Hacker News: kjs3

New comment by kjs3 in "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"

kjs3 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:21:36 +0000

Isn't it safe to assume that no video file can escape the browser decoding sandbox?

It's 'safe to assume' it's not. It's emphatically not safe to assume any mitigation is perfect.

New comment by kjs3 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

kjs3 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:09:48 +0000

I keep wondering when "undocumented" stopped meaning "don't rely on this because it can and probably will change at the vendors will and they don't want you to shoot yourself in the foot and then you're on your own"? Nothing was "owed" for the undocumented...if it worked after an upgrade, it was a good day.

The "correct approach" is "Apple doesn't support Linux on M-series processors. If you're not willing to accept shit breaking regularly and having to do (much more likely, relying on other people without compensating them) the actual work to RE Apples ever-changing stuff then don't buy hardware that explicitly does not support the OS you want to run. If you want 'plug-and-play', you are barking up the wrong tree." This really isn't hard.

Back in the heyday of Hackintosh, there was always someone who wandered into one of the forums to shittalk Apple for not supporting some chunk of hardware they owned but Apple never shipped (usually with some whining to the effect "Windows supports my knock-off of a knock-off Alibaba special and it's totally unreasonable that unsupported MacOS on unsupported hardware doesn't Just Work!"), but I don't recall the adults in the room giving that sort of nonsense the time of day other than to say "here's the stuff that we know works...if you don't have that, it's on you not Apple or the uncompensated Hackintosh devs to figure it out".

How times change, I guess.

Edit: s/plug-and-pay/plug-and-play/ Freudian slip, I guess.

New comment by kjs3 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

kjs3 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:32:10 +0000

The 'onus' is on Apple to support an OS they never said they'd support, to the potential detriment of the one they do support, because a tiny number of people bought Apple hardware to run...lemme look again...an OS Apple never said they'd support? That's an...interesting...point of view, but probably not suprising considering the pervasive "how dare you not do unpaid work to make me happy no matter what your priorities are" attitude running around OSS these days. At least Apple won't rage-quit the project or have a nervous breakdown because the free-riders are demanding something never promised.

New comment by kjs3 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

kjs3 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:08:20 +0000

Ah...it's "they haven't matched Apple" (not even Graviton?), not "Apple impeded them in some way". Fair, but that was not clear.

New comment by kjs3 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

kjs3 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:53:15 +0000

I must have missed something...what does Apple creating M-series have to do with Allwinner, Qualcom, Mediatek, AWS, and the rest of the ARM ecosystem having 'lackluster performance'?

New comment by kjs3 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

kjs3 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:47:59 +0000

You get clicks for "Apple bad", not for "there was this boot flag and once we figured that out problem solved".

New comment by kjs3 in "CP/M-86 & MS-DOS Cross Development Environment"

kjs3 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:54:25 +0000

I knew some shops that went CP/M-86 because they were big CP/M-80 shops and thought the price difference was worth a presumably lower conversion and training cost. Didn't last long since MS-DOS ate the software world, which is all that mattered.

New comment by kjs3 in "CP/M-86 & MS-DOS Cross Development Environment"

kjs3 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:41:19 +0000

Add Turbo Pascal.

New comment by kjs3 in "thunderbolt-ibverbs: We have InfiniBand at home"

kjs3 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:38:32 +0000

Sounds like the old days using Firewire as an IP transport to get 400/800Mbps PtP networks. Interesting hack.

New comment by kjs3 in "Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint"

kjs3 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:53:27 +0000

Sorry...I'm too busy laughing at the idea of "there is one canonical 'standard' for anything in web UX that everyone agrees with" to google up one (or a dozen) websites that disagree with the undoubtedly fine folks at the Baymard Institute.

New comment by kjs3 in "thunderbolt-ibverbs: We have InfiniBand at home"

kjs3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:44:38 +0000

Thanks for saying this. I'm as 'get off my lawn' about AI as any oldster at this point, but if all project were this up front about what and how they're doing things I'd have a lot fewer reasons to grumble.

New comment by kjs3 in "Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint"

kjs3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:38:11 +0000

Troll trots out the old "You should only be allowed the web site aesthetic I approve of and anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid!" and is shocked that not everyone on HN appreciates their insightful genius.

New comment by kjs3 in "Ruby for Good"

kjs3 — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:56:35 +0000

Give it time. Claude front end design will be the default soon as more bottom three quarters devs just vibecode it out.

New comment by kjs3 in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

kjs3 — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:41:33 +0000

When I was called up for jury duty last year, the foreman instructed the all of us jury candidates that we should only evaluate the what was presented in court, and not to make decisions based on whatever is on the nightly news that night, and especially not whatever gets posted about the case on social media. That's the foremans emphasis, not mine. This was said not once, but several times a day while the process worked it's way out.

So I might misunderstand juries (sorry...suppressing a laugh there...assortment of people...), but I'm going to go with the instructions from the guy who works in the courthouse (I suspect he knows something about how juries work, but you probably disagree), and not some critical thinking impaired drone who accepts YouTube screeds from anyone who makes money from uncritical people accepting whatever they drool out as The Truth. Hit like so they can keep you full of infotainment...er...Truthiness!

I know I'm in the minority around here, waiting for inconvenient 'facts' to be established and being skeptical about obviously biased sources before I declare a guilty verdict and break out the torches and pitchforks, but I just can't help it. The curse of thinking independently over tracking social media upvotes.

New comment by kjs3 in "Don't Build Your Own Lisp"

kjs3 — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:11:38 +0000

Sure, I agree with you (and, for 2/3 of it, I don't much disagree with the OG). I just don't think articles like this hits as hard as it could when a significant portion of it is "now lemme talk about this pet peeve of mine, which I'm very committed to, even though it is at best tangential to purported topic I'm writing about". C may (or may not) be the worst of all possible languages to write a Lisp in (not touching that one :-)), but if you're gonna lecture me about writing a HLL, talk about the language, not dump a bunch of venom into an implementation detail. Or at least be up front and title it "Don't build your own Lisp in a language I hate" or something.

New comment by kjs3 in "Don't Build Your Own Lisp"

kjs3 — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:01:59 +0000

I feel like third or so of this critique could be subtitled "have I mentioned that I don't like C?".

New comment by kjs3 in "Why Peter Thiel Is Decamping to Argentina"

kjs3 — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:55:00 +0000

Doesn't seem so weird. Argentina has a history of taking in wealthy folks with...um...baggage.

New comment by kjs3 in "SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims"

kjs3 — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:41:56 +0000

If I'm supposed to buy a robot to clean my house, I personally don't want to have to go looking for where the stupid thing has put my cups and plates or whatever whenever it straightens up. I expect there to be a place for all the things and all the things to be put back in place. That's not "er mah gerd the world is ending because millennials am I right!"; that's "your idiot robot can't do the one job I bought it for".

New comment by kjs3 in "SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims"

kjs3 — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:34:32 +0000

The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.

I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.

New comment by kjs3 in "High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building"

kjs3 — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:13:23 +0000

One of Mary Beard's documentaries ('Meet the Romans' I think) touches on Roman insulae. Literal death traps, and seemingly miserably uncomfortable at the best of times. At least you're out of the rain (except on the top floors).

And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.