Unlurker|Replay|About
Phil Spencer Retiring, Sarah Bond Out, Asha Sharma Named New Xbox Boss (ign.com)
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Not a surprise, with how things have changed at Xbox over the last couple of years.
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Pretty obvious that Spencer was forced out and Bond (who was being groomed to take over from Spencer) was passed over, hence the resignation. At least the new XBox boss brings a lot of gaming experience from her previous role at....Instacart.
I found a Vulnerability. They found a Lawyer (dixken.de)
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For a moment I thought he was an immigrant from a post Soviet country. A very unusual arrogance and Robin Hood complex for a German. It's wild to imagine a German behave this. Unless absolutely necessary, do not get involved in any legal battles or anything potentially involving lawyers. Not getting involved is always less expensive and less problematic. Unless your ass is covered by some big and influential organisation; never fight on your own. No one was dying here; people's lives were not in danger. Acting hostile and poking a company to sue you won't bring you anything good. His post won't make waves big enough and he might lose clients instead of gaining them.
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Malta has been mentioned? As a person living here I could say that workflow of the government here is bad. Same as in every other place I guess. By the way, I had a story when I accidentally hacked an online portal in our school. It didn't go much and I was "caught" but anyways. This is how we learn to be more careful. I believe in every single system like that it's fairly possible to find a vulnerability. Nobody cares about them and people that make those systems don't have enough skill to do it right. Data is going to be leaked. That's the unfortunate truth. It gets worse with the come of AI. Since it has zero understanding of what it is actually it will make mistakes that would cause more data leaks. Even if you don't consider yourself as an evil person, would you still stay the same knowing real security vulnerability? Who knows. Some might take advantage. Some won't and still be punished for doing everything as the "textbook way".
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Maintaining Cybersecurity Insurance is a big deal in the US, I don't know about Europe. So vulnerability disclosure is problematic for data controllers because it threatens their insurance and premiums. Today much of enterprise security is attestation based and vulnerability disclosure potentially exposes companies to insurance fraud. If they stated that they maintained certain levels of security, and a disclosure demonstratively proves they do not, that is grounds for dropping a policy or even a lawsuit to reclaim paid funds. So it sort of makes sense that companies would go on the attack because there's a risk that their insurance company will catch wind and they'll be on the hook.
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> the portal used incrementing numeric user IDs > every account was provisioned with a static default password Hehehe. I failed countless job interviews for mistakes much less serious than that. Yet someone gets the job while making worse mistakes, and there are plenty of such systems on production handling real people's data.
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Since the author is apparently afraid to name the organisation in question, it seems the legal threats have worked perfectly.
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Or maybe in the diving community, "Maltese insurance company for divers" is about as subtle as "Bird-themed social network with blue checkmarks".
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If you follow the jurisdictional trail in the post, the field narrows quickly. The author describes a major international diving insurer, an instructor driven student registration workflow, GDPR applicability, and explicit involvement of CSIRT Malta under the Maltese National Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Policy. That combination is highly specific. There are only a few globally relevant diving insurers. DAN America is US based. DiveAssure is not Maltese. AquaMed is German. The one large diving insurer that is actually headquartered and registered in Malta is DAN Europe. Given that the organization is described as being registered in Malta and subject to Maltese supervisory processes, DAN Europe becomes the most plausible candidate based on structure and jurisdiction alone.
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Is this Divers Alert Network (DAN) Europe, and it's insurance subsidiary, IDA Insurance Limited?
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Another commenter basically deduced this
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Why does someone with a .de website insure their diving using some company based in Malta? Based on this interaction, you have wonder what it's like to file a claim with them.
> vulnerability in the member portal of a major diving insurer What are the odds an insurer would reach for a lawyer? They probably have several on speed dial.
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What makes you think they don't retain them in-house?
Another comment says the situation was fake. I don't know, but to avoid running afoul of the authorities, it's possible to document this without actually accessing user data without permission. In the US, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and various state laws are written extremely broadly and were written at a time when most access was either direct dial-up or internal. The meaning of abuse can be twisted to mean rewriting a URL to access the next user, or inputting a user ID that is not authorized to you. Generally speaking, I think case law has avoided shooting the messenger, but if you use your unauthorized access to find PII on minors, you may be setting yourself up for problems, regardless if the goal is merely dramatic effect. You can, instead, document everything and hypothesize the potential risks of the vulnerability without exposing yourself to accusation of wrongdoing. For example, the article talks about registering divers. The author could ask permission from the next diver to attempt to set their password without reading their email, and that would clearly show the vulnerability. No kids "in harm's way".
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Instead of understanding all of this, and when it does or does not apply, it's probably better to disclose vulnerabilities anonymously over Tor. It's not worth the hassle of being forced to hire a lawyer, just to be a white hat.
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Part of the motivation of reporting is clout and reputation. That sounds harsh or critical but for some folks their reputation directly impacts their livelihood. Sure the data controller doesn't care, but if you want to get hired or invited to conferences then the clout matters.
This is somewhat related, but I know of a fairly popular iOS application for iPads that stores passwords either in plaintext or encrypted (not as digests) because they will email it to you if you click Forgot Password. You also cannot change it. I have no experience with Apple development standards, so I thought I'd ask here if anyone knows whether this is something that should be reported to Apple, if Apple will do anything, or if it's even in violation of any standards?
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>whether this is something that should be reported to Apple, if Apple will do anything Lmao Apple will not do anything for actual malware when reported with receipts, besides sending you a form letter assuring you "experts will look into it, now fuck off" then never contact you again. Ask me how I know. To their credit, I suspected they ran it through useless rudimentary automated checks which passed and they were back in business like a day later. If your expectation is they will do something about shitty coding practices half the App Store would be banned.
This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance.
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> contains no real substance. The same could be said of the accusation being levied here.
HN's comment section new favourite sport, trying to guess if an article was generated by LLM. It's completely pointless. Why not focus on what's being said instead?
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I thought the same thing. With the rate LLMs are improving, it's not going to be too much longer before no one can tell. I also enjoy all the "vibes" people list out for why they can tell, as though there was any rhyme or reason to what they're saying. Models change and adapt daily so the "heading structure" or "numbered list" ideas become outdated as you're typing them.
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What's being said is a sensationalized clickbait narrative that appeals to people's outrage instincts (got threatened for white hat hacking! GRRR!!!), which is lacking in any evidence of the claimed event or anything interesting at all, really. I personally think this has zero merit and is not worth reading, all the moreso when the writing is the output of an LLM. If you do, good for you. You are free to read it to your heart's content. What, exactly, is the problem with disclosing the nature of the article for people who wish to avoid spending their time in that way?
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> This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance. Nothing in the original message refers to it being clickbait, the core complaint is the LLM-like tone and the lack of substance, which you also just threw it there without references ironically. > What, exactly, is the problem with disclosing the nature of the article for people who wish to avoid spending their time in that way? It's alright as long as it's not based on faith or guesswork.
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It is not based on guesswork. For whatever it's worth, I have gotten 7 LLM accounts banned from HN in the past week based on accurately detecting and reporting them to moderation[1]. Many of these accounts had between dozens and 100 upvotes with posts rated to the top of their threads that escaped detection by others. I have not once misidentified and reported an account that was genuinely human. I am aware that other people have poorly-tuned heuristics and make false accusations, but it is possible to build the skill to detect LLM output reliably, and I have done so. In the end, it is up to you whether you believe me, but I am just trying to offer a warning for people who dislike reading this, nothing more. [1] Unlike LLM-generated articles, posting LLM-generated comments is actually against the rules.
I wonder if there's any probabilistic analyser that could confirm that the article is generated, or show which parts might have been generated
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Pangram[0] thinks the closing part is AI generated but the opening paragraphs are human. Certainly the closing paragraphs have a bit of an LLM flavor (a header titled "The Pattern", eg) [0] https://www.pangram.com
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There are no automated AI detectors that work. False positives and false negatives are both common, and the false positives particularly render them incredibly dangerous to use. Just like LLMs have not actually replaced competent engineers working on real software despite all the hysteria about them doing so, they also can't automate detection, and it is possible to build up stronger heuristics as a human. I am fully confident and would place a large sum of money on this article being LLM-generated if we could verify the bet, but we can't, so you'll just have to take my word for it, or not.
I think the problem is the process. Each country should have a reporting authority and it should be the one to deal with security issues. So you never report to actual organization but to the security organization, like you did. And they would be more equiped to deal with this, maybe also validate how serious this issue is. Assign a reward as well. So you are researcher, you report your thing and can't be sued or bullied by organization that is offending in the first place.
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If the government wasn't so famous for also locking people up that reported security issues I might agree, but boy they are actually worse. Right now the climate in the world is whistleblowers get their careers and livihoods ended. This has been going on for quite a while. The only practical advice is ignore it exists, refuse to ever admit to having found a problem and move on. Leave zero paper trail or evidence. It sucks but its career ending to find these things and report them.
Your response didn’t have anything to do with the parent comment. And I’m on a phone (iOS) and had no issue reading it, for the record.
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As well as contrast issues, could also be that there was a javascript error on their end (or they don't whitelist sites for JS by default). This is unfortunately one of those sites that renders a completely blank page unless you use reader mode, enable JS, or disable CSS. If it was a random JS error, well, that reminds me of: https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html
Because you are highjacking a thread. Wanna trash the site's design, you should open a top level thread instead.
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Ah then I deserve it. I didn't notice from the app I was using that it wasn't all the way to the left
> Wanna trash the site's design, you should open a top level thread instead. Or better, don't[1]: Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Being impossible to read is not common
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Exactly, thanks
> These are the sort of things that are supposed to lead to commendations and promotions. Maybe I live in fantasyland. I had a bit of a feral journey into tech, poor upbringing => self taught college dropout waiting tables => founded iPad point of sale startup in 2011 => sold it => Google in 2016 to 2023 It was absolutely astounding to go to Google, and find out that all this work to ascend to an Ivy League-esque employment environment...I had been chasing a ghost. Because Google, at the end of the day, was an agglomeration of people, suffered from the same incentives and disincentives as any group, and thus also had the same boring, basic, social problems as any group. Put more concretely, couple vignettes: - Someone with ~5 years experience saying approximately: "You'd think we'd do a postmortem for this situation, but, you know how that goes. The people involved think they're an organization-wide announcement that you're coming for them, and someone higher ranked will get involved and make sure A) it doesn't happen or B) you end up looking stupid for writing it." - A horrible design flaw that made ~50% of users take 20 seconds to get a query answered was buried, because a manager involved was the one who wrote the code.
