Unlurker

The $8 Linux Computer (2022) (thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com)

One could buy an old router or Android device for media playback on a TV for less. So the main attraction here is not that it's cheap, but that it's small and has convenient GPIO.

This article motivated me to buy three of these, it was fun, I had to get a pico to build the interface. I still intend to go back, but time keeps on slipping... I'm sure many have collected an impressive number of SBCs since the beaglebone, someday I want to build a display case that runs them all on some distributed process as a visual art piece

Complete starter kit for $90 here https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html?cid=usd&src=raspberrypi

You’re not saying that this 8$ project costs 90$ today, are you?

I love looking back 10+ years for the cheapest Linux thing you could buy. People were buying devices that were for kids or a router or something and repurposing it because it was open enough to get a shell on / flash Linux to it and start doing projects with. In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family. Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.

My friend has gotten full Linux on a number of weird RISC-V boards. https://github.com/queenkjuul/milkv-duo-ubuntu

The Raspberry Pi Zero sold for $5 before the foundation sold out.

When they were that cheap, I would grab my one on every trip to Microcenter, just because I'd probably find a use for it, and if I didn't, I knew someone else would want it. Fun times.

To be fair to them that was over ten years ago, and prices of everything have risen significantly in that time.

Sold out? Or catered towards market demands?

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Tomato. Tomahto. Personally the pricing changes are absurd even with inflation and memory prices in mind. RPi is horrible value now you can get so much more from a lot of other boards it's not even a comparison now.

Quick someone upload a passmark score Probably a little faster than a Pentium 3

The C906 core that runs Linux on the BL808 SoC on this device has roughly the same integer performance as a P3 on a per Mhz basis. The C906 is about 2.4 DMIPS / Mhz and the P3 is roughly 2.4 (Katmai core) - 2.8 (Tualatin core) DMPIS / Mhz depending on the version. You are looking at roughly P3 450 integer performance Its an interesting comparison that Im not sure reflects positively on the RISC-V C906 core when you factor in core area and process nodes and core area, 22nm vs 250nm. Even if we choose the worst case scenario for the P3 cores to compare which would be the Katmai core. We are basically look at ~parity with a 30 year old core design C906 core only @ 22nm = ~0.6 mm2 C906 core only @ 250nm = ~78 mm2 (geometric transform) P3 core only @ 22nm = ~0.5 mm2 (geometric transform) P3 core only @ 250nm = ~76 mm2 Apologies if this is messy and badly formatted. Im currently at a wedding, sat waiting between the ceremony and the after party and Ive quite a few beers. I responded because its something I looked at previously with RISC-V cores and I already had the answers in my head

Interesting, thanks! Would be cool to have the same comparison for a modern Intel cpu

The chip computer used to be much more capable and feature rich at just 9$

I'm so sad that one didn't prosper, I still love the deck they sold

Upload Your RAM (uploadyourram.org)

I enjoyed this alternate phrasing of the Sam Altman quote: "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to [let billionaires] have a bunch of the world's limited supply of [money] sitting in their own [stocks] and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum [taxes] if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

The difference is Codex couldn't shake its preference for making flashy, loud, obnoxious marketing websites that look like they're trying to sell you a SaaS. This website looks like it wants my money. Meanwhile the website from op is simple, focused, and far more comedic than codex's slew of AI-generated "jokes".

I agree, and it's on purpose. I deliberately made it stink of vibe coding. It's also hosted as a ChatGPT site.

> And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades. Strongly recommend you get Gemma 4 12B QAT on a computer that can run it, and then disconnect the internet and see what it can still do. Even the smaller E4B will show you. Local AI is the first thing in decades (since editing video, perhaps) that meaningfully changes what a disconnected machine is capable of.

Yes, but system requirements bloated to this extreme point long before there was any AI at all.

Why do people pay $15 just to buy domains for these meme websites?

