Hacker News: wiml

New comment by wiml in "The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy"

wiml — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:57:08 +0000

Disney eventually walked it back due to bad PR, but this did happen: https://wdwnt.com/2024/08/disney-dismissal-wrongful-death-la...

New comment by wiml in "Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe"

wiml — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:03:45 +0000

LEO is crowded enough (mostly with Starlink) that satellites have to actively maneuver to avoid collisions [1]. There's research [2] arguing that we're probably already in runaway territory in some orbits — that is, debris from 1 collision likely produces more than one secondary collision — we're just way over on the left of the hockey stick curve. A bit of bad luck, or two megaconstellations that don't perfectly coordinate their operations with each other, could move us to the right pretty quickly.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643

[2] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...

New comment by wiml in "ESP32-S31"

wiml — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:37:54 +0000

As I understand it, Z-Wave is substantially more closed/proprietary. Both Thread and Zigbee are protocols that run on top of 802.15.4, which Espressif already has in other products.

New comment by wiml in "I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph"

wiml — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:53:53 +0000

The miterlimit just controls when to change between a miter join and a bevel join.

New comment by wiml in "Flipper One – we need your help"

wiml — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:32:14 +0000

In the 1800s? Pretty often, I'd guess.

New comment by wiml in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

wiml — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:45:53 +0000

You'd think people would be doing that already. Has anyone posted details?

Can you skirt the GDPR by making it hard to discover who you need to ask?

New comment by wiml in "Stop MitM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider"

wiml — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:09:21 +0000

There are a bunch of methods for transforming a hash into something that's easier to compare. You've probably already seen the RandomArt thing that openssh uses for comparing host keys on first use. Some apps produce a sequence of emoji for fingerprint comparison. It's a small but fertile little research niche.

I can't offhand think of anything that an LLM image generator would do to improve the process; it'd be an interesting research task. You'd need a way to transform the 256-bit hash into LLM input in a way that would maximize the perceptual difference in generated images. The problem is that it's absolutely critical that two different implementations work the same, which means the spec would need to specify the exact set of model weights to use.

New comment by wiml in "The Car That Watches You Back: The Advertising Infrastructure of Modern Cars"

wiml — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:47:05 +0000

I'm pretty curious what Slate's telematics/privacy story will be like. No way to tell until they start shipping, I guess. It's pretty cheap to add a cell modem, so I don't think it's safe to assume that a "bare bones" car necessarily won't have spyware.

New comment by wiml in "BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth"

wiml — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:03:07 +0000

LoRA is a spread spectrum chirp modulation already.

New comment by wiml in "Waymo says can't avoid bike lanes because riders want to be dropped off in them"

wiml — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:42:37 +0000

What that means is that Waymo is intentionally choosing illegal behavior, at a corporate level. Uber/Lyft are merely turning a blind eye to the illegal behavior of their employees... er, "contractors".

New comment by wiml in "Stealth signals are bypassing Iran’s internet blackout"

wiml — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 04:00:40 +0000

I think they're just doing forward error correction (FEC). Not sure what that has to do with proof-of-work?

New comment by wiml in "Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times"

wiml — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:35:59 +0000

You may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.

New comment by wiml in "Bacteria found in the human intestine capable of improving muscle strength"

wiml — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:36:13 +0000

Recommendation #1 is almost always "eat a healthy, varied diet high in vegetables, fiber, etc". Pretty f'in straightforward if you ask me.

New comment by wiml in "Iranian missile blitz takes down AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai"

wiml — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:24:16 +0000

Water is used for cooling. You take in liquid water, release water vapor, and the phase transition takes away a lot of heat. Otherwise you need to pump that heat into dry air, which is much more difficult (energy-expensive). It's the same thing you do when you sweat.

New comment by wiml in "Iranian missile blitz takes down AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai"

wiml — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:20:33 +0000

Sure, but insurance is just outsourcing that calculation to a third party. AWS is big enough that I would think they largely self-insure, though I don't know if they do.

New comment by wiml in "Observations from carbon dioxide monitoring"

wiml — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:36:34 +0000

The tension between an energy-efficient building and a well-ventilated one is real, but energy-recovery ventilation (ERV or HRV) is a thing and apparently works pretty well. Some kinds use counter-flow heat exchangers, some use an oscillating flow over a thermal mass (sometimes also a sorbent to keep moisture in or out).

New comment by wiml in "Arm AGI CPU"

wiml — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:27:02 +0000

Yes, that's how fraud works a lot of the time. It removes you from the market but not until after it's removed your money. And there's an endless supply of new people ready to make the same mistake after you've learned your lesson.

New comment by wiml in "Some things just take time"

wiml — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 21:12:17 +0000

Then you bring the fox back, take the hen across the river, ...

New comment by wiml in "Juggalo makeup blocks facial recognition technology (2019)"

wiml — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:16:57 +0000

It really is past time for another expansion set for Illuminati.

New comment by wiml in "Juggalo makeup blocks facial recognition technology (2019)"

wiml — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:09:07 +0000

Is there support for this idea? I've seen it in plenty of novels, but I'd want some stats on how it affects a known, relatively modern, deployed gait recognition system.