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I've seen into some moderately high levels of "prestigious" business and government circles and I've yet to find any level at which everyone suddenly becomes as competent and sharp as I'd have expected them to be, as a child and young adult (before I saw what I've seen and learned that the norm is morons and liars running everything and operating terrifically dysfunctional organizations... everywhere, apparently, regardless how high up the hierarchy you go). And actually, not only is there no step at which they suddenly become so, people don't even seem to gradually tend to brighter or generally better, on average, as you move "upward"... at all! Or perhaps only weakly so. Whatever the selection process is for gestures broadly at everything , it's not selecting for being both (hell, often not for either) able and willing to do a good job, so far as what the job is apparently supposed to be. This appears to hold for just about everything, reputation and power be damned. Exceptions of high-functioning small groups or individuals in positions of power or prestige exist, as they do at "lower" levels, but aren't the norm anywhere as far as I've been able to discern.
Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links (arstechnica.com)
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Why not show both? Wikipedia could display archive links alongside original sources, clearly labeled so readers know which is which. This preserves access when originals disappear while keeping the primary source as the main reference.
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The objection is to this specific archieve service not archiving in general.
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It seems a lot of people havent heard of it, but I think its worth plugging https://perma.cc/ which is really the appropriate tool for something like Wikipedia to be using to archive pages. mroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perma.cc
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Does Wikipedia really need to outsource this? They already do basically everything in-house, even running their own CDN on their own bare metal racks, I'm sure they could spin up an archiver which could be implicitly trusted. Bypassing paywalls would be playing with fire though.
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Archive.org is the archiver, rotted links are replaced by Archive.org links with a bot. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot https://github.com/internetarchive/internetarchivebot
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There are dozen of commercial/enterprise solutions: https://www.g2.com/products/pagefreezer/competitors/alternatives also the oldest of that kind and rarely mention free https://www.freezepage.com
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It costs money beyond 10 links, which means either a paid subscription or institutional affiliation. This is problematic for an encyclopedia anyone can edit, like Wikipedia.
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Wikimedia could pay, they have an endowment of ~$144M [1] (as of June 30, 2024). Perma.cc has Archive.org and Cloudflare as supporting partners, and their mission is aligned with Wikimedia [2]. It is a natural complementary fit in the preservation ecosystem. You have to pay for DOIs too, for comparison [3] (starting at $275/year and $1/identifier [4] [5]). [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment [2] https://perma.cc/about ("Perma.cc was built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of libraries. We’re both in the forever business: libraries already look after physical and digital materials — now we can do the same for links.") [3] https://community.crossref.org/t/how-to-get-doi-for-our-journal/3163 [4] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#annual-membership-fees [5] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#content-registration-fees
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"Non-paywalled" "ad-free" link to archive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5
Anyone has a short summary as to who and why Archive.today acted via DDos? Isn't that something done by malicious actors? Or did others misuse Archive.today?
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If you read the linked article it is discussed
I don't see the point in doxing anyone, especially those providing a useful service for the average internet user. Just because you can put some info together, it doesn't mean you should. With this said, I also disagree with turning everyone that uses archive[.]today into a botnet that DDoS sites. Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions about the authenticity of what we're reading. The site behaves as if it was infected by some malware and the archived pages can't be trusted. I can see why Wikipedia made this decision.
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Did they actually run the DDoS via a script or was this a case of inserting a link and many users clicked it? They are substantially different IMO
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they silently ran the DDoS script on their captcha page (which is frequently shown to visitors, even when simply viewing and not archiving a new page)
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 has the earliest writeup that I know of. It was running it via a script and intentionally using cache busting techniques to try to increase load on the hosted wordpress infrastructure.
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> It was running It still is, uBlock is killing the script now but if it's allowed to load then it still tries to hammer the other blog.
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Ah good to know. My pi-hole actually was blocking the blog itself since the ublock site list made its way into one of the blocklists I use. But I've been just avoiding links as much as possible because I didn't want to contribute.
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Thank you this is exactly the information I was looking for. "You found the smoking gun!"
The fight is not about where it is shown and not about what, not about "links in Wikipedia", but about whether News Inc will be able to kill AT, as they did with 12FT.
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What is News Inc? Are they a funder of Wikipedia(I think Wikipedia didn’t have a parent company so they’re not owners)?
I will no longer donate to Wikipedia as long as this is policy.
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About how much had you previously donated over the years?
Second sight is advisable in such cases. Fact is, archives are essential to WP integrity and there's no credible alternative to this one. I see WP is not proposing to run its own.
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> Fact is, archives are essential to WP integrity and there's no credible alternative to this one. Yes, they are essentional, and that was the main reason for not blacklisting Archive.today. But Archive.today has shown they do not actually provide such a service: > “If this is true it essentially forces our hand, archive.today would have to go,” another editor replied. “The argument for allowing it has been verifiability, but that of course rests upon the fact the archives are accurate, and the counter to people saying the website cannot be trusted for that has been that there is no record of archived websites themselves being tampered with. If that is no longer the case then the stated reason for the website being reliable for accurate snapshots of sources would no longer be valid.” How can you trust that the page that Archive.today serves you is an actual archive at this point?
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The operators() of archive.today (and the other domains) are doing shadey things and the links are not working so why keep the site around as for example Internet archives waybackmachine works as alternative to it.
> an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Oh? Do tell!
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I would be suprised if archive.today had something that was not in the wayback machine
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Accounts to bypass paywalls? The audacity to do it?
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Oh yeah those where a thing. As a public organization they can't really do that. I personally just don't use websites that paywall important information.
KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge (bbc.co.uk)
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I raised chickens as a teenager, mostly for eggs, but also meat. Chickens are terrible, I hate them. They're mean, cannibalistic, and I can easily see them evolving gigantism like other theropod did and becoming apex predators. I honestly think eating them isn't bad. Nevertheless, encouraging cruelty in poultry keepers is a bad thing. Casual cruelty has a corrosive effect on people.
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Well this is probably why KFC chicken has become inedible. I don't know what they are doing to those things but they are practically a different species at this point. I love fast food and eat it all the time, but KFC "chicken" is just a disgusting grey slimey pile of garbage.
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has it ever not been inedible?
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>has it ever not been inedible? No restaurant ever makes it big without being good to begin with. I remember the chicken being on par with any other fast food as a kid, they just fell off hard in the 2000s. I'm really not sure who is still buying their buckets.
It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good . I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that (see also: the significant multiple more that we pay for most infrastructure compared with peer states). It would help explain why a lot of "poorer" countries reportedly don't feel poorer to live in, for a normal family, than the US.
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> "It would help explain why a lot of "poorer" countries reportedly don't feel poorer to live in, for a normal family, than the US." There are many sources for purchasing power parity (PPP) corrected GDP if you're looking for a source on this. PPP-correction does indeed reduce the disparities, but does not eliminate them. It's also tough to judge relative living standards as a tourist or during a short-term stay in a poorer country, as one is generally exposed to 'nice' subset of locales and people.
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GDP is a useless metric when so much of it basically wash trading. It's always been a dodgy metric and susceptible to gaming. But now that money is less and less connected to useful value, it's almost a sick joke.
I recently had a discussion with my wife and we check our bank records to find out how long it's been since we've been to a KFC, McDonalds or Burger King. Apparently it's been 16 months now. It's overpriced, unhealthy and American. Enough reasons to not go.
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As an American I also have not gone to any of those restaurants. The thing is, America is the China of food[0]: we make shittons of unsafe, dangerous product and foist it onto the market by burying the market's pricing mechanism under a mountain of garbage until nobody else can compete and we dictate the price. People will note that China makes plenty of safe, normal products too. The same applies to American agriculture, but that doesn't matter. The problem is mainly that the industry has absolutely no standards. If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will. [0] And, prior to this century, we were also China in general - a lot of our manufacturing was stolen from Britain and ran for far cheaper.
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> "If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will." What I find most interesting about the USA is the variety; yes, there are low-cost (often unhealthy) options, but there are also a wide variety of wonderful restaurants which are not pinching pennies on their costs, even amongst national chains.
Interesting that the pledge is about fast growing vs normal growing chicken. Does the UK not have the overcrowded cage conditions we have here in the US? The complaint is about these companies not wanting to reduce their profit margins, but how slowly do the other chickens grow? Are we doubling maturity time or increasing it by 10%? Doubling would probably impact consumer prices beyond what could be absorbed by eliminating the margin. Most lay opinions I can find online claim the fast growing birds to have inferior meat quality. I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test.
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> Most lay opinions I can find online claim the fast growing birds to have inferior meat quality. I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test. It’s easy to distinguish. The fast growing birds are much larger, breasts at least 2x the size of normal chickens. The larger breasts you notice when cutting them when raw, they often have a tough texture and meat inside like strands. When cooked and chewing it’ll have a hard chewy texture, sometimes feeling raw/uncooked. This is called woody breast. If you have a standard small chicken breast, the texture feels much more pleasant when eating, like chicken. I always try to avoid large chicken breasts and get the smallest possible but it’s virtually impossible now unless you live near high end low volume butcher with their own independent supplier.
I was reading today that we have managed to grow chickens with so much fat that the meat is less healthy than red meat.
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Can you share a link to what you were reading?
but it will be localized farm environment only.. Its just question of risk/benefit ratio, benefit is clear: cheap meat, because producers will be less impacted by deceases. Risks are not so clear in this case.
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It doesn't stay localized; runoff from farmland is a major issue. In other words, the farm animal poops out a bunch of antiobiotics, then it rains and that poop ends up washing into the river/lake/water table. That's already something that happens with situations like E. coli contamination. Things that happen on the farm don't stay on the farm.
Facebook is cooked (pilk.website)
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I remember Zuckzuck saying out loud that his vision for the platform was that people wouldn’t need actual humans to interact with, and bots is what you’d mostly get. I’ve used it enough to understand this is happening now. Literally impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.
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> So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid's school. This part here kills me. I’ve also been forced to engage in the Zuckerverse. I hate WhatsApp.
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Just reminder that when Meta stock went to ~90 in late 2022 we had non-stop “Facebook is dead I don’t know anyone that uses it lol” posts on reddit, hackernews, etc. The stock is ~650 today. We are not the target audience.
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Instagram is gone as well. Everything is fake in different ways. If the video isn't ai generated, then it's influencers acting out a scenario they think will get engagement. I realized that when it's a real video, there is a caption that says some scenario is happening, but there is nothing in the video that shows that is real. I think people are just reposting videos with different captions and testing out whatever invented scenario make the video have the most views.
> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm? No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago. Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it. She asked other women about this, and they all said their partner's feeds were the same. This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever talked to or read about on the internet. Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted. I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again. It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for. But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.
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Meta rediscovering the age-old adage that "sex sells". The core concept is little different than old car commercials featuring scantily clad women but with the plausible deniability of an algorithm so Meta can wash their hands of any negative consequences.
