Hacker News: turpentine

"If I Didn't Have These Powerful Tools,I Wouldn't Do It at All"-The Oliver Twins

turpentine — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:26:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.timeextension.com/features/if-i-didnt-have-these-powerful-tools-i-wouldnt-do-it-at-all-the-oliver-twins-explain-why-theyre-dizzy-about-genai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50032732

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by turpentine in "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything"

turpentine — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:19:17 +0000

Studying and patching binaries has always been done. This is not new.

A Rant About Two Things: AI and the People Who Rant About AI

turpentine — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 07:55:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.patreon.com/FluffyQuack/posts/rant-about-two-168230683

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030716

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by turpentine in "South Korea says AI agents appear to have been used to hack the country's banks"

turpentine — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 02:22:06 +0000

afaik up to 2020, IE and ActiveX was required for online banking. Past that I heard you had to install a local webserver that the browser could communicate with. I'm not sure if any security issues are mandated by law, but it does sound like a minefield.

New comment by turpentine in "My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps"

turpentine — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:33:25 +0000

You've erased your own voice and evidence of thinking and writing.

New comment by turpentine in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

turpentine — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:44:19 +0000

Syntax is listed right there in the GP comment. They've given plenty of rope to hang themselves by.

Someone who says that programming is not about working at the level of about data structures and algorithms without LLMs raises red flags.

New comment by turpentine in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

turpentine — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 05:23:43 +0000

> We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms.

Focusing on data structures, architecture and algorithms is what competency in programming has looked like since forever. Building systems out of smaller pieces gets you there.

If your complaint above is that you were struggling with syntax and reading documentation, one might ask if you failed to progress past beginner levels, and now AI is just your cheat-code?

New comment by turpentine in "Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions"

turpentine — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 02:19:57 +0000

> You would think that an engineering school would be wiser...

Schools are a business run by administrative staff who make purchasing decisions to solve business problems. Schools love to reduce billable teaching hours through online coursework, which invites academic dishonesty from students, and paying for honorlock is a way to achieve that reduction in expenditure, rather than paying tutors to supervise exams in person.

New comment by turpentine in "Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions"

turpentine — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 02:11:19 +0000

Ubuntu still considers 152.0.7977.64 stable.

New comment by turpentine in "Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions"

turpentine — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 04:51:14 +0000

What does your vibe-coded-in-C browser do to mitigate this kind of exploit?

New comment by turpentine in "My practical approach to surfing the web safely"

turpentine — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:50:57 +0000

We're exactly in that era of insanity that someone will use agent drivel development to cobble together a browser from existing browser sources in exchange for thousands of dollars of compute. Will it be standards conformant? No. Will it have security issues? Yes.

New comment by turpentine in "My practical approach to surfing the web safely"

turpentine — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:46:43 +0000

Qubes OS is looking less crazy lately too.

New comment by turpentine in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

turpentine — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:14:04 +0000

It's likely that regular Fastmail users are subsidising their AI costs. I've talked to several people who were a bit shocked when Fastmail decided to complicate their offering with the current hyped trash.

New comment by turpentine in "Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM"

turpentine — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:55:20 +0000

51% of people are still on 1080p according to the July 2026 steam survey.

New comment by turpentine in "Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it"

turpentine — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:22:57 +0000

Online tools to simplify this process like Perseus have existed for at least 15 years, and you could view original texts side by side with English for comparison, and original words have all their cross-references hyperlinked etc. All maintained by academics committed to rigorous and nuanced approaches to translation.

Ancient Library is some vibecoded alternative that the LLM translation it uses will be incorrect. Color me unimpressed.

New comment by turpentine in "Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer"

turpentine — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 03:49:26 +0000

For the sake of archival/computing history, do you know if a copy of the am29k High-C compiler could turn up on archive.org one day?

New comment by turpentine in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

turpentine — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:25:54 +0000

Yet the dev has posted here on HN saying they used LLMs to do the port, but have a preference not to communicate their AI use.

New comment by turpentine in "Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party"

turpentine — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:36:56 +0000

https://bsky.app/profile/neocities.org/post/3mnkqgxostk2k - This is recent and inexcusable sloppy work for a domain registrar. Private equity explains it if they're cutting and offshoring operations. Even if they hadn't been acquired by PE, it is still inexcusable. They didn't even bother to respond publicly to explain how it happened and that they're course correcting.

New comment by turpentine in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

turpentine — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:44:01 +0000

Try a different host machine to rule out it being a DAS enclosure.

New comment by turpentine in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

turpentine — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:21:19 +0000

> You can get cheap LSI PCI cards and do miniSAS to SATA if needed.

People say those generate a ton of heat because they're normally in a rack mounted server with plenty of airflow. Probably a significant drawback for a "cheap prebuilt PC".