2. I knew friends who used them but we had the RIBBS list (Rhode Island BBS List). What was amusing at the time (90s) is that despite Rhode Island being the smallest state, there were still "local long distance" calls that cost money to make, so you had to be aware of what numbers you were able to call for free.

3. "Boards" were the terms we used, the term "server" was not in use that I know of for BBS host machines (despite them being essentially servers). There were definitely more popular ones, but also ones that served specific niches (photography, gaming, role playing). One of the more popular ones in RI got shutdown for hosting pirated games. The pirate stuff was never visible to my account, though they did advertise having GB of files available. This amount of data was huge compared to the 120MB hard drive I had at the time.

4. The vibe was variable based on the BBS. My impression was that the early internet had a better vibe than BBSes, because they were relatively small and regional you mostly got the discussion that was happening in your own locale. National BBSes were certainly a thing as well as services like GEnie and CompuServe, but those weren't something I frequented.

5. Honestly, I didn't see a lot of programming discussion. I am sure it was there, but I wasn't seeking it out. From a technical standpoint, a lot of it was talking about the new hardware of the day and also discussing BBS operation and configuration.

It started with my actual old email address (a Yahoo address I've had for 20+ years) being swapped out to a gtempaccount.com addresss, which appears to be the attacker moving the account into a Google Workspace.

How they did this for a yahoo.com email address without my approval is not clear, but I am 99% sure my Yahoo email is secure. I have taken the standard precautions anyway (changed password, confirmed 2FA which is already enabled)

Since then I've received a flood of similar notifications with different email addresses cycling through the same profile.

I can still log into my original account but it shows as the "@gtempaccount.com" suffix, and there doesn't seem to be anything useful I can do within the account.

Despite extensive searching and chatting with Google's support bots, there is no clear place to report this issue.

Any suggestions as to where this can actually be reported or other actions to take are very welcome.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500808

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Open to fractional CTO (particular interest in non-profits) roles, AI/LLM process integration and web/mobile app development projects.

  Location: Rhode Island, USA or REMOTE
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to Relocate: Mostly no, but possible for the right opportunity
  Technologies: Vue/Vite/Pinia, HTML/CSS/JS, Python, AWS (S3/Lambda/CloudFront/Dynamo/RDS)
                OpenAI/Anthropic APIs, Security/PCI audits and compliance 
  Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjbent/
  Email: gmail - andrew.bent

My interpretation of OP's point is that excessive complexity can be a "code smell" on its own. You want to use the solution to match the complexity of the job and both the team that is building it and the one that is likely to maintain it.

As amused as I am by the idea of a dev team being debased by the inelegance of basic bitch programming, the daily reality of the majority of software development in industry is "basic bitch" teams working on "basic bitch" problems. I would argue this is a significant reason why software development roles are so much at risk of being replaced by AI.

To me, it's similar to the choice one has as they improve their vocabulary. Knowing and using more esoteric words might allow adding nuance to ideas, but it also risks excluding others from understanding them or more wastefully can be used as intelligence signalling more than useful communication.

tldr: Complexity is important when it's required, but possibly detrimental when it's not.

Low exposures of both things are statistically less likely to hurt you than large doses. We pick a line to call "safe", but completely safety in either case is not guaranteed.

Even so, I still frequently use Siri now despite it being much less successful than that.

I find myself missing the experience of earlier iPhone where it didn't feel like I had so much crammed into my phone.

I can imagine using a device that I interact with primarily by talking with it, and the GUI is secondary or non-existent. For the bulk of what I use my phone for other than consuming video / doom-scrolling (which I could use much less of anyway), I think a voice interface would be preferable.

Initially "Apple Intelligence" was very exciting to think about, in that having a Siri that you could actually talk to would have a lot of possibilities, but we've seen essentially no progress in that direction.

I am thinking about this more in the angle of moving to a simpler device, not a switch to Android which feels to me like it's trending toward just a different walled garden.

After considering, my only main barriers for switching:

* Cloud Sync / Backup

Particularly for Photos, Messages and App Data, the data is auto-saved seamlessly. If I lose my phone, I can be back on a new one in a few hours.

* Calendar and List Management

As primitive as the experience still is with Siri relative to modern AI assistants, having my to-do and shopping list sync'd to my devices and being able to add to them with voice commands is an essential.

* Electronics Interface Apps

A few devices I have (solar charge controller, leak detector) require an iOS/Android app to use. There's not a great way around this, but keeping an old phone as a controller is an option.

It's really a much shorter list than I thought it would be. There are definitely some apps that I use whose experience would be decidedly worse if I had to use them in a browser (YouTube, Spotify, Maps) but it feels almost worth trying.

If there were an AI-focused simple phone that could solve the first two and offered a modern AI voice interface, I would be very interested to try it.

I am curious to hear other's opinions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296090

Points: 6

# Comments: 9

Apple did a ton of work on the power efficiency of iOS on their own ARM chips for iPhone for a decade before introducing the M1.

Since iOS and macOS share the same code base (even when they were on different architectures) it makes much more sense to simplify to a single chip architecture that they already had major expertise with and total control over.

There would be little to no upside for cutting Intel in on it.

I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.

This is still alpha, but I have been using it to handle the multi-agent worktree paradigm.

However, if you are familiar with Pliny the Liberator's work, essentially all modern models are easily jailbroken, such that the original prompt can be overridden. All it will take for your agent is to download a malicious payload, perhaps disguised as a relevant library or documentation for the task at hand, and it can be running whatever the attacker tells it.

An 'rm -rf /' would be a pretty mild outcome. The more likely one would be the attacker silently installs malware on your machine.

If a library author wants to make their package "look" maintained for some reason, they could generate superfluous commits and open and close fake bug reports. This could be a "good" signal to the heuristic, but has no real world benefit or worse-case could be used to lend credibility to a package with known vulnerabilities.

i.e. This is my opinion, take it as you will. If you want proper legal advice, you should be consulting a lawyer.

Getting outside investment, signing a high value contract, receiving threats of legal action? I would consult one immediately.

I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.