Viscount has hilariously bad security. I used to live in a building in Toronto that used Viscount infrared fobs for access control. They were no more secure than TV remotes; no rolling codes, no encryption, nothing. An attacker could easily sit nearby with an IR receiver and collect everyone's fob codes at a distance, allowing access to all floors.
This was 30 years ago, so I'm sure a lot has changed since then. I was a missionary and the way we got into buildings in Toronto to knock on doors was to just pick the last name with the most letters from the directory, buzz them, and when they answered, we would just say "pizza delivery" and 95% of the time they buzzed the door open.
It'd be nice if missionaries weren't such hypocrites. Claiming to be the pizza guy when you're actually selling magic underwear is bearing false witness.
Technically it depends on the interpretation of "עֵ֥ד" and "בְרֵעֲךָ֖" whether that commandment is admonishing against telling any lie, just lies in court when making a legal accusation against another person, or somewhere in between.
Even if we accepted the premise that one book should be the basis of all morality, this one contains within itself contradictions, satire, sarcasm, and a community context we no longer have: with individual quotes I can make anyone look like a hypocrite.
To my mind the more interesting question is, does a singular community condemn a behavior in out-group members that they tolerate or even praise in in-group members?
Yes. The inevitable rejection is the point. It reinforces the otherness of the outside world, creating more separation from non-believers and stronger connection and devotion to the cult.
Yes. I'm no longer a Mormon, but I baptized around a dozen people on my mission and they were all found from knocking on doors. But this was also thirty years ago, before the internet was a thing for most people.
Exactly. This article should be titled "I figured out a really obtuse way to break into apartment buildings."
A rock will get the job done in a fraction of the time.
It's like all those nobodies on HN who go through all kinds of software gymnastics to secure their phone against imaginary "threat actors," when a mugger is just going to keep twisting their arm behind their back until they enter their PIN.
This is way better than a rock. It raises no suspicion and leaves no trace. Maybe it doesn’t matter for burglary, as you’re probably going to take things anyway, but if you want access anyone knowing you were there this is gold.
In a lot of modern buildings the elevator will not let you up to any floor unless you've been admitted, so the rock won't do you much good unless you also use it to smash the lock on the elevator control panel and override the security there.
Wait, what? You have to point a powered device at an IR receiver and press a button like a TV remote? I've never seen a building entry system like that!
Exactly that, yes! IR receivers outside every exterior door to the building, and IR receivers in the elevators to control access on a floor-by-floor basis.
The fobs were visible by an IR camera (including the average smartphone) and could trivially be decoded as a short bit sequence with an IR sensor wired into a microphone jack, as the bit pattern was transmitted at ~audio rates.
The first and best solution is to help these people improve, obviously. You've tried that, but it's not working quickly enough. (People can always be coached; some are just more coachable than others. When I hear that someone "isn't learning," that always reads to me as someone who's "learning more slowly than I have patience for.")
Then, the second-best solution is for management to move people around to other teams, or out of the company. Unfortunately, that's difficult and slow - and sometimes impossible, depending on the company culture or regulations.
Then, the third-best solution: move yourself to an environment with "better" people in it. This also may not be possible or desirable; job changes are difficult and can be risky.
So, the fourth-best (but most common) solution: make your peace with the situation by finding ways to become comfortable with the gap between your expectations of your colleagues and their actual performance.
Some strategies:
- Remind yourself that "the company pays me well to put up with this." (And if the company doesn't pay you well enough to make it worth it, then yes, absolutely leave. I assume Microsoft pays you well though.)
- Dig deep to find out what frustrates you about working with these people, and address those concerns instead. Are you frustrated because these people increase your workload? Are you worried that their lack of quality work will reflect poorly on you? Do you worry that they will compromise work that you care about? These are all insecurities that can be addressed.
- Remember that intelligence is not linear; nobody is strictly smarter than somebody else in every aspect of life. These people may be good at parts of their jobs that you don't see, in which case your expectations of these people may be what needs to change.
Every post from patio11 is such a joy to read: precise, exact, descriptive, and entertaining. I'd love to understand where his writing style comes from and how to emulate it.
The true answer, which may not be useful, is that style is what happens when one writes five million words. For the first few hundred thousand you end up sounding a lot like your favorite authors and what your teachers wanted. Then you start doubling down on what is working, try random experiments, bounce around an incentive gradient a bit, and also accumulate a decade plus of life experience and hopefully some knowledge. Eventually, people start sounding like you. There is no day in the middle where you hire a focus group of writing professionals to develop a house style guide.
