标签：#ha

How a face-customization puzzle at HackMIT went from clicking sliders by hand to reverse-engineering a hidden formula from 10,000 API calls. Face Value looked simple at first glance: ten sliders (Face, Skin, Hair, Brows, Eyes, Nose, Mouth, Glasses, Mole, Accessory), each 0-9, controlling a cartoon avatar. A hidden model scored every configuration, and the goal was to find one it would fully accept : Confidence ≥ 99.9% Edit distance from the starter config ≤ 5 (only half the sliders could move) Charm check: pass Sync check: pass The puzzle's own hint: "Not all features affect the model equally. Some are more sensitive than others, especially together. Single-feature sweeps can be misleading." That warning turned out to be the whole game. Phase 1: Brute Force by Hand The first instinct is the obvious one: click a slider, hit Query, read the result, adjust, repeat. Every query returned four numbers, shown together in a Reviewer panel: Probability, Charm, edit Distance, and Sync. All four had to align at once. This works, sort of. Over the first ~24 manual queries, real patterns emerged: certain Glasses values seemed to matter for Sync, Mole and Accessory nudged confidence up, some sliders had sharp peaks rather than smooth slopes. But progress plateaued hard around 60-77% confidence . Manual testing can only really explore one or two dimensions at a time, and the puzzle explicitly warned that the model cared about combinations ; you can't discover a 3-way interaction by changing one slider and squinting at the result. The first real breakthrough was small but important: after enough fiddling, one query came back with Sync: True for the first time, confidence still low (8.14%), but proof that the four conditions weren't mutually exclusive. Phase 2: Escaping the UI The turning point was popping open Chrome DevTools, clicking Query once, and grabbing the actual network request as a curl command. Underneath the slick UI was a plain JSON API: POST https://facevalue.hackmit.

I'm a long-time macOS user and I just want a change. Curious what people here actually use every day and what made you stick with it. Curious if you also switched from a Mac too. I'd like to get out of the "walled garden" ecosystem.

Hi all, I've been on parental leave and while working on my garage door, I thought to myself... it would be great to open up this garage door from my phone without having to buy a bunch of expensive stuff. That snowballed into, I want the garage door buttons on my car's rear view mirror to trigger automations in home assistant. I went down a bit of a hardware rabbit hole and wrote a little writeup of my journey and a how-to. It's my first piece of public technical writing so I'm open to any feed