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I used to run YouTube with “ad targeting” turned off. The ads were 100% scams. Lots of AI slop. Deepfakes of celebrities pitching all sorts of scams. Lots of nsfw products and even occasionally illegal things like drugs or guns. Also lots of ads in languages I do not speak.

I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.

On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.

Ah yes. “Non-existent security” is only a pesky detail that will surely be ironed out.

It’s not a critical flaw in the entirety of the LLM ecosystem that now the computers themselves can be tricked into doing things by asking in just the right way. Anything in the context might be a prompt injection attack, and there isn’t really any reliable solution to that but let’s hook everything up to it, and also give it the tools to do anything and everything.

There is still a long way to go to securing these. Apple is, I think wisely, staying out of this arena until it’s solved, or at least less of a complete mess.

I just scrolled through my Libby history to check. I checked out 25 books in 2025. Several of them I didn't finish, so the number is closer to 15 completed books, but that's only though Libby. I also finished an entire fiction series that wasn't available on Libby, which was an additional 7 books.

Series is really what makes the number so high IMO. I read a lot of fanasy/sci-fi which is often a lot of trilogies. Reading just one trilogy puts you above the median. I have several friends that read only 3-4 books last year, but several that also read as much or more than me. Discussing the books amongst friends helps, as we recommend books to each other. Book-tok and other book-centric social-media circles are huge.

And it may seem like a lot but that was spread across an entire year. I often read a few chapters before bed each night, but it often depends on how hooked I am on the book, I make more time for it when I'm more hooked on a book, or on a deadline to return the book to the library.

Audiobooks helps carry the number higher as well. Its a lot easier to "read" a book when you can do it while doing other things. Although I prefer to sit down and dedicate time for e-books, I do listen to some audiobooks as well, and many of my friends exclusively read via audiobooks.

One big part of this is that gcode isnt really a 3d model its a set of instructions on how to move the printhead around. You don't download the gcode directly, because that varies by printer. You download a model, and then a slicing program turns that into a set of printer-specific gcode. Any subtle settings changes would change the hash of this gcode.

And the printer doesn't really know what the model is. It would have to reverse the gcode instructions back into a model somehow. The printer isn't really the place to detect and prevent this sort of thing imo. Especially with how cheap some 3d printers are getting, they often don't really have much compute power in them. They just move things around as instructed by the g-code. If the g-code is malformed it can even break the printer in some instances, or at least really screw up your print.

There are even scripts that modify the gcode to do weird things the printer really isn't designed for, like print something and then have the printer move in such a way to crash into and push the printed object off the plate, and then start over and print another print. The printer will just follow these instructions blindly.

Interestingly, theres an account in that thread claiming to be from Gyrovague, but its not the same one thats in this thread, which has been confirmed to be legit as it is mentioned by name in this latest Gyrovague article.

I wonder, is the newer gyrovague-com account because they lost the login for the old one? or was the old one a different person? Hopefully they can clarify, because if there's an account pretending to be them that makes this story even more confusingly weird.

I didnt flag the article, but anecdotally, I was initially unable to load the article at all. It mentions how it ended up in an adblock list. The article makes it sound like this is a good thing, as it stops the DDOS, but it isn't preventing people from loading the page directly. That may be true for people using an adblocking extension, but my adblocking DNS seems to be blocking it based on that same list. I had to manually tweak my dns-based adblocker to allow the domain in order to read the article.

Same. I know and see several of the codes all the time. But occasionally I encounter a weird one and I always go to http.cat to find out what it is.

It does work reliably enough though. A huge portion of games on Linux do so via pretending to be windows via wine/proton. It’s what allows the Steam deck to exist as a product at all.

And Linux on those handheld devices out-performs windows to such a degree that Microsoft has noticed and is trying to make windows perform better on those devices, basically making a gaming mode / handheld mode for their Xbox Ally.

The removal of several features from windows 10 is infuriating. Why can’t the taskbar be moved to the side? Why can’t the taskbar be made smaller? Why can I pick the smaller icons, but the taskbar remains the same size, with massive margins and blank space?

At least they finally added back the “don’t combine taskbar icons” but it’s still lacking basic functionality that was previously there.

The KDE plasma UI feels like all the best parts of windows 10 to me. The default taskbar+clock+system tray+start menu UI feels exactly like windows 10 to me. But you can also customize it very easily. The settings menu feels a bit more like MacOS than windows’ control panel though.

Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.

That whole subreddit has unfortunately become inundated with AI slop.

It used to be a decent resource to learn about what services people were self hosting. But now, many posts are variations of, “I’ve made this huge complicated app in an afternoon please install it on your server”. I’ve even seen a vibe-coded password manager posted there.

Reputable alternatives to the software posted there exist a a huge amount of the time. Not to mention audited alternatives in the case of password managers, or even just actively maintained alternatives.

Yeah. Its going to be easy to skip the first result in an app store search, not because its highlighted, but additionally because it isn't ever what i was searching for. The app store search has been broken like this for years and any change they make short of adding or removing the ad won't change my habits.

in every search ive done on the app store in the last several years, I'm looking for a specific app. That app is never the ad result at the top, its always the second result down.

Right now i did a search for several different popular social media apps. TikTok was the top 'ad' result for all of them. Then i did a search for TikTok and got some random app i've never heard of as the 'ad' result. Its like it doesn't want the same app to fill both of the top two slots, but there is always an ad. So what you are looking for is always second on the list. Never first.

Because of this, why would i ever click the ad? If i search something less-specific like "flashcard app" the best result will fill the second slot. Something else goes in the ad slot.

Ive been trying to learn a new language and this feature is awful.

It constantly either translates language-learning videos entirely into english or into the language i'm trying to learn. Despite all settings on my account being set to english, if I include any non-english text in my search query that is enough to get youtube to translate all videos out of english. When it does this, there is seemingly no built-in feature to change this back, other than through addons. And there isn't even an indication that conveys the fact the video title and description are auto-translated, other than maybe i recognize the channel and can tell that its supposed to be in another language.

And part of me thinks, "maybe once i learn enough, such a feature could maybe be helpful in learning a language" But every video ive seen so far thats auto-translated into English is done so quite badly and confusingly. I can't trust the translation.

I don’t think it is an improvement.

At the level of League of Legends me and my friend group play, we never noticed cheaters. We play casual ARAM games. Never noticed any hackers or anything.

But we definitely notice when at the start of the game, one of our team didnt actually get past the loading screen because Vanguard decided instead they need to reboot their machine. And then good luck winning when you are down a player for several minutes.

It doesn’t happen often, but it happens way more often than cheaters did. And this bug happens to multiple people in my friend group. This anti cheat software is extremely buggy. And causes way more problems than it solves for us.

I wish i could say “but the software is improving” because the last few weeks it’s been fine, until literally yesterday. I got out of fountain and into combat and then got a “Vanguard must be running” popup. It kicked me out and I couldn’t get back in until I rebooted. And then if you open league too fast after the reboot, because you are hurrying to get back in, you can actually open League before Vanguard starts and then too bad you have to reboot again!

It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one.

I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type YouTube in. This not only happens with YouTube, but with every bookmarked page I have, from the HN front page to the site I use to check the weather.

Those issues are a surprising read. I would expect issues with TPM on old or niche devices, but not Dell XPS laptops, or a variety of VMs. But I guess I'm not entirely sure how my vms handle TPM state, or if they even can.

I'm running nearly all of my personal tailscale instances in containers and VMs. Looking now at the dashboard, it appears this feature really only encrypted things on my primary linux and windows pc, my iphone, and my main linux server's host. None of the VMs+containers i use were able to take advantage of this, nor was my laptop. Although my laptop might be too old.

Not sure if its a "significant" u-turn, when its a relatively new feature. Its only been out for a few months, and seems to be getting rolled back because it was breaking things.

Its annoying that a security benefit is being turned off, but it can be turned back on if you are confident it will not break your setup.

They may not say "turn off bitlocker", but people definitely recommend backing up the recovery keys, and windows allows you to back up the key to microsoft because they know people won't actually back them up. Not sure if that happens by default, but they provide a variety of options for the recovery keys because there is definitely a non-zero chance you need them. There were several stories of this happening with the windows 10->11 upgrade push, where people were auto-updated and then scrambling to decrypt their hard drives.

I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering. The lights are the issue not the camera.

Rooms with these lights give me migraines. I can always tell when lights in a room are like that, and I use the 240hz slow motion on my phone to double check or figure out which specific lights are the issue.

I hate these lights and I don’t understand why places use them.

I get all those same ads on YouTube. It’s easily >90% complete scam products, and most of the non-scam products are at least breaking YouTube’s own “rules” regarding what content is allowed. Like if one of the reportable reasons is “addictive product” why do I see so many ads for nicotine products?

