Hacker News: cbdevidal

New comment by cbdevidal in "Hayes AT command set"

cbdevidal — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:40:07 +0000

My first job in IT was at AOL tech support and we could rattle off modem strings from memory :-)

New comment by cbdevidal in "Getting Started with AT Protocol"

cbdevidal — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:39:33 +0000

My first job in IT was at AOL tech support and we could rattle off AT modem strings from memory :)

New comment by cbdevidal in "Getting Started with AT Protocol"

cbdevidal — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:38:37 +0000

Someone also posted a link to the Hayes command set and I was glad.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567961

New comment by cbdevidal in "Hayes AT command set"

cbdevidal — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:37:07 +0000

That's funny. I clicked on the HN article on the home page about the AT Protocol[1] expecting an article on the Hayse set. And then I scrolled down and saw this article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527123

New comment by cbdevidal in "The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News"

cbdevidal — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:11:45 +0000

I couldn’t help but notice that there was an equally cold spike at the bottom.

New comment by cbdevidal in "Never Give Them Your Face"

cbdevidal — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:45:09 +0000

OfferUp also has a ton, as does AutoTempest and even good old fashioned AutoTrader. I'm currently shopping for my son.

Facebook seems to have the lowest cost cars, but it also seems to be the least successful way of contacting people. When I bought a car for my sister in April, I contacted (no exaggeration) 70+ sellers and heard back from about ten of them. And yes, I changed the default "Is it still available?" message to something demonstrating urgency e.g. "I have cash and would like to buy." But with persistence, I found her the right car through Marketplace. Really hate the FBook search interface though, it's total garbage.

I spend most of my time looking on CList and OfferUp.

New comment by cbdevidal in "Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux"

cbdevidal — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:57:20 +0000

Correct, but who 25 years ago could have imagined they’d have gone so far as to roll their own? I remember the Balmer days.

But the fact that they’re rolling a distro tells me they’re likely also writing software for Linux. I’m sure their Azure Linux contains apps they wrote and maintain, used by the OS.

Then there’s Microsoft apps on Android, with Linux under the covers.

New comment by cbdevidal in "Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux"

cbdevidal — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:13:14 +0000

Also relevant quote that I think about when this subject comes up:

“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.” ~Linus Torvalds

In this case, an entire freaking distro.

New comment by cbdevidal in "ESP32-S31"

cbdevidal — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:10:48 +0000

I personally am itching for more hardware H.264 or even H.265. There's the ESP32-P4 but it requires a second ESP32 to handle the WiFi. I got it working, but it feels like a hack, and the BOM cost is more than 2x a single chip.

Course more PSRAM and hardware encoding would drive up the price...

New comment by cbdevidal in "Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it"

cbdevidal — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:01:12 +0000

Air-gapped attacks are the most fascinating. Change my mind

New comment by cbdevidal in "Muxcard, a DIY credit card size computer"

cbdevidal — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:44:29 +0000

Now you’re talking!

New comment by cbdevidal in "Muxcard, a DIY credit card size computer"

cbdevidal — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:41:33 +0000

What fun!

I’d love to also go the opposite direction, a full-sized laptop with an ESP32 running tiny386 and Windows 95 ^_^

https://www.hackster.io/news/he-chunhui-s-tiny386-turns-the-...

New comment by cbdevidal in "Muxcard, a DIY credit card size computer"

cbdevidal — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:37:56 +0000

It’s got more horsepower than my first desktop computer

New comment by cbdevidal in "Chuwi Minibook X"

cbdevidal — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:32:22 +0000

Crash Override boot screen made me genuinely LOL. Nice touch.

https://photos.tylercipriani.com/2026-05-31_chuwi-boot-smol....

New comment by cbdevidal in "The History of "Prisencolinensinainciusol""

cbdevidal — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:45:14 +0000

Make it your Wifi password too lol

New comment by cbdevidal in "The History of "Prisencolinensinainciusol""

cbdevidal — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:44:31 +0000

It's funny to me that he wrote the song to prove that his fans would buy any American-sounding song no matter the lyrics, but it was such a banger that even we in America love to listen to it. Backfired in the best way possible.

New comment by cbdevidal in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

cbdevidal — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:38:58 +0000

Happened to me. CoPilot changing prices prompted me to cancel my CoPilot subscription and install a local coding model running entirely in VRAM. Will call Claude APIs when I get really stuck, but I should be able to handle 80% of my needs with a dumber local model.

For a long time, too. Programming languages rarely change much, techniques rarely change, so I should be able to use said model for I hope at least five years; and if at any time they optimize local models to cram even more intelligence into the same amount of VRAM, I can upgrade to that.

I like this path.

New comment by cbdevidal in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

cbdevidal — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:35:58 +0000

Old hardware is surprisingly effective. I've been considering a side hustle selling offline AI to local businesses who are privacy-sensitive. Medical, legal, places like that.

At the low end, I'd use old Xeons with gobs of DDR3, install some V100s, run a smaller agent for general chat inquiries, and a frontier model for the deeper stuff, with a router that passes between them depending on the complexity.

The frontier model would perform very slowly, but if it's a deep task the user can submit it in a batch in the evening e.g. "Correlate all of these cases and look for patterns" then receive the output with morning coffee.

Of course, AI helped me work out a plan for this. Haha

New comment by cbdevidal in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

cbdevidal — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:27:45 +0000

:-) I'll keep you in mind.

New comment by cbdevidal in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

cbdevidal — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:26:03 +0000

I just have never been in any kind of dedicated developer role. A sysadmin who happens to know development for the past 25 years.

And didn't know development at a high level; no one to guide, so I self-learned and acquired some bad habits that I'm now breaking, and didn't learn some necessary techniques that I'm now learning.