What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

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Today I pushed a small fix for mtw: the MediaTek MT7601U USB WiFi driver in FreeBSD.

The issue: driver worked perfectly on first boot. Connect the adapter, it initializes, you're online. Great. Then you reboot your machine and... nothing. "timeout waiting for MCU to initialize." The only fix was to physically unplug the adapter and plug it back in, or do a full cold boot (power off completely).

The root cause was a state machine transition problem. When you do a warm reboot, USB devices don't lose power - they just sit there, happily retaining whatever state they were in. The MT7601U's microcontroller still had its "ready" flag set from the previous session. So when the driver came back up and checked "is firmware already running?", the device said "yep!" and the driver said "cool, nothing to do" and returned early.

Except the device wasn't actually ready. It was in a Schrödinger state - simultaneously "ready" and "not ready" until you observe it by trying to actually probe it, at which point the wavefunction collapses into "definitely broken." Technically powered, firmware loaded, flags set, but not actually functional.

The fix was straightforward: if we detect the MCU is already marked ready at attach time, assume it's stale state from a previous session, reset the MCU, clear the ready flag, and do a proper initialization from scratch. Force the cat to be alive.

Also added USB re-enumeration on attach and bumped some timeouts because these devices can be slow after a reset.

What's funny about driver development is that progress isn't linear. You find and fix a bug in hardware revision 1 and 2. Revision 3 ships and works perfectly - they must have fixed it in silicon, you think. Then revision 6 manufactured a year later shows up with the exact same bug. Different fab? Cost reduction? Recycled design from a different product line? Who knows.

You end up maintaining a mental map of "this chip from this date range has this quirk, but the same chip from that date range doesn't, except if it's from this OEM who used a different reference design."

And the datasheets - when they exist - are always for the "ideal" version of the hardware that exists only in the minds of the engineers who wrote them.

Anyway, if you're running FreeBSD with an MT7601U adapter and wondered why you had to unplug it after every reboot, this one's for you.

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Good news:
My Zaurus blog post got on OSNews! Cool!
Bad news:
The RSS on my site is broken!

For some reason, Zola (the site gen I use) doesn't seem to build the RSS feed when I'm on OpenBSD. It works fine on Linux. I don't have time to figure that out right now, but I will ASAP.

Here's a short blog post about my move: goldfishdev.net/posts/movingth

Special thanks to @OpenBSDAmsOpenBSD Amsterdam and httpd(8)!

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I haven’t seen this discussed and it confuses me: companies tend to avoid tricky licenses like (A)GPLv3 for legal reasons. Why is there no hesitation to using LLMs to generate code, when we still don’t know whether that is fine under copyright law?

Training an LLM has been ruled fair use in the US. I am not aware of a ruling whether that applies to using it. And if the output of the model isn’t a copyright infringement of the input, then the output cannot be copyrighted because it was not created by a person. So AI-generated software cannot be copyrighted.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_s

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Hawaiian Telecomがハワイ州はアメリカで最初の「fully fiber-enabled」な州だってコマーシャルしてて「fully」ってどういう尺度?って検索してみたら「Hawai‘i’s households and businesses」って全員ぽい。舗装路から遠く離れた丘の上とかに商用電源の通じてない家とかあった気がするんだけどそういう場所まで光ファイバーを敷設しますよってことなのかな?だとしたらすんごいことだなあ…(僕は何か見落としてそう)

Hawai‘i to Become the First Fully Fiber-Enabled State by 2026 (2025年1月づけ)
https://blog.hawaiiantel.com/connections/hawaii-to-become-the-first-fully-fiber-enabled-st

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최근에 Manim-community 들어갔다가 GitHub에 있던 저장소가 Codeberg로 가게 된 걸 알게 되었는데 (지금은 또 GitHub에 돌아와있다) 그때 홈페이지에 How my GitHub Pages got Hacked 라는 글과 함께 해당 사실을 알리고 있었다[1]. 오늘 아마 이와 같은 내용으로 도메인을 뺏기는(?) 현상을 주변에서 봐서 verified domain들을 등록해놓았다.


  1. 당시 아카이브: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229233759/https://www.manim.community/ ↩︎

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今天是成人の日,街上好多新成人。女生大概妝畫很濃的關係吧感覺都好超齡。而男生一律西裝看來就是社畜的預備軍。我看到有位女生髮飾結了很多蕾絲緞帶又配黑色長靴,繞到前面看才發現她臉上打了一些環。青春的氣息啊~🫠

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최근에 Manim-community 들어갔다가 GitHub에 있던 저장소가 Codeberg로 가게 된 걸 알게 되었는데 (지금은 또 GitHub에 돌아와있다) 그때 홈페이지에 How my GitHub Pages got Hacked 라는 글과 함께 해당 사실을 알리고 있었다[1]. 오늘 아마 이와 같은 내용으로 도메인을 뺏기는(?) 현상을 주변에서 봐서 verified domain들을 등록해놓았다.


  1. 당시 아카이브: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229233759/https://www.manim.community/ ↩︎

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今天是成人の日,街上好多新成人。女生大概妝畫很濃的關係吧感覺都好超齡。而男生一律西裝看來就是社畜的預備軍。我看到有位女生髮飾結了很多蕾絲緞帶又配黑色長靴,繞到前面看才發現她臉上打了一些環。青春的氣息啊~🫠

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So there is this Facebook page with 1M subscribers, and an associated network of content creators with tens of thousands of followers, that's essentially dedicated to posting nonsensical, AI-generated circuit "schematics".

And it's interesting because... 1/3

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