My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s. I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the world, and the comments sections were filled with with some beautiful messages from her many many friends and family. From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind of experience.
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This is how my parents' Facebook feeds look, too. And my wife's. And my friends who still use it. I log in a couple times per year and see the same thing. It's nice to catch up with the friends who still use it. One thing I've noticed over the years on HN is that many of the people talking confidently about Facebook also start their posts with "I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago, but..." and then go on to describe what they imagine Facebook is like for everyone else, as pieced together through the type of sensational headlines that hit the Hacker News front page every day. There's another failure mode where someone tries to use Facebook but doesn't have any active friends on the site. They might scroll past photos from friends and family to click on ragebait links or engage with someone debating politics because they can't resist an internet argument. The algorithm takes note that this is what they engage with and gives them more of it, while showing less of the content they're scrolling past. Then they wonder why their feeds are full of topics that make them angry. There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed. Meanwhile, people like my parents and extended family treat Facebook like a friendly gathering where everyone knows discussions of politics and religion are off the table. They click "Like" on things they want to see more of. They leave nice comments under photos of their friends and family. Their feeds adapt and give them what they want.
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I have this with Twitter surprisingly. I only use it for animal pictures, art, and to follow artists. I usually just use the Following page, but my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want. No weird right wing shit, no weird crypto shit, no drama or ragebait shit, etc... somehow. I know some day it'll break though.
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Same here. The trick is to unfollow people who start posting things you don't want to see in your feed any more. It sounds so simple, but many people treat their following list as an append-only log. I've followed accounts for hobbies that later spiral off into the deep end of Twitter's topics of the day, which is always my sign to unfollow them. Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.
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International flight attendant. So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary. If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that) What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck program which came to light back in 2021
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My feed is like this too. I rarely use FB now, but I’ve aggressively pruned and blocked anything that becomes political or negative.
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Was she using the 'Friends' tab? Anything else is complete trash.
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This is regular feed. I have another friend that is like OP's Mom, basically posts 4-10x per day. her main feed is basically just her and her friend's stuff, comments etc etc (few ads here and there of course but basically her feed looks like OG Facebook)
They should offer that privilege to the rest of us for a few bucks a month. I'd probably pay.
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You don't need to pay anything. That's just how Facebook works when you have active friends on it and you engage with their content. I do find it interesting that tech people are so baffled when other people enjoy Facebook and derive value from it. I think we see so many exaggerated headlines about algorithms and feeds that people who don't use the site have a very different idea of what people who do actually use the site are seeing.
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The problem is that your friends probably don't post much to facebook, and so they'd show you that, and you'd get to the end and find something else to do, so they have to bulk it up. There is a "friends" feed that's buried under a couple of menus that does this though.
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I wouldn't mind seeing an empty feed that says, "your friends didn't post today," or whatever. They have to fill the feed because I'm not paying them and they need the engagement. But if I were paying them, even a little bit, then maybe they could. But I didn't know there was a friends-only feed so I'll check that out.
This is not unique to Facebook. Reddit has seen a large uptick in AI-generated posts, or repeated posts from the past. I think we need to recognize that social media of 2026 is not the same as what we had in 2006. AI generated content, regardless of if it is image, video, or text, is here to stay. And it will only get better and more convincing as the technology improves. What people really need to ask is this - what do they want to get out of social media? Is it personal relationships and status updates? Is it entertainment? Is it something in between? The harsh truth is most people at this point use social media for entertainment, and AI content is entertaining, or at least engaging, to most people. Remember that 54% of USA adults read below a 6th grade reading level [1]. It is not perfect, but it is convincing enough that a large enough number of people are beginning to accept it as "real". [1]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-facts/#:~:text=21%25%20of%20U.S.%20adults%20are,points%20between%202017%20and%202023.
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The reddit bots are quite nefarious. Even in technical communities where no advertisement is happening there are so many posts made by bots either recycling old posts or masquerading as humans doing banal things like complaining about end users or something. Hundreds of bots that do nothing more than pretend to be people complaining about work, really curious what the goal of the operators is with these ones. Makes me wonder if they are bots supplied by reddit to artificially boost engagement.
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Reddit is so insufferably political now it's insane. Like why do 3d printing subreddits need to stand with (insert leftist outrage of Gaza / Israel / Ice / Canada / on and on)
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Weren't you the one telling us X.com should replace legacy media? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891442 As a reminder, a glimpse at the X front page a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504404 I think it's very telling how you went to Reddit first when complaining about politics on social media, one of the only big ones that still hasn't been completely invaded by MAGA sycophants. Just admit you have no issues about politics on social media, you just want them to align with your views.
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X is the most mainstream online community for free speech. It has wildly free speech
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Why do you think? Enragement = engagement. You could generously assume that it's users optimizing for posts that get them likes/karma/whatever, or ungenerously assume that the platform itself is gaming engagement via AI or bots, but the effect is the same and it's pervasive. The only out is finding tiny communities that are still communities, and praying they don't grow. Everyone saw the Facebook model and adopted it. It's why Reddit has the valuation it does (and why it's still insane to me people intentionally use it as a recommendation or information tool).
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I actually think it's because reddit is supported by a vast group of unpaid labor (moderators) and conspiratorially I believe they (actually) get paid by NGOs and governments to push narratives and suppress others. Although denied (poorly) it is very likely ghislaine maxwell was one of the most powerful moderators of reddit, modding hundreds of subreddits including r/worldnews, up until the day she was arrested
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Coining HNs Law Any mode of communication that depends on advertising for funding will over time t monotonically approach total BullShit Grifting as t increases.
Same, Facebook Marketplace is really good at my location because there is nothing else and never have been. It's not like Facebook destroyed something, no one else offered a classified sites like this
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Craigslist.
Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content. Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there...but the feed itself is dreadful, I never see anything from friends. It's all just slop from bigger brands/publishers. At this point, there are just chat services to me and my friends.
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> Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content For me it fluctuates between animals and thirst traps. It's a really odd recommender system. > Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there... Seems to depend how far you scroll, the first dozen will usually be good, clean recommendations. After that it goes downhill.
Addendum to this: my filipina aunt is elderly and I was absolutely shocked at the amount of highly specific AI generated content seemingly targeted directly at her on Facebook. Except instead of thirst traps it was a weird mix of outrage porn, religious imagery, and kids + pets being cute, singing or rescued from odd situations. I asked a few questions of her to try and figure out if she like really grasped that it was AI, and she knew the general idea, but there's already so many filters and choppy edits of things it was honestly just too hard for her to make the distinction.
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I had a similar revulsion watching older folks in my family scroll and scroll through obvious AI slop and AI ragebait. They can't even really tell it's AI, and they just sit there gobbling it all up, even though it's 100% nonsense. I mean, on one hand, who am I to tell people what media to like and consume, but on the other hand, I kind of fear for their grip on reality.
Instagram is serving me literal porn when I browse shorts (for instance women showing their private parts). It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to block it. Facebook basically has sexual content spam as in the OP article all the way. It's to the point I'd never open either app when in public.
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> It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to block it. I'm not convinced they care about moderation outside of legal necessity.
> (I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.) I wish, but from personal experience I'm afraid quite a bunch of them are creepy old guys which have no idea how creepy they have become(1), because they are in a bubble with mostly only other creepy old guys (1): Like I don't mean people which always have been creepy or "secret/hidden" creepy. But people which through increasingly more "not caring" and echo champers/ad bubbles and similar twisting their world perception/social feedback loop have become increasingly more creepy in the last 10-20 years.
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In German we have a word for old people who post with their real name under such posts: Klarnamensexboomer ('real name sex boomer')
They are not fake. I've also seen these and checked commenters' profiles. Real people, in the 35-50 age range.
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How can you tell by just looking at their profile? Bots have for over a decade been able to generate a profile with a real looking picture (usually just scraped from the web) and a realistic sounding bio.
It's a complete mystery to me how Facebook operates. Like, they need money to keep the lights on, right? Where is the money coming from if no humans are using the platform?
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There's no mystery, just your own ignorance. Billions of people use facebook every day. They remain the largest and most active social network on earth.
I had a similar experience recently, where I logged in to Facebook after not using it for years and was shocked by how much garbage was there. My spouse does use Facebook somewhat regularly so I looked at her feed and it was much more reasonable. I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.
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I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once it sees how you behave. For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable. But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do. I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just because my old friends started sending me videos to the music related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to make a DAU out of me.
I still log in fairly regularly and get a bunch of reasonably targeted content, but also a ton of ragebait ai shit like protestors attacking cops. So it’s a bit of both, they’re just flooded with bad ai posts. It’s changed drastically in the past year, from a bunch of posts you could argue make sense, to mostly posts of rage. But the number of actual friends posts is basically zero
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The problem is you have to be defensive. If you mess up once and click some AI reading Reddit posts or hawk-tua style street interview, you’re cooked. You used to be able to reset by watching stupid financial content with high value like gold coin stuff and cleanse, but Meta is smarter now.
I logged in to instagram after like 5 years and my whole feed is literally just thots and AI generated content, even though I follow a crapload of accounts.
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Same with mine - all thirst traps in the search, which I have never really searched for.
He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote sexual content, which is nuts, because anyone who’s spent 5 mins on the platform knows this absolutely not the case
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In my experience it’s mostly sexual adjacent content with just enough plausible deniability that you could say it’s a comedic sketch or something. They’re not funny, and the punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of a joke.
YT is like this too, if you're not logged in, thirst trap, crazy stuff until you build up a search history (even not logged in)
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I enjoy the period before the advertising profile narrows down to boring established brands selling boring everyday products. Last time I got a new phone youtube thought I had HIV, or that I wanted to buy supplements from AI Joe Rogan.
maybe the centralized, corporate-owned web, but not the internet... at least, not yet...
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If anything the open internet seems worse . Every google search for some anodyne home maintenance task returns hundreds of AI-generated slop "guides" with affiliate links. YouTube is the last refuge for real information on this kind of thing. Coming across a human-written guide on the open web is increasingly rare.
I used to run the Facebook page for a church-affiliated children's summer program associated with a minority group. I accidentally switched to that account the other day. The feed was the most right-wing, Fox News crap you could imagine!
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I have a very sweet elderly friend of the family who only uses Facebook for church-related stuff, and since I'm "the tech guy" she asked me to look at her facebook and help her understand why she sees so much Trump, right-wing, hateful, violent, "Nazi-adjacent" (interestingly never -overtly- Nazi) stuff in her feed. I didn't have the heart to try to explain to her demographic bias, revealed preferences, and overlapping group interests, so I just said it's probably a software glitch in Facebook.
What do your social groups use nowadays?
