Hacker News Reader

shaboinkinon Epic Games Inc v Apple Inc

I wonder if this will result in a situation where Apple will find some other means of getting paid for all of the money they spend on producing the software that allows access to their hardware. How else do you develop apps for iOS, even if you create your own store, without directly using the software and tooling they provide?

shaboinkinon California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year

Slightly tangential, but I wonder how much energy savings could be had if street light timings factored in the energy it takes to get cars moving from a stop to the posted speed limit from one intersection to the next. Terrible light timings around my area mean 20-30 cars all start getting to move only to stop a short distance later because one car on a side street happened to approach the sensor when a larger intersection turned green, which leads to a snowball affect where the timings at the next major intersection don’t consider the odd side street breaking the flow, causing more and more timing issues. This affects not just gas/electricity usage but also tire and brake wear.

shaboinkinon Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior

Risk aversion could be looked at in the same lens in my opinion. It’s possible to be risk adverse in a modern society as we have risk takers to do it on your behalf. Policemen and women, firefighters, warfighters, astronauts, test pilots, athletes, etc. But if you’re a deer in the headlights and unable to be willing to push yourself past your preconceived fears and limits, you’re holding yourself back from your true potential. And why might that be the case? Did something happen in one’s life that causes them such behaviors where they’ll always prevent themselves from entering into uncomfortable situations? Anecdote, but there’s someone I know that absolutely avoids anything that could possibly be uncomfortable for him because of an accident that happened in his childhood. It’s all mental.

shaboinkinon Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

Counter point: Apple exists in their size because of the US’s willingness to keep shipping lanes and trade routes open by use of force and US diplomatic efforts to allow for trade to exist in foreign nations. It’s debatable if this still holds true or is the correct approach given the shitshow going on right now.

shaboinkinon Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs. Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to spend money on it to remove ads. Maybe someone could tell me what actually is a fair value of tapping into literally every single video uploaded in YouTube’s existence on demand? $16 a month seems reasonable to me.

shaboinkinon Without America to rely on, EU gearing up to be a global power in its own right

https://youtu.be/NFw7ZifqhTg?si=IujBLjIsaQysNHmp&t=267

4:27

“The time when we conveniently let the United States carry the burden for our security is over. The US is absolutely committed to NATO, but this commitment comes with a clear and long standing expectation, that Europe and Canada take more responsibly for their own security, and I believe that is only fair.” -Mark Rutte

shaboinkinon Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors

Anecdotally, my company has a device driver posted on Windows Update. I inherited the project and was digging through Microsoft’s hardware dashboard trying to find information on the stability of the driver. I ended up finding that our driver was crashing rather frequently. Looking closer, the name of the driver shown was curious as it contained the name of our driver as defined in the inf file, and appended at the end was “(WeTest)”. I looked through all source code looking for a reference to this string with no avail. Eventually I googled “WeTest” and find out WeTest is something owned by Tencent. I double checked all drivers that were ever posted to the server from our account and found no reference to “WeTest” in any of the driver packages uploaded. I emailed our Microsoft contact and got no answers as to where this driver came from and why it was visible from our account. After a few months, this driver finally was removed from our dashboard and our administrator for the account had to submit government documents to Microsoft to show he worked at where he said he did. I won’t give specifics on who’s or what’s, and anyone is more than welcome to dismiss what I’m saying without evidence. But your comment, “when Microsoft’s update servers get compromised..”, made me want to share this experience. Maybe it was some terrible software bug on Microsoft’s end that managed to combine information from two different entities, but we were never given an explanation as to how this happened.

shaboinkinon OpenAI won't make money by 2030 and needs another $207B, HSBC estimates

From watching talks by the various US think tanks (CSIS, CFR, Hudson, etc), the common theme whenever the topic of AI is brought up is that the US is in strategic competition with China where it essentially boils down to economic superiority where the idea is to have US technology spread globally and not China’s. Oh and military application of AI.

I have a hunch the hyper won’t slow down anytime soon if these groups who have the eyes and ears of the government are suggesting to go full steam ahead in the technology.

shaboinkinon iPhone Air

“Sixty-three percent of adults said they would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent, unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but down from a high of 68 percent in 2021.”

