Hacker News: spicyjpeg

New comment by spicyjpeg in "I paid people to try and follow my README"

spicyjpeg — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:52:55 +0000

When deciding on a style for documentation, I typically draw the line between tutorials and references. The linear top-down flow of an introductory guide lends itself well to inserting additional context throughout it even if not completely on-topic, while in an API or hardware reference you generally want to keep each section reasonably self-contained, trivially searchable for (minimizing false hits by carefully choosing keywords) and readable independently of the others. I have found the literate programming approach [1] of writing entire tutorials as code to work pretty well for this purpose, which I've used to great effect in some of my pet projects [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

[2] https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Original Sony PlayStation 2 security chip 'broken wide open' after 26 years"

spicyjpeg — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:12:35 +0000

There actually is a pretty large community of hardware reverse engineers decapping chips for fun, sometimes just to dump internal ROMs (like in this case) and other times going as far as to try reconstructing the original schematics and netlists in order to document the chip's internals and allow for more accurate emulation, in some cases all the way down to the transistor level [1] [2]. If you want to learn more, Ken Shirriff has written a lot of blog posts on the subject [3] and Siliconprawn [4] hosts a huge collection of die shots from many contributors.

[1] https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix

[2] https://github.com/iaddis/metalnes

[3] https://www.righto.com/

[4] https://siliconprawn.org/

New comment by spicyjpeg in "The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great"

spicyjpeg — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:29:28 +0000

ZKPs (as well as C2PA and similar user attestation systems) are quite literally a DRM scheme for the web, fraught with all the usual control and accessibility issues while still being relatively easy to circumvent by a sufficiently motivated and funded actor. Given the huge number of shady companies that run "phone farms" for purposes ranging from social media spam to Spotify royalty farming, I doubt they would even put a dent on this kind of automated abuse. They would however be very effective at locking every Linux and GrapheneOS user out of the internet.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great"

spicyjpeg — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:20:35 +0000

I like to call this phenomenon "reverse compression", or occasionally "depression". It's even lossy and subject to generational loss.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now"

spicyjpeg — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:52:21 +0000

The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).

Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Stopping the smart TV from being used against you"

spicyjpeg — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:24:17 +0000

This isn't even the worst payload ever delivered through Windows Update. The prize for that should probably go to chip manufacturer FTDI, which once abused the system to publish a driver that would semi-permanently brick USB serial bridge parts the driver detected as counterfeit [1] by exploiting a command that the genuine parts did not implement correctly (how ironic) [2]. The backlash was large enough that Microsoft ended up pulling the update almost immediately, but that did not stop FTDI from trying again a few years later with another driver update that deliberately corrupted data sent through detected-counterfeit parts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTDI#Driver_controversy

[2] https://github.com/therealdreg/ftdibrick#diving-deep

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Stopping the smart TV from being used against you"

spicyjpeg — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:03:55 +0000

This is indeed what is happening behind the scenes. By default Windows Update will automatically download and install support packages for pretty much any device Windows can identify through manufacturer/device IDs, which includes PCIe and USB devices but also monitors. This is most commonly used to deliver drivers but Microsoft allows these packages to silently install any user-facing application as well, presumably due to peripherals such as GPUs or audio chipsets often requiring "control panels" or similar companion apps.

Around a month ago LG took advantage of this feature by publishing a Windows "driver" for all their TVs and monitors that consisted entirely of payola bloatware, resulting in predictable backlash [1] and the obligatory subsequent HN discussion [2]. None of this has anything to do with the TVs themselves being connected to the internet or not.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q9uefFYe6bM