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I am in my mid forties and most people around me seem to use instagram to share memes and stuff + keep contact with rarely seen friends and whatsapp groups for closest more tightknit circles. I am still on whatsapp but I am planning on nuking my account in september after a large event involving people from various continents. I have no idea if I will be able to stay directly in touch with those people after that, probably not. I am still unsure if I'll send a message to most of my contacts or if I'll just tell my nuclear family, in laws and closest friends.
Similar experience for me and it’s just been replaced with… nothing. My gaming buddies talk on Discord but I just don’t really hear from my aunts and uncles and cousins anymore. It’d be a hassle to even figure out how to contact them. Only 13 people showed up to my high school reunion last year from a graduating class of ~400.
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It’s returned to nothing. Losing touch with people you didn’t contact regularly was the norm until the mid 2000s. For someone who grew up in the ‘golden years’ of social media, it’s kinda weird to see.
Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet (neuroai.science)
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> Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it’s unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of a chunk of the spectrum. I absolutely think this is the right approach. The glasses which do 'blue light filtering' which barely change your perception are clearly placebo, but a very strong redshift I think is obviously a different creature.
These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science. You might as well try to claim hot tea doesn't help you get to sleep, or reading before bed doesn't, or whatever else you do to wind down. I personally don't care if some narrow hypothesis about blue light and melanopsin is false. I know that low, warm, amber-tinted light in the evening slows me down in a way that low, cold, blue-tinted light does not. That's why I use different, warmer lamps at night with dimmers, and keep my devices on Night Shift and lower brightness. It works for me, and seems to mimic the lighting conditions we evolved with -- strong blue light around noon, weaker warmer light at sunset, weakest warmest light from the fire until we go to sleep. Maybe it doesn't work for everybody. That's fine. But it certainly does for me. And maybe it's not modulated by melanopsin. Or maybe it's not about blue light, but rather the overall correlated color temperature (CCT), e.g. 2100K instead of 5700K. Who knows. But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would result in one other physiological change isn't supported. That doesn't mean "blue light filters don't work" as a universal statement. It's hubris on the part of the author to assume that this one hypothesis is the only potential mechanism by which warmer light might help with sleep. And it's this kind of science writing that turns people off to science. I know, through lots of trial and error and experimentation, that warm light helps me fall asleep. And here comes some "AI researcher and neurotechnologist" trying to tell me I'm wrong? He says it's "aggravating" that people are "actually using Night Shift". I say it's aggravating when people like him make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can't either.
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> These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science. No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name. "Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with skepticism. "Feels good to me" is hardly actionable evidence to begin with. It's something that is even more flimsy than sociology to begin with. I have my doubts it should even be called medicine. I could understand (not justify) skepticism in many cases (such as "common wisdom" from 1000 years ago) but this particular topic should have raised your skepticism 20 years ago back when the craze/marketing stunt was starting, and not now.
Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8. Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real clincher is that when I travel I don't change the time zone on my computer (because it screws up my calendar). But my sleep cycle continues to track my home time zone for a very long time. I life in California, but at the moment I'm in Hawaii. I've been here three weeks so far. At home I'd fall asleep around 11 and wake up around 7, but here I'm getting sleepy at 9 and waking up at 5. My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual variation. This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for the results.
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> Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. > light hygiene and using night shift The OP article is primarily about separating the variables you lumped together.
So the main claim presented here is that reducing blue reduces total "light" (lumens? watts?) by 50% (totally believable), and that reduction in light is all that matters for sleep? That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has brought bothers me a lot too. ... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to support that it's Useful and Good and is Achieving Its Intended Goal. It's reducing total luminance, because people prefer it over reducing screen brightness overall . I sure as heck do anyway (as night shift modes, they're a more comprehensive option than dark mode), though I think I'll experiment with just reducing brightness a bit. ---- For melatonin in particular, fully agreed. The recent trend of "can't even get <5mg in stores, and >10mg is appearing regularly" in the USA is mind-boggling to me. AFAICT it's exclusively because it's a "supplement" and therefore practically unregulated, and these companies don't give a shit about anyone they harm, just profit. Start with something like https://a.co/d/0dISg7oa (0.3mg, this is what I personally use) and go up from there, slowly.
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No, in the OP (after an unclear intro that confuseed many readers), there is a graph that shows blue wavelength intensity is important, but software light filters don't filter a lot of it, and the effect is cancelled by increasing overall brightness.
>the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep. Are you sleeping enough? When I was getting too little sleep, averaging 5.5 hours per night, this described me well. A single sleep interruption could make me lose most of a day of work. I'm sleeping better and longer now, and it seems I'm more able to tolerate small interruptions.
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Yeah I’ve gotten 8 hours of sleep almost everyday for like 15 years, ever since I put 2 and 2 together. But sometimes I do get bad sleep because responsibilities happen and I do like to go out, but if I let keep happening, the same symptoms come up. I start dropping stuff, forgetting things… it just takes like a few days.
I confirm that this helps me as well. Quite often I don't have any fancy filter, I'm permanently setting display/monitor to low temperature and my eyes/vision couldn't be happier. I don't even need darkmode, regular mode works just fine for me as long as blue light is toned down. Granted, I'm not doing any color correction or anything color sensitive work. I used to have terrible headaches about 20 years ago when I started spending a lot of time in front of the screen. I went to an optometrist who tested my eyes and told me I could get low prescriptions (.5) but warned me that there's no way back and that many people are fine with my current vision, choosing not to get a prescription. Luckily I figured out that it was blue light that was bothering me and once I turned it down I haven't had any problems since. I'm in my mid 40s and my vision has naturally deteriorated a bit but I am still fine with no prescriptions. And I don't believe this to be placebo. Every time I stare at a regular screen for longer than 5 minutes I get eye strain. At the same time I suspect this doesn't help everyone, but at least to me this is a great solution that still works.
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Can you elaborate on “no way back”?
I wasn't paying for them, so it was very much accidental.
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You should go back and demand they be replaced. Such a mistake isn't something you should tolerate.
Placebo and “manifesting”—the latter sounds mockable but pretty much the same thing, harmless if helpful so hey!
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If somebody is "manifesting" themselves a sleep aid, I think they'd just call it meditation and everybody would more or less accept that it probably works for that individual. Maybe you'd have a few people with severe autism who start arguing on online forums about the scientific evidence behind meditation, but that's just them being them.
Making frontier cybersecurity capabilities available to defenders (anthropic.com)
I assume that's why this is gated behind a request for access from teams / enterprise users rather than being GA but there are open versions available built on the cn OSS models: https://github.com/lintsinghua/DeepAudit
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The GA functionality is already here with a crafted prompt or jailbreak :)
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it's gone a bit unnoticed that they've stopped support for response prefilling in the 4.6 models :/
I don't understand the joke here.
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It's an Internet trope — we could link to knowyourmeme, or link to the HN Guidelines
Keep Android Open (f-droid.org)
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https://archive.is/https://f-droid.org/2026/02/20/twif.html
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https://archive.is/https://f-droid.org/2026/02/20/ .html https://archive.is/https://f-droid.org/2026/02/20/twif.html
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Good thing
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Amusingly, if Microsfot didn't have a such an awful reputation ( both recent and old ), their newly announced phones could have actually been a viable competitor.
The fundamental problem is that we are relying on the good graces of Google to keep Android open, despite the fact that it often runs run contrary to their goals as a $4T for-profit behemoth. This may have worked in the past, but the "don't be evil" days are very far behind us. I don't see a real future for Andrioid as an open platform unless the community comes together and does a hard fork. Google can continue to develop their version and go the Apple way (which, funny enough, no one has a problem with). Development of AOSP can be controlled by a software foundation, like tons of other successful projects.
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What about the Android SDK? I don't think that this is open source, is it? As a developer, when you download an Android SDK you have accept a licence that is not open source, right?
A hard fork doesn't matter when the vast majority of phones have a locked bootloader.
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Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.
Who else is going to maintain and develop it? It's the same issue as with Chrome, even if you force Google to give it to some other company, they're all just as bad. And it's too big and too costly to maintain for anyone else but tech giants. The only other options would be convincing users to pay 5 bucks a month for their software, or have some Government fork over the tens of millions required to pay open source developers. And good luck with that.
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I'm thinking with ever increasing seriousness: let's split any company that grows past a certain size. Each side gets a copy of the codebase and half the assets, no one who's been on the board on one side can be on the other side's board, and neither side can buy off the other. They can use the existing branding for a limited time and with a qualifier (say Google Turnip vs Google Potato) but after that it's on the strength of the new brand which they're each building and for which they're competing against each other and the rest of the market. This is not happening in my lifetime, of course it isn't. But by god does it need to happen.
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I welcome feature stagnation on mobile! Every single release is a step backwards. Android 15 cannot hold a candle to what cynogenmod did on top of android 2.3. And that's objective.
A hard fork is not needed. Non-Google Android do not have to enforce this requirement. It's more important to get as many people on alternatives like GrapheneOS as possible. And fund them by donating to them. If every ~0.5 million GrapheneOS users donated 10 Euro per month, they would be very well-funded.
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Get a large phone vendor to get a flagship phone with Graphene or so on the market. Otherwise nothing will happen. Even starting with the smaller ones like Blackview would do something. But almost no one will do that because users are said to want android; like my parents care... But they will care of course when their banking app stops working... That is the real issue imho.
Good thing restricting side-loading isn't legal in the European Union! Not a problem here. Apple had to enable side-loading on their EU-based phones and so will Google if they restrict it.
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The kind of "side-loading" of notarized apps outside the manufacturer's app store that Apple allows in the EU is exactly what Google proposed to do for all its Android builds. We don't want that.
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How specific is the law? What if side loading requires a "trusted" signed certificate where trusted means from Google Play? Not even playing devil's advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.
Yes it is, and no they didn't. Apple has to allow (heavily restricted) alternative app stores, and I'm not clear on whether any actually exist right now.
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My understanding is that how Apple is restricting the alternative app stores is also illegal in EU, so I don't thinkt this is the end of this story.
Personally I'm excited about the death of Android, now resources can be put toward mainstreaming and maturing the Linux Phone ecosystem Hopefully 2026 or 2027 will be the year of the Linux Phone
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> death of Android death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs? A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
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I understand why mobile/tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that's no longer needed. However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers. I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.
Strong disagree. Linux, its permission system and its (barely existent) application isolation are lightyears away from the security guarantees that Android brings.
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Desktop OSes and their derivatives are woefully behind in this regard, and unfortunately the will to bring them up to par is incredibly weak. Of those in mass use (Qubes OS is neat but its user base isn’t even a rounding error), macOS probably does the most, but it’s still lagging behind iOS and what’s been implemented has come with much consternation from the technically inclined peanut gallery. I understand some amount of reticence with commercial OSes, but there’s no justification for being against it on open Linux based desktops and mobile OSes. We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time with the only (scantly) meaningful safeguards coming in the form of *nix user permissions.