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

$999 is a lot of money.

shaboinkinon Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century

Something like this already happened relatively recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods?wprov=sfti1

shaboinkinon Texas Instruments’ new plants where Apple will make iPhone chips

It sounds like you’re making the assumption that things will remain static because the alternative is unfathomable to even consider.

shaboinkinon 2024 sea level 'report cards' map futures of U.S. coastal communities

Sure, but we’re talking about hundreds of miles of coast line all being affected, within various regions as the article points out, at relatively the same time. Thousands of coastline if we want consider a worst case rate of increase. The leaching of whatever is soaking into the water will likely occur in localized areas at similar rates. It seems reasonable to me it’ll introduce shock to the ecosystem if considered in geological timescales.

shaboinkinon 2024 sea level 'report cards' map futures of U.S. coastal communities

What I wonder about sea level rise is what happens to all of the development that gets swallowed by the sea? I’m not optimistic that there will be proper cleanup of the stuff that was built up over time. If I recall from the LA fires last year, the burnt down homes left some toxic stuff behind that require proper disposal. The same stuff in those homes presumably exists in the buildings and infrastructure that will be taken by the sea. How much pollution is going to be introduced into the environment? And what long term consequences will result from that?

shaboinkinon The un-celebrity president: Jimmy Carter shuns riches, lives modestly (2018)

That 25% turns out to over 77 million people. Reducing voting results to percentages is a bit silly in my opinion. We both major parties, including minority parties, are composed of autonomous individuals with individual worldviews that are shaped by their unique life experiences that are capable of sharing their ideas with others while simultaneously consuming new ideas, including those from faceless actors who may have a vested interest in seeing a particular group rise to power, then act on them.

I have yet to see either major party present some message where some level of respect is required to even acknowledge that someone thinks differently than another, irrespective of the validity of their ideas, even if it’s completely illogical. The mainstream discourse I read typically descends into insults, which doesn’t help anything. However, I feel we’re past a point in which this is even possible given the polarization of viewpoints. That snowball has been rolling for over two decades it seems.

shaboinkinon America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

It is if war is in the future. And I’m not saying this as hyperbole but based on statements made by NATO secretary general (both Rutte, previously Stoltenberg and former General Bauer) about Russia’s military production outproducing NATO, or Finish President Stubb speaking on the powers of the world shifting and the need to ramp production which were echo’d recently by Macron, or the Arctic region soon to become a contested region with China and Russia attempting to stake their influence in the area which is obviously at conflict with the personal interests of the other countries in the region. It seems obvious to me that the world is a bit hotter than before 2022, with the likelihood of some conflict between powers of the world coming to pass being greater. If production of raw materials to usable materials is all contained within countries that are deemed to be unfriendly by the one lacking this production capability, it’s a clearly in their vested interested to not be in that situation. Only problem is there is a seemingly idiotic US administration attempting to address these deficiencies, unless there’s some weird 4D chess play going on, but I’m not convinced it’s that.

shaboinkinon Police investigate damage to internet cable between Finland and Sweden

It’d be foolish to rule it out completely even if it looks benign at face value. It’s entirely plausible for someone to be recruited on behalf of another state, seeing how it’s currently happening now:

https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-suspected-sabotage-cam...

shaboinkinon Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

What I find funny about their sign that says “your photo will be deleted”, it fails to specify how many memcpy’s of the bits making up the photo have been made and if they made any detours along to the way to various other software systems that may save those bits across various disks. Does “your photo will be deleted” mean ALL bits making up the photo across any systems are wiped from all records? I doubt it. I also doubt if a database lookup is done on premise on closed networked systems with no possible ways to connect to the outside world.

shaboinkinon Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts

Recent events suggest dismissing sabotage as a likely cause would be foolish.

10:13 presents details involving sabotage throughout Europe as well as states choosing to not disclose to their public about the nature of what is happening to avoid spooking their citizens https://youtu.be/6KVnJqaBsnk?t=613&si=8lgB4A7x2fSmJC4N

NATO’s Admiral Rob Bauer discusses what he is at liberty to disclose to Arctic nations https://youtu.be/DjpALbzKdJM?si=b4uU2KZ18JlNW5wf

I’m willing to trust what he’s saying verses online discourse where individuals will never have the level of insight as someone in his position.

shaboinkinon I Replied 'Stop' to a Political Text Message. I Got 100 More

I like how the generated response after a “stop” is “You will not receive any more messages from this number.” Where they turn around and send you a message from a different number. How about a “take me out of your database” option?

shaboinkinon Windows Control Panel set for deprecation

If the CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet corporation I work at is anything like Microsoft, employees are given too much different work that causes needless mental context switching while you go off and do something else while waiting for PRs to be reviewed over weeks because the reviewers are also doing too much different things. Or maybe that’s just the way it works for the massive tech company I work at, but I see things taking a long time to get done for, presumably, the above reason, among many other process and people related reasons. I see lots of fluff around me, not that I claim to be a bastion of sanity in any sense.

