Hacker News: 9x39

New comment by 9x39 in "Deflock Casa Grande"

9x39 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:57:29 +0000

We were hearing during the Snowden era about the abuse of NSA systems like XKeyscore and others through what was termed jokingly LOVEINT. Anything that's built will get abused in some way - sometimes its even best not to build such databases at all.

Here's CNN discussing NSA analyst abuse from 13 years ago:

https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/

Here's an article from 10 years ago discussing the police doing it:

https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...

New comment by 9x39 in "Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace"

9x39 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:18:22 +0000

A similar world is already here.

Young men 14-?? already compromise and attempt to extort organizations daily, sometimes cluelessly from western nations, often not. It doesn’t have to be gangs when the home country doesn’t care / isn’t technologically or culturally developed.

Already seeing AI-written payloads and frameworks in the wild. I think it’ll turn out that AI won’t build you a maintainable ERP but it can create C2 networks, exploit POCs or even 0-days potentially, and let kids make their own ransomware tooling. Then we’re dealing not with a handful of cybercrime tool makers but a generational problem.

New comment by 9x39 in "The US grocery slowdown is real"

9x39 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 23:40:49 +0000

If the point is that cost/calorie has risen too much, it's substantially worse in the cost/calorie sense to eat prepared food out of the home versus cook at home.

As an aside, a quickbread like banana bread happens to be one of the simplest to make with some of the cheapest shelf-stable ingredients, and almost every home has an oven and access to the ingredients. For those who like it, I highly recommend this recipe (Mark Bittmans):

===

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, plus some for greasing the pan

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

¾ cup sugar

2 eggs

3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans

½ cup grated dried unsweetened coconut

===

Step 1

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan.

Step 2

Mix together the dry ingredients. With a hand mixer, a whisk, or in the food processor, cream the butter and beat in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; stir just enough to combine (it’s okay if there are lumps). Gently stir in the vanilla, nuts, and coconut.

Step 3

Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until nicely browned. A toothpick inserted into the center of the bread will come out fairly clean when it is done, but because of the bananas this bread will remain moister than most. Do not overcook. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.

New comment by 9x39 in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

9x39 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 23:25:52 +0000

It sucks because AI reduces call center costs in many toil tasks very effectively, regardless of whether you want to help or dissuade customers - it's just well-suited to the task and it's going to accelerate. It's a win for capital and the technology implementers, even if it's a loser for the call center employees and callers.

Some of the tech is pretty scary. One big vendor's solution [0] can provide not just AI agents but also use AI to snoop on calls in progress, evaluating sentiment from both sides [1], verifying phrases are said - pretty dystopian in theory. From experience, these things tend to go downhill based on the attitude at the top - is the mission to slash costs or take care of customers? A 1000 decisions follow from this one, and like Jira, it can be a useful tool or a prison-like hell.

[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/contac...

[1] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/contact-center/webex-...

New comment by 9x39 in "The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker"

9x39 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:00:11 +0000

Get used to it, we have a lot more people that will be coming in and they all need to be taken care of. Unsustainable lifestyles are going to have to give way. We can’t all eat beef and have air conditioning and travel in retirement if we’re going to share this planet.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-projections-sh...

New comment by 9x39 in "An American Privacy Emergency"

9x39 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:12:05 +0000

That disabled non-producers go to the ER less if given an apartment is true doesn't make it empathetic or correct to build enormous unproductive spending networks under the label of homelessness, either.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homeles...

$50,000 a year per homeless with minimal, if any, result - if it's empathy, it's suicidal empathy to emit those kinds of funds without results year after year into systems that have sprung up to capture them and ask for more.

New comment by 9x39 in "The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:50:51 +0000

Looking at cohorts of workers, automation tools like AutoCad reduce the expertise needed and commodify the job, which reduces leverage and thus per capita wages.

Consider the taxi or unskilled worker examples here:

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/a-new-look-how...

All to say, as an individual, individuals rationally try to maximize leverage in a negotiation to capture the increased output. But what happens to classes of workers in different jobs varies. My take is that capital appears to be gaining leverage over wages back from many classes of workers, even if some limited classes of expertise are stable or gaining.

New comment by 9x39 in "The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:44:21 +0000

Automation isn't foreign to the topic. There's some discussion here that refrains from estimating too hard, but I think it's closer to outsourcing's effect:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/jun/worker-sc...

