We don’t think of computers as something you’d find in the 17th century. But [Levi McClain] found plans for one in a book — books, actually — by [Athanasius Kirker] about music. The arca musarithmica, a machine to allow people with no experience to compose church music, might not fit our usual definition of a computer, but as [Levi] points out in the video below, there are a number of similarities to mechanical computers like slide rules.

Apparently, there are a few of these left in the world, but as you’d expect, they are quite rare. So [Levi] decided to take the plans from the book along with some information available publicly and build his own.

The computer is a box of wooden cards — tablets — with instructions written on them. Honestly, we don’t know enough about music theory to quite get the algorithm. [Kirker] himself had this to say in his book about the device:

Mechanical music-making is nothing more than a particular system invented by us whereby anyone, even the ἀμουσος [unmusical] may, through various applications of compositional instruments compose melodies according to a desired style. We shall briefly relate how this mechanical music-making is done and, lest we waste time with prefatory remarks, we shall begin with the construction of the Musarithmic Ark.

If you want to try it yourself, you won’t need to break out the woodworking tools. You can find a replica on the web, of course. Let us know if you set any Hackaday posts to music.

We know not everyone thinks something mechanical can be a computer, but we disagree. True, some are more obvious than others.

youtube.com/embed/ko3kZr5N61I?…

hackaday.com/2025/04/12/a-17th…

Incomplete JSON (such as from a log that terminates unexpectedly) doesn’t parse cleanly, which means anything that usually prints JSON nicely, won’t. Frustration with this is what led [Simon Willison] to make The Incomplete JSON pretty printer, a single-purpose web tool that pretty-prints JSON regardless of whether it’s complete or not.

Making a tool to solve a particular issue is a fantastic application of software, but in this case it also is a good lead-in to some thoughts [Simon] has to share about vibe coding. The incomplete JSON printer is a perfect example of vibe coding, being the product of [Simon] directing an LLM to iteratively create a tool and not looking at the actual code once.
Sometimes, however the machine decides to code something is fine.
[Simon] shares that the term “vibe coding” was first used in a social media post by [Andrej Karpathy], who we’ve seen shared a “hello world” of GPT-based LLMs as well as how to train one in pure C, both of which are the product of a deep understanding of the subject (and fantastically educational) so he certainly knows how things work.

Anyway, [Andrej] had a very specific idea he was describing with vibe coding: that of engaging with the tool in almost a state of flow for something like a weekend project, just focused on iterating one’s way to what they want without fussing the details. Why? Because doing so is new, engaging, and fun.

Since then, vibe coding as a term seems to get used to refer to any and all AI-assisted coding, a subject on which folks have quite a few thoughts (many of which were eagerly shared on a recent Ask Hackaday on the subject).

Of course human oversight is critical to a solid and reliable development workflow. But not all software is the same. In the case of the Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer, [Simon] really doesn’t care what the code actually looks like. He got it made in a short amount of time, the tool does exactly what he wants, and it’s hard to imagine the stakes being any lower. To [Simon], however the LMM decided to do things is fine, and there’s a place for that.

hackaday.com/2025/04/12/the-in…

The “USB C” cable that comes with the Inaya Portable Rechargeable Lamp. (Credit: The Stock Pot, YouTube)
Recently [Dillan Stock] over at The Stock Pot YouTube channel bought a $17 ‘mushroom’ lamp from his local Kmart that listed ‘USB-C rechargeable’ as one of its features, the only problem being that although this is technically true, there’s a major asterisk. This Inaya-branded lamp namely comes with a USB-C cable with a rather prominent label attached to it that tells you that this lamp requires that specific cable. After trying with a regular USB-C cable, [Dillan] indeed confirmed that the lamp does not charge from a standard USB-C cable. So he did what any reasonable person would do: he bought a second unit and set about to hacking it.

