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dado3212on Swipeblocked: The phrases your iPhone won't suggest

But they're not selling anything? It just feels like a blog post.

dado3212on Swipeblocked: The phrases your iPhone won't suggest

Why did someone buy a full domain for this.

dado3212on Image generation has come a long way since August 2022

Wrote up a blog entry super recently about the nostalgia of the flaws - https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/i-miss-crappy-ai-art

dado3212on Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case

With regards to facial recognition, the opt-out checkbox disappeared because the functionality was fully scrapped in 2021. [1] The feature where they auto-suggest who to tag hasn't existed in 5 years, I'm not surprised they don't have a checkbox anymore.

[1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/technology/facebook-facia...

dado3212on Apple's hostile App Store rating system

Most apps are above a 3.0 because they implement the "nagware" to prompt normal happy users to leave reviews, rather than just relying on people reviewing out of the goodness of their hearts. Unfortunately this makes nagging table stakes to not end up with an abysmally low score.

dado3212on Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs not about AI?

I write a blog that’s not about AI, though is very technical.[1] For non-self promotion I’m a big fan of Jenn’s, who I got introduced by the first Inkhaven cohort.[2]

[1]. https://blog.alexbeals.com/ [2]. https://jenn.site/

dado3212on The three lines of CSS that saved me 40kb and might do the same for you

You can also strip unused characters from fonts! I use Prism to render code blocks on my blog, which pulls in FontAwesome for only two characters. Stripping all but those two characters reduced the font file size from 160kb to 680 bytes.[0]

[0]. https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/remove-unused-characters-fo...

dado3212on Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

Isn’t this offline? Where do you see that it’s online?

dado3212on The sigmoids won't save you

But if you met an alien who said they'd been alive for 100 years you wouldn't assume they're on the verge of dropping dead: you would assume they live longer. It's a rough rule for when you don't have other information, and if you're arguing against it you need to specify what other information you're using to make that argument.

dado3212on AI uses less water than the public thinks

This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s

dado3212on US debt is now bigger than the economy for first time since World War II

I feel like economists have drawn so many lines in the sand for “it all goes downhill here” that we blow through and keep chugging that the public’s inured to debt news. We won’t solve this until it’s already unsolvable.

dado3212on Metatextual Literacy

She’s describing something much more specific than subliteracy.

dado3212on NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

I think it's more relevant for quantum computing. The ions we choose for ion trap quantum computers are in part due to what wavelengths are excitable by modified telecom lasers, because they're the wavelengths that are easiest to produce and where the most research/stability/miniaturization has been focused. If the laser wavelength is configurable to this degree then it no longer becomes a constraint, and maybe you can choose single ions with different characteristics.

dado3212on Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://blog.alexbeals.com

dado3212on Adding insular script like it's 1626

Love this and was my first introduction to the <ruby> HTML element (this feels like a great expanded use case). Also couldn't agree more re: your point on the resurrection of "old internet" blogs, it's a trend I'm very much enjoying.

dado3212on Novo Nordisk launches Wegovy weight-loss pill in US, triggering price war

I would've expected that uptake was only beginning in 2022 and still vastly increasing through 2023 (plus the compounding loophole that allowed telehealth companies like Ro to really expand the target audience). 2024 and 2025 data are likely to be better telltales of the impacts of GLP-1s.

dado3212on Beating myself at chess

Would maybe benefit from a "Checkmate!" or other finish screen, but cool project! Though I agree that it beating you may be more based on your skill level than its, given how it keeps pushing pawns.

dado3212on Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations

What makes you say that? This didn't read like AI slop to me.

dado3212on Creating custom yellow handshake emojis with zero-width joiners

Unfortunately most of the benefit of this was undone by Apple's rollback of their family emoji rendering to just be shapes :/. Cool UX though!

dado3212on The last product to get cancelled

The font is rendering as nearly invisible. I'm guessing due to some incorrect dark mode styling?

dado3212on Mr TIFF

Did a similar deep dive for one of the posters for the cult classic movie Possession (1981). Just giving random phone numbers a call is incredibly effective, lots of people are happy to reminisce about old work and have great stories.

dado3212on PHP Almost Generics: Guided Journey Through the Official Compile-Time Proposal

I'm glad that PHP has adopted more and more from Hack, Facebook's once fork and now completely separate language - https://hacklang.org/. It was never going to replace it (Go's success separate from Google has astounded me to be honest) but it heavily influencing PHP's direction feels like the best of both worlds.

dado3212on iPhone dumbphone

I ended up doing this with Screen Time, but not knowing my own passcode. Having a partner or close friend is generally the approach I'd recommend, but you can also do this with iPhone Mirroring — I wrote up a how to guide in https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/setting-an-unknown-screen-t....

dado3212on I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer

I did something very similar for Fitness SF in the Bay Area!

https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/custom-apple-wallet-passes

dado3212on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2025)

FYI your Wix portfolio URL is broken.

dado3212on How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin

I don’t think it says anything useful for crawled but not indexed, unfortunately. My suspicion is that it’s almost always backlinks, but not totally sure.

dado3212on AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

Related, but to whichever PM put the "AI Mode" on the far left side of the toolbar, thus breaking the muscle memory from clicking "All" to get back from "Images", I expect some thanks for unintentionally boosting your CTR metrics.

dado3212on Give footnotes the boot – alternatives to footnotes on the web

I'm a big fan of sidenotes as a solution for this. If you're on desktop they'll pop out to the side and it's easy enough to glance over at them or stay focused on the main text without having to navigate around. On mobile that obviously doesn't work, but instead you can just have them open inline, so you don't have to deal with the annoying anchor link jump behavior and remembering where you were. And it's all doable with CSS and float, no Javascript!

Here's an example with a fair number of sidenotes:

https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/possession

dado3212on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

Recently, a lot of reverse engineering. I’ve been writing them up on my blog, so there’s a growing list of technical deep dives from this year: around Letterboxd with mitmproxy[0], iOS Shortcuts deeplinks[1], the QR codes for Fitness SF[2], and binary patching some non-open source code[3]. Hopefully followable even if you don’t have as much debugging or reverse engineering experience.

[0]: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/extracting-letterboxd-token...

[1]: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/reverse-engineering-ios-dee...

[2]: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/debugging-fitness-sf-qr

[3]: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/start-process-extensions