Hacker News: bobthebuilders

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Wireshark 4.6.0 Supports macOS Pktap Metadata (PID, Process Name, etc.)"

bobthebuilders — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:03:22 +0000

I think it is not an exaggeration to say that without Wireshark, so much of modern computing would never have been developed and we would be stuck in the past. The amount of visibility it gives is immense. I have used it for years, decades now.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "The best worst hack that saved our bacon"

bobthebuilders — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:02:41 +0000

Half the time I read the stories they're just a thinly disguised ad for some flavor the day SaaS, so at least in this instance the hook was somewhat useful. Now if everyone uses this to shill their SaaS, then maybe not.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "NSA and IETF: Can an attacker purchase standardization of weakened cryptography?"

bobthebuilders — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:59:50 +0000

If you have nothing to hide, feel free to mail me your unlocked phone.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Americans Are Using PTO to Sleep, Not for Vacation–Report"

bobthebuilders — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 18:43:24 +0000

People are getting fired and are having to rely on gig work to live. It's a reporting gimmick by both administrations to convince us the economy is doing better when it hasn't.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

bobthebuilders — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 21:28:33 +0000

Wow I never knew I "can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem".

This is why people use Obsidian.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Trump calls on Intel CEO to resign"

bobthebuilders — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:21:04 +0000

It may not be illegal for someone to have close ties with the Chinese, but we should also not let them control one of the most important companies for the US military and industrial advantage over our rivals.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Resizable structs in Zig"

bobthebuilders — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 01:04:10 +0000

Alloca is a fundmentally insecure way of doing allocations. Languages that promote alloca will find themselves stuck in a morass of security messes and buffer overflows. If Zig were to adopt alloca, it would make the catastrophic mistake that plagued C for over several decades and introduce permanently unfixable security issues for another generation of programming languages.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat"

bobthebuilders — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:08:19 +0000

I used to work at a game company fresh out of college, and this is simply untrue. The company made roughly 40% of sales from cheater whales (one can imagine how much the chest makers made), and there were guidelines on repeated bans where we recognized similarities to make sure we wouldn't ban them again too early.

I left the industry because of thah and the other things like loot boxes and matchmaking for profit and to push micro transactions. It's a terrible place.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit"

bobthebuilders — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 21:09:50 +0000

I am not talking about drones like DJI quadcopters with grenades duct taped to them or even large fixed wing aircraft, I am talking about small personal humanoid drones.

Civilization is going through a birth rate collapse. The labor shortage will become more endemic in the coming years, first in lower skill and wage jobs, and then everywhere else.

Humanoid robots change the economics of war. No longer does the military or the police need humans. Morale will no longer be an issue. The infantry will become materiel.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit"

bobthebuilders — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:14:01 +0000

The rules of traditional warfare will still exist, they will just be fought by advanced hyper intelligent AIs instead of humans. Hunter Miller humanoids like Optimus and drones like Anduril will replace humans in war.

War will be the same, but the rich are preparing to unleash a "new arsenal of democracy" against us in an AI takeover. We must be prepared.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Use the XDG Base Directory Specification"

bobthebuilders — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 16:35:36 +0000

XDG_BIN_HOME is crucial, without it, not supporting the spec seems like the right call. Better to deal with the status quo until updates happen than to get stuck in bikeshed hell.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "FBI chief says TikTok 'screams' of US national security concerns"

bobthebuilders — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:40:09 +0000

Because the data is going to a foreign country instead of staying in America, where it's subject to American over site (see Schrems II in the EU).

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Ford's new patent proposes a way for banks to disable features on leased cars"

bobthebuilders — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 23:33:17 +0000

We already have that though, it's called repossession. This feature just removes the human barrier and makes it vulnerable to hacking.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Curl turns 25 years old GitHub Celebration"

bobthebuilders — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 07:43:58 +0000

Rust is definitely the worst language for this, writing curl in C++ would unlock memory and type safety while not throwing 30 years of language design out the window.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "The Futility of Doctors"

bobthebuilders — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 05:55:41 +0000

Do you have any evidence for this? As an American who's been to many doctors, this just seems wrong.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "We unplugged a data center to test our disaster readiness"

bobthebuilders — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 07:17:55 +0000

I mean restarting hardware once a day isn't going to hurt the hardware (indeed its the norm in some places to shut down many racks after business hours), and software will probably only see less bugs.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Indirect branch tracking in Linux for Intel CPUs"

bobthebuilders — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 03:09:25 +0000

Yup, this is a great win for free software as proprietary modules have less leeway to call GPL functions.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "Richard Stallman to Deliver ‘State of Free Software’ Online on April 13"

bobthebuilders — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 02:57:15 +0000

All but like two of those are important at all for advancing the FSF's missions. They would also completely break backwards compatibility. Half of those aren't even under the control of the FSF.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability"

bobthebuilders — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 05:59:04 +0000

I'm sorry, but I'm not a nation-state. I wish I was though.

New comment by bobthebuilders in "The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability"

bobthebuilders — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 23:19:14 +0000

You have it the wrong way around. Tagging the release as security allows nation-state level attackers with large budgets to investigate the fixes, while normal people have to wait to patches. This gives nation-state level attackers with large budgets a heads-up, making it worse for everyone else. Furthermore, nation-state level attacks with large budgets are more focused on offense than defense.