Hacker News Reader

blfron Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished

As a Linux user of over 20 years, I really don't like thinking of myself as some Aborigine barely holding on to a scrap of ancestral land. My tech preferences have become so ubiquitous that nearly the entire Internet runs them.

In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.

I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.

blfron My Feed, My Way

Yeah, it has gone further. You wouldn't hear "kill all men" at a uni in the 90s either. But I am not convinced that this is social media because hardline feminism predates it significantly.

blfron Mistral raises €3B

Why hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.

blfron My Feed, My Way

I was a teenage boy in the 90s and "girls are stupid" is definitely not a Tik Tok original. Yeah, yeah, scale matters but this is not in fact the first generation to discover sex differences or vices.

blfron Mistral raises €3B

It's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.

blfron My Feed, My Way

I cannot relate to liking Facebook because I never did in any of its eras but once upon a time newspaper was a competitive information technology. People would read them on the subway and at the beach. I did this, I am old enough to remember "saving" articles to read when I took a magazine into the sauna.

The same happened to algo-less social media sites.

blfron Mistral raises €3B

Right now the weakly regulated American market is delivering staggering competition where massive corporations are fighting tooth and nail over my 100 bucks.

I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.

blfron Mistral raises €3B

I don't care about benchmarks. Benchmarks show that Opus 5 is a stronger model than Fable 5 which is obviously not the case.

But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.

blfron My Feed, My Way

Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that social networks are popular despite the content algos and not because of them? The reason Tik Tok blew up is because it shows you what you want to see without you twiddling with a dozen dials.

Maybe giving people what they want is not great for them. I am ok with this argument. But then "giving people control" won't change anything. Vast majority of users would rather put up with shocking (to me) levels of annoyance and expense just not to configure/fix anything themselves.

blfron Doomscrolling ourselves to death

I didn't have time to write a shorter comment.

blfron Doomscrolling ourselves to death

The not-reading part is seriously starting to sound like lamenting the death of the epos. Yeah, there is a real loss of an art form there but also most books are padded to death and should have been articles at most, maybe even tweets.

The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.

blfron "We Have to Assume That the Internet Will Go Offline in the Next Few Years"

I see no reason for the Internet to go offline, other than various political blocks compartmentalizing it. So: China, Russia, EU having their own network? Yeah, maybe. Super-AI nuking the Internet: no.

In fact, the more I use AI (handed sudo to Claude on my AI dev box just yesterday), the more I see it as a pretty good, and certainly tireless, sysadmin. Looking at what people do with AI by connecting it to undocumented hardware interfaces and getting working setups from this, the Internet will do fine.

The whole article is just a grab-bag of various AI fears without much grounding in what is happening. Maybe the summary doesn't do justice to what was said.

blfron The Real Luxuries In Life

Slow mornings and rest without guilt are very apt and specific but time and health are just general wishes.

I would add work with meaning and flow.

Also life with few... snags, all the issues that are small but extremely bothersome (knocking sound in a car, that one window that doesn't close fully, etc).

blfron I Want a Wife (1971) [pdf]

This cannot be resolved, you will not be an equal parent or even close to it the first few months, maybe even over a year. Breast feeding and various dependencies that develop (like that the kid wants to fall asleep at the breast) mean that most of the effort of parenting early falls on the mother.

And then there's the fact of life that other stuff needs to be taken care of. Trash still needs to be taken out, groceries bought, etc further pushing you towards the stuff outside of parenting.

This can hardly be resolved with money. We could hire nannies, get the top nursery, whatever. It would even be cost-efficient if it let mom work. However, the kid doesn't want to be without his mom and much more so she doesn't want to be away from him for a longer time! Even with me 4-6 hours is about it.

blfron Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions

Aren't we all nowadays.

blfron Digital Sovereignty is written in PHP

The German case is worth looking at closely, because the decision is documented rather than inferred.

At least install of the text humanizing skills.

blfron In defense of two-state theme toggles

It annoys me to not be able to reset a preference so I always give the third option: for light/dark and for the language.

blfron Google Antigravity TOS: 3rd party usage can get Google account suspended

This would have been a massive issue if Antigravity/Gemini were any good.

I don't appreciate but kinda understand that Anthropic can act arrogant with Fable. Google (shockingly) is really in no position for this.

blfron Invisible Companies

The value is mostly in succeeding and communicating the mechanism. There's very little value in merely trying to understand.

But I think economists did pretty well: supply and demand, marginalism, opportunity cost, Coase theorem... Not physics-level well but well.

blfron AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

There are some good points, and I ask the question of where is the ground breaking stuff myself, but severely weakened by

* stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years,

* using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable.

Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putting the app, database, and background processes on the same server is very much the right starting point. With the next steps being employing Cloudflare or similar solutions long before managing a fleet of servers.

blfron Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

And yet it will live forever, just like Dunning-Kruger despite its statistical issues. I fully expect to see it cited during some workshop or other pointless training exercise.

blfron OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?

It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

blfron Bug Blindness

iOS has no (user-viewable) notification history?

blfron You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It

If virtually all the websites operators make the same choice, then this is the result of GDPR. What's nonsensical is ignoring real-life results of regulation because it had some other intention. I don't live with its intention.

blfron Manifesto – who we are and what do we want (2002)

A/I explicitly state they don't provide stuff to groups like political parties. So regardless of culpability, they would be at least violating their own rules.

blfron You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It

Banner gets a lot of attention because of the never-ending annoyance it's causing. It's like being surprised that someone would care about something so small as a little rock in their shoe. Yeah, you care about these little things.

It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech they're regulating and its potential. Again, not some weird controversial point.

With every next leak where my full name, PESEL (that's like SSN here in Poland), email, phone number become semi-public and... nothing happens, I am becoming more convinced that we are annoying ourselves for nothing. Just degrading our digital lives and generating tons of legal digital text no one reads for no benefit of anyone involved.

At the same time, the very people who pretend to defend my privacy, oppose Tor, Signal, anonymity online, and other tools that definitely benefit me.

blfron Autistici/inventati: Manifesto – who we are and what do we want (2002)

I know them. I think I even had an account there once.

How did it go from

> The services we provide are not intended for (directly or indirectly) commercial use, or to be used by organized religions or political parties

> Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/

Is this allegation simply not true? Do they have nothing in common with PKK?

blfron U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications

There is a whole site with various trends that diverged or changed since 1971.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

It's not exactly an unbiased selection but it is interesting.

blfron Anger, Anxiety and Agency

Really? You don't write dockerfiles, ansible playbooks, never wanted something rewritten into typescript so that it also works client-side, or get stuck in some cloud console?

blfron Anger, Anxiety and Agency

Maybe it's AI psychosis speaking but how can you not be excited? You can outsource virtually all electronic drudgery for $100/mo.

I haven't been this excited about tech since I set up my first home server 20+ years ago. And Claude doesn't sounds like an always-on vacuum cleaner (it was a decommissioned proliant).