This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.
This is why I have 50TB of HDD space and a plex server. We tried watching a show on Amazon Prime and it was brutal, so many commercials. My wife skipped backward because we missed a part and were too close to the ad break so it made us watch a second 1:30 reel of unskippable ads. We subscribe to Prime and I still downloaded it. I’m not going to let them boil this frog.
This happened to me when I tried to buy Oakley’s, it was because I’d changed my router to an ad blocking DNS which made their support session lookups fail, so they couldn’t help me. Transactions failing, all because of their site being too tightly integrated into tracking and ad platforms. I ended up going with Zenni and got similar glasses for 1/5 the price.
8khz polling rate mouse and keyboard, 240hz 4K monitor (with Oled to reduce smearing preferably, or it becomes very noticeable), 360hz 1440p, or 480hz 1080p, is current state of the art. You need a decent processor and GPU (especially the high refresh rate monitors as you’re pushing a huge amount data to your display, as only the newest GPUs support the newest display port standard) to run all this, but my Windows desktop is a joy to use because of all of this. Everything is super snappy. Alternatively, buying an iPad Pro is another excellent way to get very low latencies out of the box.
That's a good one. I probably should have brought up variance though. These cache-less systems had none. Windows might just decide to index a bunch of stuff and trash your cache, and it runs slow for a bit while loading gigabytes of crap back into memory. When I flip my lightswitch, it's always (perceptibly) the same amount of time until the light comes on. Click a button on the screen? Uh...
Hah, that’s a good point! Unfortunately I have Hue smart bulbs and while they’re extremely convenient and better than most, there is sometimes a slight pause when using my WiFi controlled color schemes to switch between my configured red and daylight modes. What you gain in convenience and accessibility (being able to say “turn off the master bedroom” when I’m tired is amazing) I’ve lost in pure speed and consistency.
My friend just made an app. The idea sounds really dumb and he keeps asking me to install it. He’s never written a line of code in his life. I’d imagine a lot of the apps are stuff like this. It’s an app that tells you who died today, and who you’ve managed to outlive. Seems really glum and a downer.
My grandparents would have loved this. They spent most of the mornings scanning through obituaries for old friends who had died. Might be one of those bittersweet hobbies you get into when you reach your 80s.
Eventually these super expensive SXM data center GPUs will cost pennies on the dollar, and we’ll be able to snatch up H200s for our homelabs. Give it a decade.
Also eventually these WEIGHTS will leak. You can’t have the world’s most valuable data that can just be copied to a hard drive stay in the bottle forever, even if it’s worth a billion dollars. Somehow, some way, that genie’s going to get out, be it by some spiteful employee with nothing to lose, some state actor, or just a fuck up of epic proportions.
This is decidedly not what I’d expect to be discussed at Thotcon. That said, super interesting!
As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game which were going years without cracks now have “cracks”, although they rely on hypervisor fixes and disabling secure boot and giving the hypervisor cracks unfettered access to your system to intercept the Denuvo checks. [0] It’s a dangerous game we’re playing to keep these AAA games bottom lines fat.
It has their uses. If, for example, a company wants to issue fleet computers to workers or school to students, you want to have secure boot on those devices to prevent tampering. Secure boot makes it so that physical access is not the end all of security.
If you own the computer yourself, you "ought" to be able to turn off these measures in a way that is undetectable. Being unable to do so would be the red line imho - and looking at those hypervisor cracks available, it's not quite being crossed. The pessimistic, but realistic future prediction is that various media companies would want and lobby for machines to have unbreakable enclaves for which they can "trust" to DRM your machine, and it's just boiling the frog right now. Windows 11's new TPM requirement is testament to that.
Switch to linux asap - that's about the only thing a consumer is capable of doing.
This is coming. In particular, without a Secure-Boot-enforced allowlist of operating systems, it will be near impossible to verify that an OS connecting to the internet complies with your locality's age verification laws, so it will soon be illegal to run a computer that does not make Secure Boot mandatory and connect it to the network.
If you're starting to think "huh, maybe that's why these age verification laws suddenly became all the rage", you're onto something. Whatever the case, "general purpose computing" is definitely cooked.
General purpose computing as it was done in the 1900s is cooked for the average user because there is no market incentive for it to exist. The actual market incentive revolves around apps as they provide user value along with the ability to deploy custom apps.
The laws in my locality place requirements on the service provider (e.g. the adult website operator), not on random computer owners or manufacturers or software vendors.
