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Everything I own, owned

schlarp.com

211–220 of 367 posts

Re: Everything I own, owned

#211

People are praising how this new age of owning our stuff is here, while actually all this will bring is stricter lockdown in every level of the supply chain. Enjoy while it lasts, but I expect even more closed stuff, and less openness from these t.rends

Well, the takeway is that we should keep pushing to write everything in Assembly and C, so that human errors allow such "ownership".

Re: Everything I own, owned

#212
post #51
post #10

Key takeaway: > And the existence of WebUSB, WebHID, and WebBluetooth mean that for some devices, depending on the specifics of which classes are used, a moment of user indiscretion in accepting a permissions prompt could permanently backdoor one of their attached devices.

The preceding sentence is equally prescient: > Operating systems aren’t really equipped to work with the user to ensure that a microphone stays a microphone, and doesn’t spontaneously turn into a keyboard that hits Win+R and drops a payload to steal all your data when the room is quiet enough that it can assume you aren’t watching. In a world of USB-C everything we no longer have power supplies that are physically bo…

I recently realized something similar. I think that usb-proxy[1] could be used to force what looks like a mass storage device to stay a mass storage device, and likely could be built to be a sort of firewall. usb-proxy is a toy project showing that you can physically "MITM" USB with an RPi, but it could be a starting point.

[1] https://github.com/AristoChen/usb-proxy

Re: Everything I own, owned

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you didn't read the text you just copied and pasted, but here it is for you: "I have never intentionally run pixel cleaning on this monitor and I never will, I don’t care, and I would like for that overlay to go away forever." No need for ackshually, the guy is clear with what he desires. That is, by the way, the point of TFA. I want my devices to do what I want , not what a product manager wants or what a du…

The user should be the final authority over what his computer does. Not the computer manufacturer. Not the OS developer. Not the 3P app developer. Not some product manager at a software company. The end user. Even time computer says no, or does something without your permission, or does something counter to your wishes, or alerts you to do something, or urges you to do something, or makes you opt-out, is a failure.

I think there are actions a user may sometimes wish to take that software should simply refuse, ideally. Some actions are, and can only be, mistakes. I don't think it's a bad idea for software and hardware to defend itself against misinformed, confused, or clumsy users.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#214
this is interesting, while i greatly apreciate the ability with claude code to basically customize my own firmware. There are things that I am strictly speaking wondering about the authors choices. The Author removed Pixel Cleaning? As far as I understand Pixel Cleaning is a process to make sure your OLED Monitor lives longer, why would you want to not do that?

Re: Everything I own, owned

#215
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it strange that among the 900,000 1-minute tasks you need to complete on a given day, this one is low on the list?

Some people's time is actually worth or even just valued more than others to be bothered doing maintenance tasks such as there. I have a life to live outside preserving every last minute of functionality out of a monitor, I'll buy a new one eventually regardless.

I think it's nearly impossible to explain the benefit of not seeing such a popup to most people.

It comes down to the joy of doing things, and if the joy of using said monitor depends on a popup not being shown, then so be it.

I hope that the popup can be removed :)

Re: Everything I own, owned

#216

People are praising how this new age of owning our stuff is here, while actually all this will bring is stricter lockdown in every level of the supply chain. Enjoy while it lasts, but I expect even more closed stuff, and less openness from these t.rends

The other option is to look for better products that take simplicity, security, ownership and verifiability seriously. I think there's a market. Consider Precusor[0] who's design philosophy could be duplicated. Such a company could become the Anker of computer peripherals: build quality products that decommoditize markets. Now is the time to make such a company, because by the time the peripherapocolypse hits (in a few months) by then it will be too late.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates...

Re: Everything I own, owned

#217

I did this but with a dedicated machine for the Silicon Motion sm750 GPU. A budget single HDMI output GPU card for servers and a max resolution of 1080p. It is based on an older VGA/DVI version of the same hardware. I'm still testing but oh wow. My new driver now works with my ultra wide 21:9 ratio at 2048x864, it also manages 2048x1152. The driver works well, and now has full DRM and DKMS support. It also runs on mo…

> custom magic square dither mode for 16bit colour and it absolutely flies vs the 32bit mode

While that is cool, why do you need such a thing? More FPS? Less video RAM?

Re: Everything I own, owned

#218
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, I'm with you, but over the past decades I often saw companies being lazy about their software. So I think chances are good that we can make use of this situation. Not long ago, you had to accept certain decisions or servers going down with leaving devices useless. I'm hopeful that more stuff can have a 2nd/better life in our hands.

I like being able to have all this access, of course, but I'm not sure if "we" all truly have the character to be good stewards of this. Or rather I am sure that we do not. OTOH, maybe it needs events like these to build character. It just will suck for whoever turns out to be the collateral.

That's the downside of the medal, but let's face it. A tool is a tool. You can forge helpful stuff or weapons, but this is not the fault of the tool itself. So we're currently at the stage where we were on the internet 30 years ago. Let's see where this leads too.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#219

People are praising how this new age of owning our stuff is here, while actually all this will bring is stricter lockdown in every level of the supply chain. Enjoy while it lasts, but I expect even more closed stuff, and less openness from these t.rends

While closedness is bad, I assumed peripherals like these were closed anyway; the fact they were hackable implies they were not secure enough.

So if closed means they are secure, which 99.99% of end users expect, I'm actually okay with it.

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