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> We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time I do agree with that, and I strongly believe that the iOS and Android security model is way ahead of Desktop Linux. But what I observe is that nobody seems to care about the security model. A recurrent complaint I see against anything AOSP-based (including Android) is that people "want to be root".
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This assumes that the mentioned systems are the only security considerations on a Linux system. Clearly this is not the case so I am unsure why you omit other security-related aspects of Linux here.
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Android, being based upon the Linux kernel, has all those and its own app permission system built on top. Linux on its own comes nowhere close to this.
I.. don't think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don't think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory: - AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability - there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace ) - small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks - anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption
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I think adoption will hinge on whether existing Android apps will just run on it with something like waydroid/anbox or not. Gaming on Linux took off with Proton. Linux on phones might go the same path.
For me as a desktop linux poweruser, I find this potential transition pretty intimidating, I've never flashed a phone with a custom rom let alone switch to a completely different OS, and I am not sure if the phone can even be reset to its original OS, if things go south.
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It's relatively easy. It's basically a command for each step you want to do and it tends to fail gracefully nowadays. If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone. If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
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That describes relatively easy for you, but not for the average person who can’t even be bothered to change the default ringtone.
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It's also high risk. I've bricked two phones doing it.
you're a really vanilla user then. wake me up when there's an adblocker on an iphone.
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There are several that plug into Safari, and Pihole just works. Does Android have ad blockers that do more? It's been a few years since I switched.
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I can run proper uBlock Origin in Firefox on Android. Sure something like Pihole works, but I am often on mobile data or other WiFi networks.
Thankfully you don't really need an adblocker for apps on an iPhone. Your browser could use one, but thankfully those do exist :) That said, I want off the iOS ecosystem, but Google has basically said guess what? We are going the way of Apple, so we don't care about you either. So right now there isn't really anywhere else to go. I'm going to keep trucking in iOS for now, but I hope I find something better soon.
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> Thankfully you don't really need an adblocker for apps on an iPhone. Your browser could use one, but thankfully those do exist :) uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile is significantly better than any Safari adblocker I've been able to find. (1Blocker's the best I've found for Safari.)
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who is talking about app adblockers. power android users get their apps from fdroid. You relly are out of touch. And you know very well, There are only meme adblockers for the browser on IOS.
KDE Connect works just fine on iOS.
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It "works" but it is significantly less useful. Notification mirroring doesn't work, you can't read/respond to text messages, it can't reliably run in the background. These are all due to limitations imposed by Apple.
This isnt going to be a popular post because the HN crowd is very much a "China bad" crowd but I hypothesize China will likely step in and offer a fork that's compatible with open ecosystems not under the direct control of the us state department. This might be in the form of commits and investment in fdroid and pinephone, or a tiktok like alternative to the wests walled garden. Edit: this will likely exist "uncensored" in other markets but conform to the PRCs standards and practices domestically, similarly to how tiktok operated prior to selling a version specifically taylored to US censorship and propaganda.
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Competition needs to come from somewhere due to lack of antitrust enforcement in the US. If not China then hopefully elsewhere. The US system is dying from lack of competition.
I am genuinely curious, what is your moral justification to attempt to use party A to forcefully influence how party B develops/sells *their* intellectual property? Party B owes you nothing. You are free to not use their products or start a company to compete. How do you justify it, and how would you feel if you were on the receiving end of such a dictum?
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Party A enforces Party B's intellectual "property"
And you can use it. You can, in fact, keep using the software that shipped on it. What you want is access to further intellectual property they develop (updates, features), that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware and ability to shepherd it in a direction you want and they don’t.
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> that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware the hardware is specifically locked down with "trusted computing" features to facilitate this. It's not a random coincidence. The problem here lies in the network effects and the use of trusted computing. If my bank app mandates that I use "real deal 100% certified android", then I can't just develop my own OS. So it's an antitrust situation. If every company in the world teamed up with MegaCorp and made their services contingent on wearing a MegaCorp shock collar powered by trusted computing, would you wear it? You are free to not use the collar... and starve to death in the woods I suppose. I don't usually even care about intellectual property. It's a hack to grant a temporarily exclusive monopoly as a way to incentivize R&D. The R&D in this case is just solving the question of "how do we establish a larger monopoly". So why should the public be forced to uphold it? Asking me if I am willing to violate intellectual property in this situation is like if I was being lowered into a pit of liquid hot magma and in order to get out I had to break the flag code or jaywalk or something.
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> And you can use it. Tell that to the locked bootloader. > What you want is access to further intellectual property they develop (updates, features), that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware and ability to shepherd it in a direction you want and they don’t. Well yeah, I am paying them with money (and data) and thereby with power and expect them in turn to provide directions for my device, so that is does what I want. That's kind of the deal. If they don't want to provide that, then they can just not accept my money (and data). They can of course produce devices, that to what they want, and want me to carry them around, but then they better pay me. If they use the power I gave them against me, then I will demand my power projection as a service provider (aka. the government) to project power in my interest.
That is not their fault, though. I can see how you could complain to the people who mandate you use B’s products. Otherwise what you’re saying is that control of any intellectual property can be stolen from its owners simply by becoming popular outside of their control
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> That is not their fault, though. It is though. They are actively working on increasing their marketshare. That doesn't happen by accident. They have chosen to place the interests of the corporation over the interest of their fellow people. They are fine to do that, because we separated that responsibility. Corporations can only chase for profit, because we have governments, that make the rules, so that chasing profits is in the interests of the people. Maybe you don't like that, and that is fine for you, although I don't like that you don't like that. Maybe you want a society where might makes right. However a lot of people don't feel that way, hence why we outsourced that world model to the government. People don't like that their neighbor is stronger than them and takes there stuff, so they pay feudal lords. Then the feudal lords want some security, so they outsource that to elected emperors. After I while the feudal lords misuse their power, so parliaments are invented. Eventually people have enough and demand voting rights. The elected leaders betray the people by sending them to war, so they created multinational institutions, that try to prevent this (EU). They haven't used their power to betray the people enough, so we are still fine with them. "Wealth comes with obligations" is literally in my country's constitution. You, may don't like that, but I do. I think a lot of other people do as well. It is of course always for discussion how much.
GrapheneOS is great. But that currently means you have to buy a phone from Google to work around Google looking down Android.
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They say they will announce a partnership with a major OEM manufacturer in March 2026!
> They should be able to install any software they want. That's very different than demanding someone make their software exactly how you desire. ie. You should be able to install your own operating system, you don't get to tell them how theirs should operate. I don't think the distinction exists the way you're trying to describe. If I should be allowed to install any software I want, surely that includes any .apk I want? Conversely, someone could make the exact claim one step down the chain and argue that you don't get to tell them how their firmware should work and if you want to install your own OS you should just go buy a fab, make your own chips, write your own firmware, and make your own phone. And that's absurd, because users should be allowed to run their own software without being forced to ditch the rest of the stack for no reason.
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No, I don't think you have the inerhent right to install any apk you desire, if their OS is designed to prohibit it. You should be free to try to alter their OS any way you want, but they should not have to make it easy. And the argument is the same lower down the stack. You shouldn't be able to tell someone how to design their firmware. The only problem is where the law prohibits us from trying to undo these restrictions, or make modifications ourselves. It's government that restricts us, and we should focus our efforts there.
On average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phone, per day [1]. I find it hard to believe someone would spend 4 hours and 9 minutes _per day_ looking at their banking app or using NFC payments. [1] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats
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Your assumption they used their phone an average time was false probably.
If you really don't have an alternative in Europe, buy the cheapest Googled Android device (less than $100 or euros), and use that as a glorified 2FA device. It's not ideal because you have to pay for it, but on the other hand Android devices with unlockable bootloaders (mostly Google Pixels now) tend to be cheaper than iThings. A Pixel 9a or 10a running Graphene for everyday use plus a cheap Android phone that stays are home are still considerably cheaper than Apple and Samsung devices, and give the users far more privacy and freedom.
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Yes, that's the endgame, an Android device in a drawer at home. But what do I have to carry on my pocket to use the minimum amount of apps? Firefox, WhatsApp with video and audio calls, Telegram no video no audio, a mail client, a YouTube client (possibly not from YouTube), a maps and navigation app (for cars), phone calls, SMS.
Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says (electrek.co)
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For every story like this, there are 10 stories of people who died the old fashioned way behind the wheel. Accidents like this are obviously tragic, but let's remember that self driving software is already ~10x safer than a human. Unfortunately, lawsuits like this will slow down the rollout of this life-saving technology, resulting in a greater loss of life.
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Companies that roll it out responsibly aren’t having issues. Tesla deserves these judgments and should not be allowed to roll this software out in the irresponsible way they have been.
Developing, no, but once companies start releasing vehicles onto our shared public streets I have a lot less tolerance for launching science experiments that end up killing bystanders. I can understand the argument that in the abstract over-regulation kills innovation but at the same time in the US the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s time for a correction.
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I have no tolerance for bystanders being killed in general. If the science experiments kill on average less bystanders I'm all for them, if they don't they should be stopped until made safer.
If the average person does not know what an autopilot does, why would they expect Tesla's 'autopilot' to take such good care of them? I am reminded of a case many years ago when a man turned on the cruise control in his RV and went to the back to make himself lunch, after which the RV went off some sort of hill or cliff. Rudimentary 'autopilots' on aircraft have existed for about a century now, and the earlier versions (before transistorization) only controlled heading and attitude (if conditions and other settings allowed it), with little indication of failure.
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> If the average person does not know what an autopilot does The average person does know what an autopilot does, they're just wrong. I think the example you provided supports that.
> If you accidentally kill someone with your car, do you think you should have to pay $243m? If you have billions of dollars, and somehow can't go to prison, yes you should. If not in compensation to the victim, then in some kind of fine scaled to wealth. The amount paid needs to be high enough to be a deterrent to the individual who did wrong.
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If this extreme judgement causes Tesla to abandon autodrive, there will be more deaths on the road. It just isn't rational. Besides, nobody makes you turn on the autodrive.
I'm not clear on what Tesla is doing these days. They've been left in the dust on autonomous driving, they've failed to update their successful car models, and their only new model was a spectacular failure.
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https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2026-us-electric-vehicle-experience-evx-ownership-study Tesla Model 3 highest overall in owner satisfaction. "Left in the dust?"
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I don't understand how that's a retort against the claim that they've "been left in the dust on autonomous driving". Are you contending that autonomous driving is the only reason that Tesla owners would like their cars?
