HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cormorant

282 karma · joined April 16, 2018

You can email me: (HN user name) @ box129.com
submissionscomments
cormorant··on Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?
How do you disable Shortcuts?
cormorant··on Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?
Many people are experiencing the opposite.
cormorant··on Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?
> mediaanalysisd

Incredibly, the current mitigation is a cronjob to SIGSTOP it once per minute. https://github.com/jac-jim/stop-mediaanalysisd

Yearslong history of this issue, with it getting harder and harder. https://gist.github.com/huksley/564be2c903312bcee7dffe415d12...

cormorant··on Verizon outages reported across U.S.
Further info: https://old.reddit.com/r/cellmapper/comments/1qcwj48/observa...
cormorant··on Verizon outages reported across U.S.
It's a population map lacking Dallas for sure ... which might mean something real ... but that doesn't match the per-city charts they offer. Who knows.
cormorant··on How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?
> 48khz exists because it syncs with video easily

I guess meaning 24fps video? Because 44100 is already a multiple of 25, 30, 50, and 60.

cormorant··on The Delete Act
> Before submitting a deletion request, you will be required to verify you are a California “resident,” as defined in section 17014 of Title 18 of the California Code of Regulations as that section read on September 1, 2017. Verification is made with assistance from state contracted third-party vendors, including Socure and Login.gov, through the California Identity Gateway.

-- https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/

cormorant··on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
Not only that, but they post a sign about this at every register. (That must be required.) So you can point to the sign. I think a typical store manager would comply. Maybe I'm not cynical enough.
cormorant··on The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
Here's that short documentary if you're interested: https://archive.org/details/restoring-the-civil-war
cormorant··on What's in a Passenger Name Record (PNR)? (2013)
The "IP address" shown is in the private range 172.16/12. What other incorrect claims are lurking in this "article"?
cormorant··on New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair
EDIT: https://archive.is/MYBSe

Site is down, not in archive.org or archive.today. This Yandex Cache link worked for me: https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=176237557...

cormorant··on Female spies are waging 'sex warfare' to steal Silicon Valley secrets
Classically, spies are motivated by: money, ideology, coercion, or ego [1]. I wonder which it is. A Russian woman "marrying a target, having kids with a target — and conducting a lifelong collection operation" on an "aerospace company" in the "military-space innovation community".

I'd guess it has to be ego.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/9ccc45dc156271d1176...

cormorant··on I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
Worrying about editing git history buries the lede. Any comment system allows users to insert data into your site, which, if it might be illegal things, is a legal risk.
cormorant··on Rayhunter: IMSI Catchers We Have Found So Far
But someone else did: https://san.com/cc/exclusive-evidence-of-cell-phone-surveill...

using a different tool, "Marlin". The article has some technical details.

cormorant··on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that
What is the significance of the half-erased numbers in the sand? (You seem to imply it's a hidden message?) What is "rootα" (root alpha?)?
cormorant··on Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
There are mirrors and backups of Wikipedia. Archive.org has no substitute.
cormorant··on Synthetic gasoline
Interesting, good to know, though I wish it weren't so. I wonder how long until the pendulum (of SEO) swings the other way, and then following it, AI websites' style.
cormorant··on Synthetic gasoline
Wow, that's...something.
cormorant··on Synthetic gasoline
Yes and even in the New York Times[†], but somehow it's still different in some way I can't articulate.

[†] Q&A format: https://archive.is/20250828121105/https://www.nytimes.com/20... ;

Bulleted list with bold format: https://archive.is/g8K5w#live-feed-items

cormorant··on Synthetic gasoline
Honest question: how do you all sense when a page is AI-written? To me, the many headings, lists, and frequent use of bold stand out stylistically. Additionally: the multilevel numbered table of contents; the parenthetical acronyms (to the point of silliness, as in "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)" stand out.

Non-stylistically, the non-answers to questions or misinterpreted questions (read the bolded final sentence under "What is the octane rating of synthetic gasoline?") are a tell.

cormorant··on Lack of intent is what makes reading LLM-generated text exhausting
> Note on the title: “Artificial Inanity” comes from Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem.

Which was awfully prescient in 2008: https://archive.org/details/anathem0000step/page/794/mode/2u...

They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum.

...

cormorant··on Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations
Are you saying an algorithmic content recommendation system is an important part of "collecting all the world's knowledge"?
cormorant··on Sign in with Google in Chrome
The article mentions a setting in Chrome only. Someone using uBlock Origin is not using Chrome.
cormorant··on Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations
Can anyone explain how Wikipedia supposedly is in Category 1? [1]

And if it marginally is, how come they cannot just turn off their "content recommender system"? Perhaps an example is the auto-generated "Related articles" that appear in the footer on mobile only?

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2025/226/regulation/3/ma...

cormorant··on Tom Lehrer has died
Richard Severo, the author of this obituary, died two years ago!
cormorant··on Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
It would be astonishingly hypocritical if the author (https://www.maalvikabhat.com/ who btw does academic research on societal influences of AI) wrote the following using AI (a quote from beyond the paywall follows). If anything I wonder whether she picked up a ChatGPT speech pattern herself from so much exposure to it.

"This is why AI can write but cannot create. It can remix existing patterns with mechanical precision, but it cannot sit in the fertile void where genuinely new ideas are born. It cannot endure the months of terrible drafts that make you question your sanity, the years of failure that feel like slow starvation, the decades of practice that transform a human into an artist through accumulated scar tissue and hard-won wisdom. AI has never stared at a blank page at 3 AM, coffee cold, wondering if anything will ever come. It has never had to choose between the easy metaphor and the one that makes your chest tight with recognition. It has never experienced the moment when disparate ideas suddenly fuse into something that didn't exist before, something that surprises even its creator. It can simulate the surface of creativity (the clever turns of phrase, the familiar structures), but it cannot access the underground rivers of human experience that feed genuine innovation. It writes like someone who has read about love but never been heartbroken, someone who can describe the ocean but has never tasted salt water."

cormorant··on Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
The second half of this post is behind paywall, in case you didn't notice.
cormorant··on UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US
Why are you quoting an article about WhatsApp after making a claim about iMessage and what Apple builds in?

(Not that the article has any evidence supporting the same claim about WhatsApp, either. In fact, the article describes WhatsApp/Meta claiming to have "disrupted" the spying and reporting it to the Italian government.)

cormorant··on UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US
> It's a feature of iMessage with various names such as "zero click".

All web results for `imessage "zero click"` are about vulnerabilities/exploits. Are you claiming some of these are intentional, or what?

cormorant··on A new PNG spec
"common but not representable RGB spaces like Adobe 1998 RGB or ProPhoto RGB cannot use CICP and have to be identified with ICC profiles instead."

cICP is 16 bytes for identifying one out of a "list of known spaces" but they chose not to include a couple of the most common ones. Off to a great start...

I wonder if it's some kind of legal issue with Adobe. That would also explain why EXIF / DCF refer to Adobe RGB only by the euphemism "optional color space" or "option file". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...

← PreviousPage 2 of 5Next →