Outsourcing and automation both reduce worker leverage, which reduces wages, which could explain reduced labor share. I'm not sure how one would weight it all.

New comment by 9x39 in "The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:39:25 +0000

They didn't make the rising tide analogy, I read it as how much could be captured by labor if we increased leverage.

In any case, it doesn't follow that wages grow with earnings. Wages have historically been a lagging indicator.

New comment by 9x39 in "Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:20:50 +0000

>I'm not saying there is an easy solution, but to simply lay blame on narcissistic CEOs is laughable.

I agree. The laptop class is still labor, despite their bit of leverage today.

New comment by 9x39 in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:34:06 +0000

I do see the criticism, but those critics appear made unwilling to accept that material support to other bad actors snares one in their web. No people were punished for mere possession, you or I could possess those zines and even email the prosecution about it.

This shouldn’t be such a leap, but rationalizing is what it is.

The hefty punishments are principally from the punishment enhancements meted out for the alleged terrorist label, firearms, wounded police, etc that overflow from the chief perpetrators onto those caught in the web through membership and their support.

Perhaps hiding evidence should be merely hiding evidence, not hiding evidence in the burying of a highly political prosecution where someone is catching life plus cancer, yet here we are.

New comment by 9x39 in "Microsoft Needs Windows Lite"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:20:46 +0000

The majority also wants their stuff to work - the program that solves a problem or the hardware they bought, and all that surface area to support it is how Windows is Windows.

> What else are you supposed to do?

Customize. You can strip out entire features, often called “debloat” but it’s hyper specific. It couldn’t be a general purpose pc after, and a debloated gaming config might lack the support to run other kinds of apps, or vice versa.

They even have a lightly modified version called LTSC although it retains so much feature surface area so as to remain “Windows” it’s not like the article’s idea, but it exists.

New comment by 9x39 in "Microsoft Needs Windows Lite"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:07:10 +0000

Rolling out the updates to a fleet is the easy administration he’s talking about, which is neither optional nor a trivial task.

Printer administration and Windows printer UX are different too, although the endless-printer-list-oh-god-its-not-even-alphabetical situation is more of an admin oversight to a clunky and low priority situation than anything. Small comfort, no doubt.

New comment by 9x39 in "Schools are closed, records are broken. Let's talk heatwaves"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:54:06 +0000

Not mentioned: air conditioning, which is an essential heatwave response.

90% of the US has them, apparently only 20% of the EU on average does, with UK/Ger being like 3-5%.

The US Pacific Northwest was like that, but adapted after the new reality:

https://www.cascadepbs.org/environment/2022/12/seattle-no-lo...

New comment by 9x39 in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:42:24 +0000

Thank you, that’s right.

New comment by 9x39 in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:42:04 +0000

Prosecutors were successful in using them as evidence of connection between the members, and as a result of building that connection partly through the zines, held them jointly accountable for the groups overall actions.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.41...

New comment by 9x39 in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 05:24:28 +0000

Ah, attempted murder since he surprisingly lived, it looks like. No harm, no foul, right?

New comment by 9x39 in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:55:34 +0000

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.41...

I only have the .gov version, but 20-30 rounds were fired, Song was convicted as the attacker apparently and Baumann and Morris were evidently armed as well (the woods gunmen). It wasn’t the whole group but doesn’t appear to be just one individual.

They were successfully tied together by the prosecution as conspirators to the satisfaction of juries by their shared mission, chats, organization, papers, safe houses, and prior meetings among other things.

New comment by 9x39 in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 03:53:52 +0000

The actual members of the jury convicted the defendants though, accepting the .gov's evidence and witnesses that these individually innocuous elements together established their links to each other, collectively murdering an officer in the course of an attack.

New comment by 9x39 in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

9x39 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 03:50:19 +0000

"The government showed that there were items in the box that were the same items found in the Soto’s residence, tying Sanchez and Rueda to the Sotos, and similar items found amongst the other defendants. It also showed materials in the box contained handwritten notes on them, specifically the name “Ines,” and “Ines in bc” [Ines in book club].

This further drew the connection between Sanchez, Rueda, and the Sotos. This connection was important for purposes of Pinkerton liability and showing they all shared the same motive, intent, knowledge, and foreseeability."

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.41...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_liability

No lawyer, today is the day I learned about Pinkerton Liability, but apparently under it you can be held liable for the actions of your co-conspirators.