$15 is cheaper than a movie ticket and the creator probably got more enjoyment out of it. Also, sometimes getting a few giggles out of people is return enough out of an investment.

Some things will always be true: - Large centralized compute is more powerful than portable compute - Wired is better than wireless - The public wants new things - The tech industry grows to use/“use” the available processing power As long as you’re not continuously comparing to AI in large centralized compute, what you’re really looking for is “when does portable compute become powerful enough to run AI models that are capable of meaningful work” and I’d say we’re already there and it’s getting better.

Also: - local latency is lower than network latency - latency is important for action games

Don't think of it as a step back, it's just a point in a familiar cycle: New application of computing requires a lot of compute -> compute centralizes -> compute improves, smaller, faster, cheaper -> compute decentralizes -> new application of compute is found -> (return to beginning of cycle)

Can you think of examples of this cycle? I know this is roughly what happened with mainframes, but I struggle to think of other times it went like that. Maybe arcade games?

Not only if the internet dies. If the country or countries managing the AI decide they don't like your country and ban you from using their (major) AI providers, in a world where most knowledge and work tanks will require access, you're screwed. Not even talking dictatorship scenarios here. The USA might simply decide it doesn't like your country. Or maybe heavily cripple the models you can use, or censor them, for whatever reason. I guess this is an argument for local AI. Probably not feasible for the less technically savvy.

I have high hopes for AMD Halo / NVidia Spark or sth. similar - relatively open computers (unlike Apple) with unified memory. Now if those prices just came down a bit... :-/

AI slop-cloning is killing small indie games too.

Is it really? Slop clones of games have been a thing for ages, I’d expext the market to be reasonably resistant by now.

It also won't be worth it to make games for next gen consoles if the prices end up being what people are saying. So in the end they'll just keep doing what they're doing right now, and not increase the hardware requirements of their games.

The extensive use of AI for producing better code (if so instructed) may even decrease the hardware requirements.

Most of it has switched to mobile phones and tablets. It doesn't help that almost everywhere digital classroom means tablet instead of laptop. Sure, the control is convenient for the teacher, but it also means we are raising our children in walled gardens. So much so, that whole generations don't even leave that garden in their spare time.

I'm still waiting for the day a mac air style shell exists where I plug my phone in and just get a real desktop experience. The chips in phones these days are plenty powerful. I always thought it would be where we were going, but alas, no major manufacturer seems to want to make it feel like a seamless, premium experience. Samsung got sorta close, but the peripherals involved never felt great or didn't make sense from a cost perspective. I wonder what it would look like if Apple offered a slimmed down shell from the Neo for ~$300 that required a connected iPhone. Maybe as iOS and MacOS converge we'll get there.

What's the rumours on the Pi6?

its gonna be at around early 2028

People keep saying that but I have never met anyone who doesn't own a PC or laptop.

I know youngsters who dont even have an email address. Though, this may change if they have to enter the workforce. Lot of people using their office-notebooks at home, even if its not allowed. Most people out of tech do not have big hardware at home anymore.

Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier (8rank.ai)

> who you know Whom you know.

For the GDPR to have impact here, wouldn't they have to be collecting the information in the first place? If they're doing all the work on your own computer, that wouldn't trigger any GDPR issues.

Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party :)

How does one disable this?

I expected the article to address that. Maybe it's obvious?: Disable the daemons, delete the directory, lock down permissions to the database files / directory, lock down the daemons' permissions, delete the daemons, ... I'm not recommending those things - I don't know what the consequence is for the system - but that's where I'd start.

At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting. A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern. If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription. With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401

See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.

Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI

I've also become totally exhausted by all these "someone is making your computer do X behind your back" revelations. Whether it's the app developer or OS vendor, it doesn't really matter. When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user, and instead start operating on behalf of the OS vendor and app developers? Every day there's a new case of this.

I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc. I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.

Add me to the list. This feels like a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” item.

That saying is what it is for good reasons, but the path to post-capitalist dystopian hell is paved with bad intentions covered with plausible deniability. I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.

