Hacker News: epcoa

New comment by epcoa in "Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts"

epcoa — Fri, 15 May 2026 03:22:16 +0000

That’s exactly how all the current cloud chat bots and agents work now.

New comment by epcoa in "Local privilege escalation via execve()"

epcoa — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:19:12 +0000

There was no snark. If you have something of importance running and the inevitable discovery of an LPE is something you don’t have defense for or can quickly mitigate you’re doing a bad job as a sysadmin. For all general purpose OS in common use today that usually means patch and reboot should be an NBD workaround.

New comment by epcoa in "Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract"

epcoa — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:32:04 +0000

You literally said: “They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. ”

“Inauthentic” was I still think a close enough reference paraphrase of your statement. Not a value judgement. You even used the word "authentic" in your thesis. And in general I wouldn’t necessarily disagree but I don’t see how it is necessarily related to their choice of personal devices. An internet celeb probably doesn’t use GrapheneOS because the limitations sucks for most people, not because of some calculated subscriber count play.

If you use an unrooted Pixel, why are we even having this conversation, and if not.. well maybe the dude just wants to use a secure wallet.

Regardless of this influencer's "real life" persona I see nothing incongruent about even their "influencer" persona using an iPhone. Therefore I see no relevance to anything in your original comment.

New comment by epcoa in "Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract"

epcoa — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:08:15 +0000

So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest about who contributes to open source. The point is there is a certain extent I will go to maintain my ideals of using certain systems and it is more than average even for here (the peanut gallery), and on par with the influencer in question, ie I can relate regardless of their “inauthentic” persona. Most people, even those that consider themselves “enthusiasts”, simply won’t go to the effort of reverse engineering or writing drivers - if it were the case there would be a much larger ecosystem of high quality drivers and a larger pool of contributors. I am in that minority and still use an iPhone, and I don’t have a subscriber count.

2. A google pixel isn’t meaningfully more open than an iPhone (I depend on functionality that would be unavailable if rooted). This wasn’t meant to be an iPhone vs android debate. For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent.

New comment by epcoa in "Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract"

epcoa — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:36:30 +0000

I use Linux as a daily driver, write and modify kernel (mainline and out of tree) and userspace drivers, have reverse engineered various things. ie beyond most of the HN peanut gallery. That said I use an iPhone because I have a day job and nothing “open” is worth dealing with.

New comment by epcoa in "Local privilege escalation via execve()"

epcoa — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:01:48 +0000

Anyone relying on a 30+ year old monolith kernel written in C to not have some exploitable LPEs lurking should stay in basket weaving and out of sysadmin.

New comment by epcoa in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force attacks"

epcoa — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:27:13 +0000

So maybe I’m wrong but the belief is that debit card protections are worse than a credit card in the US. I really don’t have the personal time to test this, but I do know that when I dispute on a credit card it is initially removed until proven valid.

Again maybe I’m wrong but I don’t agree they are equivalent. It sure fucking feels that way, the money isn’t threatened from my account.

New comment by epcoa in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks"

epcoa — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:19:40 +0000

In addition to nominal fraud prevention (and how is any debit card better) there’s nothing better to claw back transaction fees, so what the fuck am I supposed to do?

New comment by epcoa in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force attacks"

epcoa — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:13:05 +0000

Well good for you. Us poors in the US like them for what they’re worth.

New comment by epcoa in "The Super Nintendo Cartridges (2024)"

epcoa — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:07:18 +0000

The Dreamcast charm is partly how simple it is, a jellybean CPU. The PowerVR is competent but it’s not outside the norm for 3D accelerators of the period (and there was a mass produced PCI card available of it). Nothing about the Dreamcast is exotic. Though the pack in modem and VMU are neat (did say “maybe” for the DC). GD-ROM vs DVD was obviously a dumb move. Perhaps Sega didn’t have the war chest to loss leader a DVD Dreamcast (they didn’t have the vision either at that point).

A technical demo like Bleemcast doesn’t demonstrate how far ahead something is, it has to be seen relative to the hardware of a similar generation. Having said that the PS2 which had some early programming hiccups would go on to eat DC’s lunch.

New comment by epcoa in "The Super Nintendo Cartridges (2024)"

epcoa — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:09:21 +0000

Not sure how any of these except maybe the Dreamcast (and then not by that much - it was almost literally a contemporary arcade board clone) were examples of “ahead of its time”.

New comment by epcoa in "Making RAM at Home [video]"

epcoa — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:51:51 +0000

That is really not the takeaway from this video, at all.

New comment by epcoa in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

epcoa — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:52:56 +0000

No. Ethanol and tylenol compete for CYP2E1 that produces toxic NAPQI, so no, acute alcohol intoxication has a protective effect at least where it comes to tylenol toxicity.

New comment by epcoa in "Servo is now available on crates.io"

epcoa — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:59:49 +0000

lol

New comment by epcoa in "Make macOS consistently bad unironically"

epcoa — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:35:11 +0000

> I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.

Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.

New comment by epcoa in "Bubble Sorted Amen Break"

epcoa — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:38:52 +0000

It’s pronounced “Allman Brothers”

New comment by epcoa in "zclaw: personal AI assistant in under 888 KB, running on an ESP32"

epcoa — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:26:19 +0000

> vastly more complexity.

Doom is ingenious, but it is not terribly complex IMHO, not compared to a modern networking stack including WiFi driver. The Doom renderer charm is in its overall simplicity. The AI is effective but not sophisticated.

New comment by epcoa in "Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025"

epcoa — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:06:00 +0000

You know, there are external drive USB controllers that linux blocks/blacklists SMART passthrough when using UAS due to paranoia and historical problems, but this can overridden.

https://www.mcgarrah.org/usb-drive-smart/

I guess it is possible this is not your problem, but the last Seagate external I bought in October worked just fine with this workaround. This is probably safe from a data integrity standpoint, at least with a modern filesystem, but in my case it was no issue as I was only using the SMART to do tests before shucking the drive. Also, I don't know of any modern drive that truly doesn't support SMART.

New comment by epcoa in "The wonder of modern drywall"

epcoa — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 02:36:32 +0000

For nearly a decade, Chicago does allow MC cable in a number of circumstances, basically up to 25 feet branches where you don’t want to open up a wall.

New comment by epcoa in "The wonder of modern drywall"

epcoa — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 01:54:45 +0000

So outside of a few notable examples, the materials rarely fail, galvanized duct work should easily last half a century in a properly installed and maintained system, properly installed copper pipe or PEX and even (C)PVC, properly installed NM or wiring in conduit where code requires, where people get into trouble is with shoddy builders and the housing market often causes those to forgo proper inspections and it is ultimately a “market for lemons”. But blaming drywall seems a bit misplaced, since shoddy building in targeting cost only, they’re going to be the last ones replacing drywall with something fancy and expensive.