HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

squidmaster

257 karma · joined October 7, 2026

submissionscomments
squidmaster··on Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware threatens most servers on planet Earth
That was always little more than unix propaganda. Until GNU came around and held itself to a higher standard, it was common for unix tools to do bullshit like read input into fixed length line buffers and silently truncate anything longer (when they weren't overtly crashing). "Do it well", hardly. A more true to life account of "unix philosophy" is "worse is better". It doesn't have to be good, merely available.
squidmaster··on Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking
But it is okay if not-rich people do it. I have "pirated" and otherwise flaunted copyright my whole life, along with many millions more. Nobody has ever come at me for it. Enforcement of any sort against common people is exceedingly rare. For a long time it was only corporations who took copyright seriously, and now that even they are flaunting copyright people such as yourself suddenly pretend that the little guy has to care.

Well I don't! Copyright is a farce and I continue to wipe my butt with it.

squidmaster··on Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
America isn't in a legally declared war with Iran either. Hasn't been in one since WW2. No treason convictions since then have occurred.
squidmaster··on Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner's phone
You're out to lunch. The Dutch government has an obligation to spy on the US. To not do so would be an abdication of their responsibilities as a government.
squidmaster··on Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
Ofcom started it. They sent nasty legal letters to 4chan first.
squidmaster··on The plight of the public potty
Germany's ideology was bad, we know this because it abjectly failed and lead Germany to destruction. Singapore's ideology is good,we know this because it has lead Singapore to a safe, clean and productive society. Stop being obtuse and judge it empirically. The results are what matters.
squidmaster··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
The Renaissance Cyborg.
squidmaster··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
Humans having understanding of the system went out the window hundreds of years ago at the latest. The "Renaissance man" era is long gone. I know you said "collective understanding", but that's not a real thing. Humans aren't borg. Our entire lives have been spent in systems we can only understand in piecemeal if at all.
squidmaster··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
No argument there, but it doesn't change the fact that some people, properly motivated, with the right backgrounds and right tasks, do get plenty of lift with these tools.

Note that I specifically mentioned that I'm skeptical of claims of insane lift in workplace contexts. Several factors work against it there, organizational dysfunction not least of all, not to mention a disconnect between the people doing the work and the people for whom the work has value. People being crunched by their boss to ship some corporate portal software faster are going to make shit. You making something for yourself, to solve your own problem to your own satisfaction, needing to clear problems outside but adjacent to your proficiencies, should be able to do much better. Many people have found it to be so.

squidmaster··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
If it gets the job done, that's what matters. Linkedin shitters were never going to do anything interesting in the first place, look at what actual hobbyists are making instead. People complained about Berm Peak using an LLM to code up a new user interface and control software for an ebike, but it worked so the complainers can be ignored.
squidmaster··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
It's easy for AI to make somebody 100x more productive if they were insanely unproductive in the first place. In the workplace this is unlikely, but in hobby spaces I believe it. Lots of hobbyists using AI to program micros/etc that, in the past, would have been beyond their capabilities without extensive study first.

Consider for instance the bicycle youtuber Berm Peak, who's been using AI to reverse engineer and hack shitty ebikes. This kind of work is outside his expertise, so the relative lift he gets is massive.

squidmaster··on The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
Maybe so, but its a mistake to assume others are falling for it just because they don't outwardly react to it. Ignoring it is the low-effort route that gets you through the day, so most people will usually do that.
squidmaster··on The plight of the public potty
You call it savage, but the result is more civilized. Why should we settle for a middle ground? Why should we negotiate with degenerates who can't even be trusted with a toilet?

There is nothing savage about the way Japan treats those who are incompatible with civilization. On the contrary, to parley with the savages is what makes you a savage too.

squidmaster··on The plight of the public potty
You can't pay janitors enough to deal with degenerates who routinely deliberately destroy public bathrooms in western countries. It's a job for police and the courts, but those are dysfunctional in a way which "more money" doesn't fix.

Result is all the clean and useful bathrooms are private, because only thus can shit-smearing vandals be reasonably excluded (and only then, somewhat.)

squidmaster··on Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will (2016)
Cloudflare = Crypto AG. Prince is a cutout.

