Hacker News: pwndByDeath

New comment by pwndByDeath in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

pwndByDeath — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:25:10 +0000

I've not been a fan of Reddit in a while, but I do appreciate a useful asynchronous human interaction. I think reddit lost the useful humans a few bad ideas ago but I'm not well versed in that drama.

I'm curious what HN minds would consider a useful fix to this cyborg Internet problem. It seems having humans and bots coexisting is problematic.

If you had to start over knowing what could happened and what we should avoid, how would you do it?

Right now the reticulum network stack has my vote, it enables and cripples just the right things to make me think it might help.

But I don't earn my living from the commercial form of the Internet, I find I blame the commercial interest for the bulk of the problems (enabled by human fragility)

But I may just be a crusty old mind.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Pact: Anonymous Credentials for the Web"

pwndByDeath — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:34:17 +0000

I'm likely naive, but I'm very excited about a future that abandons the web and builds on reticulum. But I worry that the same flaws will be replicated out of habit instead of using it as a chance to avoid the dark paths.

Reticulum uses a proof of work "stamp" as a user side defense against not like behavior.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server"

pwndByDeath — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 13:54:08 +0000

PXE is one of those easy to take for granted without appreciation for how much of a PIA it is to get working sometimes.

I run a homelab PXE & NFSboot, so no hard drives in the homelab. Works great until I do something to bork it up.

I have been fine tuning setup scripts to automatically get things going for scratch, but I always find there was one more hack I didn't automate last time.

iPXE is on my to-learn list.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

pwndByDeath — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:47:34 +0000

I'm sorry, David, I'm afraid I can't do that.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

pwndByDeath — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:44:25 +0000

Sounds like adict talk to me ;) Seriously though, the legit claims of benefits are from people who need outreach and don't want to pay for advertising. But your favorite taco truck gets attention while you get to slip into depressive oblivion.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems"

pwndByDeath — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:41:42 +0000

I wonder I'd that's the math for the ludicrous space data center ideas "floating" around...

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

pwndByDeath — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:18:04 +0000

Everyone has an anecdote of the immigrant they know who's a much better "American" in their values. The same for anecdotes of the people with the least American values being home grown and inbred

New comment by pwndByDeath in "The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization"

pwndByDeath — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:01:39 +0000

Perhaps tokens is a dead end?

New comment by pwndByDeath in "A network smuggling Starlink tech into Iran to beat internet blackout"

pwndByDeath — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:35:50 +0000

Are you under the impression that the starlink terminals in Iran are for US military?

New comment by pwndByDeath in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"

pwndByDeath — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:12:50 +0000

In a vehicle, all the parts are moving

New comment by pwndByDeath in "MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code"

pwndByDeath — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:37:28 +0000

The protocol is CC and Mark has said go wild, it seems he doesn't want his work to contribute to an unstoppable AI killing machine networm

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Columnar Storage Is Normalization"

pwndByDeath — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:59:35 +0000

None-or-many?

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

pwndByDeath — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:03:36 +0000

Im not sure that's an honest rhetoric, we have seen many other things in the last few years that have increased the demand for compute. It would seem lunacy to propose, to accelerate the miniaturization of compute we need to send a bunch of people to bounce around the moon, then we can forget about the space nonsense. If the goal was begin the path that leads humans into so many resources it would take centuries before fighting over something was more profit than going to the next empty rock, we clearly failed.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

pwndByDeath — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:23:15 +0000

Suarez is, IMO, very good at researching current/near tech and mixing it into a good story about what is possible with what we have right now. Nothing in the books is really out of our reach except the will and perhaps strategic discipline to make and execute the plan.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

pwndByDeath — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:01:29 +0000

My point is this path doesn't lead to the future, it leads to the sad state of space between Apollo and this Shark Jump.

The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

pwndByDeath — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:50:58 +0000

My pessimism comes from a hindsight that the Apollo missions, while amazing failed to create the future they promised. Looking at how the missions were designed, the political focus, the academic infighting of NASA scientists trying to keep niche research funded. I fail to see how this time, the same strategy will produce a different result.

I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.

To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

pwndByDeath — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:52:00 +0000

As a long time space nerd, I'm not sure what this accomplishes by repeating the previous stunts that failed to usher in the promised space frontier.

Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.

An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

pwndByDeath — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:31:16 +0000

Hot take: if you think LLMs could be or will become AGI, have some more Brawndo

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Yggdrasil Network"

pwndByDeath — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:08:05 +0000

I always thought of them as the same.basic idea, but CJD went on to make a network crypto thing that I never really understood.

Ygg and cjdns are the same from a cosmetic point of view just different developers.

IMO ygg is easy to install, cjdns was adding some new dev things that complicated the non developer experience, but that was a few years ago

New comment by pwndByDeath in "Yggdrasil Network"

pwndByDeath — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:09:02 +0000

I don't recall the year but it was a long while ago, the developer and CJD from cjdns were chatting about ygg, very similar projects just different projects.

The point was to put routing and privacy at the foundation of "the internet"

It was mostly a response to the knowledge of prolific government and corporate spying. There are public nodes to piggyback on the legacy internet but it's another project that let's users build and control their own infrastructure, e.g. mesh-local

Also see CJDNS, darknet project and hyperboria