

So it wasn't a design consideration for ARPANET, but it would have shown up in enough early papers to give the myth some legs.

soneil commented on Wireguard FPGA github.com/chili-chips-ba... · Posted by u/hasheddan

brcmthrowaway · 2 months ago

If a PC can do 10Gbps, are there any cycles left for other stuff?

soneil · 2 months ago

bps are easy. packets per second is the crunch. Say you've got 64 bytes per packet, which would be a worst-case-scenario - you're down to 150Mpacket/sec. Sending one byte after another is the easy bit, the decisions are made per-packet.

soneil commented on Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find theregister.com/2025/09/2... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

constantcrying · 3 months ago

What does

>The pins that were supposed to nestle into the motherboard were instead pointing skyward

even mean? How do you physically solder a chip the wrong way around?

The story seems totally unbelievable. This is a training session, someone asks a potentially reasonable question and then is just let go? Hiring people is expensive and letting someone go over something like that is ridiculous.

The story isn't even alleging that the manager disagreed or that the manager tried to argue there was no defect. If you take the story as told it is completely nonsensical.

soneil · 3 months ago

> How do you physically solder a chip the wrong way around?

With effort, and bodge-wire. I've seen chips done dead-bug style when the board's been messed up (eg, the footprint is orientated for the bottom of the board, but placed on the top, and vice-versa).

It's definitely not something you'd ship, but a kludge that can get you working until the next board spin.

soneil commented on Raspberry Pi 500+ raspberrypi.com/news/the-... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

geerlingguy · 3 months ago

Nit: It's the Pi 500+ (the + was eaten up by HN's automated title sensationalism-removal, I guess)

And I've posted benchmark data to my sbc-reviews repo here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/81

Performance-wise it's pretty much the same as the Pi 5 16GB (and can be slightly faster than the regular Pi 500 depending on the task, if it benefits from faster storage or more RAM...)

Since this is the first Pi with built-in NVMe (I'm not counting the Compute Module Developer Kit), I plugged in an eGPU and tested a new 15-line patch for AMD GPU drivers, which seems to support practically all modern AMD graphics cards[1].

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/full-egpu-acceleratio...

soneil · 3 months ago

> Nit: It's the Pi 500+

I really want to hope the name is a nod to the Amiga 500+ (which had twice the RAM of the A500 ..)

soneil commented on I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/calcifer

masklinn · 3 months ago

A big difference is that if you go to a gas station you’ll have both (and possibly more). At least in Europe. So while you need to fill with the right fuel unless the pump is broken or the tanks are empty the fuel you need will be available.

In the US, if you roll up to a random charging station you may or may not find a plug matching your car’s port.

soneil · 3 months ago

I think the common mistake they’re alluding to is Europe and north America having conflicting standards for colour-coding the pumps. So here green is unleaded and black is diesel, which can catch American tourists unaware. (Especially so with language barriers, “sans plomb” in French is not intuitively petrol/gas/benzo)

soneil commented on XZ Utils Backdoor Still Lurking in Docker Images binarly.io/blog/persisten... · Posted by u/torgoguys

torgoguys · 4 months ago

I'm the one who submitted this link. (I have zero affiliation with the authors). What you say is fair enough, but I thought the article an interesting data point nonetheless. In particular, I found it interesting how a vulnerability: 1) with a tiny window during which it was published, 2) of very high potential severity, and 3) with SO MUCH publicity surrounding it could still be lingering where you might accidentally grab it. The threat isn't giant here, but I saw it as just today's reminder to keep shields up.

soneil · 4 months ago

It'd be some fluke of an accident. You'd need to be targeting not only debian:testing/unstable, but specifically debian:testing-20240311. And then - making sure not to apt upgrade at any point so you don't accidentally get any updates from the last 18 months - you'd need to also install openssh-server to avail of the backdoor, plus a service manager because running sshd in the foreground killswitches said backdoor. And then don't forget to expose the ssh port otherwise our effort is wasted.

The most realistic way to hit this would be to have built an image 18 months ago, on top of :testing or :unstable, and then not update or rebuild it at any time in those 18 months - in which case removing anything from the repo wouldn't help you. Or be purposely trying to recreate an affected environment for testing/research, in which case it's on you.

You're not wrong that we should keep our shields up - but "update sometime in the last 18 months" perhaps isn't such a revelation.

One thing does come to mind though - I do wonder if there's a way to strongarm apt's dependencies mechanism into having openssh-server conflict with affected libxz versions, so that if you did apt update && apt install openssh-server in an affected image, it'd bring a fixed libxz along for the ride. (and the images don't carry apt manifests, so apt update is required and you would have today's package list.) You could still pin an affected version, so there'd still be enough rope to allow you to recreate a research environment.