That is a joke but not much of one; writing style guides to capture "What is... taste? How do we scale it?" is a project I've actually been involved with. This project brief has defeated many talented people, the least of which being me.
Agree, It's the perfectly balanced between "too dry/academic", or "too vague/gimmicky".
It's often mentionned in HN, but in the same style, I cannot recommend enough "Money stuff" [1] which is Matt Levine's newsletter at Bloomberg. Highly entertaining.
I think it's a witty and knowing but rather opaque writing style that's designed to make you work. Often worth the effort, but he could use an editor or beta tester to help dial it back a bit.
There were a few times when I almost sent him a tweet that he got some logic backwards, but after rereading, I realized that I had misread it, that it's right but confusing.
I hope to hire an editor one of these days, but some of my characteristic style is intentional and some is just a reflection that the production function is "Crikey I've put the kids to bed and now have checks watch four hours to write prior to my effective deadline."
Maybe it's because English is not my native language, but I had a very hard time to get the gist of both articles. I'm not even sure I have learned something concrete about KYC/AML. The only take away I have is that it's a deliberately opaque set of rules and that neither the regulator nor the banks have a complete picture of what is actually going on in the financial system. And that it's leaky as hell.
But maybe that is all the author tried to convey to the reader, just in an opaque way :)
I really hope he compiles these blogposts into a book. There is so much nuanced industry knowledge here.
> I'd love to understand where his writing style comes from and how to emulate it.
In the "good old days" they made students memorize passages from great authors and reproduce them. The idea being that this process will force you to think about the structure of their sentences and vocabulary. I used to do this when I was a kid, but I don't think I did it enough to have an impact.
I'll give you a hint - the post was originally twice as long and _did_ go into detail about why I wanted to patch something, but a reviewer of the post pointed out that I could potentially have run afoul of one or more laws in one or more countries if I had succeeded in doing so.
I'll give you a hint - the post was originally twice as long and _did_ go into detail about why I wanted to patch something, but a reviewer of the post pointed out that I could potentially have run afoul of one or more laws in one or more countries if I had succeeded in doing so.
Thank you very much for the follow up as well. At a risk of generalizing, it's frustrating, to say the least, that a 26-year-old device can be treated like safeguarded property or an industry secret at the same time when they're happily cast in the dustbins of a product cycle; or lost as insignificant pieces of company mergers.
This product line is not in the dustbin at all. Kurzweil just introduced the K2700, which still includes the VAST engine introduced in the K2000. It’s pretty amazing how long and continuous the Kurzweil technology timeline has been.
The K2000 was ahead of its time, and is still an amazing instrument today. I'm intrigued to discover that MAME is adding support for it, which sounds like an awesome project, I wonder if I can help in any way (K2000R is still here, but not been booted for a while).
As the other comment notes, I’m not sure if MAME can actually properly emulate any music hardware. There’s a skeleton Elektron Machinedrum/Monomachine in there for example but it can’t really do anything interesting (although this thread talks a bit about how some hackers used it to help reverse engineer and ultimately create their own firmware for the Machinedrum, see my other comment for more details: https://github.com/jmamma/MIDICtrl20_MegaCommand/issues/88)
Another project which may be of interest is this emulation of the Motorola DSP536xx DSP, which was used in a lot of classic late 90s hardware synths: https://dsp56300.wordpress.com. It can actually run Access Virus ROMs pretty much perfectly and apparently on an M1 the performance is pretty good, it’s usable but crackly on my i9 Mac. They’re hoping to be able to emulate many more synths which used the same DSP but for now the Virus is the focus.
MAME seems to have had "skeleton driver" (i.e.: very rough and unfinished) support for a number of 80s- and 90s-era synths, given that they're very similar to video game hardware from the same era. In my reverse engineering for this project, I realized that the MAME driver might now boot, but there's an extremely long way to go before audio comes out; the K2 series used custom ASICs for waveform generation that have no public documentation. I've heard that some folks much smarter than me know how to de-cap chips and reverse engineer them from the hardware, but I'll be extremely impressed if someone can make that happen and emulate those chips efficiently.
Just speculating but anyway, it could be related to allowing the digital dump of the various waveform samples, so that they could be used to create for example a software plugin that replicates some or all the functions of that instrument.
Modern hardware would allow the recreation of many old instruments at a fraction of their cost, either in hardware and/or software, so it's understandable that manufacturers are fiercely protecting their IP.
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