Hacker News: wildzzz

New comment by wildzzz in "Subaru is killing off gas cars and will only sell EVs in Europe"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 22:16:43 +0000

Nowadays, a Subaru is just a cheaper Toyota.

New comment by wildzzz in "Require Police to Get a Warrant to Search ALPR Data"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:55:00 +0000

I can see that as an argument, it's the patterns that ALPR data produces which could become an invasion of privacy, not the actual photos themselves. However, how is this any different than a cop legally following your car around all day?

New comment by wildzzz in "Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:36:54 +0000

Very true. I am still somewhat skeptical over the Supermicro implant but seeing these Ledger implants makes it less of an impossibility.

New comment by wildzzz in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:31:50 +0000

I guess the issue is that American heat pumps use central air handlers. There is a coil inside and outside the house a fan that blows air across each coil. The inside fan pulls air from around the house and then blows hot or cold air through vents. It sounds like British heat pumps just push hot water through pipes. We use insulation over the refrigerant pipes to prevent condensation from forming in the walls. The length of the run is also kept as short as possible to reduce losses.

New comment by wildzzz in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:22:36 +0000

My experience is completely different. I've only had to replace two LED bulbs in the past six years. At the last place I lived, I swapped the CFLs in some of the fixtures (overhead lamps mostly) for LEDs and then swapped them back, taking the LEDs with me, when I moved. I've got a desk lamp in my laundry room that's been on nearly continuously for six years and that came from my last place as well.

New comment by wildzzz in "Making a VGA Driver in SystemVerilog"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:13:44 +0000

I remember working on a project like that in my Digital Design II class. We built a VGA driver to display a chessboard but the real challenge was that we couldn't use a framebuffer, that would have been too easy. We had to build a logic circuit to display the chessboard, a piece on the board (a bitmap), and then use inputs to move the chess piece around. We also used the ARM processor onboard the Cyclone FPGA to run Linux where we wrote a program in C to send board positions to that chessboard logic circuit.

It was kinda hard and I struggled a bit but got it working in the end.

New comment by wildzzz in "Require Police to Get a Warrant to Search ALPR Data"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:57:16 +0000

As much as I'd love for this to happen, the analogue of ALPRs is a cop following someone all day (no warrant required) or an army of cops on street corners writing down every license plate that passes (no warrant required). Just because it's a computer doing the reporting, how does that suddenly make it a fourth amendment violation?

Cops can't wiretap without a warrant because a phone call is a private conversation between two people in a private space. A cop is allowed to stand next to you while you chat on a park bench or hear your side of a cellphone conversation.

Cops can't gain access to your email without a warrant because those are your private papers, explicitly called out in the fourth amendment. Just like they can't open your incoming and outgoing snail mail. However, cops can look at mail covers with a non-warrant approval just like they can see email metadata without a warrant simply because everyone else can see that mail cover or metadata.

A license plate is not private information. It's bolted on to your car in at least one place and is designed to be very visible from a distance. Public roads are in the public and you do not have a reasonable expectation to privacy driving around on public roads (the contents of your car is different). Since your license plate, and possibly your face, are in plain view in the public, how can we effectively protect ALPR data by requiring warrants?

It would be much easier to try to require a subpeona or court order to obtain ALPR data. Even the data created by ALPRs on cop cars should still require a court order except in extreme cases like tracking a violent suspect or a missing person.

New comment by wildzzz in "Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month"

wildzzz — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:08:57 +0000

It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine. It sips power, runs cool, requires almost no maintenance, and pulverizes orphans into dense little cubes for easy clean up.

New comment by wildzzz in "Honey, I shrunk the TV"

wildzzz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 23:52:27 +0000

I've regretted nearly every Samsung device I've ever purchased. The only one I've ever been pleased with were the Galaxy Buds Pro (gen 1). I bought the gen 2s after I thought I lost my first pair but found them a month later. Those gen 2 buds have always been flakey. They take a few extra seconds longer to connect, sometimes one doesn't connect until I dock it and try again or if it does connect, it has staticy or garbled audio on just one bud. I also have an awful time getting them to switch to other devices. Connecting them to my steam deck requires telling the deck to forget them and then re-pair. Meanwhile, the gen 1 buds just work. Battery life is not great on them anymore but they last long enough for my typical daily use.

New comment by wildzzz in "Plex vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild to drop a cryptominer"

wildzzz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 23:35:07 +0000

When Plex made their free TV channels front and center, I knew things would only get worse. I've been really happy with Jellyfin, especially with the Moonfin plugin. There is a weird issue with my Samsung TV never showing subtitles but that's my only complaint.