> which cannot be disabled (viaGUI) Are you sure? I've just inspected my macOS 27.2 machine with my firewall and I couldn't find requests to smoot.apple.com while typing in spotlight(show related content and help improve apple search are both disabled).

I am certain only up to Sequoia; there is a new mini with Tahoe on it sitting here so let me replicate that behavior (if hostname isn't smoot., it'll be something). I've been meaning to update to GoldenGate (since buying it last week it has been used for just 2 hours, playing with LLMs on the default Tahoe); so I'll do this too and then see what the latest macOS's behavior is. While I'm doing that, pull up your *.apple.com outreaches.

I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-the-wrong-hands

Thanks for the research. Have you looked into how to secure / disable the subsystem? (I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' the AI subthread.)

I disagree. Hand-authored articles can be slop too. This research is great, and your subjective feelings about word cadence don't affect the information. I guarantee you read AI output every day and don't know it.

Hand-authored engagement or clout (LinkedIn) farming articles and corporate press releases are usually slop, most others aren't. I'd be surprised if corporate press releases today weren't largely AI-written - no one would know the difference.

The criticism can be restated, then, as “you used AI to write it, and unlike others who use AI to write things, you did a bad job directing it and editing the work.”

This comment is not directed at you, but this is the best place I could find to insert my thoughts on this "nO LLm slOP" distraction: ---- The research is jaw-dropping enough for the average reader to comprehend (e.g: I am not a techie, but a former IBEW datacenter wiretwister). It could be covered in pube-sprinkled-turds and would still be worth reading. To me the "slopLOL" crew is akin to people who'll take their time to correct others' their/they're/there usage: Just read the fucking sentence (LLMs can and do and aren't so poopy-you-suck-for-asking-questions).

We know there’s interesting information in there. That’s not the point. How news is delivered matters. If you don’t believe that, why would news outlets compete with each other? Even if the facts are the same, would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?

>would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer? I am smart enough to not need perfection. I just want the data . Write however tf you want, good'll'be read. And so will LLMs. I'll suggest adaptation. >why would news outlets compete with each other? My suggestion would be: competition for the masses' con$umption$. It generally works ; shouldn't have to obfuscate the `man` pages for this always-running daemon... how many people even know what `man`pages are (obviously not here)? how to access them? why they would even want to?

Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose. The vast majority of society does. > I am smart enough Knock yourself down a peg, kid.

I will, sure, but I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic, despite being a bluecollar electrician. Also, my IQ scares even me; I've chosen bluecollar so I don't have to be evil as much with it. ---- Companies do not give two shits about most users, with (e.g:) AMD saying the quiet part out loud , recently, with their recent gamers-last announcement. Also see: Apple's invasive attempts to categorize all local data, by default; if you want to opt-out (some service, like OP's, you cannot!), it takes dozens of clicks for each new software – intentional dark-patterns to make opting-out cat-and-mouse. ---- >Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose. I care too much, is the problem (at least from my POV). Companies are soulless, and only care for shareholder value (legal requirement). Data is the new_oil is the new_carbon is the new_tin is the...

Interesting for me it's the opposite. I care about this so I let AI do it since LLM are better writers than the majority of people. I'm not so arrogant to think I'm a writer of that caliber.

LLM are terrible writers though. Worse than most humans unless they have some mental disability.

You are. I promise you. Almost every single person is a better writer than an LLM. You're wilfully sabotaging yourself.

> In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. A defense would be "I just used it for spellchecking" not "I just used it for the meat and the important parts people care about, the rest is mine!"

Yes, that was a weird defense; essentially, he used it for the actual interesting parts of the article.

