Michael

because people keep asking me: yeah, if you do a guided random generation of text at unfathomable scale and try interpret some of it as computer instructions you will inevitably get a few “try log in as admin/admin”s in there. it’s not really remarkable other than how dumb the credulous reporting on the phenomenon has been.

The AliExpress cable I bought has seven pins, which can be re-arranged carefully. Might be easier to combine two of them to make a clone clone cable.

Anyway here's the pinout to get a Sony Walkman to enable USB out for external DAC, and some shots of the FiiO clone board I took the pinout off: 1 Ground 2 NC 3 USB D+ 4 USB D- 5 Ground 6 100k resistor to Ground 7 NC 8 Bridge to pin 10 9 NC 10 Bridge to pin 8 11 NC 12 NC (this is where VBAT would come out in theory if the pin was present) 13 NC 14 NC 15 NC 16 NC 17 NC 18 NC 19 NC 20 NC 21 Connected to (and labeled) USB 5v but it's actually the "digital audio out" pin that sits around 1.8v. I assume the official Sony adapter regulates VBAT to 5v in the plug or something. 22 Ground Pinned from "looking in to the back of the connector facing up".

Excitingly this uses more than one of the pins marked RESERVED in the current public pinouts! The forbidden knowledge must flow.

I carefully dissected a rare Sony WMC-NWH10 cable (the one that lets you plug a Walkman in to an external USB DAC) and figured out the necessary pinout and signalling resistor value. You can carefully re-pin cheap WM-PORT connectors from AliExpress to the right pinout but I suspect you might need to harvest the pins from two to make a proper clone WMC-NWH10 cable. Will post on my Dreamwidth when I have it working.

the perfectly optimised used car lot where not only can you not tell if any of the cars are good also none of them are

My colleague Denis has put together some cogent thoughts on what the state of the art in security testing actually involves: https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/articles/timeboxed-penetration-tests Expect further articles in this series.

Monday reminder that the output of an LLM is “this is what an XYZ looks like” not “this is an XYZ”

Local peeps: what are the finest 18650 cells I can get mail ordered to my house? I only need two

I don’t have beef with computation, computation seems to be a fundamental property of the universe for one thing.

I do have beef with people needlessly misrepresenting computation to control one another.

I nearly forgot but it’s the 100th anniversary of the launching of the Hikitia today!

I am not doing as much volunteer work with the vessel at the moment but work continues as ever on the restoration project :)

Feel pretty strongly that “free software” that doesn’t take mismatch of social privilege in to account isn’t sufficient. Making “use someone else’s giant stolen graph database of other people’s code” part of free software only makes this problem worse.

The normal way people get radicalised against “AI” is that they look at some output that is in their area of expertise and realise it’s complete trash. The fact that programmers overwhelmingly look at “AI” and go “wow this is amazing!” is a bad sign for programmers.

guess it must be time to perform The Ritual again