Is that necessarily a bad thing? I have older laptops than the U729 that still see some use. If you're not locally compiling a big codebase, running some AI/LLM thing, playing GPU-intensive games, etc., you really don't need much.
Is it just me, or is there some kind of asteroid game shooting bullets at my cursor while I try to read this [1]? I hate to sound mean, but it's a bit distracting. I guess it's my fault for having JavaScript enabled.
It's extremely distracting. I'm not normally one to have issues that require reduced motion, but the asteroids are almost distracting enough on their own, and the fact that it causes my cursor to vanish is a real accessibility issue. I didn't actually realize just how much I use my mouse cursor when reading stuff until now, partly as a fidget, partly as a controllable visual anchor as my eyes scan the page.
I actually can't read things on that site at all. I move my mouse around while reading, not necessarily near the words I'm currently reading, so when my mouse disappears it's haltingly distracting. In addition to that, the way the "game" visually interferes with the text that I'm trying to read makes it incredibly hard to focus on reading. These two things combine to make this site literally unreadable for me.
I don't get why people keep posting and upvoting articles from this user-hostile site.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
The described behavior sounds like significantly worse than tangential annoyance, and isn’t really a common occurrence even on modern user-hostile websites.
He used to have a loading screen that did nothing if you have JS enabled in your browser, but no loading screen (which, again, did nothing) if you had JS disabled. I'm pretty sure it's meant to deliberately annoy, though this one is less annoying than the loading screen was.
The HN hivemind decries the lack of humanity and personality of the internet of nowadays but at the same time wants every website to be 100% text, no JS, no CSS because allegedly nobody needs CSS and, if you dare to do something remotely "fancy" with the layout, you have to build it with <table>s.
As an American that grew up in a rural area, this definitely isn't something that would've been taught in a public school here. At best, we had typing classes in middle school, and the (quite old) teacher insisted on two spaces after the end of a sentence, something that disappeared after we stopped using typewriters.
More to the point, the two spaces after the end of a sentence is a consequence of the typographic style at the time that the typewriter was introduced where additional space at the end of a sentence was employed (this is most common in books typeset in the 18th and 19th centuries, although earlier and later examples exist). Despite what people will tell you, it has nothing to do with legibility for monospace printing, and an awful lot with 19th century compositors getting paid by the line and padding their paychecks by increasing spacing wherever possible. William Morris and his followers, direct and indirect, led to a contraction of word spacing and the elimination of the additional space at the end of sentences in emulation of the best printing examples of the 15th and 16th centuries.
Basically go was designed ignoring all the research and progress that had been made in programming languages until then.
It was designed with contempt for developers, for example disallowing developers to create generic data structures, or lacking a decent way of error checking that is not extremely error prone and verbose.
It's been several years at this point, but I used to be a cloud support engineer for AWS (i.e. the first line of defense against support tickets). We were trained to always be kind to the customer, even if we're frustrated with them, so a response like "please read how the lambda works" probably would've gotten me reprimanded. Customers can rate your response from one to five stars, and if I remember correctly, anything less than four required a written explanation to your manager as to what went wrong.
That job was a glorified call center; I didn't last very long.
Very cool post! I enjoy anything that has to do with game hacking, and it's nice to see D, a language I don't have a ton of experience with. Just one note you/the author may be curious about:
> Notably a process_vm_writev syscall also exists, however it adhears to memory page protections - so if I wanted to inject data into a write-protected memory page, it’d fail.
You can work around this by convincing the process to re-mmap() the read-only section with PROT_WRITE. One way I've done this is by building a shared library with __attribute__((constructor)) that gets LD_PRELOADed into the game binary, though you have to be careful with the timing (e.g. your library may start running before the game has allocated the mapping you're looking for). That said, if you've done this, you are also free to just allocate your own memory rather than having to look for unused portions of it.
Ah nice - I had considered using LD_PRELOAD to do something similar (seeing if I could use mprotect on the mapping), but it felt like too much of an extra complication at the time.
I'd definitely consider giving it a try though if I the code injection becomes too annoying to keep track of doing it the ptrace 8-bytes-at-a-time way.
We are similar. The only time my phone makes any noise whatsoever is if I get a phone call from someone in my contacts or a Slack ping during work hours. Everything else can wait.
Not even "contacts", but the 5 favorite contacts (and even that's only vibration). Even the work app stays on silent - if I'm working I'm around anyway so I won't miss it by much, and if it's outside hours I don't even know those folks.
- They can know when you sleep
- They can detect when there are 2 people sleeping in the bed instead of 1
- They can know when it’s night, and no people are in the bed
I'm probably naive, but I'm failing to see how any of this is exclusive to having remote SSH access to the bed. Who's to say this isn't already happening with other binaries in the firmware? Maybe they're already phoning home?
[...]that bypasses all forms of formal code review process.
How does the author know if anything else in the firmware goes under any kind of code review process?
It's not a bad article, but it does seem to make a lot of assumptions, and you already agreed to let arbitrary code run on your network when you added an IoT device to it.
I think what he's trying to emphasise is the idea that anyone who's part of the engineering team could spy on you, without anyone else knowing. It's bad enough that the company has this data, sure, but there's at least an assumption that it will be secured and penalties can be enforced if not. Some random engineering being able to look into your life intimately by themselves is a completely different level of violation.
It is in fact already sending this data to their servers, because it doubles as a sleep tracker and everything goes through their servers. I really wish there was an option to do local-only connectivity, but very few internet-enabled products these days actually care about supporting a local-only mode, and I suspect the number of products that do would be even smaller if HomeKit didn't mandate it (sadly, temperature-controlled beds are not a HomeKit product category).