[Dillan] also dug more into what’s so unusual about this cable and the connector inside the lamp. As it turns out, while GND & Vcc are connected as normal, the two data lines (D+, D-) are also connected to Vcc. Presumably on the lamp side this is the expected configuration, while using a regular USB-C cable causes issues. Vice versa, this cable’s configuration may actually be harmful to compliant USB-C devices, though [Dillan] did not try this.

With the second unit in hand, he then started hacking it, with the full plans and schematic available on his website.

The changes include a regular USB-C port for charging, an ESP32 board with integrated battery charger for the 18650 Li-ion cell of the lamp, and an N-channel MOSFET to switch the power to the lamp’s LED. With all of the raw power from the ESP32 available, the two lamps got integrated into the Home Assistant network which enables features such as turning the lamps on when the alarm goes off in the morning. All of this took about $7 in parts and a few hours of work.

Although we can commend [Dillan] on this creative hack rather than returning the item, it’s worrying that apparently there’s now a flood of ‘USB C-powered’ devices out there that come with non-compliant cables that are somehow worse than ‘power-only’ USB cables. It brings back fond memories of hunting down proprietary charging cables, which was the issue that USB power was supposed to fix.

youtube.com/embed/E_6Y1iip3p0?…

hackaday.com/2025/04/12/hackin…

Lots of people swear by large-language model (LLM) AIs for writing code. Lots of people swear at them. Still others may be planning to exploit their peculiarities, according to [Joe Spracklen] and other researchers at USTA. At least, the researchers have found a potential exploit in ‘vibe coding’.

Everyone who has used an LLM knows they have a propensity to “hallucinate”– that is, to go off the rails and create plausible-sounding gibberish. When you’re vibe coding, that gibberish is likely to make it into your program. Normally, that just means errors. If you are working in an environment that uses a package manager, however (like npm in Node.js, or PiPy in Python, CRAN in R-studio) that plausible-sounding nonsense code may end up calling for a fake package.

A clever attacker might be able to determine what sort of false packages the LLM is hallucinating, and inject them as a vector for malicious code. It’s more likely than you think– while CodeLlama was the worst offender, the most accurate model tested (ChatGPT4) still generated these false packages at a rate of over 5%. The researchers were able to come up with a number of mitigation strategies in their full paper, but this is a sobering reminder that an AI cannot take responsibility. Ultimately it is up to us, the programmers, to ensure the integrity and security of our code, and of the libraries we include in it.

We just had a rollicking discussion of vibe coding, which some of you seemed quite taken with. Others agreed that ChatGPT is the worst summer intern ever. Love it or hate it, it’s likely this won’t be the last time we hear of security concerns brought up by this new method of programming.

Special thanks to [Wolfgang Friedrich] for sending this into our tip line.

hackaday.com/2025/04/12/vibe-c…

!Poliverso_forum_di_supporto

Vedo che in Raccoon, nel menù a panino in alto a sinistra, ci sono dei canali che mi sarebbero utili per espandere le mie conoscenze nel Fediverso, "for you" e "discover", il problema è che sono entrambi vuoti, come mai?

Ho visto che c'è un canale "English" che immagino raccolga tutti i post del Fediverso in inglese, come posso crearne uno simile per i post in italiano?

Da PC esiste la possibilità di vedere una timeline contenente solo i post pubblicati nell'istanza a cui sei iscritto, da Raccoon invece non la vedo. Non c'è?

Avrei voluto che questo post comparisse nel forum "Poliverso forum di supporto" ma dubito di esserci riuscito. Come si fa a scrivere nel forum da Raccoon?

#raccoon
#Poliverso
#supporto

Grazie.