Newsom signed a law that places those requirements on every operating system in California, and in practice, organizations tend to comply with California's terrible laws no matter where you are, rather than stopping doing business there or making two variants of their products.
With software it's trivial to have a switch for "California compliant" mode, but in any case, that makes it clear that such criticisms should be directed at California. Other (generally "red") states already had a more reasonable solution: make the sites offering the restricted service liable for their actions just like other businesses.
The problem is that you could face liability if you do business in the United States and permit a minor in California to use an OS in non-California-compliant mode. If you're an "OS provider" in Wichita, KS, California will find that its jurisdiction still applies because the minor was in California and sue you in its courts. If you fail to turn up that's a judgement for the state by default. (And if you do turn up, it's a judgement for the state as soon as they prove a kid ran your non-age-checking OS.) And, thanks to the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution, California will be able to collect on its judgement against you in Wichita.
Hardware vendors are not going to want that kind of liability, in California, Colorado, New York, or anywhere else. So they will switch to selling hardware with locked bootloaders and only allowing approved operating systems within that locality (which for end-user PCs will mean pretty much just Windows). There is still foreign hardware, but those chinesium PCs are going to be confiscated by ICE unless the Chinese manufacturers also play ball.
Besides all this... federal legislation is coming.
If you'd humor me, or just read the last paragraph for a tldr...
So let's say a PC builder(an individual; not a company) were to donate a PC to charity. Let's say it's built with a fairly recent MSI motherboard(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRQSWSFQ/) 'MSI PRO B760-P' if you'd prefer to avoid amazon.
I remove all my internal SSDs and NVME drives but buy a new 1tb SSD for whoever receives the PC. I also install a Linux OS, as well as sign the secure boot keys via sbctl myself, setup ukify, efibootmgr, etc. Everything the recipient would need to switch over to another OS if they so choose.
But oh no, the donated PC landed in the hands of Johnny, a 17-year old in California.
So who's at fault here, MSI for creating a BIOS that allows for non-windows EFI images to be installed? The PC Builder(donator) for knowingly installing Linux(though not knowing where it would end up)?
This is kind of what confuses me and I'm curious what this means for future hardware sold in the US and those who build PCs for their own use or others. Most modern motherboards are "locked down" by default, but can easily be unlocked by the end-user, it may take a few extra steps or be a bit harder to find but still pretty simple for someone moderately tech-savvy.
The full faith and credit clause does not apply if the court lacks jurisdiction, which California clearly would. There's a reason "California compliant" already exists as a phrase; you can buy and sell things that break California law outside of California. If you bring it in that's on you.
> If, for example, a company wants to issue fleet computers to workers or school to students, you want to have secure boot on those devices to prevent tampering. Secure boot makes it so that physical access is not the end all of security.
Measured boot is actually better for that: You can still boot whatever you want however you want, but hashes are different which can be used for e.g. remote attestation. Secure boot has to prevent that "unauthorized" code (whatever that means for each setup) can ever run. If it does, game over. That means less freedom and flexibility.
Measured boot isn't any better. Look at Android phones, where it's technically possible to unlock your bootloader, but a ton of apps (e.g., McDonald's and most banking apps) use remote attestation to see whether you did so and will refuse to work if you did.
Having an operating system purposefully allow support to installing rootkits should clearly be a bad idea. It shouldn't be surprising you have to turn off security features to install a rootkit.
Anti-cheat drivers are just as much of rootkits, and in practice, they have vulnerabilities that get a lot more hosts pwned than cheats do. Let's get Microsoft to stop loading their drivers.
I agree. Microsoft should provide proper integrity APIs to apps so they don't need such drivers. The fact that the PC ecosystem is so far behind XBox's for platform integrity is a big failure on Microsoft's part towards the PC gaming market.
Integrity is needed for a fair playing field. Their is consumer demand for such a fair playing field so it is a good thing for an operating system to respond to customer demand.
it is stupid to turn it off. It is incredibly easy to infect your system components without your knowning.
that being said, it does assume a certain trust in firmware vendors / oems. If you dont trust those, then dont buy from them.
i think for most ppl trusting OEM or trusting rando from interwebz with a custom hypervisor and requirement to cripple my system security are totally different things ..
u know they could actually make theyr HV support secure boot etc. to do it properly and have ur system run the cracks but not have gaping holes left by them -_-. lazy.