My evidence is that I made it the fuck up, but if it turns out to be true everybody will groan and say they should have guessed. I don't want to be like that, so I'm saying it now.

squidmaster··on How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
Vocal fry being the tramp stamp of voice is such a perfect way of putting it!
squidmaster··on The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
When you're working with a bullshitter and can't just leave, what use is there in performative caring? Your coworkers may have still cared, privately, but actively complaining about it, presuming boss man doesn't care anyway, is just pissing into the wind. You may as well accept that he's a bullshitter and get over it. Some people are like that and it doesn't help you to spend your time seething over it.

If you can get him fired then go for it. Otherwise, you're only harming yourself by letting yourself dwell on it. As for believing him; when my coworker starts rambling about the time the Navy seals came to him for help, I just say "wow man, crazy". I don't believe him, but neither do I confront it. Why bother? I'm not being paid to call out his dumb lies. This is probably what your other coworkers were thinking.

squidmaster··on Tesla Roadster
Bad promises for future releases and timelines, as well as odious politics. I don't like the guy either, but where are the fabricated demos? That's what he's being accused of in this thread, but I see no precedent for it. In fact upthread the example of a fabricated demo had to come from Nikola,a completely different company run by a completely different man. Why bring that up if there are good examples of Tesla faking their own demos?
squidmaster··on Tesla Roadster
Is it going to be released at all, let alone on time? I'd bet against it. Tesla promises about future releases are worth dogshit.

Was the demo fake? I also doubt it. Tesla doesn't have a history of fake demos. It was only fake insofar as these were extensively planned stunts and they'll never be improvising maneuvers like that on the fly, as airplanes can. But was the car made out of CGI or sytrofoam? No. That's just painfully silly. Tesla has no track record of behaving like that.

squidmaster··on Gold is now the top U.S. export
10 million (troy?) ounces is 311 metric tons. That's plenty of gold, but doesn't seem terribly impressive compared to 160 tons annually? Also, to get that 10 million onces figure, I think you must be including the mid-20th century dredging and hydraulic mining era? That stuff was a far cry from humble prospectors with pans like people might imagine.
squidmaster··on I love software rendering
Cassette players and chunky buttons are historically linked though. That there's no intrinsic fundamental technological connection and counter-examples exist doesn't change the fact that most people with memories of cassette players will have memories of chunky buttons connected to that. You're hung up on technicalities when the discussion is actually about nostalgia.

In an case, the author specifically cites the example of Ion Fury, a game which ships with a hardware renderer enabled by default but also uses nearest neighbor interpolation, so the premise that the author isn't aware that the aesthetic isn't possible with hardware rendering is mistaken. He knows. He's calling it software rendering because that's what the aesthetic is historically connected to.

squidmaster··on Tesla Roadster
We're saying, simply, that the CEO being personally odious doesn't mean the car is fake.
squidmaster··on I love software rendering
Ah, I see. Maybe: somebody says they love audio cassette players, and start talking about the super tactile mechanical buttons and switches that go chunk in a satisfying way. You could rightly object that that you can put buttons like that on an mp3 player. But it's a historical fact that these things are actually linked, in a way that's meaningful to people, namely in their personal nostalgic experiences.
squidmaster··on Tesla Roadster
They have a long history of promising bad dates for future releases, or of exaggerating the capabilities of their ""FSD"", but they haven't rolled cars down hills or built them from styrofoam.
squidmaster··on Tesla Roadster
I genuinely didn't believe they'd ever do more than use cold gas thrusters for a lame boost effect, if at all. Happy to admit I was wrong, that was cool.

(still not buying a tesla thooughbeit)

squidmaster··on I Love Software Rendering
It's still there, though I don't play with it. The characteristic Build mouse look distortion makes me queesy.
squidmaster··on I Love Software Rendering
No software rendering requires DOS, you could use it with Windows back in the day (how I originally played Half Life) and engines that still support it will run on modern OSes too.
squidmaster··on I love software rendering
> Ion Fury, a Build engine game from 2019, still ships with a software renderer.

Amazing game BTW, best shooter I've played in many years. I never really got into build engine games back then, so it's not just my rose-tinted glasses, that game is a masterpiece.

squidmaster··on I Love Software Rendering
How is it not software rendering? These games shipped without hardware renderers. Yes, they also don't have AA, but how does that make it not software rendering?
squidmaster··on Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher
Would you say a desktop application using lua instead of javascript has less smell? What do you make of something like mpv, which supports both?
Page 1 of 2Next →