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@Il Mercatino del Fediverso 💵♻️

L’Associazione Artigiani e Piccole Imprese (CGIA) di Mestre ci comunica che non sono gli artigiani e le piccole imprese a evadere il fisco. E che anzi, queste categorie evadono persino meno di lavoratori dipendenti e pensionati.

l’infedeltà fiscale si annida soprattutto nelle società di capitali e solo in piccola parte nelle micro imprese e tra i lavoratori autonomi che, addirittura, annoverano un carico residuo non riscosso in questi ultimi 25 anni pari a poco più della metà del dato riferito alle persone fisiche. Ovvero all’ammontare complessivo dei debiti fiscali in capo ai lavoratori dipendenti e ai pensionati che, ricordiamo, sono tassati alla fonte e, pertanto, non dovrebbero, almeno in linea puramente teorica, evadere alcunché. Cosa che, invece, nella realtà di tutti i giorni non accade.

cgiamestre.com/tasse-a-non-pag…

With the Trump administration throwing its abductees in shady jails and prisons from Louisiana to El Salvador, it’s essential that incarcerated journalists and whistleblowers are able to expose the conditions they’re dealing with. That is unless you trust Donald Trump’s cronies to admit to abuses.

But incarcerated journalists nationwide face relentless retaliation for speaking truth to power, and they’re systemically obstructed from seeking recourse from the courts.

After I reported on Texas prison officials’ inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was charged in bogus disciplinary cases, repeatedly transferred to different prison facilities, tossed into solitary confinement, assaulted with chemical agents, and held in a cell for weeks without basic necessities, like soap, toothpaste, deodorant, a mattress, and writing supplies.

When all my administrative complaints failed to stop the infringement upon my constitutional rights by rogue prison officials, I turned to my only other option — the federal courts.

Being a layman of the law, I failed to realize that my decision to file a civil rights lawsuit against prison officials came with insurmountable judicial hurdles and dire consequences. It was an awkward and untimely introduction to the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

Signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, the PLRA placed extreme restrictions on incarcerated individuals’ ability to file, win, or settle civil rights lawsuits. Lawmakers argued that there were too many frivolous lawsuits against the government.

But the law severely obstructed the pathways for all incarcerated individuals to obtain justice and crippled incarcerated journalists’ ability to make human rights violations known to the public.

The Prison Litigation Reform Act severely obstructed the pathways for all incarcerated individuals to obtain justice and crippled incarcerated journalists’ ability to make human rights violations known to the public.

Jeremy Busby

Historically, the federal courts were a major source of oversight for prisons and jails. In my home state of Texas, civil rights lawsuits filed by a handful of prisoners led to the class action litigation, Ruiz v. Estelle, that completely transformed the deplorable conditions inside Texas prisons and restored incarcerated constitutional rights.

Judge William Wayne Justice presided over one of the longest periods of federal judicial oversight of a prison in U.S. history, issuing a consent decree that spanned over three decades.

The Ruiz litigation, despite being credited as one of the glaring examples of judicial checks on violations of constitutional rights, would not have stood a chance today.

The PLRA imposes strict challenges on incarcerated litigants that are oftentimes impossible to meet. These limits force the court to dismiss the vast majority of legitimate complaints from incarcerated individuals over the smallest technical issues.

For incarcerated journalists, the unavailability of recourse when they’re retaliated against — as they so often are — exponentially increases the “chilling effect” of potential retaliation. The message is, if you criticize us in your writing, we can do whatever we want to punish you and, with the PLRA, there won’t be anything you can do about it.

Struggling with the ‘exhaustion doctrine’

The exhaustion doctrine mandates that all incarcerated individuals first present each of their grievances to prison administrators through the internal grievance system before suing. If they don’t, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuit immediately.

This rule fails to consider how prison internal grievance systems are littered with indirect and direct obstructions. Accessing the approved grievance form, meeting deadlines, understanding the grievance process’s convoluted rules, and getting the grievance to the proper prison official are easier said than done.

For example, after I was transferred to three different prisons in five days and tossed into a solitary confinement cell without any personal property, I was a drowning man without a life preserver.

First, I knew none of the staff or incarcerated individuals to enlist them to provide me with an approved grievance form and a pen so I could fill it out.

Secondly, if I was successful in obtaining the form and a pen, the grievance rules only permit me to raise "one issue" per grievance, and one grievance per week, so I have to make the unfair decision of which constitution violations to seek redress for and which ones to overlook. If I cite two violations in one grievance I violate restrictions placed by the PLRA. Texas prison grievance rules allow only 15 days to file grievances about any violation.

