Hacker News Reader

lom888on Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.

lom888on Why China Believes America Will Flame Out

Wang Huning, then a little-known academic, was moved by his travels through the U.S. to write the book America Against America, in which he described a nation beset by social fragmentation, inequality, and political dysfunction. Shocked by the country’s problems of homelessness, drug addiction, racial violence, social divisions, and low education standards, Wang concluded that America contained the seeds of its own destruction.

I would love to see poll numbers how many red and blue would prefer to be ruled by the Chinese than to the opposing domestic tribe. I suspect it may be one thing that unites them...

lom888on Why we lose our friends as we age (2023)

It's just gonna be chatting with sockpuppet AIs from here on out. Someone needs to set up a social network where our AI agents (who for many of us, know us better than our families) sort out who we'd be best set up to socialize with and then set up play dates.

lom888on Does current AI represent a dead end?

I don't know how to code in any meaningful way. I work at a company where the bureaucracy is so thick that it is easier to use a web scraper to port a client's website blog than to just move the files over. GPT 4 couldn't write me a working scraper to do what I needed. o1 did it with minimal prodding. It then suggested and wrote me a ffmpeg front-end to handle certain repetitive tasks with client videos, again, with no problem. Gpt4 would often miss the mark and then write bad code when presented with such challenges

lom888on The NYPD is spending $390M on a new, encrypted radio system

FTA, quotes from council members:

Encrypting police radios “is a crime in itself,” Councilmember Robert Holden testified on Monday.

“There should never be a blackout of the press,” Councilmember Vickie Paladino added.

Radio encryption technology is more than 20 years old. In the UK this technology has been in place since 2000. Criminals monitor open frequencies and use this information in their crimes. I fail to understand the logic of why one would have a police department and then hinder the tools that they use to effectively enforce the law. It's not like they can't just use a cell phone anyway and not have their comms heard by the public.

lom888on If needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation

It is pretty rich that Microsoft of all companies is now coming in to be seen as the savior and not many people are batting an eye. It's a face turn 20 years in the making. If Facebook, Apple or Google were doing the same I suspect we'd hear more opprobrium.

lom888on Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

Okay, here's something written by Trump supporter and Cal State Fresno prof. Victor Davis Hanson discussing the effect of immigration on a community where he has lived since 1970:

https://www.hoover.org/research/diversity-illegal-immigratio...

lom888on Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

It's interesting that we treat kettling children up indoors by age cohort with little movement and making them solve math problems ad nauseum as if it were the most natural thing in the world and treat those who can't sit still and learn in such an environment (or understand the purpose of doing all of those math problems for 13 years) as if they are an aberration.

lom888on Opinion Google Pixel's ad campaign is destroying humanity

https://archive.ph/hHACg

lom888on Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

Exactly, the deflections of 'racism' and 'sexism' are thought-terminating cliches bandied about in an act of pure class war. No need to listen to Trumpies talk about immigration and how it effects their community if they're all racists; that makes them the other and we can just pretend they don't exist.

lom888on US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts

I subscribe to the FB and Insta accounts of local libraries in my county and those next to mine, and it appears that many of the librarians view much of their position to be engaging in agitprop for certain political points of view. I can understand why funding may dry up when half of the stakeholders in the library are alienated due to culture warring.

lom888on Firefox tooltip bug fixed after 22 years

This bug is older than the initial release of Firefox by two years.

lom888on The Instagram Account That Shattered a California High School

https://archive.is/8S4oD

lom888on One of Reddit’s biggest communities suggests move to Discord [Strike ongoing]

I hope that self-hosting is the route that this plays out a la rdrama and themotte. Eventually these sites will all be confederated via link aggregation and can have their own moderation practices independent of a corporate behemoth.

lom888on The internet didn’t kill counterculture, it's just not on Instagram (2021)

>pub trivia

This was one of my two outlets for social participation until about 10+ years ago, but this pursuit has been ruined by phones. Participants cheat without a second thought and the emcees refuse to enforce rules.

lom888on Supreme Court Rejects Student Loan Forgiveness Plan

Removing the bankruptcy exemption from student loans as was the status quo prior to the 1980s solves this. The lenders then have a vested interest in ensuring that their lendees generate enough income to pay off the loans.

lom888on Pornhub blocks access to entire state of Virginia

I had to throw my VPN on to see this, PornHub in Virginia now shows a message by Cherie Deville against age verification as it's currently being enforced.

lom888on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

But perpetuating the logic of groups being advantaged over groups only keeps the identitarian mindset going. By openly favoring certain groups the discrimination never ends. All you need to do is look at India where the active discrimination in favor of scheduled castes goes on ad infinitum to see that the effect of any discrimination amplifies sectarianism. The line needs to be drawn somewhere. You don't fight fire with fire, you fight it with water. You don't solve discrimination with more discrimination, you fight it by having people not accept the logic of identitarianism.

lom888on American states are bailing out public transport

https://archive.is/cAfee

lom888on Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

In your opinion, do they have to say a racism or merely think it to be worthy of being locked out of their home?

lom888on Sub.Rehab – See where Reddit communities have relocated

A few subs like r/themotte and r/drama moved offsite and self-hosted before this current kerfuffle, does anyone know of others of the same ilk?

lom888on The Problem with Taking TikTok Away from Americans

https://archive.is/DF4hZ

lom888on Fall in petrol use in gas-guzzling US heralds shift for global markets

https://archive.is/FMKQH

lom888on Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

https://archive.is/YLmuR

lom888on Random acts of violence? Better get used to it

https://archive.ph/zAAfw

lom888on The GPT disinformation age is now

>FTA: The user has 98 answers and, you've guessed it, they are all created with GPT. PLOT TWIST: The questions where also created with GPT!

Hopefully the internet is turned to grey goo before the successors of ChatGPT start optimizing for addictiveness.

lom888on Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

You can usually ask ChatGPT to do a point/counterpoint to argue both sides of an issue and then get it to focus only on the counterpoint. Alternatively you can create a sci-fi scenario similar to the real world one and it will give a non-hall monitor view.

lom888on TV Ratings Road Map: Where, When and How Viewers Watch in the Streaming Era

I am a cord-cutter. On Sunday I can watch the NFL from 1pm until 11pm on three separate channels. On Saturdays I have a choice of three or four channels for college football and I have games on most of the day. During hoops season I can watch college basketball on some weeknights and then during much of the weekend.

That being said, I will not be able to watch any of the College Football Playoff over the air, and I only get a smattering of baseball games over the air during the regular season.

lom888on Lofi Girl: YouTube sorry for taking down music stream

The company I work for builds websites for small and medium sized businesses throughout the US. For a period of about two years we would host a copy of a video that we made for the customer on YouTube and use it on customer websites. There came a point where a handful dissatisfied customers claimed infringement for some of these videos and our YouTube channel (thousands of videos) was terminated without appeal, even though the customer had always provided authorization and the contents for these videos. Fortunately we'd decided to self-host our videos before the channel was terminated but there were cases where we lost content that we'd created.

lom888on Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

I wish we saw more comparison between the US and Latin America in online discourse. There is an excess of references and analogies made to the emotionally salient topics of the US Civil War, the Civil rights period and Europe from 1918 to 1945 when discussing the current American situation and a dearth of comparison to Latin America. The frequent comparison of Trump to a dictator instead of to a populist president in the Latin American mold is an example.