shaboinkinon Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses

That was my thought. The supports look like toothpicks relative to the ships that routinely pass through. I don't know enough about the forces involved here, but I'd like to think when they rebuild, they will add some sort of deflection capabilities around the supports that ships must past in between. But again, I don't know what that would take to deflect a massive ship like this. In hindsight, the bridge looks terribly exposed given the persistent risk of ships passing through.

shaboinkinon Declassified U.S. report on origins of Covid-19 virus [pdf]

> Some of the WIV's genetic engineering projects on coronaviruses involved techniques that could make it difficult to detect intentional changes. A 2017 dissertation by a WIV student showed that reverse genetic cloning techniques which are standard techniques used in advanced molecular laboratories left no traces of genetic modification of SARS-like coronaviruses.

What practical, beneficial purpose would this serve?

shaboinkinon Wild mammals are making a comeback in Europe

I raised my eyebrow at that comment and found [1] and [2] which mentions evidence of human influence in the region, though I can't watch that BBC doc in my region, the paper is pretty interesting in there appears to be some lost civilization buried under the trees. That paper is from 2003 so I'd imagine there's more up to date research somewhere out there. I'd consider the statement "man-made" to be massively exaggerated unless proven otherwise.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0122njp [2] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Amazonia-1492%3A-Prist...

shaboinkinon Europe accuses US of profiting from war

Unchecked aggression tends to lead to more aggression if you just glance at history. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Spanish invading the Americas, US pushing out the Natives, Roman Empire into Europe, Genghis Khan. It stands to reason that if there was an equal or greater opposing force for the acts of aggression and expansion all throughout history, the rate of expansion would be severely limited. I don’t know much about the Crusades but that seems like a candidate for a stronger force stopping a weaker force from invading parts of the Middle East.

shaboinkinon The type system is a programmer's best friend

I'm working in a codebase that has, at times, 10+ different expressions within a single conditional in many places, and trying to pull out the context of why the conditional exists in the first place make grug brain hurt. At the very least, you could put all of the expressions and assign to a boolean with a variable name saying wtf it is you're conditioning on.

https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-expression-complexity

shaboinkinon NIH blocks access to genetics database if research enters “forbidden” territory

Imagine finding a correlation between specific genes and specific spending habits. Have Alphabet spin up a company that does what 23andMe does, offer a cooler, trendier version of the competition to entice adoption, then in the fine print say they’ll mine the data they find in your genes. Those resulting ads are gonna get ugly, quick.

Edit: Although, in the context of medicine, it would be pretty cool if you can find trends in medicinal health that tend to be common with individuals like yourself, and give you warnings should conditions are more likely to arise. I imagine that would involve adding in a different dataset to compliment understanding characteristics of your DNA

shaboinkinon I spent $3k on a Samsung Smart TV and all I got were ads and unwanted content

I learned this with my router. I updated the firmware thinking it was the smart thing to do, security fixed and all that, but instead I was greeted with ads for their other products and them wanted to shove their stupid phone app in my face to interact with the router. I then installed OpenWRT and said nuts to using proprietary router firmware.

shaboinkinon Apple is top funder of lobby group that says it represents small developers

As I understand it, 30% pays for all of the frameworks Apple develops that is available to you when you fire up Xcode, as well as everything involved with running the store, and they take their cut when you post on their store and sell stuff. If a law comes by and says Sorry Apple, you need to provide a way for other stores to exist in your ecosystem, well, something is going to have to pay for the development of these frameworks they provide.

>then restricting it behind a paywall sounds like something customers would sue apple for

Slightly difference scenario here but I feel it's similar. In my last job my company bought a system from Oracle that did a bunch of number crunching for processing images to be printed. As I understood it, Oracle charged for utilizing more cores, even though it was an on premise system and everything was already in the box ready to go.

If Apple, or anyone, makes hardware and wants to charge a license to use said hardware, isn't that legal? This sounds like BMW charging a license for their heated seats. The hardware is already there and ready to go, but is behind a paywall.

shaboinkinon Apple is top funder of lobby group that says it represents small developers

I feel an unintended fallout of an eventual mandate to allow 3rd party stores on iOS would be Apple charging a license for the frameworks and tooling they provide. Something like, "Want to use CoreML? Well, each API call will cost you. Or would you rather take our 30% flat rate?"