This is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker of an event over 20 years prior. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t go into the details of exactly what was tried, beyond the key parts of the story.
I won't repeat it here, but I posted What I saw as an insider. I think that not all of the facts were quite right. However, some of the overtones definitely are.
Not an expert here, so I’m genuinely curious how could a video stream (edit: with muted audio stream) possibly cause another laptop in close proximity to crash?
What is claimed in TFA is that the hard drive resonate frequency reacts to the Janet Jackson video in bad ways because that music video puts out music that interferes with what the hard drive expects.
TFA was lacking details so this is merely a retelling.
Obviously not the video but the accompanying audio track. Could also just be a made up apocryphal engineering story that never actually happened exactly as described. Engineering as a profession is chock full of them but they do tend to be memorable parables of things to keep in mind when working on a relevant piece of tech.
What is definitely well documented is Brendan Gregg’s related discovery of performance degradation in servers from vibration of sibling servers / clapping nearby that caused spinning disks to pause their heads.
I doubt it could, but when you run into a problem that defies your understanding of reality, you might try out responses that also defy your understanding of reality, in the hopes you might gain the missing insight somewhere along the way, yeah?
Also not an expert, it would have to be EMI or maybe the bright light was causing LEDs on the nearby laptop to generate voltage. LEDs can poorly work in reverse.
If this is just a fiction novel world‑building question: The video pixels create a bitstream to bitbang the gpu bus into emitting a 2.4‑gigahertz EMF signal to exploit a flaw in the Wi‑Fi driver.
Why would you come to that conclusion instead of the obvious one being that the kind of people to use Hacker News are the same kind to prefer old Reddit?
Surprisingly neurotic files full of strange comments and odd blocking choices[1]. Feels very much like the pet project of a few wannabe activist teenagers in a Discord chatroom with too much time on their hands.
[1] Numerous individual pages on places like digital storefronts and social media sites appear in the blocklist. Do the people behind this think they can create a list of every single AI-adjacent thing on the entire internet?
99% of the "main" list entries would be made redundant by simply blocking all .ai domains.
> Surprisingly neurotic files full of strange comments
1. Have you looked at block lists before?
2. Do you have a specific example of what in these blocklists is strange/neurotic? I swear I've skimmed all of them a few times now and although I won't be using them, I'm struggling to understand what's odd about them.
I don't know why people say this. I look on the front page and it's just interesting articles and blog posts on a variety of differing subjects. You must be either actively seeking out stuff you don't like and wasting your time actively hating it or just imagining it.
Yeah, I'm aware of extensions like Stylus and use it on a few sites. But my brain is irrational and doesn't treat it the same as having a snapshot of HN during Christmas.
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