Author Archives: pappp

How the Stream Deck rose from the ashes of a legendary keyboard

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Oh man, I remember the hype around the Art Lebedev Optimius keyboards, and tracing this line is the kind of thing I do for fun.
3D render of a keyboard with LED screens for keys.
Image: Richard Parry for The Verge

Back in 2005, a small firm offered a tantalizing vision of the future of computer keyboards.

What if your keyboard was filled with tiny screens that showed you exactly what any given press would do, each built into a crystal-clear key? The keys would morph and shift as you needed, transforming from letters and numbers to full-color icons and app shortcuts, depending on what you were doing.

Readers and tech bloggers adored the idea. “It’s about time someone shook up this stagnant keyboard market,” declared Engadget. “The concept is fantastic,” wrote Gizmodo. Slashdot lit up.

The keyboard was just a concept, dreamed up by Art Lebedev, a Russian design firm, and it was an ambitious idea at that: called the Optimus Maximus, it would require...

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The Mafia of Pharma Pricing

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Everything I learn about the modern healthcare system makes it looks worse.
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A bit more regarding UTM SE on the iPad

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Sigh. Apple finally approved (For sale in notionally-third-party markets) a version of UTM... and they had to cripple it so thoroughly as to be useless to get it accepted. Terrible performance, jank integration, etc. An iPad with a keyboard is so close to a compelling computer, but they'll bait international regulatory agencies to make sure it stays a coercive consumption device.
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Pretty pictures, bootable floppy disks, and the first Canon Cat demo?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh neat. The experiments and demos answer a bunch of questions I've had since I read about the Cat.
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Gpu.cpp: A lightweight library for portable low-level GPU computation

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat. Single-header wrapper around the WebGPU (which was a terrible name choice for a generic mid-level GPU API) bindings for doing compute. Less vendor-specific lock-in, less boilerplate.
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Antonin Scalia Stole Your Car

Source: Hacker News

Article note: HN apparently did not like Cory calling out the combination of monopolistic practices, B2B middlemen, patchwork legacy tech, and regulatory capture/failure that makes the exploitation engine run, but it's a great piece.
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Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This has come up a couple times in different venues, this version links several of the earlier iterations. They seem to be so complicated no one can _exactly_ root-cause the behavior, but the gamers, and the hosters, and folks doing benchmarks and such all come to the same "there seem to be problems with Raptor Lake K-series parts that escalate over time" conclusion. I tend to believe the theory that they're slowly degrading some little chip area - likely in the memory system, probably because of localized heating and/or over-stressed power/ground routing, less likely due to some charge build up triggering migration - when run flat out near the top of the range that was supposed to be safe.
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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is the most "do silly, frivolous things that serve no other purpose than making your happy" project. ARC firmware shim so you can boot NT4 on a handful of ancient PowerMacs. I love it.
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AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in data breach

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh look, gigantic data silos that probably shouldn't be retained, held by third party vendors subject to supply chain attacks. Sprinkle on a little negligent reporting practices, and you've got a disaster.
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OpenSSH bug leaves RHEL 9 and the RHELatives vulnerable

Source: The Register

Article note: Man The Register has produced some good wordplay over the years. I will be referring to RHEL-like distributions (Alma, CentOS, Oracle, Rocky, SLL, etc.) as RHELatives (R-hel-atives) from now on.

Newly discovered flaw affects OpenSSH 8.7 and 8.8 daemon

The founder of Openwall has discovered a new signal handler race condition in the core sshd daemon used in RHEL 9.x and its various offshoots.…

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