I tried to report an ad that had literal nudity/porn in it. The report page was acting funky so I pulled it up manually in safari where I wasn’t logged in. and it made be log in to report the ad because the ad was age restricted. why is it running as an advertisement at all then? Clearly it got flagged somewhere to be age restricted.

YouTube has approximately zero incentive to fix this. They are a complete monopoly and there isn’t any consequence to any of the blatantly illegal products that I see advertised on their platform. I’ve seen ads for drugs and firearms. The firearm ad was claiming it was “easy to sneak past security” but the highest consequence is that the ad account gets nuked and another immediately takes its place.

This was changed, and it is pretty easy to think the feature got removed.

When it was pressure-sensitive, you could push harder anywhere on the keyboard. But now that it’s tap-and-hold, it only works on the space bar. Most other pressure-sensitive actions just got replaced with tap-and-hold with no changes. But doing that on any other key brings up letter-specific accents, so they moved it down to spacebar.

It also used to be faster. Now you have to wait, but before it was pressure sensitive. You could trigger it instantly with more pressure. Edits were so fast and convenient, but now it’s a slight pause each time

Nope. When a new iOS update comes out, all supported devices may immediately install the update if they seek it out. Or it will usually auto update on its own, or at least nag the user to update.

It’s gotten slightly more confusing with the major updates now being optional. You get a choice between getting a feature update or just security patches. Unless I missed it, my phone never really asked me to update to the latest iOS 26. But I can, it’s there. I’m instead on the latest version of iOS 18. (They changed number schemes. 18 is last years major update)

Apple also does security updates for quite a long time. iOS 15, from 2021, got a security patch in September of this year, and works on the iPhone 6s from 2015.

I’m curious where you got any of those numbers. Many laptops use <20W. But most local-ai inferencing requires high end, power hungry nvidia GPUs that use multiple hundreds of watts. There’s a reason those GPUs are in high demand, with prices sky high, because those same (or similar) power hungry chips are in data centers.

Compared to traditional computing it seems to me like there’s no way AI is power efficient. Especially when so many of the generated tokens are just platitudes and hallucinations.

I just followed their guide last week and was surprised how smooth it went. Their documentation seemed very thorough. I kinda expected a few issues, but everything worked flawlessly. Seems like they do a pretty good job of detecting most of the edge cases that would cause issues. Granted, my installation hasn’t been modified too heavily outside the norm. I think I had one or two modified config files I had to edit, but the helper script found and told me about them and how to handle it.

I had put off the upgrade for a while figuring it would be a breaking change. But it went so smoothly I’ll probably be upgrading to 9.1 pretty soon.

My hacker news icon has been stuck as the icon for a weather site that I sometimes check. It’s been stuck that way for close to a year now, and has survived an iOS update too.

It persists across profiles and into private browsing mode.

The tailscale login servers had an issue last week. My local network had an issue at the same time and all connections dropped. Then none of my stuff could reconnect because I couldnt connect to tailscale :(

Looking into setting up my own headscale instance now. This is the first issue I’ve had with tailscale but seems dumb that my local lan devices couldn’t even talk to each other.

There isn’t a date in the article, but I know I had read this months ago. And sure enough, wayback has the text-to-image page from April.

But the image editing page linked at the top is more recent, and was added sometime in September. (And was presumably the intended link) I hadn’t read that page yet. Odd there is no dates, at first glance one might think the pages were made at the same time.

I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode. Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.

Theres a lot of weird setup often required on the backend in my experience, but when it works, it works well. But until you get everything dialed in it can have weird issues that don't have a clear path to fix them.

It might be better in their weird AIO solution? But i dont like the idea of giving a docker container the ability to spawn more containers. I just use one of their normal docker containers and have had to manually change a lot to make it work as they actually suggest. Like just recently i setup their notify_push plugin as it improves performance - but the provided setup instructions didn't work in my setup and i had to manually tweak several things.

The world has already migrated through so many past now-insecure cryptography setups. If quantum computers start breaking things, people will transition to more secure systems.

In HTTPS for example, the server and client must agree on how to communicate, and we’ve already had to deprecate older, now-insecure cryptography standards. More options get added, and old ones will have to be deprecated. This isn’t a new thing, just maybe some cryptographic schemes will get rotated out earlier than expected.