By which metrics has Tesla been left in the dust wrt autonomous driving? Right now they are the only brand where you can buy a car and have it do basically 90% (or sometimes 100%) of your daily driving. Sure, it's supervised, but the alternatives are literally extremely geogated taxis
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> By which metrics has Tesla been left in the dust wrt autonomous driving By the fact that they don't have autonomous driving. And this very judgement demonstrates that. If you have to keep your full attention on the road at all times and constantly look out for the 10% case where the autopilot may spectacularly fail, it instantly turns off the vast majority of prospective users. Funny enough the tech that Musk's tweets and the Tesla hype machine has been promising for the last decade is actually on the streets today. It's just being rolled out by Waymo.
That's still massively simpler than making a self-driving car. It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude you want and over a reasonable timescale it will do just that.
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> It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude That seemingly shifts the difficulty from the autopilot to the airframe. But that’s not actually good enough, it doesn’t keep an aircraft flying when it’s missing a large chunk of wing for example. https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-collision/ Instead, you’re talking about the happy path and if we accept the happy path as enough there’s the weekend equivalents of self driving cars built using minimal effort, however being production worthy is about more than being occasionally useful. Autopilot is difficult because you need to do several things well or people will defiantly die. Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes but again it’s the or people die bits that makes it difficult. Tesla isn’t actually ahead of the game, they are just willing to take more risks with their customers and the general public’s lives.
No Skill. No Taste (blog.kinglycrow.com)
I suspect that in the future, apps will be like these blogs: most people will have them. The app authors will they they are great, most won't be great. Some will be great and hugely popular, many will be great but nobody will know or about them, because the attention economy is always hard. I think that's fine. What I really think is that most of the logical folks here think we ought to be focusing our attention and organizing to maximize the efficiency of app making, and that vibe-coding really blows that up, because there is no way to know what is quality and what is trash without actually having to do the work and figure that out. That does suck, but it's why creators should have blogs, github/bitbucket accounts, etc, to offer up their credibility to facilitate bona fides. I think the programming industry is going to become a lot more like the indie game industry, where loose networks based on mutual respect start forming and critics review the newest apps, because you really don't want to waste a bunch actually using all the stuff. It's inefficient, but that's life.
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> I suspect that in the future, apps will be like these blogs: most people will have them Most people don't have blogs though.
What I hated most about the NFT culture was being approached by people who wanted me to make NFTs out of my photographs and visual art. At the time I was very much craving feedback and validation but I wanted honest validation, I knew some of what I was making was really good and some of what I was making was crap -- I wanted validation from people who could tell the difference, not from people for whom it was all the same.
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Don't mind the NFT culture, they were just some termites in search of monetizing their grift. I didn't bite but I heard of countless stories where artists were either scammed or had time wasted on this. I hope you found your audience and were able to get the validation you were craving for.
Of course they are, taste is a social conversation to align for a window of time on a set of guidelines. Taste is a social construct, being a social construct (or "made up") does not make it any less real or valuable.
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Taste isn’t a social construct, it’s a function of how your brain is structured/wired. How it’s applied is a social construct.
I think you can lead yourself astray imagining that there’s a big difference between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. One is just a college educated term for the other. More importantly, I think that enough time has passed that we can critique poor old Kant on this matter. When he says the taste has no interest in something what he is really implicitly describing is that taste is the province of rich people. If one has to strive or worry or self promote or anything like that, with regard to an aesthetic decision, it is easy to mark as tasteless. In most cases, the people with access to the kinds of habits that allow them to act in matters of aesthetic without interest are rich. The main reason people drive themselves in circles, talking about taste and subjectivity, and college-educated words for subjectivity is because we don’t want to admit that it is bound up in class and upbringing. That and not the passage of time is why it is so hard to understand Kant on this matter. He’s describing a fiction that we agreed upon so that we didn’t have to talk about the influence of money.
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I think your analysis is interesting but I would argue it has more to do with status than money.
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> In most cases, the people with access to the kinds of habits that allow them to act in matters of aesthetic without interest are rich. This isn't true at all. There's a whole world of artisans and fine artists that range from middle class to broke, and they wouldn't be in that financial situation if they felt like compromising their point of view for money.
But what were they actually saying? They just used the phrase "college-educated" and several synonyms as an insult to put themself forward as just some working class Joe who has no time for rich people and their hoity toity high and mighty philosphizing. If I was to be charitable, I guess maybe their argument was that Kant only believed in subjective universality because he was rich, but that doesn't make any sense. Both Kant and Hume grew up middle class, and ended up in academia, and had very different conclusions about what "taste" is. It's just a knee jerk reaction to dead white men philosophers and anyone who is interested in them as a bunch of elitists. That's not an argument, that's some kind of misplaced class resentment masquerading as an argument.
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that's not what they said at all though, sorry but the only one doing knee jerk reactions here seems to be you
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Idk I've read a lot of Selridge's comments up and down the whole post now and it really seems like any idea of taste to them defaults to classism and then they misapply that framework here, which is realistically one of the fairest arenas. If someone likes what you make it doesn't matter where you come from.
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Ok, so what were they saying?
That would honestly be an incredible performance art piece, like a distilled waste of a human life just to prove a point. Then even after all that you could ask the question "Is the art inferior, did it prove the point effectively.". I think there's a real argument to be made that it didn't, becuase just having the argument surfaces some very interesting points about worth.
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Haha, you made me laugh. With my eating habits - I'm already halfway there to realizing my vision of becoming a hemoglobic Jackson Pollock.
I honestly tried to not inject my own standards into this and tried to stick around dynamics as much as possible. I think you shouldn't post to post, but if you've considered your audience and thought about something outside of yourself as to why someone may like this, earnestly, and not just kidding yourself, you are acting in good faith imo. Similarly, I should have done more in the post to steer people way from the perception I'm shitting on them for building for themselves, that's great I have plenty of personal projects running at home that are just for me, if I ever decided to share them out I'd work to make sure its ready and valuable for people to receive.
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The way you're expressing it, it sounds like you simply believe your own standards are representative of what everyone else's are. I disagree, for whatever that's worth.
Presentation matters. Good documentation is evidence of a library that has been carefully thought through. Slop in the readme suggests slop in the code.
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I could vibe code the hell out of something but write a good README for it by hand, doesn't mean that something is actually good. But yes, A -> B != B -> A, as your last sentence says.
Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? (2025) (newyorker.com)
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Anecdotal but the three times I’ve been in the states recently I come away feeling like trash. When I’m there I crave salads and green food pretty fast. It feels like, as a tourist, unless you’re making food yourself from scratch the ingredients used in most food are not good for you. I don’t feel that way holidaying in other countries..
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(2025) some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623315
Agree. Focusing on "processing", "junk food", and scary-sounding ingredients is a distraction. A lot of processing is removing fiber so foods can be eaten faster and are less satiating. Eating more fiber automatically addresses most of the problems with he American diet.
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Don’t forget adding all the artificial emulsifiers, which impact the intestinal lining.
Yes, I found the group description confusing as well. The group 4 description starts off with "when foods are refined, bleached ...". I'm pretty certain the flour used to make standard grocery store pasta is both refined and bleached. Even if I make it at home, I'm using refined and bleached white flour. And my understanding is that should be considered fairly processed - the refining makes it less fibrous and easier to digest, which spikes insulin levels and is bad for gut bacteria etc.
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Minor note: dried pasta is made with semolina flour, not white flour & eggs like many fresh pastas are. It's still a refined (germ removed) ground wheat flour, though not usually bleached.
Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court (bbc.com)
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What a collosal missed opportunity for Trump. His supreme court was about to save him from himself and his ruinous tariffs. He could have continued to insist that his tariffs were genius while letting someone else take responsibility for bad outcomes. Economy does poorly? Blame the supreme court for striking down his beautiful tariffs. Economy does well? Take credit for shepherding the economy past a hostile court. Remember, in his narcissistic mind, Trump can never fail he can only be failed. Instead he's now insisting he'll restart the tariffs under some even more flimsy interpretation of executive power.
In response, POTUS just declared a global 10% tariff. Does anyone understand if this is legal? https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-orders-temporary-10-global-tariff-replace-duties-struck-down-by-us-supreme-2026-02-20/
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Aw shucks, I guess we'll have to wait another year to find out won't we?
Extremely biased comment. The SC ruling today: 1) Does not stop the president from enacting tariffs, at all. The dissents even spelled out that no actual change would come from this ruling. 2) The ruling creates the absurd scenario where the president can (under this specific law) totally ban ALL imports from a country on whim, but not partially via tariffs. It's akin to being able to turn the AC on or off, but not being allowed to set the temperature. As usual, interesting discussion about the nuances of this ruling are happening on X. Reddit and HN comments are consistently low-signal like the above.
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> discussion about the nuances of this ruling are happening on X I'm sure they are lol.
His reputation will be forever tarnished by "Kavanaugh stops"
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That the the four sexual assault allegations (Thomas had "only" one during his nomination): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh#Sexual_assault_allegations
> the relevant stocks are up on the decision Predictable result, unpredictable timing. > they could just as easily have not stayed the injunction and just let the Supreme Court do it if they were inclined to Hindsight is, as always, 20/20.
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> Predictable result, unpredictable timing. That wouldn't explain the prediction markets thinking the administration had a double digit chance of winning. The sure things go 99:1. > Hindsight is, as always, 20/20. It's not a matter of knowing which docket would be used. Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you?
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> That wouldn't explain the prediction markets thinking the administration had a double digit chance of winning. I am not a believer in the accuracy of prediction markets. > Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you? They didn't think that. They thought SCOTUS would back them up faster. Back in November: https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-ieepa-conservative-justices-alito-gorsuch-thomas-liberals/ "That suggests a potentially lopsided 7-2 vote against Trump, who appointed Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh during his first term." We got 6-3. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/international-trade/trump-tariffs-fate-rides-on-supreme-court-justices-he-picked "Though he normally aligns with Thomas and Alito, Gorsuch may be more likely to vote against Trump’s tariffs than Kavanaugh is, according to Prelogar. “It might actually be the chief, Barrett and Gorsuch who are in play,” she said." https://www.quarles.com/newsroom/publications/oral-arguments-heard-in-trump-v-learning-resources-as-justices-question-scope-of-trumps-tariff-powers "During the argument, several Justices expressed skepticism about the IEEPA expanding the President’s powers to encompass the ability to set tariffs." This was the widespread conclusion back then; that the justices were clearly skeptical and that the government was struggling to figure out an effective argument.
