Hacker News: JFingleton

New comment by JFingleton in "Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?"

JFingleton — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:59:08 +0000

RSS is the technological backbone that enables the distribution and subscription of podcasts...which by the way is massive at the moment.

As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.

New comment by JFingleton in "Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription"

JFingleton — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 13:02:47 +0000

I never trusted VW after the emissions scandal : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5r9rgg6yno

Now I trust them even less, if that's even possible .

New comment by JFingleton in "UK government states that 'safety' act is about influence over public discourse"

JFingleton — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 09:53:49 +0000

Here is more information about the arrests that are currently taking place:

https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...

New comment by JFingleton in "Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England"

JFingleton — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:57:54 +0000

> EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."

And yet they are still pushing [0]

[0] https://edri.org/our-work/despite-warning-from-lawyers-eu-go...

New comment by JFingleton in "Debian 13 “Trixie”"

JFingleton — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 15:49:23 +0000

Incus is fantastic. I think Proxmox is where everyone is migrating to after the VMWare/Broadcom fiasco, but people should seriously consider Incus as well.

Brave Search: AI Grounding API

JFingleton — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 16:54:40 +0000

Article URL: https://brave.com/blog/ai-grounding/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848083

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by JFingleton in "Our European search index goes live"

JFingleton — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 16:21:56 +0000

When the UK was in the EU, hardly anyone I know voted in the EU elections, and equally they weren't covered by the media. I believe there was so little interest in the EU elections and it felt so far removed from the uk that I'm not sure it really counted as "democratic" (perhaps someone will correct me here?).

I'm hoping voters in European countries feel differently, I suspect not though.

New comment by JFingleton in "GPT-5"

JFingleton — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 21:19:50 +0000

A quick google gave: https://aloe.inc/

New comment by JFingleton in "VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in"

JFingleton — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 16:56:06 +0000

I always thought a police state would demand identification at every street corner (perhaps I'm wrong?) and any minor breaking of the law being dealt with severe justice. The UK has always been against a "state ID" unlike a lot of European countries, so I'm not completely convinced the description of "police state" is accurate. In fact I think it's the opposite given people can freely break the law despite cameras being on every street corner.

The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.

Bureaucracy kills any kind of infrastructure project (see HS2), so don't expect any improvements any time soon.

We do have some nice cities: Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge. (I've probably missed a few from this list). London feels pretty far from 30 years ago - and not in a good way.

New comment by JFingleton in "Local-first software (2019)"

JFingleton — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 21:44:39 +0000

A properly designed app would leverage multi threading to place any long running jobs in the background, allowing the user to carry on with other tasks.

Spinners should not exist in a local first app.

New comment by JFingleton in "Biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s (2024)"

JFingleton — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:13:38 +0000

I'm in my mid-40's and I'm in the best shape of my life. However it's taken a lot of hard work and sacrifice, that I weirdly enjoy:

* Cooking all meals from scratch (I try and reduce UPFs as much as possible).

* No bread or pasta ever. Fresh non-supermarket bread and pasta is probably OK for you...

* Less alcohol (only on special occasions). Modern no-alcohol beer is actually very enjoyable.

* Lift weights 3x a week. I built a home gym in my garage, with a TV mounted on a wall. It's a great time to unwind, watch YouTube and get fit. It's alone time I look forward to.

* Walk every lunchtime for 20 minutes, rather than browsing the Internet

The key thing about exercise, is that if you don't enjoy it then you won't do it. For me, the alone time watching Youtube or listening to a podcast is the pull-factor. For others it'll be a sport playing in a team.

Food is the major factor in your general health, and we really have fallen into a trap in the Western world with our food habits. Fortunately we have a choice in this regard.

New comment by JFingleton in "UK to buy F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers"

JFingleton — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:40:56 +0000

> You think yelling at allies to pay up, threatening to leave NATO, and undermining trust serves Western unity?

Yet look at the current NATO spending review:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/25/nato-dona...

Looks like unity to me...

New comment by JFingleton in "UK to buy F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers"

JFingleton — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:09:16 +0000

> Given that the US is now governed by Russian assets

Donald Trump has consistently and forcefully argued that European NATO members must significantly increase their defense spending. He has long criticized European nations for not contributing enough to their own defense and relying too heavily on the United States.

Why would you do this if you're a Russian asset..?

New comment by JFingleton in "Saab achieves AI milestone with Gripen E"

JFingleton — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:54:48 +0000

LLMs work on tokens. There's no reason those tokens can't be something other than text.

New comment by JFingleton in "Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America"

JFingleton — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 19:22:41 +0000

Doesn't seem to work? It's the pay walled site.

New comment by JFingleton in "Open Source Society University – Path to a free self-taught education in CS"

JFingleton — Mon, 26 May 2025 09:26:46 +0000

It does make me sad that in 2025 we still don't have an open real-time chat service.

IRC was too janky for widespread use... Everything else that has come after it hasn't been able to reach the "network effect". Too many options, too many half finished projects. Lots of missed opportunities.

New comment by JFingleton in "Open Source Society University – Path to a free self-taught education in CS"

JFingleton — Mon, 26 May 2025 09:19:12 +0000

Really inspiring thankyou.

Although I've not used it, I've heard good things about Khan Academy... Which is aimed at kids/teenagers but would cover any core principles you might be missing:

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing

New comment by JFingleton in "I used o3 to find a remote zeroday in the Linux SMB implementation"

JFingleton — Sat, 24 May 2025 21:31:41 +0000

Zero days can go for $$$, or you can go down the bug bounty route and also get $$. The cost of the LLM would be a drop in the bucket.

When the cost of inference gets near zero, I have no idea what the world of cyber security will look like, but it's going to be a very different space from today.

New comment by JFingleton in "Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?"

JFingleton — Sat, 24 May 2025 07:40:24 +0000

3. Focus on leveraging AI to solve real world problems.

You don't need to deep dive into the maths. You'll need to understand the limitations, the performance bottlenecks, etc. RAGs, Vector DBs, etc

New comment by JFingleton in "OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive"

JFingleton — Wed, 21 May 2025 19:49:25 +0000

It feels like all those hacktivists moved to Discord... Which is even more "locked away" than Reddit.

I miss the old skool php web forums.