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956688

New comment by spicyjpeg in "“It works better in the app”"

spicyjpeg — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:27:03 +0000

A particularly worrying trend that keeps spreading is the one of restricting significant amounts of (often non-financial) functionality to the apps only, gated behind your phone passing device integrity checks, in what seems to be a poorly thought out attempt at blocking all forms of scraping and automation (AI or not). The worst offender right now is probably Twitter, which alongside the recent Nitter cease-and-desist now appears to require client integrity on all logged out access.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

spicyjpeg — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:03:39 +0000

The FeliCa NFC standard made its way into more than just transit cards in Japan. One notable user is the Amusement IC network, which lets you quickly log into arcade games across multiple manufacturers using a single card. Some implementations (Konami's e-amusement most notably) even go as far as to allow any FeliCa-compatible card or device to be linked to a profile, including transit cards, phones (with no app required!) and certain models of Sony Bluetooth earbuds which use FeliCa for quick pairing.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID"

spicyjpeg — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:21:30 +0000

If C2PA and similar signature systems ever become a meaningful authenticity signal, they will create huge incentives for someone (potentially a state actor) to hack at least one camera in order to sign images of arbitrary provenance with its private keys. This will in turn inevitably lead to the same game of cat-and-mouse we have seen play out with video DRM schemes, where keys are regularly extracted from exploitable devices and used to decrypt as much content as possible before the device gets blacklisted entirely (harming all legitimate owners in the process).

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Malware infects Android-based automotive head unit firmware"

spicyjpeg — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:11:27 +0000

The article does not make it particularly clear, but the malware in question is delivered through official first-party OTA updates on cheap Chinese aftermarket head units that happen to run Android. It cannot self-propagate to any Android-based head unit, nor does it affect Android Auto which is a "dumb" screen mirroring protocol with the bulk of the software running on the connected phone rather than the head unit. This seems to be a very similar situation to that of cheap generic Android TV streaming boxes, which often come pre-infected from the factory with residential proxies and other malware as well; most of the infrastructure is likely shared.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)"

spicyjpeg — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:48:06 +0000

The 6502 and its variants are still ubiquitous as well, powering millions of toys based on Sunplus/GeneralPlus microcontrollers [1] [2] [3] as well as the vast majority of bootleg game consoles that use variants of "Famiclone" hardware (or occasionally general-purpose 6502 MCUs [4]) to this day. It's fascinating how the toy industry went for the 6502 over the 8051 and PIC12 clones more common in other cheap electronics; I suspect it had to do both with the architecture's better performance (important for tasks such as audio decoding) and with the historical availability of experienced 6502 assembly developers as the game industry moved away from 8-bit platforms.

[1] https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity&page=2

[2] https://archive.org/details/furby-source

[3] https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=37.%20Pixter#_TOC_a6fe...

[4] https://github.com/davidgiven/tony-sdk

New comment by spicyjpeg in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

spicyjpeg — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:24:32 +0000

Browser fingerprinting can get creative at times, to say the least. eBay's WebSocket port scanner [1] and Reddit's abuse of DRM and JavaScript JIT exploits [2] from years ago are two examples of the kind of in-depth introspection you can perform completely in the background using nothing more than simple non-permission-gated APIs.

[1] https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/

[2] https://iter.ca/post/reddit-whiteops/

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history"

spicyjpeg — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:35:51 +0000

It's even funnier when you realize that not too long ago a decent chunk of the software industry did have to deal with the realities of having to press CDs, print boxes and ship them to retailers in time for the holiday season. The idea that you can ship a half-baked product directly to your end users, charge for it and promise it will get better over time (but only if you manage to secure enough VC funding in the meantime) is a relatively new invention.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

spicyjpeg — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:08:44 +0000

RISC-V is in many aspects just legally-distinct-MIPS, from the base instruction set all the way up to how certain extensions introduce kludges that are very reminiscent of later MIPS additions. While I do somewhat agree on the fact it was a huge missed opportunity to improve upon MIPS's technical flaws in order to realistically compete against the likes of ARMv8, we still have to keep in mind that the primary driving force behind RISC-V is and has always been fixing the legal flaws instead.

