Japan doesn't allow dual citizenship if you acquire the japanese one later in life.

Plenty of people in Japan, like my nephew, have dual citizenship by birth. I don't know if they can keep both when they're adult. But as kids 100% guaranteed Japan allows it.

And then a great many mixed couple do, on purpose, give literally two different identities to their kids. One by registering them, say, in Germany with the name written in roman characters (say "Akane") and the other in Japan with the name written using kanjis (or kanas for that is allowed to).

I'm not talking about dual citizenships / two passports: I'm talking about the same person having two entirely different identities because his parents registered him, on purpose, differently in two different countries.

So, yes, there are literally a few people counted twice on earth. And you probably don't want to do that with the US citizenship (for US taxes its citizens worldwide and it's a reporting clusterfuck). But if you've got, say, a japanese identity and whatever european one: you're totally fine.

Now I may be mistaken but when I learned about 0/1 Knapsack three decades ago, my immediate thought was that for quite some cases you could do, using dynamic programming, an approximate version (requiring less memory and hence well, for example fitting into memory) and prove that your solution was "at most 1% off of the optimal solution". Never really looked into it though so I may have be wrong.

Basically say you need to 0/1 Knapsack the quantities 1739, 2989, 3798 and 4233, etc.: you can e.g. divide them by 10 and then round them up, so you've now got 174, 299, 380 and 424 and you need much less memory to run your dynamic programming solution to 0/1 Knapsack. And the best solution you find is guaranteed to be at most x% off the optimal solution.

Something like that. Does that work? Anyone ever heard about something similar?

Exact same! My neighbors (still friends to this day) managed to put their hands on lots of used 10base2 network cards and coax cables / Ts and terminators from a company that closed shop.

So we put those cards in our PCs and created a LAN and we had a coax cable going from our bedrooms (my brother and I) to the neighbors' house. On the third floor! We contemplated using utility cables in the middle of the street to hook the neighbor across the street but decided it wasn't wise (we were teenagers so we still contemplated the idea). We also fancied the idea of drilling a hole between the two houses: my neighbor's father was fine with it and provided us with a really long drill but my parents didn't want to hear about it.

And we didn't have the proper dedicated BNC connectors crimp tool though (and had zero idea where to buy one and were too broke anyway), so we became masters at building coax cables with BNC connectors by using regular pliers.

Them little orcs and humans from Warcraft 2 would then transit through the coax cable from house to house (so around 1995).

I've got many dumb cheap ethernet switches and I'd say as long as they're really dumb/unmanaged/not advanced: you can't go very wrong. I've got probably two TP-Link ones and they're on 24/7 and just work: zero problem since years (and they followed me in four countries). Never had any issue with big .iso files or anything.

And I've got a little homelab: VMs and ZFS on a Xeon with ECC RAM, countless Raspberry Pi, two physical different LANs (not VLANs as all my switches are dumb) with a Pi doing the bridge/routing.

It's when things get complicated: configurable stuff, "advanced" capabilities, etc. that the cheap junk stops working properly and that you're better served with proper gear.

And of course there's the $200 or $500 vs $20 question too.

But people shouldn't underestimate how reliable good old dumb unmanaged Ethernet is for home usage.

Heck, I can go from 1 Gb/s to 100 Mbit/s to then a very old 10 Mbit/s (!) switch by daisy chaining them all switches and everything simply just works (I did that for I was thinking about playing with bounded-retrieval-model, hence physically limiting network speed on purpose).

No whether you should support or not a company selling shitty managed switches and shitty routers by buying the products that are okay from them is another question.

What happens when people decide to hack the Unitree robots and have them pick up knives and stab their owner and then go on a spree in the street?

Before people say: "But that's never going to happen, nobody would ever do that!" I'd like to state again the fact that people did just remotely hack fridges to ruin food.

"But ruining food for everybody is nothing, it's just kids playing around, people would never hack robots to hurt other humans!".

Is that what people really think?

Or do they think that "this time programmers managed to create secure software that cannot be hacked into"?

Concealing a recording device in a conference room in toilet paper is a bit strange. Do executives meet in the toilets to discuss strategic moves?

Apparently the hacker did remove the battery and replace it with a smaller one, leaving enough room for the tiny eSIM/LTE modem / OCR chip that did recognition of the secret on screen.

I don't care about cryptocurrencies but I've always been fascinated by the cryptography behind it. I've also dabbled with hardware wallets for non-cryptocurrencies stuff: like U2F auth.

The idea of a master secret that is behind a secure element which I control and which I can duplicate is amazing to me (as opposed to, say, "your" passkeys which Google/Microsoft/Apple can basically backup and transfer to other devices for you).

But really to me in the cryptocurrencies world people have been sold the lie that a hardware wallet was secure: it's not. It could be tampered with (as happened in this hack, where an additional rogue chip reading the screen and then sending it using an eSIM steals the secret) but it can also contain a bug (like the recent Coldcard exploit where Coldcard hardware wallets fell back on a RNG with only 32 bits of entropy and some dark-hat hacker cracked those and stole Bitcoins) and, most of all, the vendor of the hardware wallet itself can do nasty attacks (like "kleptography").

From the very start everybody in the ecosystem should have pushed of "n-of-n" schemes (say even just 2-of-2), where one secret goes on a hardware wallet from one vendor and the other secret goes on a hardware wallet from another vendor.

For years and years the tune has been: "PCs cannot be trusted, use a hardware wallet" but it mislead people.

PCs indeed cannot be trusted but unsuspecting users should have learned how to use 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 schemes, to become immune from hacks affecting one hardware wallet vendor.

