Hacker News: aftbit

New comment by aftbit in "RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020)"

aftbit — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:34:15 +0000

The internet is for whoever wants to send bits to each other and is willing to pay for transit to do it. The WWW might be for end users, though that seems less obvious by the day.

New comment by aftbit in "Small Portable Weather Radar"

aftbit — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:11:55 +0000

I love to see more amateur experimentation with radar. Another example of tech that was government lab black magic in the 1940s becoming accessible to random smart individuals with a few hundred dollars worth of lab equipment in the 2020s.

New comment by aftbit in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

aftbit — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:38:23 +0000

No, I meant that having a lot of debt puts you in a position to be more vulnerable to any kind of negative outcome. Intuitively, this seems to hold true across the spectrum from the personal level to the government level.

If a person has a lot of debt and no savings, and they lose their job, then they will find themselves in trouble a lot faster than someone who owns their home and car and has 6 months in a savings account.

If a company has a lot of debt, they might find themselves in trouble with credit rating agencies as soon as they have a bad quarter. Or they might have cashflow issues if rates increase. Both of these can lead to an accelerating negative feedback loop.

Governments (at least those with fiscal independence) have a unique set of tools to work around this situation, but they too can struggle with high debt loads acting as a drag on future prosperity.

Debt plays a critical societal role in allowing new production in advance of revenues, but it can also be a dangerous trap.

These AI and tech companies are priced as if they are still running a capital-light, 0-marginal-cost SaaS business. That's no longer what's happening. This economic engine makes up a substantial amount of both the value and the growth in the American stock market.

If there's a loss in confidence, high leverage will make things fall faster. This could be infectious. Not just the AI and tech companies, but the whole market might suffer.

New comment by aftbit in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

aftbit — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:02:12 +0000

What's the purpose of keeping it off the balance sheet if not to hide it?

New comment by aftbit in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

aftbit — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:01:08 +0000

I disagree - high leverage inherently makes systems less stable.

New comment by aftbit in "Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver"

aftbit — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:01:41 +0000

Yeah... that's been my past experience with USB docks, at least any with more than one slot. I've never had great luck with them. "Can recover from power outage without being touched" is a key requirement for my NAS so I'll give that one a pass and stick with my "SATA drives directly attached to a SAS controller" strategy for now. Thanks for the reply.

As for the 24/7 use, yeah so be it. The I in RAID stands for Inexpensive. If they fail after 10 years at 24/7, so be it. I have drive level redundancy and frequent offsite backups of anything critical.

New comment by aftbit in "I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation"

aftbit — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:58:58 +0000

I used developer tools to delete the dementor, then I muted the site when it started playing music.

New comment by aftbit in "Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver"

aftbit — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:01:35 +0000

Neat blog! I was intrigued by this bullet point mentioned in passing:

>my four hard drive USB 3.2 ZFS raidz2 array with four 24 TB drives

Can you speak more about this? Which USB array did you choose? How well does it work? I've been slowly planning a transition away from my power-hungry surplus enterprise gear in the 19" rack towards a smaller, quieter, lower power setup ... but storage is the real kicker right now. I have a 12x18TB array in raidz2 built into a 1U NAS case, and I just can't quite figure out a better way to package something like that. I would need three USB arrays if I want to reuse the existing drives, which I think I do given how expensive storage is today.

New comment by aftbit in "Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA"

aftbit — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 02:51:15 +0000

Can you configure Bifrost using entirely config files without the web interface? Can it run without a database or anything stateful? I'm using LiteLLM but it is not trivial to run.

New comment by aftbit in "Microsoft Confirms Windows GDID Device Identifier That Cannot Be Disabled"

aftbit — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:33:09 +0000

Which applications do this?

New comment by aftbit in "Microsoft Confirms Windows GDID Device Identifier That Cannot Be Disabled"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:12:18 +0000

Which is also well documented and trivially rotatable by anyone with root on the machine. How do you rotate the MS identifier?

New comment by aftbit in "DEA to Temporarily Schedule 7-Oh and Related Substances to Protect Public Safety"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:06:37 +0000

aka "gas station heroin"

New comment by aftbit in "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:02:09 +0000

Yeah.... that was a cool idea. Too bad it'll never be built.

(Supposedly they're building it in West Texas - last update in 2024)

New comment by aftbit in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:44:17 +0000

SpaceX-the-space-launch-business is doing amazing things, which is part of what makes it so sad that the financials and buzz is all for SpaceX-the-enterprise-AI-business.

Their S-1 projects $28 trillion TAM, with 93% of that attributed to AI, ~6% to connectivity via Starlink, and only ~1% for space launch capability.

Of their $20 billion CapEx spent in 2025, 60% was spent towards AI data-centers, 20% was spent towards Starlink satellites, and ~20% was spent towards actually building Starship and Falcon 9. That's gone up to nearly 80% towards AI in Q1 2026.

Of course, "AI" makes up only ~20% of their current revenues.

So... this company is priced as an AI startup but it's actually a satellite internet and space launch business.... or is it? Shame to see the coolest thing that Elon did be eaten by the AI monster.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

New comment by aftbit in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:38:14 +0000

Not a recommendation for this fork of the extension, just the first I found googling.

https://github.com/aspenmayer/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean-m...

New comment by aftbit in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:02:20 +0000

The fact that this works by exploiting AMP is delicious.

New comment by aftbit in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:00:24 +0000

>Doesn't matter if the business fundamentals are sound.

The business fundamentals are rarely sound for modern IPOs, especially anything Elon adjacent. His companies are just as bad as crypto token sales in terms of their hype. Heck, some of the stock price appreciation of Tesla _was_ driven by their ownership of crypto for a year or two.

New comment by aftbit in "TS-2026-009: Insecure argument handling in Tailscale SSH permitted root access"

aftbit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:57:02 +0000

It appears that tailscale ssh is off by default? How can I validate that? When I try to log in, I just get:

    No ED25519 host key is known for $host and you have requested strict checking.

New comment by aftbit in "Samsung Health app threatens data deletion if users opt out AI training"

aftbit — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:10:20 +0000

I sorta assumed they were making money from selling you the device.

New comment by aftbit in "Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop"

aftbit — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:55:56 +0000

Does Codex run its own sandbox? I see that sometimes it runs commands without asking, which then fail for some reason, and it asks to run them again "outside of the sandbox"