Fortuitously before the Unix date rollover in 2038. Nice.
Readit Newszh3 commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto
zh3 commented on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com/blog/teaching... · Posted by u/firefoxd
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).
zh3 commented on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com/blog/teaching... · Posted by u/firefoxd
I have a TV-Be-Gone device, which is designed to disable TV’s in a certain radius. It has been an absolutely wonderful little accessory during business trips .. someone watching something obnoxious at the hotel bar? TV-Be-Gone!
A Flipper Zero would be the modern equivalent, I suppose. I like the idea of being able to turn off devices in a certain radius - but I don’t like the idea of everyone having one. Having ultimate power over the wireless noise in my immediate vicinity - awesome .. but seeing someone empty their pockets at the airport and a Flipper Zero in the inspection box - not so fun.
It’s going to be a wild and woolly future, the more these kinds of shenanigans become relevant.
It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).
RF remotes are harder to hack together but similar principle. Whether IR or RF, the codes are common across all devices of the same model/protocol.
zh3 commented on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com/blog/teaching... · Posted by u/firefoxd
In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.
Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.
zh3 commented on Virtual Boy on TV with Intelligent Systems Video Boy hcs64.com/video-boy-vue/... · Posted by u/hcs
A question for the mech engineers: why the back and forth wobble? My first thought when I saw that mechanism was "that sounds harder than it should be. Wouldn't a spinning 6 sided mirror work better?"
A spinning mirror is certainly an option, there are many projects around using them as projectors e.g. [0]. It would need precision faces and be a larger volume than the flapping mirror approach. Because the mirrors are spring-mounted and designed to resonate at ~50Hz they actually take very little power to drive - there's an optosensor on the back used to stabilise the oscillation amplitude, which is why the VB and Private Eye display widths vary during startup.
Can't see the video from this location, so may be just restarting stuff in it.
[0] https://hackaday.com/2018/04/20/laser-projector-ditches-galv...
zh3 commented on Virtual Boy on TV with Intelligent Systems Video Boy hcs64.com/video-boy-vue/... · Posted by u/hcs
I saw a teardown of the Virtual Boy recently. Wild tech:
The screens are each a bar of micro LEDs. Each eye has a mirror that oscillates every frame to smear the LED bar across your field of view.
If you've ever seen those bike wheel displays, where the light-up spokes make a pattern when the wheel spins - it's that, but as a VR headset.
Unfortunately you can't get the LEDs any more - they were originally from LED printers and those all now use infrared LED arrays. I'm actually working on something similar, and am even using a few VB scanner mechs in development (driven by a raspberry Pi).
For further background, they were developed from an earlier system called the "Private Eye" - still a few references to them on the web e.g. [0]. I've built a circuit to drive one from a Pi Zero - amazing gadgets for 90's tech.
zh3 commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest
> Yes, I haven't even read most of the files, just threw it up there as an example for the OP (I too am tired of the lack of examples, so stepped up to the plate on this one).
Right, kind of like an LLM skimming and missing the core points :)
OP didn't ask for "Anything you've vibe-coded" but explicitly asked for code written with LLMs that is high quality and structurally sound, and "creates more value than it creates technical debt". That's why I felt like reviewing the code in the first place, and why I gave the feedback.
I understand now that maybe it felt like my impromptu code review came out of nowhere, but I thought you were actually trying to give OP a accurate sample, so sorry if it felt like it came out of nowhere :)
NP, and the exact definition of vibe-coding is, I think, yet to be determined. This wasn't a yolo, it was read all the prompts and generally accept them. Overall I'd say the code and web page are at least of a quality I've seen in many commercial settings; the code itself looks reasonable and if I was to do anything to it for a real 'release', I'd update the documentation which has suffered due to the extensive scope creep during implementation.
zh3 commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest
Have you reviewed the code? What were the problems with it? Where did it do things better than you'd expect of humans? Have you compared the effort of making changes to it to the effort required for similar, human-written software?
I don't think anyone says it's not possible to get the LLM to write code. The problems OP has with them is that the code they write starts out good but then quickly devolves when the LLMs get stuck in the weird ruts they have.
Far short of a proper review, however I have scanned the code. Bear in mind this was a purely personal project, never intended to see the light of day and initially just done to create a small but operable chunk of dbus/blueZ glue code for another project.
I have no doubt that a C developer with sufficient knowledge of dBus, bluetooth, the HRM profile and linux could have written the C code in a day. Adding the HTTP server again would be easy if the developer also had experience of that (n.b. there was a minor compiler error when I tried it on another system due to a slightly different version of libmicrohttpd). Adding the API would be straighforward (but tedious) and similiarly the web page (the web page was an one-shot after Claude wrote the API, vis. "Create a web page to display a real time plot with history using the API").
So overall I'd answer that that human developers would could have pulled that off in a day are few and far between (and likely to cost a lot more than $25 plus a day of my time).
And do I think the code is good enough? Yes, more than good enough. I could take it and run with it, against that because it ended up 100% AI-generated I feel a bit like leaving it as a monument to "pure AI".
After all, I never intended to release it - it was this thread that made my throw it up on Github as an example for the OP.
zh3 commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest
Just as a heads up, LLMs doesn't actually understand why they do what they do, you asking about it will make them reason about why it happened, but it's not the "motivation", it's essentially guesses with no anchoring to reality.
Just thought I'd clarify as I've seen prompts like this and people thinking this is the actual motivation from the "inside the LLM" or whatever, which is a bit far away from the truth.
Fair enough, I did ask for "inspiration" through rather than "motivation" - mainly because I recall a comment on here a few days ago that LLMs are carefully trained to never reveal where the training material came from. So the prompt was aimed at working around that.
zh3 commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest
It's a good demonstration of when agents still don't get everything right when you place things into Markdown documentation. You have to be really valiant and verify everything from top to bottom, if you want to control how things are implemented to that degree, otherwise the agent will still take shortcuts where they can.
In https://github.com/lowrescoder/BlueHeart/blob/68ab2387a0c44e... for example, it doesn't actually do SSE at all, instead it queues up a complete HTTP response each time, returns once and then closes the stream, so basically a normal HTTP endpoint, "labeled" as a SSE one. SSE is mentioned a bunch of times in the docs, and the files/types/functions are labeled as such, but that doesn't seem to be what's going on internally, from what I could understand. Happy to stand corrected though!
Yes, I haven't even read most of the files, just threw it up there as an example for the OP (I too am tired of the lack of examples, so stepped up to the plate on this one).
As a personal bit of development last weekend. I can see inconsistences myself, some of which result from scope creep during development (starting with the idea of a text-only app and then grafting on the web side) - it literally only started because I wanted a working example of bluetooth and dBus in C, the rest of it just joined the ride.
As for the SSE, no expert on that myself, however if you watch the messages in the browser console it appears to push updates with sporadic notes about using polling instead.