Hacker News: 0x262d

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...

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

0x262d — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:39:11 +0000

I'm getting really tired of the enshittification cycle. Learning about android verification and captcha changes recently has been another big frustration point. I moved to android as a more open alternative to apple just a few years ago, and to bitwarden from lastpass around the same time. I would like to just have these infrastructural services work well and quietly without thinking about them for many years. Do I really have to put up with this happening faster and faster for the rest of capitalism? (I think so)

New comment by 0x262d in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

0x262d — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:46:08 +0000

right, that comment reads as if they're victims for intentionally putting themselves in the position of holding and reading the maximum amount of information about everyone they can. bizarre

New comment by 0x262d in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

0x262d — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:23:09 +0000

is this better than normal communication in any way, or just not much worse?

New comment by 0x262d in "Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?"

0x262d — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:35:51 +0000

A lot of people expect to be owning the capital. However I also just don't think the technology will displace programmers that quickly.

New comment by 0x262d in "Microsoft will give the FBI a Windows PC data encryption key if ordered"

0x262d — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:18:19 +0000

Is it meaningfully misleading? How often is this an obstacle for the FBI?

New comment by 0x262d in "Tesla's Germany Sales Down 72% from Their Peak"

0x262d — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:52:28 +0000

sorry, owning a tesla is a sign of being poor?

New comment by 0x262d in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

0x262d — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:54:18 +0000

I'm curious if you think the same thing was lost with the transition from reading man pages and first-party documentation to going to stackoverflow or google first (at least, I assume the former was more common a couple decades ago)