Hacker News: 0x262d

New comment by 0x262d in "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"

0x262d — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:41:02 +0000

I use the free-tier Oracle server, but: Nextcloud. Minecraft server. I will probably move my Joplin and Wallabag hosting there soon, currently paying for both. I tried running a Valheim server there, but ran into bugs emulating it with FEX, unfortunately.

New comment by 0x262d in "Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones"

0x262d — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:41:44 +0000

Yeah, getting all your sensitive stuff off your phone onto a secure cloud service seems like the obvious approach here right? They can still escalate what they try to coerce you to do, but they don't have physical access to your data just by taking your phone, and you can also leave the phone with them and only lose the device if needed. In my likely scenario - innocent traveler, they aren't looking for anything specific, but I still don't want them to look through my files and photos just because I happen to travel internationally - that seems like it puts it out of reach (and out of obvious view) for now.

New comment by 0x262d in "Nvidia Insists It Can Keep Printing Money to Fund the AI Boom"

0x262d — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:21:00 +0000

To what extent is it organic demand rather than manufactured demand? Clearly there's some demand for AI use but a lot of it has been shoved down people's throats with usage quotas, pushing it into every webpage and application, etc. To me it seems like there is a large degree of central dictate to use it pushed, at some level, by the perceived need to invest in it faster than China.

New comment by 0x262d in "Nvidia Insists It Can Keep Printing Money to Fund the AI Boom"

0x262d — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:17:30 +0000

This observation is exactly the Marxist prediction of how capitalism gradually transforms society from early capitalism, which nearly fit the Econ 101 assumptions of many small producers and consumers and such, into something that operates economically more like communism by being centrally planned, but with the severe drawbacks of a minority ruling class and being run undemocratically on the basis of private profit not usefulness to people. This is an interesting book on the subject of how far we have come in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...

New comment by 0x262d in "Nvidia Insists It Can Keep Printing Money to Fund the AI Boom"

0x262d — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:11:05 +0000

That's certainly an opinion... Quite a lot of condemnation for no real argument. I personally think surplus value and socially necessary labor time are quite straightforward, intuitive concepts. Meanwhile, I found this tidbit on Henry George's wikipedia page: "Upon Marx's death, George admitted he has not read any of his works, which were untranslated into English at the time,"

For anyone interested in reading more from Marx's side, Wage Labour And Capital by Marx is a pamphlet meant for mass distribution and not a difficult read. I've heard A People's Guide To Capitalism recommended as a high quality modernized version of the same ideas.

New comment by 0x262d in "Two German airport workers die of malaria after 'mosquito arrives on plane'"

0x262d — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:02:14 +0000

How could two people die from it in Germany with modern medicine? Is malaria randomly fatal despite treatment, or did they not understand what the infection was or not seek treatment or something?

New comment by 0x262d in "Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]"

0x262d — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:58:25 +0000

"getting people to bet against themselves" ie forcing them to via oligopoly and regulatory capture.

New comment by 0x262d in "The Amazon tax"

0x262d — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:02:24 +0000

I think this comment is mistaken. The blog post is simplistic and doesn't cover the case you're describing of multiple good products for different consumers, but it's ultimately still right. Ads are not a good solution for this use case either because they don't exist to actually match consumers to good products, they exist to selfishly drive sales to their brand owners. That goal is parasitic to the service of product recommendation. Similarly with Amazon itself, their goal is to maximize some combination of sales revenue and ad revenue.

The solution to this is just what you described, a 3rd-party recommendation service. I don't think there's any reason Amazon should be able to make better recommendations than I can with a minute or two of research. Advertising giants only have a marketing profile on people, I think it's fairly limited in terms of how helpful it can be.

The problem with the "top 10" sites you mention is ironically that they are almost all actually advertisement sites, not genuine product recommendation sites. This means they get paid to place products and are essentially corrupt. I would guess the ecosystem is so universally horrible is because SEO costs money and requires them to aggressively monetize to exist. I've read that the Wirecutter is one of the only genuine sites and I find that it usually works fairly well at the price bracket they choose and for certain kinds of home goods.

New comment by 0x262d in "The Amazon tax"

0x262d — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:52:42 +0000

One would hope it means it sorts by sales volume.

New comment by 0x262d in "The Amazon tax"

0x262d — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:51:48 +0000

They also keep making it more annoying to even get to and read the reviews. It feels like it gets more hidden at the bottom of the page every few months. What a shame! Imagine how useful it could be.

New comment by 0x262d in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

0x262d — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:34:04 +0000

The other thing that is characteristic of AI text is messing up the underlying meaning or fine details of what it's saying. It's not just that it's imitating people who write bad contrasting clauses, it also can't write good ones reliably.

edit: Ironically that last sentence is not super clear (but hey writing is hard and I'm constantly exposed to slop). My point is the nature of AI makes its writing worse than its training data, it's not all bad training data.

New comment by 0x262d in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

0x262d — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:56:03 +0000

wow, hadn't heard about this until now. article: https://archive.is/J9Ant

correction that it says:

> The investigators who questioned Jon told him Homeland Security couldn’t obtain his emails, documents, photos or other content with an administrative subpoena, he said, but the breadth of what federal investigators did ask for shook him.

> Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

However, what information the US government can or can't get from tech companies seems like a moving target.

New comment by 0x262d in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

0x262d — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:31:22 +0000

look at every paid streaming service...

New comment by 0x262d in "Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18"

0x262d — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:54:14 +0000

"whoring"?

New comment by 0x262d in "Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18"

0x262d — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:53:25 +0000

Thanks for clarifying this. The article is heavily AI-written and unsurprisingly does not make that distinction, which is annoying. Not a very high quality source post for this.

New comment by 0x262d in "The great wealth transfer reality check"

0x262d — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 02:52:25 +0000

Right, that was egregiously misleading. Well, I'm not sure how misleading it is because the average is a meaningless metric for most people's experience, so probably very.

New comment by 0x262d in "Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU"

0x262d — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:21:51 +0000

just putting "rewritten by AI" in the headline would prevent the missed expectation feeling I got from clicking into it. but it would also sound less cool and probably get fewer upvotes, so...

New comment by 0x262d in "Steam Machine launches today"

0x262d — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:41:53 +0000

What is the downside of this if I trust the software provider (eg Riot Games or presumably Valve if this ever comes to Linux)? I have recently come around in support of Riot's anticheat because multiplayer competitive games are so damaged without it, even though I use Linux 95% of the time.

New comment by 0x262d in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

0x262d — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:45:16 +0000

This is not a valid critique - I don't agree with your conception that "the people and businesses that frequent this forum" have a shared ideological viewpoint either. I equally distrust Chinese and American capitalist perspectives.

New comment by 0x262d in "The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden"

0x262d — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:49:05 +0000

I just read the linked Fast Company article [0]. One question that particularly frustrates me about this process is: why are the former leadership of companies that become enshittified so quiet about it? Do they just get paid out with restrictive NDAs?

One of the only exceptions to this I can remember is the founder of Whatsapp, who gave an interview pretty critical of Meta some years back after it acquired Whatsapp.

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/91542655/bitwarden-scrubs-always...