I'm going to say up front that I'm not as familiar with this period of history as I should be, but -- would it be totally unfair to say the same of the "Industrial Revolution"?

I'm not gonna say they're equivalent by any means, but my understanding is the "Industrial Revolution" was hellish for many people. Maybe the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?

On the one hand I get it, TLS is pretty heavy, and it makes sense to take advantage of a VPS or Cloudflare or however you want to do it.

But once you are spinning up a VPS, the question is ... why the Pi? The VPS in the article has less RAM, but more storage. If you're already doing TLS termination on the VPS (the most RAM intensive part), you might as well just do the whole shebang there.

I know this is all for fun, I'm just wondering -- is the Pi Zero really too slow to handle TLS, especially with an optimized TLS library? In this setup, the Pi is already being directly exposed to the Internet anyway, there's no VPN being used. That ARM11 isn't "fast", but surely a 1 GHz ARM11 can handle an optimized TLS library serving some subset of TLS1.2.

But what stands out to me is that it's barely able to draw a "recognizable" pelican at all. The Devstral 2 model even looks slightly better, though maybe I'm splitting hairs: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/9/

I've gotten a lot of use out of Mistral models, and I imagine this model is pretty good at other things, but it really feels like a 128B parameter dense model should be at least a little better than this.

But I do wonder about the practicality. This would, I presume (never done DOS development, never touched a memory extender) only run on 386+ CPUs, and maybe more importantly, probably require a newer CPU than that to run anything non-trivial at acceptable performance. So I wonder how many "real DOS machines" this can practically target.

Still, it is massively cool.

I wonder how similar this project is to "BSD on Windows": https://archive.org/details/bsd-on-windows

Also, I know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_9x, but it's not really meaty enough for my taste. :)

The problem with Recall was that it was opt-out and deployed everywhere (that supported it, as I understand). This, assuming it stays opt-in, makes much more sense. When I play with Google's Antigravity, I run it in a VM. There, where my environment literally only contains something I'm working on, a feature like Recall could be genuinely useful.

I think it is essentially "complete drawbridge", too. I haven't played around with it in a while, but from memory, you can coerce it to run arbitrary Windows executables, basically anything without graphics (which are missing from the PAL they ship).

It's quite impressive, though also necessary if you think about it. SQL Server requires the legacy dot net stack, AND it also ships with a full copy of the msvc compiler/linker! Not sure if that's ever used by the Linux port, but it is installed. MSSQL kind of exercises every inch of the Windows API surface.

You can even run e.g. xp_dirtree and see an overlay of the host disk along with Drawbridge's copy of Windows.

The question still stands, "are the benefits worth the cost to society", but it bears remembering we do a lot of things for fun which aren't "necessary for society".

With high quality displays that have good contrast and backlight controls that go "really far down", I prefer light mode UIs nowadays.

But, only a few of my displays can dim enough to make it work in dark(er) rooms. CRTs were great at this, with the brightness control for the raster. LCDs generally aren't, though the fancy "FALD" backlight in my macbook pro does get dark enough to make light mode work well in dim spaces.

I have to ask, since people who'd know will probably be here, what's the "ten thousand foot view" of Oberon today? I'm aware of the lineage from Pascal/Modula, and that it was a full OS written entirely in Oberon, sort of akin to a Smalltalk or Lisp machine image. What confuses me is the later work on Oberon seems to be something of a cross between a managed runtime like Java or dot net, and the Inferno OS, where it can both run hosted or "natively". Whenever I've skimmed the wikipedia or web pages I've been a bit confused.

I had been under the impression that DriverKit drivers were quite a different beast, but they're really not. Here's the layout of a NS ".config" bundle:

  ./CG6FrameBuffer.config/English.lproj
  ./CG6FrameBuffer.config/English.lproj/Info.rtf
  ./CG6FrameBuffer.config/English.lproj/Localizable.strings
  ./CG6FrameBuffer.config/CG6FrameBuffer_reloc
  ./CG6FrameBuffer.config/Default.table
  ./CG6FrameBuffer.config/Display.modes
  ./CG6FrameBuffer.config/CG6FrameBuffer

Now, on OS X:

  ./AirPortAtheros40.kext/Contents
  ./AirPortAtheros40.kext/Contents/_CodeSignature
  ./AirPortAtheros40.kext/Contents/_CodeSignature/CodeResources
  ./AirPortAtheros40.kext/Contents/MacOS
  ./AirPortAtheros40.kext/Contents/MacOS/AirPortAtheros40
  ./AirPortAtheros40.kext/Contents/Info.plist
  ./AirPortAtheros40.kext/Contents/version.plist

That said, indeed, the abstraction layer here is delightful! I know that some NetBSD devs managed to get PPC Darwin running under a Mach/IOKit compatibility layer back in the day, up to running Xquartz on NetBSD! With NetBSD translating IOKit calls. :-)

(It's currently available for testing in Android's AICore under a developer preview)

In my experience, though, it's necessary to do anything security related. Interestingly, the big models have fewer refusals for me when I ask e.g. "in situation, how do you exploit ?", but local models will frequently flat out refuse, unless the model has been abliterated.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619467

Points: 2

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My understanding is v6 has two different autoconf schemes, DHCPv6 and a more "native" solution. Do these both always result in interfaces having multiple (routable) addresses?

Most of my IPv6 experience has been setting it up on aforementioned VPS, and being rewarded with slow OS updates, since NetBSD's default CDN, Fastly, blackholes PMTUD, so I had to drop the MTU on the interface just to get v6 TCP connections to work at all[0]. And for point-to-point networking in an overlay VPN, where I just discovered that Chromium has an 11-year outstanding "bug" where it refuses to perform AAAA lookups if you don't have public IPv6 routing.

[0] I could switch mirrors, but the bandwidth drop isn't quite bad enough for me to bother...