New comment by wildzzz in "The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

wildzzz — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 18:46:12 +0000

I'm guessing it's because she's still trying to control the narrative even though she's literally just waiting until her prison date.

New comment by wildzzz in "Passkeys are not a trap"

wildzzz — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:25:33 +0000

Usually you can setup an alternate 2FA like TOTP, a recovery SMS, or something else you can use to prove who you are. And then once you're into the site, wipe the current passkey and setup a new one on your current device.

New comment by wildzzz in "Passkeys are not a trap"

wildzzz — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:23:41 +0000

Sometimes the url for the login page changes or I'm logging into a different part of the site and my password manager doesn't recognize it. My university used Duo for authentication but depending on which resource you were trying to access, the subdomain might be different. How would I immediately know that I had just typed in my credentials to a misspelled domain or a hacked user account on a school web server displaying a phishing login? That last one would be even more nefarious because my browser might not even display past xyz.abc.edu/ and it would even have a valid SSL cert. Even if my password manager didn't recognize that URL and I manually typed it in, my passkey manager certainly wouldn't even attempt sending a key.

New comment by wildzzz in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

wildzzz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:54:50 +0000

After I got braces (stopped wearing my retainer, rip) and then got my wisdom teeth out, I had a small gap develop between two of my molars. I think one tooth tilted a bit so at the bite surface, they were touching but towards gum, the gap was large. It would constantly fill up with food and if I didn't floss soon enough, the gun would get inflamed and bloody. Hadn't seen a dentist for several years but eventually got one. I mention the gap issue to him around November. He says "you know, we could fill that in and it shouldn't cost you a dime if we can get you on the schedule before end of year." I came in a few days before Christmas on a weekend. It seemed like everyone there was getting some sort of work done, lots of drills drilling. Never had a tooth drilled before, that was incredibly nerve-wracking but overall a physically painless experience. I definitely had been wanting something done about this gap for a while, I've been concerned about a cavity developing because of stuck food or something worse. But to my dentist, I'm guessing I looked like easy money, especially since the only thing I had to give up was my Saturday morning.

New comment by wildzzz in "Gaming on Linux without cheating"

wildzzz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:23:49 +0000

Arch-based doesn't mean EA needs to use the kernel that the Archlinux devs sign. I'm sure Valve compiles their own kernel and would eventually sign it using their own key.

New comment by wildzzz in "Amsterdam police confiscates server left-wing ISP A/I at American request"

wildzzz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:54:20 +0000

The Israeli government does support Zionism and it does have quite a lot of influence with western governments. In the US, Israeli-tied special interest groups donate significant sums of money to our politicians who then vote in ways that benefit Israel. I don't think it's fair to say "Jews control the world" and I can certainly understand the sensitivity of that statement but it's not wrong to say that Israel has significant influence over the foreign policy of a world superpower.

New comment by wildzzz in "OpenAI employee arrested by FBI over hidden listening device, company says"

wildzzz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:49:17 +0000

Hear actionable insider information, give it to your friend to bet on OpenAI-related futures.

New comment by wildzzz in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

wildzzz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:44:15 +0000

It's absolutely amazing that I can light my entire house for the same power draw as like one 100W lightbulb.

New comment by wildzzz in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

wildzzz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:27:01 +0000

The great thing about heat pumps is you can run them in reverse to become an AC, only requirement is a drain for the condensate.

New comment by wildzzz in "OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room"

wildzzz — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 22:09:15 +0000

Or it was a voice recorder plugged into a USB port on the back of the TV for power.

Looking at the photo of the device, it looks like an XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense with the camera removed but the camera board still installed along with its microphone. The wifi/Bluetooth antenna is installed but it also supports microSD cards.

If I was building this, I'd just set it up so I'd never have to recover it. Have the wifi AP come on for a few minutes at various times during business hours under a MAC and SSID that resembles a smartphone hotspot. Vary the time based on the current day of month week to produce pseudorandomness. Walk by that conference room at some of those times, but not every time, and use a burner to connect and download the latest recordings. Once a recording has been transfered, it's deleted and overwritten to prevent someone from establishing a timeline. If recordings sit for more than a few days, they are wiped. If you can encrypt the SD card, keep the key in RAM so there's nothing useful to recover if someone pulls it out.

You'd never have to recover the device because all data is transfered covertly. Even if security finds it, they'll likely inadvertently wipe it when it's removed.