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Everything I own, owned
Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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The Vibe Tax
Pol had 12 hours, a blank repo, and a fresh weekly quota. By morning, only one of those remained.
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Explain it to me like I'm ten
In 2012, the creator of the xkcd cartoon Randall Munroe unveiled Up Goer Five — a detailed diagram of the Saturn V rocket, annotated using only the most common 1,000 (sorry, “ten hundred”) words in…
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Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that…
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I spent $266 and four AI models to own my tablet. GLM-5.3 finished it in a day
Owning a tablet Amazon kept shutting down: CVE-2022-38181, four AI models, five months
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Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10k individuals may be neurotypical
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.
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To become a better writer, read as much as you can
I’m obsessed with the craft of writing. I write every day, I read about the craft often, and in my...
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I dream of quieter computing
A quick note about future of computing and indieweb. It's about a 2 minute read.
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A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is a song about regret, asking for forgiveness, and wanting another chance after having hurt someone. But philosophically speaking, what exactly makes an apology morally meaningful?
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Three important steps in my maturation process
My father passed recently, and he was twice my age. I am approximately the same age that he was when I was born, and I am now “the old generation” - there’s no one left in the generation above me.
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Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos
OR: The Great Switcheroo
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Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
A new way to think about brainpower.
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Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all…
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I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
OR: an apology to my English teachers
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I don't enjoy the Internet any more
The pale is growing
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An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
It's been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Here's an update on how things have been going after my move to Fastmail.
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Buy Your Friends Batteries
Pool your money and give your friends batteries that lower their electricity bills and keep essential devices running during outages.
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Flat Chair by Sara Paculdo
Innovative Housewares This page : SMART IRON | FRISPER | FLAT CHAIR PROJECT | FIRST AID WITH A FACE OLISO is a small design firm focused on delivering inventive solutions to "change your home and lifestyle." As the sole industrial designer at the time, Sara worked with engineering, marketing
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Being ambitious and being a dad
When I was going through YC, I didn’t mention my seven month old daughter to anyone. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed schedule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life competes with my work.
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Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
First we reinvented statistics. Then finance. Now we're reinventing program management and calling it agentic orchestration.
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Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas
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I Remain a Skeptic
I still do not use LLMs for anything I actually care about. There are a lot of reasons I could give: environmental, social, political. I could talk about ecosystem lock-in, learned dependence, self-soverignty, philosophical concerns, the intentional dismantling of labour bargaining power, and more. But before all of…
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The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
A fictitious Sean Byrne ended up on a U.S. government restricted-party list. Sixteen years later, Apple, Nasdaq and others have mistaken me for him.
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Seven books I keep close because I love them
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Dear people who work at the airport
I would like you to know that we passengers are trying our best. To you, this place makes sense -- you come here every day. You speak the lingo. You kno...
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Blog about things you don't understand yet
Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing…