Monthly Archives: January 2025

‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Naturally, flag killed on HN because the valleybros don't like being called out on their bullshit. There have always been competing cultures in the tech world, and the startup-hustle-buisness-culture strand - who love to pretend they're the O.G. Hackers but are a largely unrelated group that came later - has always had a distasteful amount of hierarchy (especially misogyny) in their world view.
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OpenAI Says DeepSeek May Have Improperly Harvested Its Data

Source: NYT > Technology

Article note: The plagiarism machine, fed with incredible quantities of unlicensed material whose economic value they hope to capture without compensation, is offended another player might have treated them in the same way. Cue the world's tiniest violin.

The San Francisco start-up claims that its Chinese rival may have used data generated by OpenAI technologies to build new systems.

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We’re bringing Pebble back

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh that's exciting. Pebble, somehow, is still arguably the only (or one of two, Apple has done OK) compelling smartwatch system. Google is open-sourcing the old platform software, and Eric Migicovsky (Pebble founder) is spinning up to make new hardware.
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DeepSeek panic triggers tech stock sell-off as Chinese AI tops App Store

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Hopefully this will begin gently deflating the bubble. We have piles of evidence that the current techniques are more expensive than can be justified (a situation which is favorable to incumbents with large infrastructure investments, hardware vendors, and no one else), and a nice gentle letdown would have fewer disruptive second-order effects than the full on pop the valleybro hustlers probably deserve.

On Monday morning, Nvidia stock dove 11 percent amid worries over the rise of Chinese AI company DeepSeek, whose R1 reasoning model stunned industry observers last week by challenging American AI supremacy with a low-cost, freely available AI model, and whose AI assistant app jumped to the top of the iPhone App Store's "Free Apps" category over the weekend, overtaking ChatGPT.

What’s the big deal about DeepSeek?

The drama started around January 20 when Chinese AI startup DeepSeek announced R1, a new simulated reasoning (SR) model that it claimed could match OpenAI's o1 in reasoning benchmarks. Like o1, R1 is trained to work through a simulated chain of thought process before providing an answer, which can potentially improve the accuracy or usefulness of the AI models' outputs for some types of questions posed by the user.

That first part wasn't too surprising since other AI companies like Google are hot on the heels of OpenAI with their own simulated reasoning models. In addition, OpenAI itself has announced an upcoming SR model (dubbed "o3") that can surpass o1 in performance.

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The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like It

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's a _publishably rigorous_ incarnation of a frequently colloquially noted phenomenon. See IOT: "> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! > Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise." Or the older and more generic "Why do the sysadmins always dress like they're going camping? Because they're the people most acutely aware of how tenuous all of our technology is." bit. Many modern technologies seem to have this property.
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I don’t like Docker or Podman

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Many of these annoyances are true, but are completely separate from the ones I hate on containers over. Containers indicate your software has been put together so sloppily that it is not deployable. Containers have weird failures in separation (permissions with docker is alarming). Containers (and also OP's preferred VMs which at least avoids the separation problem) are hauling around a whole fucking Linux distribution per binary, which is an absurd waste of space and bandwidth.
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Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is extremely cyberdeck, in the actual Idoru box with glasses and gloves (not that last part) sense that few things that use the term match up with.
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An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is the niftiest, most deeply technical esoterica I've seen in a while. Apple has an invalid instruction in the ROM of the Classic II (ca.1991), whose undocumented behavior on real hardware is necessary to compute an address during the boot process. Discovered because emulators that implement the documented instruction set crash, either on the invalid instruction or on the next instruction because the side-effect didn't happen.
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Data breach hitting PowerSchool looks very, very bad

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: ...Speaking of problems with data silos: One of the biggest ed-tech carpetbaggers got hacked and lost control of large amounts of personal data for tens of millions of people, many of them children. Good job.

Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel.

The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California, firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students and employ an unknown number of teachers. Besides providing software for administration, grades, and other functions, PowerSchool stores personal data for students and teachers, with much of that data including Social Security numbers, medical information, and home addresses.

On January 7, PowerSchool revealed that it had experienced a network intrusion two weeks earlier that resulted in the “unauthorized exportation of personal information” customers stored in PowerSchool’s Student Information System (SIS) through PowerSource, a customer support portal. Information stolen included individuals’ names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security Numbers, and unspecified “other related information.”

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Brick Layer Post-Processor, Promising Stronger 3D Prints, Now Available

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Neat! This looks like one of the more promising low-hanging strength improvements for printed parts that, like many things in 3D printing (and everywhere) is/was being held back by bullshit patents.

Back in November we first brought you word of a slicing technique by which the final strength of 3D printed parts could be considerably improved by adjusting the first layer height of each wall so that subsequent layers would interlock like bricks. It was relatively easy to implement, didn’t require anything special on the printer to accomplish, and testing showed it was effective enough to pursue further. Unfortunately, there was some patent concerns, and it seemed like nobody wanted to be the first to step up and actually implement the feature.

Well, as of today, [Roman Tenger] has decided to answer the call. As explained in the announcement video below, the company that currently holds the US patent for this tech hasn’t filed a European counterpart, so he feels he’s in a fairly safe spot compared to other creators in the community. We salute his bravery, and wish him nothing but the best of luck should any lawyer come knocking.

So how does it work? Right now the script supports PrusaSlicer and OrcaSlicer, and the installation is the same in both cases — just download the Python file, and go into your slicer’s settings under “Post-Processing Scripts” and enter in its path. As of right now you’ll have to provide the target layer height as an option to the script, but we’re willing to bet that’s going to be one of the first things that gets improved as the community starts sending in pull requests for the GPL v3 licensed script.

There was a lot of interest in this technique when we covered it last, and we’re very excited to see an open source implementation break cover. Now that it’s out in the wild, we’d love to hear about it in the comments if you try it out.

Thanks to [greg_bear] in the Hackaday Discord for the tip.

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