> They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset. That wouldn't have given the opportunity for SCOTUS's financial backers to build up their profits first https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089443
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You think corporations and the elite .01% support tariffs? It obviously was very unpopular with that class of society. The policy was aimed to help the working class of the country. You can argue that it was a piss poor way of doing so, but it's certainly not something that the elite class advocated for and getting rich off of.,
Howard Lutnick and his sons are surely happy about this. It’s almost like Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce , knew this would happen. His sons, at their firm Cantor Fitzgerald, have been offering a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund, and if (as they did today) they get struck down, they pocket the 100% refund. https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-warren-probe-lutnick-firms-potential-conflicts-of-interest-related-to-massive-tariff-bets
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What is this shit? 4D grifting?
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If the court establishes that this was a tax, how would they administer the refund considering it's impossible to disentangle absorbed tariffs by firms and those passed along to consumers?
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SCOTUS left it unspecified, but the refund would go to the payer, legally.
It likely is nepotism (and maybe bribery depending on your definition, but very unlikely to meet the legal bar of bribery), but I'm not sure what about the GP's comment makes it so obviously clear to you that it is both of those things.
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is it doesn't meet the legal bar for bribery, it's only because the supreme Court has made most forms of bribary legal (presumably to prevent Thomas from being arrested for taking lots of bribes)
It is, however, in the interest of the American public not to have a corrupt justice system. Thus, we should not rely on far fetched assumptions instead of investigating corruption where it appears.
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The lack of the later leads to the former.
All rulings can be better, but Kavanaugh contributed to making the mess in the first place, as he and conservative members of the court spent 2025 voiding lower-court injunctions against similar radical policies, essentially telling lower-courts to "let Trump move fast and break things." In other words, Kavanaugh is lying: He doesn't actually care about legal clarity or mess-prevention. If he did we wouldn't even be in this situation in the first place.
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I agree with your first point (and I wasn't trying to defend Kavanaugh, just pointing out that the dissent calls something out), but I disagree with your second. Kavanaugh isn't lying - this ruling causes some chaos and uncertainty and I think that one of the reasons Kavanaugh doesn't like it is because it causes some chaos and uncertainty - but, to your first point, he doesn't appear to be acting in good faith. The Supreme Court absolutely could have handled this much better, and is part of the reason there's so much to undo.
The older I get and the more I learn, the crazier it is that evangelicals abandoned / were conned into supporting Reagan over Carter, all the while claiming that Reagan was sent from God or something. But then, I have seen the same thing played out recently: Biden, a devout catholic is considered borderline evil by my fundagelical parents (mostly due to religious channels from the US, even though they're in Canada), while Trump is approaching sainthood.
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Religion does weird things with the brain. I don't understand it either.
> people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want Yes, it's strange how dumb some rich/succesful people are. As I understand it, no civilization ever has done such a thing. If a civilization and its institutions crash, it remains failed/dysfunctional for a very long time. The only way to improve society is in small steps. I hope the people who finance this all will wake up to the reality that it may well cost them everything, too.
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It's not strange; they can just afford to weed out the people who say "no" from their lives. Everyone around them is either in the same situation, or depends on them for their cushy livelihood. Not having to hear "no" for decades breaks brains.
> He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo. With hindsight, it's pretty hard to believe that wasn't always the plan. It was a pretty clever plan too, because everyone calling Obama out for [mass surveillance, illegal wars, promoting the '08 crash bankers, torture, funding ICE, bombing a wedding/s, assassinating US citizens without trial, attacking whistleblowers, using his supermajority to implement a Heritage Foundation healthcare plan, etc] was dismissed as a racist. To this day I see people talk about the tan suit and the dijon mustard thing as if those fake outrage stories were the worst things he did. 'Wasn't it nice to have a President who could talk in complete sentences'.
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To be fair, it was nice to have a president that could speak in complete sentences. But yes, I agree that people go way too easy on Obama and present fake controversies as his worst. It should be possible to simultaneously recognize a president's strengths while also being critical of his flaws, but unfortunately American culture seems to have a growing personality cult problem, and it's generally just assumed that if you're not glazing a politician, you're an extremist from the other side doing false flag rhetoric or something inane like that.
The stated intention was to replace income taxes with tariffs; and it came with a bonus feature of handing the President a cudgel with which to grant him personal powers and personal rewards.
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There were something like six different stated intentions, most of which were entirely mutually-exclusive. Replacing income taxes was always the least credible of them.
> the consumers paid the price of the tariffs. These refunds are going to businesses who just passed the price along This story is often repeated, especially by businesses advocating against taxes, but transparently false if you think about it: Taxes and tariffs are costs for a business, no different than an increase in the cost of hops for Budweizer, or an increase wholesale cost of M&M's for the corner store. When hops' cost increases, Budweizer doesn't just pass it along to consumers; the corner store also doesn't just raise the price of M&Ms. Everyone knows that if you raise the price, fewer people buy your beer/candy and your profits may drop overall, while your scarce assets (money) will be sunk in products sitting on the shelves when you need those assets elsewhere. They can't just raise prices arbitrarily: if Budweizer charged $20/can they'd have zero profit. As we know well, some companies even sell products at a loss because that is the best outcome for their profits - e.g., car manufacturers, rather than have a hundred million in assets 'lost' indefinitely to unsold cars, and having no pricing that is more profitable, will sell at a loss to get what they can out of it. The clothing store puts last season's unsold clothes on sale around now. In economics the tradeoff between price and quantity sold is called the demand curve. There's a theoretical point on the curve, hard to identify precisely in reality, which maximizes your profit. So when costs increase, businesses still want to maximize profits: They decide how much of extra cost to pay directly out of their profits, and how much to raise the price and have consumers 'pay' for it. The consumers don't always go along with the plan: For products that are easy to forgo, such as M&Ms, consumers won't pay much more and businesses tend to eat cost increases. For products that are more unavoidable, such as gas for your car, consumers are compelled to pay more (until they buy more fuel efficient cars, or take a bus or ride a bicycle).
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Both can be true. On competitive environments it's harder to pass along costs to consumers, but when a supply pressure is unilaterally applied the competitive pressure to eat the increased costs goes away and is more easily passed along to consumers.
Often comments are sufficiently poorly reasoned or defecient that it makes more sense to downvote than reply. For instance complaining about downvotes always draws more as does collectively insulting the community you are participating in. As to the original question the problem is that it suggests confusion on a basic topic that was decided here centuries ago and taught in elementary school. If someone said what even is addition in an adult forum would you teach them addition or would you assume that they actually know addition and are arguing in bad faith because they feel math really ought to work differently? Also when you can divide a particular topic into clearly delineated camps appearing to disagree or question the basic premises that one camp holds is oft taken for disagreement and alignment with the opposing camp even when you are just debating a side issue and may in fact be mostly or entirely aligned with the people who feel like you are opposed to them. This shortcut as far as identifying motive and perspective can misfire but it's often correct and "just asking questions" is often underhanded opposition. Lastly a legitimate tax is one that is passed by Congress in the normal fashion and not overturned by the courts.
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I've been on this site since 2009. The level of discourse has dropped dramatically in recent times, yet I still love it here. The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting. As for talking about what shall not be talked about, how else shall we talk about it? Once I hit -4, it doesn't matter anyway so a few drops on what I have is not really a big deal. In reality, I'm not counting the numbers, I'm counting the people who have fundamentally lost the cognitive ability to reason about deeper meaning in a more philosophical sense and just click click click. Legitimate from a cultural / legal sense, but not from a philosophical one.
Ah, yes, just like he hates Japan and Italy for being run by women.
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There might be some political differences between these three women that may be relevant to the conversation.
> why would you muck with one of the most complicated systems humans have ever created That system explicitly encourages mucking with it. We have elections every 2/4/6 years. It has an amendment process. Parts of it, like judicial review and qualified immunity, were just plain invented . Per Jefferson: “On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, & what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, & consequently may govern them as they please. But persons & property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course, with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, & no longer. Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”
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so youre appealing to Jefferson to support your argument that we shouldnt revere the founders? All im doing is explaining why Americans in the current moment are conservative about the constitution. Why are you failing to acknowledge this? Im not making a value judgement im explaining why people think this way.
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I'm noting that the Founders weren't deluded or egotistical enough to think themselves as perfect as American conservatives treat them today. We should not revere them, and I think they'd agree with that .
It’s a factually incorrect claim. The other bit, “the most successful political body in world history”, isn’t even a falsifiable claim; it’s pure opinion. The Pope might disagree on it, for example.
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i will note your continued pedantry and wish you a nice day
I can understand your point in terms of negative liberty but I tend to hold positive liberty to be just as important. It is not sufficient to me that there is no law preventing me from having healthcare, I expect that the government should ensure I have the ability to have a healthy life. The 10th amendment isn't clear. Too many areas are dual responsibility. That's never going to be clear.
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So if there is nobody willing to be a doctor for the pay rate the govt is offering, what happens? Does your "right" to healthcare extend to literal slavery? I'm being a bit hyperbolic only to make the point... I don't think anyone's "rights" should include forced labor of anyone else. So certain things, even food cannot be a right... I would think that public lands and a right to hunt/gather or even some level cooperative gardening/farming might be okay as a middle ground though.
These are good examples of congressional power as defined in the Constitution. In each case the legislative branch created new agencies and delegated some power to the executive branch. But not the reverse. Can you give any example of the opposite? A case where the executive has delegated power to the legislative or judicial branches?
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The fact that these "independent" bodies even exist outside executive control in the first place. The fact that a President signed the legislation that created these bodies is an example of passing executive power to the legislative.
I didn't say SCOTUS or Justices? Even then, even if they are making political decisions, there's still the illusion of something resembling reason behind those decisions... that's far from some of the activist decisions further down the line at the district level.
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I should be more careful with my terminology. By saying the constitution made SCOTUS a political body, I meant that the design of the constitution is such that SCOTUS is free to interpret the Constitution (and laws) as it sees fit. The Constitution is designed such that it defines no rules and places no restrictions upon how Justices are to interpret the Constitution. The original design of the Constitution is that the Justices are to interpret the laws of the United States as they see fit. There is no such thing as an "activist" Supreme Court. The suggestion there must be an "Originalist interpretation" of the Constitution (e.g. it must be interpreted as intended by the Founding Fathers) is pure hogwash. If that were so, then by an "Originalist interpretation" the Constitution would already say so (and of course it doesn't). Nevertheless political conservative Justices actually made that part of their opinions that now impose the concept of "originalism" when interpretating the Constitution. A pretty neat magical trick by which the conservative Justices violate the philosophy of "originalism" to impose "originalism". And as for "further down the line at the district level", there is likewise no such thing as an "activist" court - in the sense that lower courts, unlike SCOTUS, are constrained by the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress. There cannot be "activist" district courts to the extent that if they overstep their bounds, SCOTUS will be called upon to address it. The phrase "activist court" is nothing more than a fictional invention of The Federalist Society. If there are actual politics being played in SCOTUS (this time I mean Republican vs Democrat), it is the Republicans through The Federalist Society and appointments to SCOTUS of Federalist Society Members. But now I am chasing down a rabbit hole that is best avoided.
