Hacker News: mrexcess

New comment by mrexcess in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

mrexcess — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:33:28 +0000

Wouldn’t Ternus have had a hand in the Apple Silicon backdoor?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230

New comment by mrexcess in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

mrexcess — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:32:52 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230

New comment by mrexcess in "George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four"

mrexcess — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:48:12 +0000

Here’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beginning to cross that threshold. It was the sacrifice of our forefathers who brought us there, just as it was the sacrifice of theirs who brought us from dank caves and death in our 30s from curable illness, into the enlightened world.

New comment by mrexcess in "George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four"

mrexcess — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:42:18 +0000

I don’t think, “too much equality” was one of the themes. Rather, it was about too much centralized power over the individual. And yes I do think that’s somewhat relevant to understanding issues of today, including mass surveillance the centralization of technological control behind crypto-nationalized zaibatsus, etc.

New comment by mrexcess in "George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four"

mrexcess — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 03:49:23 +0000

Atlas Shrugged, more charitably perhaps despite its manifest flaws, seemed to me to be about the dangers of putting “the needs of the many” over individual rights, and how it can ultimately be self defeating for the whole.

New comment by mrexcess in "George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four"

mrexcess — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 03:35:56 +0000

Wasn’t 1984 a bit more about control through surveillance and silencing, than about pain? Everything was a lie, and every refusal to accept the lie was a signal to Big Brother.

Cast as such it seems rather more prophetic than Soma, IMO.

New comment by mrexcess in "George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four"

mrexcess — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 03:27:06 +0000

Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.

New comment by mrexcess in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

mrexcess — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:58:43 +0000

Rebinding C-b to C-a is a necessity for those of us whose muscle memory formed on GNU screen, been doing this for years. I like to set status-right to include host load average, with something akin to:

set -g status-right '#[fg=colour39, bg=colour234]#[fg=colour160] #h #[fg=colour088]avg: #(cat /proc/loadavg|cut -d" " -f1-3) '

New comment by mrexcess in "Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them"

mrexcess — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:16:33 +0000

Any tool that is that good at vulnerability research is bound to have some killer capabilities in attack surface mapping and exploitation…

Which is not to disagree with the thrust of your point, I think: it’s even more about the fundamentals than it was yesterday. The bar for “secure enough” is what is being raised.

New comment by mrexcess in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

mrexcess — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:30:45 +0000

>Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in?

If there's any class of individual in whom I'm willing to place greater than average trust in their ability to read vocal tones, it's probably blind people. Just sayin'.

New comment by mrexcess in "Slovenian officials blame Israeli firm Black Cube for trying to manipulate vote"

mrexcess — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:35:00 +0000

>NED is not a CIA front sweatie

Curious: can you show the research steps you took to reach this conclusion? Really curious how we can all easily determine which companies are and aren't CIA fronts!

New comment by mrexcess in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

mrexcess — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:34:32 +0000

>As the article states, this war was not unprovoked either

Using the same extraordinarily broad definition of "provocation" required here, can you name a single war in history that was unprovoked? And if not, haven't we just neutralized all meaning from the phrase "provoked war" with our overly broad definition of "provocation"?

New comment by mrexcess in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

mrexcess — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:29:19 +0000

After being restarted, the red (opposing) force general resigned due to the restarted game having what amounted to a scripted end, with little to no latitude for the red force to exercise creativity in strategy or tactics. Among the highlights, the red force were required to turn on and leave on their AA radars so that blue force HARMs could take them out, and the red force was prohibited from attempting to shoot down any of the 82nd airborne / marine air assault forces during the assault.

Gen. Van Riper's tactics were apparently discredited in 2002 because they were unfair, but Iran seems not to have received the memo since their moves bear more than a passing resemblance to his.

New comment by mrexcess in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"

mrexcess — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:07:19 +0000

>Vulnerabilities have nothing to do with country of manufacture.

That depends on how you define "Vulnerability", doesn't it?

For instance, from some standpoints, the absence rather than presence of a backdoor in consumer routers could be considered a "vulnerability", no?

New comment by mrexcess in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

mrexcess — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:41:01 +0000

You're making great software and I'm sorry this happened to you. Don't get discouraged, keep bringing the open source disruption!

New comment by mrexcess in "More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams"

mrexcess — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:11:02 +0000

>Idk, while system architecture diagrams look cool and feel informative, I generally don't feel like they actually help you get started working somewhere on a project.

Can't speak to that, but they're enormously helpful in reviewing the security architecture of a design, especially when you're doing this at scale and might only get a few hours to look into a given project.

New comment by mrexcess in "UK security adviser attended US-Iran talks and judged deal was within reach"

mrexcess — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:56:51 +0000

Given the Greenland stuff, isn't it within EU and UK's interests to keep the US occupied in Iran?

New comment by mrexcess in "An old photo of a large BBS (2022)"

mrexcess — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:10:52 +0000

Disagree only in the sense that I think the drama escalated a bit in the interregnum, as the BBS scene merged into one large if fragmentary collective on the internet. Empirical evidence for that extreme level of drama and complexity here:

https://www.wired.com/2001/12/sexchart-degrees-of-separation

New comment by mrexcess in "Cloudflare crawl endpoint"

mrexcess — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:28:23 +0000

GETOLD /index.html "2026-03-11T10:30:45Z" would be such cool functionality...

New comment by mrexcess in "US missile hit military base near Iran school, video analysis shows"

mrexcess — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:47:59 +0000

So your analysis is that the US hit a few meters away with a missile, then another missile hit a few meters the other direction within minutes, but we can't know who did that?