Hacker News: SAI_Peregrinus

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May"

SAI_Peregrinus — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:14:24 +0000

To get excessively pedantic, he walks very poorly. Toddles around. So his gait makes him a literal toddler. All 1 & 2 year olds toddle, but not all who toddle are 1 or 2 years old.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits"

SAI_Peregrinus — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:37:10 +0000

Resistors don't go in the cable. They go in the device. They indicate that the device can't negotiate voltages above 5V, so just send 5V.

USB-A has no ability to provide voltages other than 5V, so there's no need for indicating it's the max.

Not all chargers have USB-A ports. Many laptops don't have USB-A ports, so if you want to charge a noncompliant device from a laptop it won't work. Or a laptop charger, which is dedicated USB-C.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2"

SAI_Peregrinus — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:53:10 +0000

In contrast, OS CSPRNG APIs usually only provide access to a CSPRNG that the OS seeds on its own, in some way not fully controllable by the user. E.g. using fast key erasure & hashing in data from a hardware entropy pool.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases"

SAI_Peregrinus — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:54:00 +0000

Most likely is either extracting the private key from the camera or getting the camera to sign arbitrary data. If the signing isn't part of the sensor die itself there's a bus where the image data gets transferred from sensor to signer, so an attacker can inject arbitrary data onto that bus to get it signed, even though they never actually extract the signing key.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Claude Fable 5"

SAI_Peregrinus — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:45:17 +0000

It's always been about the safety of their valuation.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers"

SAI_Peregrinus — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:37:00 +0000

Disagree, availability is part of security. That's why denial of service attacks are a security issue. Bad enough usability is indistinguishable from a DoS attack.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

SAI_Peregrinus — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:24:09 +0000

More verbose code takes up more space in the context. It's harder for humans to review, but also harder for future AIs to edit. Unless you manage to keep the AI to firm module boundaries & have it replace modules wholesale it's not really equivalent to how assembly gets replaced wholesale when a compilation unit changes. Compilers aren't editing the `.o` files when you rebuild, they throw the old ones out & replace them. But when you prompt an AI it is reading & editing the source files, so excess verbosity in the source files is detrimental.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "LLMs Are Closer to Religion Than They Appear"

SAI_Peregrinus — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:03:20 +0000

Or Next Tuesdayism: the universe will be created next Tuesday. Your current sense of experiencing reality is merely the fabricated memory which will have existed after the universe gets created.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

SAI_Peregrinus — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:15:18 +0000

A COPV tumbling & venting gas as it does so.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

SAI_Peregrinus — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:29:59 +0000

There's a disconnect between TDD using all sorts of tests (unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, in-field, etc.) and TDD using unit tests only. Unit tests provide the least value/line of test code of all types of tests. They're important, since they can catch bugs earlier than other sorts of tests that can't be caught by a type system, but not sufficient to catch most bugs.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

SAI_Peregrinus — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:21:05 +0000

Pad. And one of the lightning protection towers. And the transporter-erector.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "The Eternal Sloptember"

SAI_Peregrinus — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:50:03 +0000

John Grimsmo's knifemaking business has a Kern which is perfectly capable of doing the tolerances needed behind the apex. That's a very expensive CNC machine, but it's capable of precision & accuracy well beyond what's possible to achieve by hand.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "The Ask"

SAI_Peregrinus — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:54:17 +0000

3-5, usually. Tuesday is used as a placeholder for "generic day like any other". Monday & Friday might be special, or they might not. But Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are generic & interchangeable: you're not catching up after a weekend, and there's a work day the next day so there will be time to catch issues. They're Tuesdays in spirit, if not in fact.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Ferrari shares fall after launch of first EV as Jony Ive design proves divisive"

SAI_Peregrinus — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:47:22 +0000

Johnny Ive presumably likes it.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide"

SAI_Peregrinus — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:50:32 +0000

> Obviously that precludes any and all automated systems.

What if it's not an automated system? The automated system merely takes pictures of your license plate & face, then some human decides whether those pictures are evidence you broke the law. They go to court, since they're your accuser.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing"

SAI_Peregrinus — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:00:21 +0000

Instead of hanging spools off the side, get a few Creality Space Pis or similar filament dry boxes you can print directly from.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

SAI_Peregrinus — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:51:48 +0000

You can write a C compiler with exactly laid out well-defined semantics. You can't assume those semantics hold for C-the-language, because it doesn't define those semantics. UB is a property of the language, not just of a given compiler. The Rust reference defines the semantics of the safe subset of Rust without any UB, so any compliant Rust compiler won't have UB in that subset. The reference also defines the guarantees which the programmer must uphold within `unsafe` blocks to avoid UB, as long as those are upheld there's no UB at all.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

SAI_Peregrinus — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:32:16 +0000

The semantics are well-defined in both modes. You can predict exactly what will happen in either case. In C, the semantics are not defined at all, you can't predict what will happen and it's allowed to change between compilations of the same source.

It will probably get omitted, since Undefined Behavior isn't allowed by the C abstract machine, but sadly compilers are allowed to emit code for UB in the source (partly because some UB is only detectable at runtime). Sometimes disabling optimizations will incorrectly allow codegen to run for source lines which have UB, tricking people into thinking that optimizations are breaking their program. Compilers are allowed to do this, since behaviors other than "omit the offending statement" are unfortunately allowed by the standard, so it's not a compiler bug.

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

SAI_Peregrinus — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:13:09 +0000

That's related to PNS syndrome (PIN Number Syndrome syndrome (Personal Identification Number Number Syndrome syndrome)).

New comment by SAI_Peregrinus in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

SAI_Peregrinus — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:27:58 +0000

Halt and Catch Fire