Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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  • 57 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Man, that’s cool! Concrete is a heck of a lot cheaper than epoxy granite resin and is perfectly suitable for a low-precision tool like this lathe.

    I do hope that he finds a way to shield those bearings. You really don’t want metal chips or sawdust making its way in there. Any damage they sustain will cause runout, which will lead to increased chatter and parts that are out of spec. Plus, a matching pair of tapered roller bearings can be quite expensive!

    EDIT: to be clear, I mean no disrespect when I say low-precision. Not every lathe needs to have slides and handwheels. I have a little Sherline lathe that I’ve used like this in the past (using gravers, not tools in a tool holder). It’s great to quickly turn something or to put nice decorative details on a part. Precision is possible with a lathe like this, but it requires fairly strenuous effort.




  • Right, but I can’t require a second factor on a different device that operates outside of my primary device’s trust store. I’m sure there is some way to make my desktop hit my phone up directly and ask for fingerprint auth before unlocking the local keystore, but that still depends on the security of my device and my trust store. I don’t want the second factor to be totally locked to the device I’m running on. I want the server to say, “oh, cool, here’s this passkey. It looks good, but we also need a TOTP from you before you can log in,” or “loving the passkey, but I also need you to respond to the push notification we just sent to a different device and prove your identity biometrically over there.” I don’t want my second factor to be on the same device as my primary factor. I don’t know why a passkey (potentially protected by local biometric auth) + a separate server-required second factor (TOTP or push notification to a different device or something) isn’t an option.

    EDIT: I could make it so a fingerprint would decrypt my SSH key rather than what I have now (i.e. a password). That would effectively be the same number of factors as you’re describing for a passkey, and it would not be good enough for my organization’s security model, nor would it be good enough for me.


  • I just don’t get why I can’t use something like TOTP from my phone or a key fob when logging in with a passkey from my desktop. Why does my second factor have to be an on-device biometrically protected keystore? The sites I’m thinking of currently support TOTP when using passwords, so why can’t they support the same thing when using passkeys? I don’t want to place all my trust in the security of my keystore. I like that I have to unlock my phone to get a TOTP. Someone would have to compromise my local keystore and my phone, which makes it a better second factor in my opinion.

    EDIT: like, at work, I ssh to servers all over the damn place using an ssh key. I have to get to those servers through a jump box that requires me to unlock my phone and provide a biometric second factor before it will allow me through. That’s asymmetric cryptography + a second factor of authentication that’s still effective even if someone has compromised my machine and has direct access to my private key. That’s what I want from passkeys.


  • This is a bad take. Several cities in my state banded together to create a municipal fiber network called UTOPIA. The fiber is owned by the cities that bought in and is used by several different ISPs. The ISPs pay UTOPIA for access, and then they have to compete with each other for subscribers based on performance, features, and cost. Like, there’s genuine market competition for internet! If the state owns the infrastructure and then forces the playing field to be level, then everyone benefits. People in the cities with UTOPIA got fast fiber internet waaay faster than anyone else, they have a plethora of choices (want a static IP and a business plan in your residence? There’s an ISP that sells that!) at great prices, ISPs get access to subscribers without having to maintain fiber, and the cities who bought in get to make money from this and attract residents and businesses who benefit from the service.

    My city didn’t buy in. Google Fiber eventually came to town so I was able to kick Comcast out, but I am uneasy about what’ll happen if Google decides to drop their ISP business. If I was in a city with UTOPIA, it would just be one ISP folding and I’d be able to pick a new one and switch over right away.

    EDIT: cool, Cory Doctorow wrote a blag post about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-16-symmetrical-10gb-for-119-utopia-347e64869977
    UTOPIA users have access to 18 different ISPs. I feel like that speaks for itself right there. This is the future we all should have had.




  • I just wish that companies enabling passkeys would still allow password+MFA. There are several sites that, when you enable passkeys, lock you out of MFA for devices that lack a biometric second factor of authentication. I’d love to use passkeys + biometrics otherwise, since I’ve often felt that the auth problem would be best solved with asymmetric cryptography.

    EDIT: I meant to say “would still allow passkeys+MFA.” hooray for sleep deprivation lol.





  • I think they’re all top-level responses too. I took a random sampling of their comments, and they never respond to anyone else’s comment. That smells like someone being lazy and not bothering to iterate through comments when writing their dumb AI commenting script.

    Like, just, what the fuck is this shit? There’s one comment from 8 months ago that looks real. Everything else is from the past week and reads like LLM drivel. Why would you bother? Is it just someone who is bored and wanted to see how long they could convince people?


  • Thank god for projects like Valetudo thar let you break your stuff away from the cloud.

    Semi-related story time. I bought a Midea Cube dehumidifier for my laundry room. My dryer has been broken for years, and I’ve found that air drying clothes makes them last a lot longer. It’s hard to air dry inside, hence the dehumidifier. My plan was to control the dehu automagically with Home Assistant along with some fans, so people could just click a button to turn all the shit on to dry their clothes.

    After buying it, I realized that the dehumidifier could only be controlled via the cloud, and the cloud control was unreliable as fuck. With the exception of tech people, nobody is willing to deal with my flaky bullshit. If the button doesn’t work consistently, my partner, her other partner, and my FIL aren’t going to bother. Luckily, a very industrious person made this thing that let me rip out the hardware responsible for cloud connectivity and replace it with a cheap microcontroller. Now, my dehumidifier talks to my Home Assistant server directly via MQTT and it just fucking works.

    Give me local-only control or fuck off, I’ll take control myself. It’s not much to demand, and shit like what this article describes absolutely deepens my conviction around local-only control.


  • lmao fuck off Amazon. I already hate their stupid fucking AI because when I want to search reviews and the Q/A section for a word like “watt”, it makes me wait 10-15 seconds while it tells me that it can’t help me with that and that I need to give it more details.

    I’m not trusting anyone or anything with my purchasing decisions that doesn’t, say, reference the SDS for a product that’s being cagey about exactly what the active ingredients are. I did that, and that’s why I paid like $5 for a bag of citric acid powder instead of $20 on some citric acid descaling goo that comes in a pretty bottle. That’s a very specific example though. I do some variation of that shit any time I buy something, so I’m sure as shit not going to let Amazon spend my fucking spondulix based off of AI hallucinations.

    EDIT: Man, I need to deal with my anger towards bullshit AI usage because this shit isn’t going anywhere and I spend way too much time being pissed.





  • I was looking for this comment so I can vent my extreme irritation to the world.

    God, can this concept please die already‽ If you want to put solar panels where the cars/trains are, just 👏 fucking 👏 put 👏 them 👏 on 👏 top👏

    Do not put them on the ground where they will get smushed and covered in dust and snow and dirt. do not. Just make a little roof for the train tracks/road/bike path/sidewalk/game trail/snail raceway and then put the panels on top of the roof and then if you’re feeling fancy angle the panels to point towards the sun and if you’re feeling really quite fancy then you can use bifacial panels to capture the backscatter from the ground and shit and then we can all be happy. solar ground no, solar roof yes, ground no roof yes. do not play the trolley problem with solar panels on the railroad tracks. we have been doing solar energy for decades and have fucking minmaxed this shit so why are they still trying to do this just STOP.

    Fuck.

    Person I’m responding to, please know that none of this is directed at you. I’m just sour right now and should get off the internet.