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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: October 26th, 2025

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  • I really want to know why we are staring at basically the same screen from decades ago. Why isn’t GRUB menu a fancy little thing by now?

    When I was a kiddo, dabbling in duel boot, I remember this screen. It was slightly more basic, but pretty much the same. I always figured it would eventually get upgraded to something more… I don’t know, fun to look at? Something minimal, but also customizable… background image, background music, maybe a menu for doing customizations right there… like what options are to be shown.

    No… it’s pretty much the same. Why?

    Edit: I realize that I am stupid. It’s because GRUB needs to survive when everything else is broken. GRUB is the first and last standing soldier. Its simplicity is a feature enabling that capacity. But also, you can customize GRUB if you want… so I am just dumb. Have a good day.





  • Yes. My wife is an Apple fangirl still so I’ve made it a point to screenshot every little bug I run into, to send her so that she can see for herself. The platform is becoming hot garbage.

    There are issues with individual apps like the Maps app, giving me the fucking walking time when I’m driving. The iMessage app is also pretty terrible, constantly freezing in longer threads of “parental requests” from the kiddos phones. Sometimes the iMessage app completely shits the bed and restarting the app doesn’t work, I need to restart the phone.

    Other times it’s weird shit… like the phone gets stuck between two transitions, so I see my lock screen on top of my Home Screen.

    I’m constantly finding myself trying to work around bullshit with iPhones.

    I’d be fine with that, if it were a Linux phone that I could independently fix and contribute to. Such a thing does not exist. So instead, we must deal with the shortcomings of profit driven walled garden monopolies that feel they know better what’s best for you and your hardware, despite their lack of care for QA.











  • I’m honestly amazed by this. Passkeys were the touted solution to all our human password problems. How is it that something so critical went unnoticed until recently?

    You’d think this would be something that gets caught before release. What went wrong?

    IIRC, the Passkey spec did not specify the use of specialized hardware for key storage. So if this a case where people chose convenience over security without realizing they were making the tradeoff?

    That would still be phenomenal. Who leads these sort of things and why is such a blatant issue unnoticed until most of us are affected?

    It doesn’t matter how good a plan is if we can’t follow it. So what stops this issue from continuing to plague the next “great” solution to password management?


  • I’ve never fully understood the issue with pseudo-random numbers… but I do know there’s an issue. I know, for example, bad random number generators have been the surface area of attack for recovering HDD crypto wallets with old bitcoin balances on them.

    Would you care to help me understand something, though?

    I think a fair framing here is that pseudo-random numbers generators need a random “seed” (starting value) to produce the resulting random number. So if someone knows the initial seed, they can rerun the algorithm to reproduce the original “random” number.

    I think what follows is that good pseudo-random number generators introduce complexity and obfuscation in how the seed is created. Perhaps they use current time, speaker input, mouse input, and some other seemingly “random” data source.

    Given enough dimensions (sources) in the source material for the seed, surly it would create an intractable number of permutations such that the seed can not be reliably reproduced — right?

    Like, let’s say you know a 10 minute interval where the seed was created — and the tool uses millisecond granularity. That’s 1000 (mili) * 60 (sec) * 10 (min) total possible values. If it’s also collecting mouse movement in a screen, that’s a huge number of possibilities with each given interval of movement. Adding more sources (dimensions) increases the number of possibilities exponentially.

    So how are people reverse engineering seeds? This seems secure to me, for the same reason cryptographic keys using giant prime numbers is secure… there are just too many possibilities, and it would take eons to brute force the right one.

    How are they doing it faster with seeds? Shitty algorithms not using enough data sources?