Running a law firm on Free software (decoded.legal)

This is a fun blog idea, I'm going to steal it. I've been running a software engineering co-op for the last 5 years using only self hosted and FOSS software (outside of our email server and discord). The bulk of it is run through ERPnext, which handles timesheets, invoices (client and member side), and accounting. We built some modules for ERPnext to make that as automated as possible, some of which I've finally got together this week: https://github.com/508-dev/erp_rules https://github.com/508-dev/books_health I used to use Crater for accounting, but it could only handle very basic accounting, so I switched to GnuCash, which I found too complicated but also too difficult to collaborate with, thus ERPnext. We run member application management and BD pipeline through EspoCRM. Outline for wiki. Authentik for identity provider. Keila for newsletter emails. Vaultwarden for password management. Docuseal in place of Docusign. Nextcloud for basically all Google Drive / Docs / Calendar features, though it's quite slow in comparison. Coolify as a generic PAAS for MVPs or random member projects. Cal.com for appointments. Oh, to be fair, I still just route those to Google Meet. I wish we could get a self hosted Discord alternative, however I found Matrix to be too unintuitive of a UX, and member participation was plummeting. I've given a couple talks on self hosting and FOSS. Especially in the age of LLMs, I think it's very viable to move away from expensive SaaS. Just this week I had claude adding a ton of automations to our ERP, which probably isn't as possible for proprietary SaaS. Being able to straight up clone the codebase down and read/modify it directly makes for some interesting possibilities that we can then just as easily deploy ourselves since we self host. Using VPSs

Am I alone in my reaction that I want my lawyer to focus on law-ing, not pretty unique IT? What do I do if something happens to you and another lawyer or paralegal has to step in?

No, but my impression from this website is that he's a technology lawyer who enjoys maintaining his own stack, which strikes me as nothing but a plus.

I also want my lawyer to focus on lawing, not dealing with Microsoft contracts, trying to keep confidential data out of copilot, dealing with proprietary formats, etc. At the end of the day, every firm needs some form of IT. Above a certain scale you are hiring IT help to manage it anyway, might as well use free software as MS. It’s not as if managing MS for a large org is particularly easy.

I personally would find my lawyer working on projects and blogging about stuff related to his legal domain to be a good thing. This is no different than a constitutional lawyer writing a blog about some constitutional matter going on in current events.

I‘ve heard it said earlier this year at a legal workshop that not using Microsoft Word in your law firm amounts to malpractice. That was from a well known, respected, and long-time American Open Source lawyer.

Only if an edge case could cause you to miss things (such as libreoffice missing redlines?). Seems unlikely IMO.

This must have been intended as hyperbole. It is true, in some legal practice areas, non-use of Word has been highly impractical or even impossible for a long time, mainly because in the mainstream legal profession generally Word quickly established a chokehold by the late 1990s. Some courts expect Word format. I haven't been close to litigation in ages so I don't know how common a thing this is, but here's an example of an apparent "Word only" federal court: https://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caednew/index.cfm/attorney-info/word-format/ . So sure, in a hypothetical where a lawyer stubbornly refused to use Word in the context of a filing in that court, you can imagine consequences arising to the level of malpractice, but I don't think that's what they had in mind. A more familiar issue to me (and I'm guessing what that speaker was thinking of) is that if you're negotiating an agreement with some other party, and they are using Word (as they most likely will be), it is going to be highly inconvenient at best to insist on using some alternative tool. Red Hat's in house legal team is, er, was not a law firm of course, but ages ago Red Hat attempted to have as many 'back-office' staff use RHEL as possible, with few exceptions related to what was necessary for regulatory purposes. This extended to Red Hat's legal team, which attempted valiantly for a while to use OpenOffice (as was, and I suppose more specifically the RHEL packaging of the go-oo fork in those days) for all document-related purposes, including negotiating agreements with outside parties who were using Word. This proved to be impractical for at least the subset of the legal team that did that sort of work as their daily bread and butter, and eventually they got access to Word on Windows on VMware. Later on, it became possible for Red Hat lawyers to use OS X and Windows with Word, so the issue went away.

