Hacker News: thaeli

New comment by thaeli in "Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?"

thaeli — Fri, 01 May 2026 02:23:06 +0000

Also, my phone follows me between vehicles and provides the exact same interface in all of them. Heck, I can switch vehicles and my podcast or music starts back up right where I left it. That alone is a major win for the phone-based approach - if I drive my spouse's vehicle for instance, or my old truck because I need to haul something, doesn't matter, they all have the same navigation and audio.

New comment by thaeli in "People Who Hunt Down Old TVs"

thaeli — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 04:10:30 +0000

I'm the same way. The scanlined, subpixeled versions just look terrible to me.

New comment by thaeli in "People Who Hunt Down Old TVs"

thaeli — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 03:41:03 +0000

FPGA based devices that can do this, and quite well, do exist, they're just expensive. The RetroTINK-4k Pro is the top of the line as of this writing but it's a $750 converter.

New comment by thaeli in "Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?"

thaeli — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:46:55 +0000

Emissions related components work very similarly, replace the software and it’s presumed to be a defeat device unless proved otherwise.

New comment by thaeli in "Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?"

thaeli — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:43:00 +0000

For emissions related components, EPA rules do kick in though. While the current administration appears to have paused enforcement, their position for many years has been that running anything except factory approved firmware on an ECU or other emissions related computer constitutes a “defeat device” and is illegal for an on road vehicle subject to emissions controls. (Granted, in practice 99% of the reason anyone installs new firmware on their ECU, or switches to an aftermarket ECU, is for a “tune” that does affect emissions. I’m sure there is some edge case exception, but it’s very rare in on road engines.)

The alternative, and there are a very few tunes that have done this, is to prove to regulators that the tune does not negatively affect emissions in any way. In practice this is done by getting a CARB exception since they’re the ones actually checking for tunes.

New comment by thaeli in "We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own"

thaeli — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 17:50:23 +0000

Well, many areas have banned app-only payment requirements (along with card-only) so it’s possible we’ll get some mandated alternatives.

New comment by thaeli in "LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't"

thaeli — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 14:18:06 +0000

Ironically, this check would be a pretty good use for a LLM.

New comment by thaeli in "Ghrc.io appears to be malicious"

thaeli — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 01:06:04 +0000

Are there any additional mitigations folks are using for this? This issue is the only reason we can’t turn classic PATs off entirely.

Short lifetime mandatory reauth to enterprise SSO seems to be the best available, but it’s inconvenient for the single Classic PAT we actually need.

New comment by thaeli in "Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds"

thaeli — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:43:29 +0000

Yeah, interested to compare this with optimized and properly cached GitHub Hosted Runner builds.

New comment by thaeli in "Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange"

thaeli — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 16:24:13 +0000

The biggest problem with SE for me, and this is related to the culture issues you're talking about, is that the site has no good way of deprecating "formerly correct" answers. Even if a better, more correct answer is posted later, the reputation system has a huge incumbency bias in favor of older answers that have accumulated upvotes by being the best available answer at the time.

Their knowledge repository is slowly rotting under the weight of having to ask every time "okay, is this correct-sounding, highly upvoted answer actually (still) correct, or is it 10 years out of date?"

New comment by thaeli in "B.C. woman buried in Amazon packages she did not ask for and does not want"

thaeli — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 18:58:17 +0000

There was a common scam back then of sending cheap goods to someone, then billing them a high price, when they didn't order anything to begin with.

New comment by thaeli in "American hard hat jobs have the highest level of open positions ever recorded"

thaeli — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 01:24:26 +0000

Compare this to EMS, where unless you're lucky enough to be fire or hospital based, worker protections are almost nonexistent.

New comment by thaeli in "S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’"

thaeli — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:43:50 +0000

Unless we're ever ready to start treating bike thieves like horse thieves, that's unlikely to ever change. And I doubt we'll ever have the political will to do that, or even a kinder gentler version of it.

New comment by thaeli in "Ask HN: Glassdoor is unbelievably bad, why no one disrupting it?"

thaeli — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 20:26:15 +0000

The concentrated force for candidates to counteract this would be an industy-wide union. Which isn't happening.. but if you look at unionized industries this is one of the major benefits for candidates, or at least for candidates who make it into the union..

New comment by thaeli in "When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option"

thaeli — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 21:05:27 +0000

It's not ideal, per app would be preferable, but at least global can be a toggle in the global quick settings UI.

New comment by thaeli in "When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option"

thaeli — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 21:01:52 +0000

As a user, I don't care about your ML model. I care about not sending you personal info. Coarser info isn't good enough - you can convince me you actually deserve my real info, or you can get no info (preferable), or you can get fake info (alternative if you degrade or break my user experience because I wouldn't give you that info).

I understand there are some legit use cases for validated info. Unfortunately, targeted advertising and other types of profiling are also common use cases for the same info. It's a lot like MAC randomization on public wifi - it sucks, it breaks legit use cases, but it was needed because too many companies were using it to track people.

New comment by thaeli in "Cities turn to ‘extreme’ water recycling"

thaeli — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 17:52:44 +0000

We do that, but we're joking.

New comment by thaeli in "NHTSA tells automakers not to comply with Massachusetts right-to-repair law"

thaeli — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 18:56:27 +0000

Isn't that pretty much what immobilizer bypass modules have done for years?

New comment by thaeli in "1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research"

thaeli — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 01:43:19 +0000

It was correct when the book was written, but isn't anymore.

New comment by thaeli in "Jaron Lanier on the danger of AI"

thaeli — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 18:03:03 +0000

If you read Brave New World and think of the lower "classes" as instead being automation and AI (really, most of the jobs done by Epsilons and Deltas in the book were automated decades ago, and the Gamma / Beta jobs are rapidly moving towards AI replacement as well) it's not a bad system, nor is it a dystopia.