Hacker News: AstralStorm

New comment by AstralStorm in "Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking"

AstralStorm — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 11:42:24 +0000

Seems like uninformed bull. Your recording is protected by the usual copyright. It may not be used without permission except as permitted by law. If the law is being violated, sue the heck out of the state.

Now if you post it on social media, make sure you read the content privacy policy. They often suck.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Covid-19 leaves a lasting mark on the human brain"

AstralStorm — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:40:24 +0000

Well, even the antibody titre isn't foolproof (some people do not react or have their immune system later wiped). However having no antibody titre is pretty good sign you never had it. Not sure if there's a portable cheap blood test for it yet. Should be one, like for the active disease.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Europe's New War on Privacy"

AstralStorm — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 02:09:42 +0000

It will be challenged in the Tribunal if it passes, and will lose as it is incompatible with baseline EU laws.

Specifically, the charter: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/char_2012/oj/eng

Article 8 point 2. They're missing the provisions of data retrieval. If available, that would immediately take down the whole monitoring system as a full message history request would have to be available since they don't know which data is private or personally identifying.

Additionally, this falls under GDPR legitimate concern category so must be possible to reject by the user. Otherwise it's an involuntary measure making the law contradictory.

With this in mind, it's toothless if corrected.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Things that aren't doing the thing"

AstralStorm — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 05:12:26 +0000

If you haven't started doing the thing while researching it, you're doing archeology or historiography, not research. (Different scientific fields. Research requires experiment.)

New comment by AstralStorm in "Things that aren't doing the thing"

AstralStorm — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 05:09:06 +0000

It's called documentation. Somehow people forget to include a non-external service dependent version with their code these days.

Probably because "nobody is paid for doing that".

New comment by AstralStorm in "Things that aren't doing the thing"

AstralStorm — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 05:06:45 +0000

Yeah sure. The tricky part is if you even know which action to take. To actually do that you need to research enough, conceptualize the end goal and envison a rough but workable plan.

Most people don't and blindly stumble going after short term to mid term reward. Then later life crashes them hard, except for the lucky few.

And the truth is, now some people have many more luck coupons to spend than others.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Things that aren't doing the thing"

AstralStorm — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 05:03:13 +0000

Who's paying to school them at googling? Certainly not you...

New comment by AstralStorm in "Things that aren't doing the thing"

AstralStorm — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 05:01:35 +0000

Unless you wasted years by going in the wrong direction which could have been avoided by a week of serious thinking and planning... (Or even a year. Some mistakes are extremely costly.)

New comment by AstralStorm in "Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today"

AstralStorm — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 17:01:18 +0000

It's even more legally funny than this. They are also allowed to enact entrapment to some degree and it passed court muster in the US. That because it's extremely hard to use it as a defence.

Note that these actions are illegal in most continental jurisdictions as stings must be devised ahead of time against specific groups of people. There's also Article 6 of ECHR.

In other words, FBI cannot run a sting off an EU site like this, at least definitely not a German one.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today"

AstralStorm — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:50:32 +0000

How can you even sue without any legal identity? This website and an organisation does not happen to have any. Might as well be some shell company in the Carribeans with no legal standing in France. It's not even good enough for public prosecution, as the tip would then go through French services.

This law is completely backwards, and worse than a SLAPP. If you cannot respond to a report in any way, it should be null.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Firefox expands fingerprint protections"

AstralStorm — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 20:11:46 +0000

The store owner visibly responds to the customers differently. Fingerprinting is invisible. It's more like the store owner recording everyone on hidden camera.

So no, you cannot steelman a broken analogy.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself"

AstralStorm — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:31:46 +0000

It's not even that. Only a kernel of the LLM is trained using RLHF. The rest is self-trained from corpus with a few test questions added into the mix.

Because it still cannot reason about veracity of sources, much less empirically try things out, the algorithm has no idea what makes for correctness...

It does not even understand fiction. Tends to return sci-fi answers every now and then to technical questions.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Keep Android Open"

AstralStorm — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:23:58 +0000

Still waiting for someone to make a tiny token sized phone. Unfortunately the smallest around, Unihertz Atom, is both outdated and too low resolution for some apps to work.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Keep Android Open"

AstralStorm — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:20:33 +0000

Now that is more of a problem than a bank. Which is why someone beeds to integrate OTP tokens into ID cards, closing the issue.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Keep Android Open"

AstralStorm — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:19:30 +0000

Uh, banks still provide separate tokens and one time pad cards last I've heard.

If yours doesn't, pick one that does.

New comment by AstralStorm in "Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders"

AstralStorm — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:12:02 +0000

Warrant canary depends on agreed upon inaction, which shields it somewhat. You cannot exactly compel speech by a gag order.

This, being an active process, if found out, is violating a gag order by direct action.

New comment by AstralStorm in "New attacks are diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel"

AstralStorm — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:00:59 +0000

TPM itself is a simple data container with slow encryption/decryption capabilities. It cannot hide anything really.

You might have mistaken it for say Intel ME and the AMD equivalent.

New comment by AstralStorm in "New attacks are diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel"

AstralStorm — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:56:47 +0000

No, these should exist in the TPM and highly volatile memory like CPU cache. This including the decryption code. This can be achieved using mechanisms similar to what Coreboot does before RAM is initialized.

No need for the keys or decryption to touch easily intercepted and rowhammered RAM.

New comment by AstralStorm in "The new calculus of AI-based coding"

AstralStorm — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 06:59:28 +0000

Don't worry, you're going to be searching for logic vs requirements mismatches instead if the thing provides proofs.

That means, you have to understand if it is even proving the properties you require for the software to work.

It's very easy to write a proof akin to a test that does not test anything useful...

New comment by AstralStorm in "Poison, Poison Everywhere"

AstralStorm — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 06:36:32 +0000

You might have just filtered off all the nutrients and have yourself a dietary deficiency. Oops.

And your supplements might well be contaminated...