Hacker News: technofiend

New comment by technofiend in "RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one"

technofiend — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:26:26 +0000

I view it like the automotive world - lots of people like to buy a car and trick it out in some way. Same with PCs. Just think of it like that.

New comment by technofiend in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

technofiend — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:26:50 +0000

I once publicly stated it's understandable that someone would post an ad that says "No YouTubers" because people don't want to be content for others. The reply I got was "but you're being recorded all the time anyway", as if those are remotely related.

New comment by technofiend in "What Most People Miss About Getting Promoted"

technofiend — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:28:20 +0000

The exact opposite is true in some places: being a massive asshole is often rewarded because those people are able to bully others into getting what the assholes want done. Only it's dubbed "influencing". The higher up you go the more toxic and defensive the political landscape.

New comment by technofiend in "Vibe coding kills open source"

technofiend — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:24:13 +0000

>... and you don't have to worry about it.

Not to be argumentative, but I have a concern that whomever I buy my solution from will have vibe coded it instead. I guess that means my support contract entitles me to hassling them about it, but I'm starting to worry it's just LLMs and vibe coded apps all the way down.

New comment by technofiend in "The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]"

technofiend — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 06:42:40 +0000

The Cray 1-ish machines I had access to at Shell and Chevron were most definitely tucked away in rooms with no visibility into them. In fact the Chevron machine room had pretty stern "no photography" placards, which I took seriously and is sadly why I don't have a photo of sitting on the loveseat of their machine.

Getting access took just short an act of God and I was a sysadmin in the central support group! They didn't want us puttering on the machines, so as far as I could tell it mostly sat idle.

New comment by technofiend in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

technofiend — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 02:34:43 +0000

I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.

New comment by technofiend in "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"

technofiend — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 07:03:31 +0000

So you don't think Plaid sells customer data? And by extension charging for customer data requests by Plaid and other aggregators isn't in fact charging for it?

Plaid does in fact sell your data, but they ask for permission first. So does JPMC, for that matter: https://media.chase.com/news/chase-launches-chase-media-solu...

New comment by technofiend in "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"

technofiend — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:39:48 +0000

"...Selling your data would be idiotic...same reason it would be for your bank [to sell your data] in that trust is the entire business model." I'm afraid that ship has sailed and taken your data with it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/jpmorgan-chase-fintech-fees....

New comment by technofiend in "Helping Valve to power up Steam devices"

technofiend — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:33:10 +0000

You did say "I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage." Even so, if you're not ready to move tomorrow, you can give up some privacy for the next year and continue to get patches by logging in to Microsoft. Windows 10 LTSC is a possibility if you somehow qualify for a license, although there's no guarantee the latest Nvidia drivers will work on it, some version of them will, or you can punt and run Linux on your current PC until the steam cube comes out. Pick a Linux distribution you like and run Steam, or go down the rabbit hole of running native Steam OS.

I personally preferred Fedora for this but mostly because my employer is a redhat shop. It's not otherwise (as far as I know) any better or worse than any other distro for gaming.

New comment by technofiend in "Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux"

technofiend — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 03:42:43 +0000

When I paste code into the native MacOS Teams chat, my peers using Window Teams see a literal black box. I wish it worked! I really do. Or we all had MacBooks or Linux desktops.

New comment by technofiend in "Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux"

technofiend — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 03:40:36 +0000

Even Microsoft MacOS apps are second-class citizens next to the ones found on Windows. I personally feel this is $WORKING_AS_INTENDED because honestly why would Microsoft empower people to exit the platform? It would be like creating an open source version of Active Directory and giving it away.

New comment by technofiend in "History and use of the Estes AstroCam 110"

technofiend — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:03:10 +0000

Completely shared experiences with regards to both Forrest's books and Estes' rockets, except after enough losses of the latter I got pretty fatalistic about new rockets. They were assembled and flown same day as soon as the glue dried, with maybe a slapdash decal; there wasn't much point investing too much time or energy when the wind or a tree was going to take them anyway.

New comment by technofiend in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

technofiend — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:03:44 +0000

huh.. maybe publicly communicated recovery was then. I was seeing knock-on effects hours later and didn't see full recovery until late afternoon EST.

New comment by technofiend in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

technofiend — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 12:56:13 +0000

It can be a life changing amount of money but not always in a good way. If you're not careful, your spending expands like a gas to fill all the available volume and you're just marching sideways towards retirement with nothing saved because it's too fun spending money.

New comment by technofiend in "Apple M4 Series Feature Support"

technofiend — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 03:58:02 +0000

The same text is on their M3 page, so at this point you have to assume it really means they haven't gotten to a point where the support page needs updating. Although it would be nice if they updated their page to just say that instead I guess beggars can't be choosers.

New comment by technofiend in "Silver Snoopy Award"

technofiend — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:22:14 +0000

It's just anecdotal but when I asked why our Xerox workstations at JSC had dancing Snoopy line art, I was told Charles Schulz himself was a big fan of the space program and he'd drawn art for the program and extended its use to them in perpetuity.

I have been on a team that won a silver Snoopy but was a subcontractor and didn't get one myself; just the Boeing employees I worked with did. Every once in a while I Google them on the off chance I could get one as a piece of memoribilia, but they are thousands of dollars.

New comment by technofiend in "Steve Jobs and Cray-1 to be featured on 2026 American Innovations $1 coin"

technofiend — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:10:23 +0000

It's happened more than once that people thought $2 bills were fake; here's a recent example: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/houston-school-confuses-2-...

I had someone pocket a Susan B. Anthony $1 coin and put their own money in the register to replace it, but that was because it was a rare coin, not because they thought it was fake.

New comment by technofiend in "iPad Pro with M5 chip"

technofiend — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 04:20:18 +0000

It's $10,000 worth of tires on a $500 car. IOS is so crippled, it's complete overkill.

New comment by technofiend in "Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year"

technofiend — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 03:23:14 +0000

Oh there are myriad online options; I don't want to store my tax returns in the cloud.

New comment by technofiend in "Show HN: Baby's first international landline"

technofiend — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 03:12:43 +0000

I love everything about this. I've often thought families that wanted to extend their network between trusted friends could set up a literal private branch exchange (aka PBX) with only their friends as fellow members.You have a way for people to call each other without handing kids a smart phone and can also avoid the inevitable costs and unwanted calls associated with real land lines.