There is indeed plenty of value to be had from a standardized (if poorly) PlayStation-1-era instruction set you can safely implement in silicon with no risk of a zombie company husk coming after you, especially in the ASIC space where (as Dmitry himself recognized) anything is better than an 8051 core you need a copy of Keil C51 and a lot of patience to write code for. Even if you end up having to add custom extensions, it still is a much better starting point than coming up with your own bespoke ISA, building a toolchain around it and convincing potential customers that your proprietary architecture is worth the effort to deal with over another vendor's licensed Cortex-M cores with full GCC and LLVM support.

New comment by spicyjpeg in "YouTuber Davie504 slapped with ridiculous copyright claim [video]"

spicyjpeg — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:05:25 +0000

The entire point of piracy and related copyright infringement is to build a path to appreciation of an artist's works without necessarily agreeing to their pricing and terms (whether imposed by the artist themselves or by publishers). What you are suggesting is the complete opposite: leveraging established or even defunct artists as mere brands to slap on generic machine-generated content that does a great job imitating said artists' style, but bears no resemblance whatsoever to the actual creative process that led to that specific style in the first place.

Record labels would actually love this model: they'd be able to put their extensive back catalogs to use by giving everyone their very own hyper-personalized, maximally-stimulating Beatles, Queen, Linkin Park and more, all without paying a single cent to the humans who actually built those acts. What breaks this utopia, and what you seem to be missing here, is that by far and large people want to listen to the real deal and not to a deepfake Chester Bennington's song on the Israel-Palestine conflict in an unprecedented act of VC-funded digital necromancy.

AI vibe coded game projects suck

spicyjpeg — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:36:03 +0000

Article URL: https://asecretarea.com/2026/08/10/ai-vibe-coded-game-projects-suck/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49265432

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Why My Father Is Wrong: A Defense of Guitar Hero"

spicyjpeg — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:09:05 +0000

The wiki of Guitar Hero simulator Clone Hero has extensive information on controllers [1]. Some of them can still be purchased brand new but overall the most popular option seems to be to acquire (and sometimes modify) a used first-party controller from back in the day, as the quality of newly manufactured guitars can be inconsistent given the lack of demand.

You may also consider trying out other rhythm games such as the home versions of Beatmania IIDX [2], Sound Voltex [3] or Taiko no Tatsujin, for which high-quality arcade accurate controllers are readily available brand new (if somewhat expensive). There are plenty of modern titles that are playable with nothing more than a keyboard and mouse as well, so you are spoiled for choice if you are not looking for a Guitar-Hero-like experience specifically.

[1] https://wiki.clonehero.net/books/guitars-drums-controllers/p...

[2] https://iidx.org/

[3] https://sdvx.org/

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Picophysics: Single file physics for games on platforms like N64, PSX, DC"

spicyjpeg — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:14:17 +0000

It's slightly more complicated than that. The PlayStation's geometry pipeline uses fixed-point coordinates with a decent amount of fractional precision (12 bits), however the GPU lacks support for subpixel rendering and operates entirely in screen space using integer X/Y pixel coordinates; all transformed vertices thus have to be rounded CPU-side before they reach the GPU. The GPU is also a 2D rasterizer only, with no perspective correction nor depth buffering, so transformed Z values are used on the CPU to sort polygons back to front (typically using hardware-assisted linked list bucket sorting) and dropped afterwards [1].

[1] https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal/blob/main/src/08...

New comment by spicyjpeg in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

spicyjpeg — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:48:33 +0000

An overhaul of my original PlayStation bare-metal programming tutorial repo: https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal

It was never really meant to be an SDK of sorts that other PS1 homebrew projects would pull as a submodule and depend on, but since it more or less became one I am likely going to split off the examples from the "core" (headers, CMake build scripts and tools). I have also been asked to add more examples, particularly on how to play sounds through the SPU and access the CD-ROM drive, and may cover I/O on some PS1-based arcade systems in the future.