If you’re downloading torrents and running code with elevated privileges that infects your PC, 99% of people are absolutely hosed at that point anyway. I don’t see th real distinction between being owned at an elevated system level and owned by disabling system secure boot for a home user
Secure boot is an attempt to make covert persistence of an infection harder, that's all. It doesn't make it more or less likely for you to be compromised in the first place (and in general compromise of your user account is enough to be a big problem: most malware doesn't even need admin access let alone the ability to modify the parts of the system protected by secure boot)
As always in security, It Depends™; there are vulnerabilities that only impact systems with secure boot (and result in a situation worse than not having secure boot to begin with).
What I'm wondering for a while now: How do the game streaming services run the Denuvo titles? Do they get special builds? They will not run on bare metal hardware but in some kind of VM right? Wouldn't Denuvo detect that and stop working?
To add to this, almost every time a Denuvo game was “cracked” before the hypervisor methods it was because the dev accidentally published a demo with none of the Denuvo stuff. Happened to Lies of P a couple months after release.
Essentially secure boot is supposed to validate that only properly signed drivers are loaded on system startup. That allows you to block malicious/cheat drivers from being loaded because a signed AV/anticheat driver was loaded before and now it can properly control drivers that are being loaded after it.
Without it you are risking that the malicious driver will be loaded first and then make itself invisible to the later drivers.
Of course there are ways to bypass this too, but it adds a whole other layer of complexity.
Tldr
Secure boot is there so drivers loaded at boot time can trust that nothing was tampered with before they were loaded.
A little off topic, but any time I see that word, it reminds me of the first time I read the word “synechdoche”, I wanted to know how to pronounce it and watched a very helpful YouTube video [0] three times before realizing someone had pulled a very funny prank from an earlier, less serious time on YouTube. I laughed and laughed.
For April Fools Sega released an (actual, real) “Sanic the Hedgeheg” t-shirt and I wanted to see if there was anything about it on YouTube. YouTube assumed I meant “sonic” and it was impossible to correct it and say “no I’m actually searching for this dumb meme”. It just assumes everyone who uses YouTube is really dumb I guess. (I bought the shirt by the way and am excited to get it lol)
I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.
I didn’t click on any of them to verify, lest YouTube decides that it should replace my whole YouTube home page with sonic fandom and sanic memes :P
If anyone doesn't know, you can change shorts/<ID> with watch?v=<ID> in the URL and it gives you the same UI as for other videos, including the controls (the time line). Not sure why YouTube doesn't have controls for shorts. I've seen some Facebook videos not having controls, either, when I've been sent a link. I imagine it's the same for Instagram and TikTok.
I just put this into YouTube search and got results that contraindicate your claim¹:
> "sanic" the hedgehog
The quotes seem to shut down autocorrect
1: there's nothing that I see about the T-shirt, but the first result is titled "Sanic DA hedgeh0g". I will not be looking at what this video is. Several other results also include the word "sanic" in relation to the hedgehog.
Did you mean to respond to one of the sibling comments that are talking about autocorrect? I don’t understand what would be contradictory between what I said and what you said.
Apparently To Catch a Predator ("TCAP") makes YouTube think I've got a Spanish eating disorder and shoves a full screen "you're not alone" screen at you to call some eating disorder helpline.
Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that.
It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment.
Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word.
The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt.
---
(Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful.
But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good.
In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")
There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim".
Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..
A tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.
I believe you may be correct, but they're both readable-enough.
Like "cannot" vs "can not": One form may be more-correct, but both are very readable.
Either way, it's easy enough to blame spell check on our personal pocket supercomputers for these things.
(Every year or two, Google Keyboard on Android makes it its purpose to screw up "its" vs "it's". You type it the right way, you see it on the screen as being correct, and then it changes it to the wrong form. This happens 100% of the time and then the problem disappears in a few weeks.
I'd give Google a break, but they don't deserve one.
I also blame them single-handedly for the variations in spellings of brake-vs-break on the longer timeline: Sometimes, people get it right and nobody notices. Oftentimes, it's all backwards. The oscillation suggests that it is an auto-derp problem more than it is a cognitive one.)
Cannot and can not are slightly different in that both are correct (in the prescriptivist sense, I suppose; arguably whatever gets the point across is correct). But there are cases where can not is more correct.
I use a keyboard (Thumb-Key to be precise) without autocorrect, though it doesn't stop me from making typing mistakes.
I (usually!) want to find documents that include the words that I'm searching for, not an endless stream of links that some particularly-useless bot thinks I might want instead.
(And when that search returns no results, then that is also a useful data point for me.)
For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like:
"pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's"
Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.
I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too.
If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this.
A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term.
Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.
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