Hacker News: Vexs

New comment by Vexs in "Windows 3.1 tiled background .bmp archive"

Vexs — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:19:17 +0000

Some time ago I wanted the original MS solitaire playing card files. Wasn't too hard to find a copy of the binary, but the interesting thing to me is it appeared the files were handwritten- a couple possible typos in color and not a single byte longer than they needed to be.

New comment by Vexs in "Anchor: Hardware-based authentication using SanDisk USB devices"

Vexs — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:29:16 +0000

You don't. The normal procedure here is to have multiple unique keys with multiple unique secrets. If one breaks that's it it's broken. This also allows you to revoke a key without removing all keys.

New comment by Vexs in "Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website"

Vexs — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:43:47 +0000

It's not even just that- with component selection you have a handful of datasheets that give you (ideally) fairly truthful information about the device. You can rather deterministically look at these and compare them.

Regular consumer products? Good fucking luck. Anywhere an LLM pulls from is probably going to be mostly SEO'd listicles.

New comment by Vexs in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

Vexs — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:51:18 +0000

Buddy you've got like 10 top-level comments on this thread are you doing okay

New comment by Vexs in "Nvidia NemoClaw"

Vexs — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:40:29 +0000

You could pretty reasonably vibe code that in a single prompt odds are.

Additionally, there are browser extensions that can do this- check on a timer, see if some page content is there, and then notify.

New comment by Vexs in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

Vexs — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:12:27 +0000

They're also, as it turns out, vulnerable to a drillbit

New comment by Vexs in "Kagi Small Web"

Vexs — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:08:03 +0000

The only thing that seems to have gotten a lot worse is the trend of ai articles- which isn't kagi's fault but it would be nice if they could figure out how to filter them. They all follow the same patter- "specific thing you want" with a table of contents with loads of repeated chapters and unrelated information, spattered with effectively random images.

New comment by Vexs in "Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension"

Vexs — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:07:27 +0000

I don't remember exactly what I wrote and how the logic works, but I generally remember the broad flow of how things tie together, which makes it easier to drop in on some aspect and understand where it is code-wise.

New comment by Vexs in "Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension"

Vexs — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:05:52 +0000

Almost anything I write in Python I start in jupyter just so I can roll it around and see how it feels- which determines how I build it out and to some degree, how easy it is to fix issues later on.

With llm-first coding, this experience is lost

New comment by Vexs in "What AI coding costs you"

Vexs — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:35:42 +0000

I recently accepted-ish a position at a very ai-forward company. Manual programming was somewhat discouraged entirely.

I've used AI tools in the past for maths I didn't understand or errors I couldn't make sense of, and wrote the bulk myself, but now we have as mentioned, opus/sonnet 4.5- which work great.

As part of this, I had to integrate two new apis- nornally, when I write an API wrapper I end up learning a lot about how the API feels, what leads to what and how it smells, etc. This time? I just asked Claude to read it's docs, then gave suggestions about how I wanted it to be laid out. As a result? I have no idea how these apis feel, their models, etc. If I want to interact with them, I ask Claude how I do a thing with the library it made.

Mind you, the library is good. I looked over everything, it's fairly thin and it's exactly how I would write it, as I suggested it do. But I have no deep understanding, much less an understanding of how it got integrated in.

Like, normally when I integrate something in I learn a bit about the codebase I'm integrating it into. Do that enough times, and I understand the codebase at depth, how things plug in. This time? Nada.

It's.... Deeply uncomfortable, to know so little but still be able to do so much. It doesn't matter if I get it to explain it, that's just information that washes off when I move onto the next thing. The reflexive memory isn't built.

All of which is to say, I agree with the article.

New comment by Vexs in "PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]"

Vexs — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:54:53 +0000

Holy cow! I've been pushing around a TQFP48 tonight and thought I was pretty good.

New comment by Vexs in "PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]"

Vexs — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:45:09 +0000

I don't think that modern boards are really repairable at all beyond component replacement- 4+ layer stackups being the big reason. If there's a way to do anything to those boards besides total replacement I'd be super interested to know.

The techniques here are also way beyond basics I think- like, you look at most guides for repair and it's "idk just solder some bodge wires on there, here's what a good joint should look like"

New comment by Vexs in "End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git"

Vexs — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:07:45 +0000

You know, I reckon if you serve up smut or instructions on bomb creation or something they stop hammering you...

New comment by Vexs in "Pebble Watch software is now open source"

Vexs — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 04:21:27 +0000

I don't really know that this is avoidable without buckets of work and probably legal issues on behalf of core's (or anyone's) engineers- it's really just something that plagues hardware in general.

Hell, lots of sensors/etc these days are running fairly complicated software that's totally opaque.

New comment by Vexs in "Core Devices keeps stealing our work"

Vexs — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:20:58 +0000

I don't think _anyone_ who's buying the new pebble watches is to some degree not interested in software, and probably pretty interested in open-source community work. It's a wildly niche userbase, and this sort of thing is going to put crazy pressure on Eric and co, I imagine.

Still keeping my preorder, but damn dude this kinda sucks.

New comment by Vexs in "Passwords and Power Drills"

Vexs — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 05:53:33 +0000

> restart required a hardware security module (HSM) smart card.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know why? My guess would be the PW DB would be encrypted with some token generated from this card.

I've had lots of "I have a secret and the server needs it" type problems but I've never been very happy with my solutions- smart cards seem like potentially an elegant solution.

New comment by Vexs in "Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site"

Vexs — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 01:31:42 +0000

Figure 3 from the report- that's an Adafruit sensor module on a 3d printed bit of plastic with a teensy-brand microcontroller just sitting in there! Actually, the entire electronics enclosure appears printed.

Very funny to see in what I assume is a million-dollar product.

New comment by Vexs in "MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5"

Vexs — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:03:25 +0000

It's a bit silly IMO, but USB PD EPR _can_ support 24v and 48v- for charging laptops, I believe. The day I see a server rack with a pair of USBCs plugged into it is a far day off I hope though.

New comment by Vexs in "The $21B influencer industry has gone off the rails"

Vexs — Wed, 01 May 2024 19:07:23 +0000

The dude tests basically anything and everything, and gives them generally pretty reasonable goes at a proper test. Sure, it's far off from an industry standard in a lot of cases, but unlike the industry (generally) he does side by side comparisons.

New comment by Vexs in "Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year"

Vexs — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 03:16:52 +0000

midjourney and discord have a number of internal agreements- they're not on there for free anymore...