> The Federal Reserve itself would be the biggest example. Can you expand? The Constitution gave the Executive powers that were then transferred to Congress and are now performed by the Federal Reserve?
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Paste from another reply: The fact that these "independent" bodies even exist outside executive control in the first place. The fact that a President signed the legislation that created these bodies is an example of passing executive power to the legislative.
> When he dropped out in July their simply isn't enough time to run a functional primary and campaign for the vote in November. That's only problem in the USA. Other western democracies are able to have snap elections done in two months.
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Other western democracies are much smaller or have much more uniform systems than the US as well. Not to say it's impossible, but it would take reworking the system. Right now the only elections that are highly publicized and known about are the ones every 4 years for president. Next is every two years election for congress and that's a big drop off in participation. Things like primaries you really have to go out of your way to know about them happening and when and where. The first couple states really end up determining who usually wins the nomination and financial backing. It takes time to move a candidate between places and set up multiple events and fundraisers. Now in state and city elections the US can do those quickly as well. Smaller area to cover and campaign and the community stays informed. It doesn't help that national elections involve institutions like the electoral college instead of a popular vote. That's a different problem though.
The main problem is that Congress is not competitive. If you live somewhere outside of a few remaining swing areas, you can just skip voting entirely. We need to do something to fix this: gerrymandering ban, increase the number of Reps, add more states for more Senate seats, etc.
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sorry, but that is not it, unless you think politicians are fungible within parties. The problem is that there is no real feedback mechanism between a what a congress person votes for and their electibility (within or across parties) because of money in politics. how is it possible that congress has consistent single digit approval ratings and they vote for things 90% of their constituents disagree with and still get elected? This is the core problem of American politics. Politicians are beholden to donors not voters.
Sounds like an enormous indictment of the Democrat party. Public views of their policies was so bad that the alternative you outlined was preferred.
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yes thats right, the rise of Hitler was probably justified because the Jews were admittedly very annoying... I mean if I had to choose between being ok with Jews or supporting Hitler, i can understand why people would pick Hitler. The election of Hitler was really quite an indictment of the Jews. (I am not saying Trump is Hitler)
Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking (harpers.org)
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> Roy was still up. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. He and most of the Cluely staff were flopped on a single sofa. All these people had become incredibly rich; previous generations of Silicon Valley founders would have been hosting exorbitant parties. In the Cluely office, they were playing Super Smash Bros. Did they spend every night there? “We’re all feminists here,” Roy said. “We’re usually up at four in the morning. We’re debating the struggles of women in today’s society.” Noticed this during the crypto hype as well and the articles about SBF-and-friends' Bahamas lifestyle. Are there more "startups" that feel more like VC-funded frat houses than actual businesses?
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"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something. This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did." I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.
"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well." I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been told that the advice to think critically wasn't meant for me.
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Critical thinking is slave mentality, man. Master mentality, the mentality of the guys who FUCK, is knowing that what you want to happen WILL happen and doing everything you can to make it happen. /s if not obvious
Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.
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It's a numbers game. You only need one in twenty con artists to become wildly successful before they're caught, and your overall con artist portfolio is guaranteed to win out. And of course, there's no downside for the investors. If you backed a con artist, you're not culpable - you're a victim.
Horses tend not to run for office. Because they're horses.
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Everyone knows someone who worked for years on a project only for it to go nowhere. Pour years into a business that failed. Spend years getting a degree that was useless. Effort might be a part of many people's success stories, but it's not the thing that literally gets rewarded. And conversely, many people get rewarded for things that require relatively little effort. I suppose I should have said that the correlation between effort and reward has never been 1.0 and has often been a lot lower than we like to believe.
The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.
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Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.
Yes and broadly speaking those concrete concerns can be considered in aggregate as "upward mobility."
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Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach. Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for about what he made writing one essay -- regardless of how good or bad it really is today, you're not going to see people express that kind of wonder and gratitude about it today. This discussion circles around it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074389 but I think the real working class stance is that you want protection from economic shocks more than "participation", "ownership", "a seat at the table", "upside", etc. This might be a selfish and even antisocial thing to ask for over 80 years near the start of the second millennium, but I think it would sell if it was on offer. It's not on offer very much because it's expensive. One could make the case that what we really need is downward mobility. Like what would have happened if Epstein had been shot down the first time or if Larry Summers had "failed down" instead of "failing up?" My experience is that most legacy admissions are just fine but some of them can't test their way out of a paper bag and that's why we need a test requirement.
I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs (spencer.wtf)
because of my precious stash? but also the repo is huge, the clone takes 10 minutes? And all the other branches...
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> because of my precious stash? you mean the… pile of shame ?
> I use `master` in all my repos because I've been using it since forever and it never has once occurred to me "oh shit I better change it to `main` this time in case `master` may offend somebody some day. As a white person from slavic origins (my mother had an Ukrainian name and we're originally from the ukrainian city of Kyiv), my ancestors were OG slaves. It's literally where the word "slave" comes from: same etymology. We, white people, have been traded as slaves by many (including other whites) since times immemorial. And yet I really literally don't care if people name their main branch "master" or "main". I like "trunk" but I'm sure some people with a political agenda could find a way to explain how "truck" is offensive. You have my blessings and I hope the blessings from many people with slavic origins.
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Whiteness is weird. You identify as such now, but historically you would not have been seen as white in the US, along with Irish, Finnish, etc people. > Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an "inferior race" who were unable to assimilate into American society. They were popularly not considered to be "fully white" (and thus fully American), and Slavic peoples' "whiteness" continues to be a debate to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavic_sentiment#United_States
So effectively "I just discovered xargs"? Not to disparage OP but there isn't anything particularly novel here.
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It's cool that it comes from CIA, and someone who doesn't know about xargs may just learn something new. What is not to like?
Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI (github.com/ggml-org)
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Thank you Georgi <3
Does local AI have a future? The models are getting ridiculously big and any storage hardware is hoarded by few companies for next 2 years and nvidia has stopped making consumer GPU for this year. It seems to me there is no chance local ML is going to be anywhere out of the toy status comparing to closed source ones in short term
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Mistral have small variants (3B, 8B, 14B, etc.), as do others like IBM Granite and Qwen. Then there are finetunes based on these models, depending on your workflow/requirements.
i am curious, why are your comments always pinned to the top?
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They aren't pinned, people just vote on them, and more so because simonw is a recognizable name with lots of posts and comments.
the code is not public, so we can't know. i think it's much more nuanced and certain users' comments might get a preferential treatment, based on factors other than the upvote count - which itself is hidden from us.
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> certain users' comments might get a preferential treatment This does not happen. It hasn't even happened when pg made the forum in the first place.
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I thought dang explicitly said it does happen? It certainly happens for stories.
Are mac kernels optimized compared to CUDA kernels? I know that the unified GPU approach is inherently slower, but I thought a ton of optimizations were at the kernel level too (CUDA itself is a moat)
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Depending on what you do. If you are doing token generations, compute-dense kernel optimization is less interesting (as, it is memory-bounded) than latency optimizations else where (data transfers, kernel invocations etc). And for these, Mac devices actually have a leg than CUDA kernels (as pretty much Metal shaders pipelines are optimized for latencies (a.k.a. games) while CUDA shaders are not (until cudagraph introduction, and of course there are other issues).
> AMD, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Qualcomm > but not quite anti-consumer either! All of them are public companies, which means that their default state is anti-consumer and pro-shareholder. By law they are required to do whatever they can to maximize profits. History teaches that shareholders can demand whatever they want, with the respective companies following orders, since nobody ever really has to suffer consequences and any and all potential fines are already priced in, in advance, anyway. Conversely, this is why Valve is such a great company. Valve is probably one of the only few actual pro-consumer companies out there. Fun Fact! Rarely is it ever mentioned anywhere, but Valve is not a public company! Valve is a private company! That's why they can operate the way they do! If Valve was a public company, then greedy, crooked billionaire shareholders would have managed to get rid of Gabe a long time ago.
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> By law they are required to do whatever they can to maximize profits. I know it's a nit-pick, but I hate that this always gets brought up when it's not actually true. Public corporations face pressure from investors to maximize returns, sure, but there is no law stating that they have to maximize profits at all costs. Public companies can (and often do) act against the interest of immediate profits for some other gain. The only real leverage that investors have is the board's ability to fire executives, but that assumes that they have the necessary votes to do so. As a counter-example, Mark Zuckerberg still controls the majority of voting power at Meta, so he can effectively do whatever he wants with the company without major consequence (assuming you don't consider stock price fluctuations "major"). But I say this not to take away from your broader point, which I agree with: the short-term profit-maximizing culture is indeed the default when it comes to publicly traded corporations. It just isn't something inherent in being publicly traded, and in the inverse, private companies often have the same kind of culture, so that's not a silver bullet either.
PayPal discloses data breach that exposed user info for 6 months (bleepingcomputer.com)
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Who still uses PayPal? I never hear it mentioned here anymore. They always were a scammy company, but especially very bad for sellers as they always side with the buyers. Locking up money for months of startups without cause etc. They terminated my seller account because 'fraud', no dispute possible. Years later they terminated my buyer account for 'fraud' no dispute possible. Never participated in anything that even looks like fraud but to their AI. Wish them many bad press.
At one point on the internet PayPal was the most trusted way to send and receive money - at least you are limiting sharing your personal payment information with random companies on the internet who may or may not be compliant. Lately though, with companies like Stripe and Plaid making it nearly frictionless to add payments to your website just as PP once did, and things like Google & Apple pay - why is there a need to use PayPal anymore? Their support is notoriously awful, the product is slow and dated, as a consumer at least I see no reason to not stop using PayPal (and their subsidies) entirely.
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> why is there a need to use PayPal anymore When I try to purchase something with my credit card directly on Best Buy's website, my order always gets cancelled (presumably something in their fraud algorithm), but when I pay using PayPal, the order goes through just fine.
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PayPal is still the only place really that offers viable micropayment fee structure. At least that I know of. At ardour.org, where we have thousands of $1 payments per month, PayPal saves us 23c per $1 transaction.
Wero doesn't add any value over standard SEPA transfers, I don't see why does it even exists. PayPal at least has some customer protection scheme.
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It's instant and much simpler than logging into your bank. Many EU countries already have their own alternatives like swish and vipps. Can pay with just knowing the phone number, scan qr code, even quite common in stores. No fee at all for private use, small merchants just need an app, no additional hardware.
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