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mhitza

3,630 karma · joined December 7, 2010

You can drop me an email at marius.g@posteo.com

(PGP public key) https://posteo.de/keys/marius.g@posteo.com

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mhitza··on Cuba is skipping its November 1, 2026 clock change and staying on DST until 2027
Glad to hear that the tyranny of majority works at a societal norms level. Hopefully at some point that will be the case with democracies as well, instead of serving the privilege of few very wealthy individuals :)

I'd like to imagine a parallel universe where society has decided that given shorter days, as law, working hours must be reduced during the winter period to allow people to wakeup and leave work while the sun is still up. And for those unfortunate ones that work during night shifts the bonuses are significant for their added Vitamin D deficiency and life disruption.

mhitza··on Cuba is skipping its November 1, 2026 clock change and staying on DST until 2027
I'm very much the kind of person that prefers the sun extending in the afternoon than the downside waking up in the night. The current "normal" makes the days feel more easily as "lost".
mhitza··on Your Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
The topic has been discussed multiple times, and propaganda really feels like not acknowledging past discussions. You might not have seen past discussions so I'll give you a pass and restate my argument.

One important way that scams reach end users are through the willing participation of ad platforms, and even before DSA (not that much has changed) people (myself included) have done countless reports of straight up scam ads with no recourse and a templated "we have found nothing wrong with the ad".

As a data point, have you not seen the Tai Chi AI ads on YouTube that will "make you a different person by the end of the week" which where run by a company that sold you a subscription via dark patterns with all the surprises that brings (like a big headache of an unsubscribe process).

Or the fact that Meta knows that X% of it's ads are scam/phising and do nothing about it because it hurts the bottomline (an AI chat will help you with references).

The hypocrisy is too much coming from Google since they are owners of the machine that feed scams right to your doorstep.

And let's not ignore all the other fronts they are fighting on to further lock down the Android platform (such as not making source available immediately and moving more of the runtime in their play services and platform integrity nonsense).

mhitza··on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
If only I'd have 350k euros lying around to pursue this route, and have clear answers :)

But from what I gather (and my memory might be a bit fuzzy) on one hand you have to safe-keep the deposits from your operating capital in full to allow redeeming them back, while at the same time you have to hold those funds in "classical" banks. In which case, I would assume, they would fall within the same guaranteed 100k deposit safety which is across the EU. However the devil is in the details, if for example you can open a bank account for each individual user, or you're holding all deposits in a single grouped account.

As an end-user if you lose the funds that would be no different to losing your wallet, and a mechanism like this shouldn't be seen as a separate "bank account". With SEPA instant payments you would top it up as an additional wallet when you need to make payments and you don't have enough funds in your account.

The most concise page I could find right now, that talks about the EMI license is https://www.icon.partners/post/what-is-an-emi-license

mhitza··on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
> Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you.

With my short chat a while ago with GNU Taler's project maintainer was that for a rollout of Taler one would need an EMI (Electronic Money Issuance (?)) license. Besides the capital requirements to hold such a license there are rules to prevent/punish lack of deposit safety.

In short, it's not comparable to cryptocurrency "trust me bro" attitude, but it also makes it hard for new startups to get seed funded to start their own Taler exchange and payments integration.

mhitza··on Claude Duet
Silent members? I would also guess conspiratively, employees and founders that benefit from the current AI-hype status quo.
mhitza··on JetBrains Junie Local: An agent you own, not one you rent
What a slop of a page.

Anyone on HN have real experience with their agent harness?

I've mostly used codex in the past (and in IDE plugins) with llama.cpp self-hosted models. Aside from packaging those things directly together (or another inference engine) does this bring something novel? Aside from a marketing angle.

mhitza··on Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why
It was a funny annecdote that I felt like sharing. In principle searching for solutions in the way things where done in the past is generally not a good approach.

The lesson there is still that given people more room for privacy is a factor, hence the radical (and absurd) proposal at the end.

For a different annecdote, my country also complains about constantly decreasing natality, but never celebrates decreased teen pregnancy. In fact we have right-wing parties that consider anything related to sex education, a problem.

mhitza··on Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why
Of course it a multi-faceted problem, and I think my comment draws similar lines because I did not draw it out as the sole reason.

Modern media, and it's addiction is also a separate corelateable aspect.

mhitza··on Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why
That doesn't work, at the very least, for two simple reasons.

First that you can't attest who filmed something without a lot of effort that law enforcement for sure won't bother with.

In many countries caught doing such activities in public spaces falls under public indecent exposure, if not something more draconian that puts you on a sex offender list. Morally people will feel obliged to report it there.

mhitza··on Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why
The potential speculations already listed in the article sound like enough reasons.

How about you corelate this with cost of living, financial independece, and decreasing socialisation? We are seeing similar trends in european countries.

When my generation was growing up, and reaching adulthood, in the late 90s early 2000s while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!

Who in their right mind would do so today when you can't even pick your nose without being caught by some random outside camera or mobile phone.

