Article URL: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/10/06/metas-muse-is-an-adorable-privacy-and-security-dumpster-fire/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977588 Points: 22 # Comments: 2
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A dog can look convincing in a video and still look wrong when it walks across a desktop. We ran into that while building Mocha Casa, a Windows pet companion made with Electron and JavaScript. This is a development note from our own project. The useful part is the small set of problems behind the demo: synchronizing movement, handling transitions, and giving the user control over a companion that shares their workspace. The intent is to let someone see a familiar pet beside their work, especially when the real dog or cat cannot sit there.
If you run a car marketplace, classifieds site or dealer tool, the VIN field is your best defense against bad listings, but only if you validate it properly. A check-digit test alone isn't enough. Here's a layered checklist, from cheap input checks to cross-checking the listing. Trim whitespace, remove spaces and dashes, uppercase everything. Don't silently "fix" I, O and Q to 1/0.
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Close your laptop. Go outside. Come back happier. GrassMate is a small web app with one job: get you away from it as fast as possible. You tell it three things: how much time you have, what the weather is like, and where you are (park, beach, forest, village or city).
Position 11 of a 17-character VIN identifies the assembly plant. It's one of the most useful characters for spotting mismatches and understanding recalls, and also one of the most misunderstood, because unlike the model year code it has no universal table. This post explains how it works and how to use it correctly in code and when buying a car. Under NHTSA's VIN rule (49 CFR Part 565), position 11 must identify the plant of manufacture, and each manufacturer defines its own plant codes and submits them to NHTSA. ISO 3779 leaves position 11 to the manufacturer too.
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