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Comment by arecurrence | Hacker News Reader

I was very happy to see this feature announced! I turned it on immediately and so far it has had little negative impact on my life.

Some apps like Gmail will warn you that Lockdown mode is activated and that it will impact your experience but I have not encountered any drawbacks beyond iMessage links not opening the browser. This is easily worked around by copying them.

I hope this also blocks incoming calendar invites. Apple has as a feature the automatic addition of calendar invites... spammers soon noticed this and send out calendar invites with their favorite links that can clutter it up.

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Er, are you both under threat by nation-state attackers and also posting about your device security decisions on a public web forum? If so, you may wish to reconsider!

Fairly certain it's just another person wanting to go the extra mile of security. Sure, it may not do anything useful if you're just some guy Pegasus won't ever encounter. But if lockdown mode doesn't restrict OP in any way, what's the drawback of just enabling it to sleep that little bit better at night?

Seems most likely, but there’s nothing I need to say in that scenario. May as well cover the long-odds case in the off chance that I save someone’s life.

You might as well remind them the symptoms of a stroke, too.

It's just not a helpful warning.

F.A.S.T. has no corollary in digital safety.

> corollary

I'm not making an analogy. I'm saying right now, there's a similar long-odds off chance arecurrence is near someone having a stroke. And elaborating on stroke symptoms would be about as useful as the advice you gave earlier.

Ah. Yes, we agree: odds are, my comment won’t end up helping anyone. But it does no harm, either.

But also comments so unlikely to be relevant are usually frowned upon.

It’s valid, helpful, and statistically unlikely to reach anyone who needs to read it.

Statistically unlikely to be seen is the case for almost every comment I make, because that’s how I enjoy participating here at HN. The rest of the commenters have “statistically likely” covered! No need for me to pile on.

So I look for the odd weird corners and note them and earn a mix of “Whoah”, “No you’re wrong”, and “Sure but so what”. I’m cool with that :)

You're supposed to make all of your comments statistically likely to be relevant. White noise is bad.

And the warning you gave wasn't exactly going to be helpful to anyone else.

The exact wording in the guidelines that I’m adhering to is:

> Have curious conversation

There is no guideline directing me to make my comments relevant to the majority of HN readers. This is probably the most narrowly-focused HN comment I’ve ever made in a decade, though!

It’s neither offtopic nor generic, as it’s focused on the exact post topic at hand, and it says something odd but useful that no one else is saying. That’s the essence of what every HN comment should be.

And what you said wasn't useful.

We already established that the opsec scenario was so unlikely as to not matter for that particular poster. And for everyone else "you, specific person, under an extremely unlikely guess, should not be posting on HN" is not a useful post.

It’s more common than you’d think. Posting on Hacker News is generally not going to change your risk profile in such cases.

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