The typical, non-sensical, response to this is the idiotic: "but if you have two secrets, if you lose one of them you lose everything". It's totally idiotic for people basically save a list of 24 words (the "seed", which is the master secret). Well, guess what: instead of saving a list of 24 words, you save a list of 48 words. Exact same thing, just twice longer.

That's my take: the entire "your coins will be safe if you use a hardware wallet" was misguided.

In several EU countries the limit is about 6 to 7 years. Which coincides with what many banks allow to go back in time to fetch the statements (at least without additional costs).

I think that is fair. The question though is: why are my taxpayers dollars paying for incompetent public servants that only realize more than 20 years after the facts that documents were falsified? I don't want my public servants to be crybabies after they fucked up: instead I want them to discover fraudsters in a reasonable timeframe.

I see such idiots daily, in all venues of life: the world is simply really full of dumbfucks.

It's simply how things are and we shouldn't be afraid of pointing it out.

Videos are shittier. Most songs are even shittier than the autotuned pieces of shit already were. Ads are worse (even though nobody thought that was even possible). Customer support is worse.

> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using)

That nobody is using and that are worse than what we used to have. And because nobody's using them, the countless issues plaguing them aren't even reported by users anymore (there are no users anymore). Full of bugs, usability issues and gigantic security holes (but which doesn't really matter because nobody's using them).

It's not even clear that it's making long-standing software (like say Linux or Emacs or Blender or QEMU) better at all.

Now I'd say though: most of the issues you mentioned have nothing to do with LLMs / AI. But it's very clear that AI ain't solving much of the world's problems and that the promises we got years ago didn't materialize.

Yeah the amount of time the taxman has wasted in my life is beyond belief. I automated a lot of it myself over the years but now having the help of LLMs to fill the bullshit, pointless, Brazilian (the movie, not the country) crap to please mister taxman is a godsend.

Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.

We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with.

Not long ago the Coldcard hardware wallet had an issue where it'd fallback to a 32-bit only RNG that could be cracked and so many people got their coins stolen.

Now it's Ledger that sees tampered devices all around the world (in Asia for sure but now there are reports about reseller in the EU selling backdoored/eSIM'ed devices).

For people who own Bitcoin at this point one of the only thing kinda sensible to do is to use multisig schemes, like 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 multisig, where your split the secret over two or three different hardware wallet brands (meaning being able to sign a 2-of-2 wallets requires hardware wallets from two different vendors).

When Ledger hardware wallets came out and people said that seed (the list of words) could be intercepted and relayed by a channel bypassing the computer (here by using an eSIM), people would post explaining that people were nuts if they thought such an attack could be pulled off.

Yet here we are.

And Ledger is responsible for very poor security practices: for example it's impossible to use a Ledger hardware wallet in a fully airgapped/offline way. For you're forced to not only upgrade the firmware but also install the Bitcoin "ledger app" (or whatever that is called) after you entered your seed into the device.

Which is complete and total amateur hour.

In addition to that Ledger offers a service to "backup your seed": what could possibly go wrong with that uh?

I'm betting that we'll soon hear about hardware wallets getting drained due to the seed being exfiltrated through "randomness" in how transactions are built/signed (aka "kleptography").

And it's not just representative about people in the cryptocurrencies ecosystem: people simply don't understand computer security and don't understand the potential attacks nor the length at which attackers are willing to go to steal data/funds/ruin other people's lives.

At this point we've heard about chips' plans being modified before the chips are even built (only to lower the entropy of RNGs) [unrelated to cryptocurrencies btw], a worldwide backdoor attempt in SSH, eSIM sending secrets from hardware wallets with tiny attack surfaces.

You're not anywhere near paranoid enough.

That's the plain truth: most sites/servers simply serve very very very little and have not anywhere near the need for 256 GB of RAM, let alone 512 GB.

These old servers aren't sufficient for the Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Meta/Google/Oracle of this world, but for 99.9% of the rest of the world, they're more than plenty.

And the world and technology shall keep on marching: we'll have DDR6 and as soon as that happens, suddenly all the hyperscalers shall consider DDR5 to be oh-so-lame and dumped by the truckloads in landfills.

We may have two more painful years ahead for RAM but we'll then have plenty of used enterprise/datacenters gear on the market.

Yeah the Xeon E5 v4 to me are really an amazing spot. These things, today, are basically free. If you look a bit you can buy stuff like four 20 cores E5 v4 for $60, making them effectively $15 each. Basically free.

And here's the trick: I don't need my Xeon to be up 24/7. 8/7 is sufficient, so I save 2/3rd of the electricity cost. I set up my network so that when I sleep, my main server doesn't need to be on. The services that really need be on 24/7 (say my DNS for when I'm sleeping and my wife/kid need Internet) are running on a Raspberry Pi (which consumes nothing).

And when I need the shitloads of cores / ZFS etc.: I turn the Xeon on.

Now it's still a server in my case: my main machine is a recent AMD.

> if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.

Slap 128 GB of the 256 in a $50 used Xeon server and use that has a backup / to run VMs / ZFS / etc.

Nobody ever said "robot" meant "machines with AGI thinking": robot, literally as defined by the person mentioned in TFA and who coined the term, meant "to work" / "forced labor". Work/labor that could be done by servants.

If cleaning my entire apartment by vaccuum cleaning, water cleaning, giving me reports about it, obeying my orders (e.g. if I tell to stop) ain't "automated labor that could have been done by a servant", I don't know what is.

That and switches (like light switches): not only we've got way more variety in the EU but they also all feel of better quality.

Both electrical outlets and switches in the US do also look old and dated. Just like they feel when using them: old and outdated.

It's just all really weird, nearly anachronistic.

The Atari ST is in the news today on HN! (there was a TFA about the Atari Falcon, which was a really big Atari ST).