What's the point of saving $25 bucks or whatever a Word license is to use a vibe coded application?

25 bucks is 25 bucks. I also feel that losing your license because you tried to save 25 bucks on MS Word seems unlikely (not legal advice).

These law firms all using Harvey don’t know that they are giving Harvey everything they need to integrate vertically and become the Amazon for law. Then you are at their whim for every client. Also, AI doesn’t give you an edge if everyone is using the same cookie cutter solution.

This is funny, but the amlaw100 law firms signing up to enterprise saas have probably thought about their data protection terms

Port 0: The Port That Does Not Exist (acid.vegas)

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I have a feeling what sometimes :0 is interpreted as a 'first listening'. But Occam says what most of the time it's just 'DNAT dst port ANY to :80' or whatever, no magik.

Sometimes I have scripts that automatically assign ports starting from 30000. How would that work? Would I have to bind to port 0 multiple times until I randomly get a port in that range?

I'm not quite sure what a script assigning ports actually does, but if I need an app to bind a port in some port range, I just start binding ports starting from 30000 until it succeeds. If it's in a script then that might be difficult, but a racy approximation could be to loop e.g. listening socat with different ports for finding the free port. (Or maybe: parse output of ss.) But if the port use is separate from the port binding, then it might still be busy once the time to rebind it comes.

That might not quite fit my use case. My AI-generated scripts probably won't modify system-level configuration files to change the port range

... do you not have a say in the matter?

I'm not sure how I'd do acceptance/E2E testing without the magic of port 0. As long as you have a way of capturing what port it ended up using (which most languages are able to out of the box more or less), parallelizing testing workloads becomes such a breeze without having to manage ports and all that jazz, just fire everything up with N parallism and let the OS figure out what the free ports are, pass the references down and stuff just works. Thanks Linux :)

> I'm not sure how I'd do acceptance/E2E testing without the magic of port 0. Same as anything else, an explicit flag to achieve the same "just give me a port" functionality as this "magic number" does without resulting in the documented unpredictable behavior around a technically legitimate port number. As the article points out, most if not all of the services exposed on port 0 seem to be accidental and likely resulted from people assuming this magic behavior applies everywhere instead of just to one specific API.

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Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser (nfsu2.xyz)

Very nice loading times. Almost instant from cold start. Some clever tech used.

Do CS1.6 and CS Source next

This is such a fun blast from the past! I remember playing the entire NFS Underground on both the PC and the XBox - it had the most fun gameplay even compared to all the newer, shinier stuff that came later. LLAP.

chitown26.com - turned my portfolio into a full arcade with custom games

Physics hold great! https://imgur.com/a/WSRTF7h

How does one achieves this? Seems like it's been recompiled for wasm, but how was the server built and free roam multiplayer implemented?

Vibecoding. Lots and lots of vibecoding.

Ask the LLM that did it.

Playing in freeplay, I feel like I am Jason Dessen from Dark Matter. So many green Nissan 350Zs. It is impossible to drive a 100ft without hitting someone like me.

>But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone. There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.

Every time this is brought up I always think why can't the company setup a simple website where you pay 1 dollar and get a license?

When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following: "Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development." Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to? Thanks.

> Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work. Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!

On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.

But when you have a kid, you might want to share the experience with them. They'll see the magic.

My brother has our Xbox from when we were kids and his kids love all those games we grew up with.

> Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating. Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live. Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly. So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).

I think they should be far more worried about the music rights holders than EA. When I fired it up I was greeted to a menu playing The Doors & Snoop Dogg lol

you're confusing pirate consumers and pirate providers

You’re absolutely right. I was way too eager to jump on that

Same as always. Get services (google, github, chatgpt, reddit, etc.) to not help you find it. There is really no difference between distributing a decomp with assets and the real game with assets. Use yandex for this sort of thing. If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later.

> If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later. Second that, and we'd get higher quality assets. Game engines could be rewritten/rewired to support ray-tracing and what not. Exciting.