Hey buddy,

Man, you missed some interesting stuff on Hacker News yesterday, Sunday the 15th! Lemme hit you with the highlights real quick:

Starlink Mini Hacking

Okay, first off, someone posted about how to mess with the new Starlink Mini dish to run it without its built-in WiFi router. It got a lot of attention, almost 300 points and 80-ish comments. People in the comments were wondering about things like geolocks and if you could bypass service limits by hacking the terminal itself. Pretty wild stuff.

Why SSL Changed to TLS Back in the Day

There was this cool old article from 2014 explaining why SSL got renamed to TLS in the late 90s. People were talking about how they couldn't just change "https" to something else because it would break everything. Also, a surprising point came up about how the US government used to have restrictions on exporting strong encryption software back then, which TLS helped navigate a bit.

Remember Canyon.mid?

Get this, there was a whole post about Canyon.mid! You know, that cheesy MIDI song everyone heard back in the day? The comments were full of nostalgia. Someone called it very "Corporate 1990s Advertisement" which is spot on. People also got into a debate about whether software quality is better or worse now compared to the 90s. Fun trip down memory lane.

Hacking HDMI Dummy Plugs

Someone wrote about modifying an HDMI dummy plug's settings using a Raspberry Pi. These are those little plugs you use to trick a computer into thinking a monitor is connected. Apparently, you can change the EDID data to make the computer see different resolutions or even use it for cool tricks like a DIY KVM switch or setting up a virtual extra screen for presenter view in presentations. Handy!

Journalists Worried About US Travel

Kind of a heavy one, but there was a post saying journalists are getting wary of traveling to the US because of potential surveillance, maybe linked to Palantir. The comments got pretty heated, debating free speech, defamation laws in the US, and whether countries should deny entry based on political opinions. Intense stuff.

Meta's AI Remembers Harry Potter

Big AI news: Meta's new Llama 3.1 model can apparently recall 42% of the first Harry Potter book. Sounds impressive, right? But someone in the comments pointed out that the title is a bit clickbaity; it really means that given a correct sentence, it has a 42% chance of guessing the *next* sentence correctly. Still cool, but maybe not full book recall like it sounds.

Hard to Buy a Bob Ross Painting

Here's a fun fact I didn't know: it's almost impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting. Turns out most of them are owned by the company that runs his estate. The comments were interesting, people talking about his cultural impact (yes, he was famous before internet memes, mostly from PBS!) and someone even floated the idea of turning them into NFTs, which got some laughs.

Biofuels Not Great for Climate?

Finally, there was a piece arguing that US biofuels policy, especially corn ethanol, has been a failure for the climate. Comments brought up points about deforestation linked to growing crops for fuel, compared it to other things like ebikes, and even discussed alternative biofuels like biogas from cattle. Definitely a complex topic.

Anyway, that was some of the cooler stuff. Talk later!