Maybe think radically and enforce the opposit of curfews whereas old parents living with their young adults are forced to hang outside at bars/clubs from 10pm to 9am to give their youth some breathing room :))

mhitza··on Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote
The big two AI labs are still not listed on the stock market, and SPCX is still above it's listing price. Unless you can remain liquid more than the market remains irrational better find some other use for your investment funds. No?
mhitza··on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors
Why allow profiling at all? This way everyone gets a bit more privacy, second it doesn't create another situation where you got to prove that you're an adult.
mhitza··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
> people need to get it in their heads that they're not chatting with their secret BFF

I see constant ads on video platform (particularly youtube/tiktok) about llm chat apps, from friends, dating, romance and everythkng inbetween; that's personal.

People need to be reminded constantly if they use such apps that they are participating in easier mass surveillance, profiling and AI training.

mhitza··on Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
What is this a reference to?
mhitza··on I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
Or just very dubious timings. Like the other guy from Anthropic that was all over the international news. No followers, no post history but a single post blows up "naturally".

Highly suspect trends that can only make one believe it's marketing.

mhitza··on Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model
I don't have the hardware to test this, but being trained to say "I don't know" instead of misleadingly talking confidently about what it does not know is interesting in itself.
mhitza··on ChatGPT Pro 500
Alternative https://nitter.xitter.cc/thsottiaux/status/21048238120429407...
mhitza··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Your factors are real, but I think both elements are at play. I admit I could be biased as I see gen Z as more disciplined, locked in, from gyms to lifestyle.

Socialisation, or lack thereof, is a great problem for many people and newer generations raised "online", when you get for free at home endless social media distraction.

But even the 20 year olds I've met in bars were likely to stop drinking way sooner than us milenials, which still get plastered, at least on special occasions.

mhitza··on Show HN: NSL – WSL for Linux
Haven't checked the actual project but he does state he uses systemd-nspawn. Which is it's own kind of container runtime.
mhitza··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
My impression is that decline can mostly be attributed to gen Z. They grew up with social media that made a better point to emphasis how dangerous alcohol is. Previous dominant media, at most, had very sterile disclaimers that alcohol is bad for you.

Romania has seen a similar decline in consumption (though still in top 3 across EU in consumption), such as that nowadays we have articles from media outlets (as a voice for the industry) that complain of the downward trend. While in reality we should be celebrating this change in culture!

mhitza··on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
Unless you have a reliable social network with reach, reddit is still the reliable way to get some answers for one niche or another.
mhitza··on Una watch review: A modular, repairable GPS watch is a good first step
Interesting watch. The article is light on details, as for example it hasn't been put up for a real endurance test even if it's one of the author's worries.

It'd be interesting to know if the watch can sync up with a phone via the usb cable and if the bluetooth component can be removed from the watch while still remaining functional.

mhitza··on Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers
As a different datapoint Pascal is still taught here in Romania in secondary school just as it was the case 20 years ago.

Bigger problem is that they teach the fundamentals with the abandonware that is turbo pascal instead of using something like the modern Free Pascal Compiler. Which means knowledge of what is possible outside curricula is limited.

Last year I almost was tasked with porting some Pascal codebase to a modern language. Problem was the project had a bus factor of 1, legacy overengineered and would only compile on windows with some proprietary compiler.

Maybe that company would use Claude/Codex or something like that, today, to port the project.

mhitza··on VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)
Am I that much of? My reading of the following was that the remotely executed agent pushes commands back to your local vscode.

> [...] VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node. [...]

> It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can:

mhitza··on OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'
> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

It was discussed a while ago on HN, with a more well known source, that I cannot find right now, but on a quick DDG search this is a quick article I could conjure.

https://www.gate.com/news/detail/david-sacks-warns-ai-doom-n...

mhitza··on Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel
They are losing because they embraced AI at the detriment of what they where doing well.

It was a good tool, that worked, paid for it for a couple of months and then they decided to go with AI and using my writing for training.

mhitza··on Good people refuse to do bad things
I like to think of good in terms of direct positive effect, and bad in terms of direct negative externalities. Second order effects become too fuzzy.

Do the people working for AI labs believe that it has a better direct beneficial effect, or makes for a worse outcome on society?

What I've read thus far heavily lead me to believe that the balance is well tilted towards the negative.

If you're one of the "f u got mine" belief system, you do not care about effects but only your wallet.

This is also in some way how my perception has been tinted by effective altruists; which (through media representation) seem activiley present as employees at AI labs. Are those people actively donating away 10-20% of their base salary every year, or "whatever it takes to make me a billionaire" and "after that I'll do some philantrophy"?

Effective altruism hasn't really crossed the atlantic into the balkans, feel free to correct me and elucidate me on the positive effects in the US of this ideology.

mhitza··on Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain
Why do you think so many big tech companies are registering subsidiaries in Ireland? (Aside form the "Double Irish" mechanism that used to be in vogue more than a decade ago).

Plenty of hands seem to be well greased over there given how long it takes to issue fines for clear&cut violations of EU regulation.

mhitza··on Show HN: Snapdrop: Instantly share files between devices. No setup, no signup
I can't report on percentage improvement, but after a long time localsend recently pushed out a version that claims to be much better (to be read as faster) for the transfer of large/many files.

For a long time the issue was blocked because of an upstream library, maybe LLMs finally unblocked the devs to push the fixes through.

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