Finally, after overcoming those hurdles, I would have to rely on the same guards who were responsible for the violations to process my grievance form, since I was locked in solitary confinement, prohibiting my access to the grievance staff or the designated filing box. There is no system set up to confirm if a grievance has been processed or not. The smallest misstep in this process renders your lawsuit moot by PLRA.

Insurmountable obstacles for legal layman

While I was a staff reporter at the prison newspaper, I was instructed to write all my articles on an eighth grade level. That was the level at which prison officials felt that an average incarcerated individual reads. I have a degree from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and yet when I made the decision to file my civil rights complaints I could barely make sense of all the rules and statutory language of the courts.

Prison law libraries are stocked with complex and outdated legal books. Simplified DIY books are not available. There is no road map for where to begin. The PLRA requires that specific procedures are followed, which include very tight deadlines. Not understanding and following all of these procedures will result in the dismissal of an incarcerated individual’s lawsuit.

Very few incarcerated individuals, including educated journalists like myself, have the legal aptitude to navigate the complexities of the PLRA.

Very few incarcerated individuals, including educated journalists like myself, have the legal aptitude to navigate the complexities of the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

Jeremy Busby

My lawsuit listed multiple prison officials from four different facilities as defendants. As a result of rules implemented following the passage of PLRA, the federal judge broke my lawsuit up into four separate proceedings and reassigned each of them to four different federal courts.

This process — the opposite of the Ruiz case, where multiple claims were joined together in a class action — completely overwhelmed my already disadvantaged ability to meet all the rigorous rules of the courts.

Despite all of the documented evidence of prison officials violating my constitutional rights by denying me freedom of speech and due process, discriminating against me, and subjecting me to cruel and unusual punishment, my lawsuit was dismissed over a procedural error before the merits were ever considered.

Disincentivizing lawyers from taking cases

Finally, because of restrictions imposed by the PLRA, attorneys are discouraged from taking cases on behalf of incarcerated individuals.

For example, the PLRA dramatically restricts financial compensation incarcerated individuals can be awarded for injuries resulting from constitutional violations, and the legislation places a cap on attorney’s fees incarcerated plaintiffs can recover at 150% of any financial damages awarded.

As the Prison Policy Initiative has explained, that cap is highly restrictive because damages awarded to incarcerated people, in the rare event that their cases get that far, are usually nominal at best.

That results in a mere 7.6% of incarcerated litigants being represented by attorneys in civil rights lawsuits as of 2020, compared to 89.8% of nonincarcerated litigants.

PLRA should be repealed

The PLRA has served no real societal interest since its passage. It has done nothing but stop incarcerated individuals from advocating for their inalienable human rights.

The outrageous abuses inside America’s prisons that have been exposed in recent years should motivate lawmakers to provide incarcerated people with more, not less, access to the legal system. Maybe some incarcerated people file frivolous lawsuits, but so do people on the outside — it’s not a reason to deprive everyone else of legal recourse.

The PLRA’s unreasonable restrictions have bound the hands of federal judges to consider legitimate complaints from incarcerated individuals, hold rogue prison officials accountable, enforce court orders, and compel policy change.

Simultaneously, it unleashed prison officials’ ability to violate incarcerated individuals’ basic constitutional freedoms — including the rights of incarcerated journalists.

It has also restricted the basic function of journalists outside prison, and the taxpayers who read the news, to monitor how public funds are spent.

Outside journalists’ access to incarcerated sources and prison records is severely limited. Trials and court files are among the few places they can find the truth about what goes on on the inside. But when cases are dismissed on technicalities before a judge or jury considers the merits, journalists can’t discern which allegations are true.

Repealing the PLRA is a step toward justice for all. Incarcerated journalists are routinely targeted and subjected to all types of cruelty. Like journalists on the outside who run into oppressive government officials, we depend on recourse from the federal courts to serve as our last line of defense, as our news reporting often does for the incarcerated population and the American public.

freedom.press/issues/unjust-la…