The US spent ~$12 trillion in ~2024 dollars on nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1996, and the vast majority of that spending was in the 1950s and early 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

As with music and movies, it only takes one person to succeed in ripping a non-DRM'ed copy of an ebook before it'll be easy to widely distribute via BitTorrent and similar software.

Amazon has already discontinued the direct download of (weakly-encrypted) Kindle book files to PCs, and so once Kindle for PC is gone, the cat-and-mouse games will likely move to the e-reader firmware itself.

Not something I care about.

I don't have a 4K TV. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a 4K TV. I've definitely seen a very high-resolution TV at a friend's house, and it was kind of cool, but not something interesting enough to motivate me to spend $500 or $20/month to acquire one of my own.

I hardly watch TV. My TV has a native resolution of 720p, I think, and 720p videos look really high-quality to me on the occasions when I watch.

> Otherwise I think 50 - 100Mbps per person is generally the point we see law of diminishing returns.

Right. Whether we think the diminishing returns are at 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 Mbps per user, there are diminishing returns.

The vast, vast majority of residences simply do not need symmetric 25 Gbps bandwidth, and it would be a massive waste of resources to try to build out a residential network providing that level of bandwidth, rather than prioritizing universal accessibility of 50 or 100 Mbps.

I'd liken it to the overprovisioning of EV batteries, particularly in North America. Many, many car owners would be perfectly satisfied with a car with a range of only (say) 60 miles or 100 km, and overall EV cost and adoption rate is hurt by the fact that leading-edge manufacturers, especially Tesla, were only building EVs with range of 5x that.

> Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.

Right. It's a costly and irrational anxiety or obsession over a headline number that likely doesn't matter for most people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199

> But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built.

Right. I thankfully don't do that kind of development much, but I agree that I'd want a faster connection if I had to. I would certainly expect to have it at the office, though I don't find a need tor it at the home.

In the past when I worked as a developer for FAANG and related spinoff companies, I did most of my development on "cloud desktops" or VMs which had much faster connections. This was mainly in order to have more CPU, RAM, and storage for builds, although the additional network bandwidth was important as well.

> For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.

To me, 720p seems incredibly high-quality. I think I'm living out something like https://m.xkcd.com/606, although perhaps on a 20-year lag rather than a 5-year lag.

Perhaps "irrational obsession" would be a better word.

I don't understand why so many people are obsessed with maximizing technical specifications of their computers. I want a computer that works predictably and reliably with some minimum acceptable level of performance.

Overlockers void their warranties and spend thousands of dollars to squeeze out 50% more performance than what they'd get from off-the-shelf CPUs… and for what? To play games at a slightly higher framerate, sometimes, but often just to show screenshots of benchmarking rates for bragging rights.

I view people who are obsessed with Internet connection bandwidth similarly.

I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine.

It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fine for watching streaming shows. Maybe if our kids turn out to be YouTube addicts when they're older we'll upgrade; maybe we won't for that reason.

What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!

It's a tiring climb and a tiring descent, but I never felt a hint of altitude-related discomfort.

I lived near sea level and didn't often go anywhere more than about 1,000 feet above sea level in daily activities.

It's probably as simple as that…

Same.

I have financial accounts in multiple countries, many using Google Voice for 2FA.

However, whenever I create an account that allows anything other than SMS for 2FA, I immediately switch to that instead. I use an offline TOTP authenticator app, and backup the token secrets in something that's not linked to my Google account.

This greatly limits my blast radius, I think, because I can access my most critical online services without access to my Google account.

My Google Voice number is the only phone number I've used for 15+ years. It'd be a real nightmare if I lost access to my Gmail and/or Voice.

> Intel chipsets categorically do not support AP mode

This is not true.

Intel chipsets do support AP mode; what they don't support is 5 GHz AP.

You wouldn't want to run a 2.4-GHz-only router for any kind of real-world long-term use, but if you just want to start a quick-and-dirty 2.4 GHz AP for testing/hacking/reverse-engineering, Intel chipsets are very good for this because they have out-of-the-box support for channel-hopping to support simultaneous client+AP operation.

More details in my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581204

Any ath10k card is great. They support up to 802.11ac, cost about $10 (e.g. amazon.com/dp/B07HDXP9R4), and can run AP in either the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bands.

The firmware and driver are very stable and they in terms of regulatory constraints they defer entirely to the Linux kernel (which means you can use https://github.com/singe/wifi-frequency-hacker or similar for frequency hacking).

I don't have much personal experience with ath11k (802.11ax) or ath12k (802.11be), but I've heard good things about them generally.

For use in a real, practical access point, you want to avoid Intel cards. Intel's firmware completely locks down the ability to run a 5 GHz AP. For whatever reason, Intel takes a maddeningly conservative view of regulatory restrictions. They clearly don't want their cards to be used in APs. On the other hand, Intel's cards have a nice feature that they support dual-channel operation with a single radio (e.g. `iw list` shows `channels <= 2`), which is extremely handy for running a quick-and-dirty 2.4 GHz access point while staying connected to a WiFi network.

It's a shell script that allows you to turn any ol' Linux computer into a WiFi router in one quick command-line:

By default, it will setup your WiFi card as an access point (allows WPA2/3, MAC filtering, etc), setup packet forwarding and routing, and run a DHCP and DNS server. It will generally pick sensible defaults, but it's also highly customizable. If your WiFi card supports simultaneous AP and client mode, it will allow that.

Its requirements are extremely minimal: basically just Linux, a compatible wireless card, and a few common configuration packages (hostapd, iw, iproute2, iptables, dnsmasq). No NetworkManager needed.

I used it as my own home Internet gateway for many years, running on an ancient fanless Atom mini-PC.

Because it can quickly setup and teardown WiFi networks on-the-fly, it's also a valuable tool for setting up test networks when reverse-engineering IoT devices. I use it frequently for this purpose (see https://snowpatch.org/posts/i-can-completely-control-your-sm...).

Even if they cost half as much, they'd be a non-starter for 99% of home users because of this.

Does it have to be assembled in the US? Does it have to have its stock firmware developed in the US? Does the SoC have to be designed by a US company? Made in a US fab?

I very much doubt that there are any consumer-level WiFi routers which would clear any of these bars, other than maybe "firmware developed in the USA."

That's my own summary after reading the article. No AI involved.

I myself moved from the US to Canada and gained permanent residency a few years ago. I'm grateful that my NAFTA visa and PR applications were reviewed by real live humans, in some cases while they were sitting right in front of me.

Paywall-bypassing archive link: http://archive.today/2026.03.25-211049/https://www.thestar.c...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47525272

Points: 3

# Comments: 1