Hacker News: JoshTriplett

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative"

JoshTriplett — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:11:01 +0000

That too, ever since they decided everything on GitHub was fair game for training AI without respecting its license.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Show HN: What if two devices could chat using only sound?"

JoshTriplett — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:58:01 +0000

Some devices do this today using ultrasonic, in order to find nearby devices for subsequent pairing.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

JoshTriplett — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:08:32 +0000

Exactly. And I think the information theory matters here: it's worth putting in information proportional to the human-supplied input, not proportional to the AI-expanded output.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI"

JoshTriplett — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:04:14 +0000

Yes, it's one of the most common usages of a phone in the car. And most people I know have exactly that workflow: find and set a navigation destination while parked, then drive there without interacting with the phone.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64"

JoshTriplett — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:39:20 +0000

Some of them weren't wildly worse than the era. I think many old games substituted punishing difficulty for depth, so that they'd have more staying power. That was true of some of the early NES games as well.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64"

JoshTriplett — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:05:41 +0000

The only good AGI.

Impressive fitting into the machine. I wonder if SCI would be possible?

New comment by JoshTriplett in "GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost"

JoshTriplett — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:57:17 +0000

> Makes you wonder what millions of your predecessors could do that you can't.

Millions of your predecessors died in ways easily preventable today.

"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." - Ovid

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers"

JoshTriplett — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:43:09 +0000

Or data for the increasingly invasive Cloudflare captcha.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers"

JoshTriplett — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:35:55 +0000

They're serving the HTML, they have every ability to track individual web requests without modifying the content they're serving.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking"

JoshTriplett — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:40:03 +0000

The degree to which you have to follow the laws of a place you have no legal nexus in (e.g. no employees) is limited. Non-US companies can and do refuse overreaching requests from the US sometimes.

Apple is subject to the DMA in europe because 1) they have employees in Europe and 2) they want to import and sell physical phones into Europe. It's easy to block imports or fine employees. It is not especially easy to prevent people from spending money on a service provided entirely via the Internet from another country.

It is not at all impossible to impose sanctions on an entire company. But if the US tried to do so over a refusal to put in a backdoor, and the company very loudly made that clear, that would to some extent be exceptional free marketing.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking"

JoshTriplett — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:04:03 +0000

I'm not suggesting giving up the US market. I'm suggesting moving out of the US and continuing to serve the US market from elsewhere, because the US does not have a nation-wide firewall. And working with organizations mounting legal challenges to "please destroy your company in order to put in a backdoor for us".

Certificate Transparency has essentially eliminated the problem of backdoored CAs, because attempting to do so would destroy an entire CA. Binary Transparency can do the same for software.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking"

JoshTriplett — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:21:02 +0000

> If you're a US company building an app/device/etc. such that an intelligence agency like the CIA or FBI would want access to the data in that product which is normally secured, then they're not going to try to sneak it in there without your development team knowing. They're going to have a meeting with the owners of the company and say, "hey, we'd really like you to implement this backdoor for us, and in return we won't cause you in problems."

And then you say, loudly and publicly, "all the source code of our software is public, and our binaries use binary transparency so it's not possible for us to build a binary that doesn't match the source, and people will rapidly find this in our source code at which point we go out of business and you stop having a product to backdoor in the first place".

(And you move out of the US.)

And since this is a foreseeable future, you should start acting now to prepare for that future.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

JoshTriplett — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:42:19 +0000

> Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too.

No, other things are serious and key issues, and immigration is the scapegoat that gives people someone to blame for their problems, distracting from actual solutions that don't fit in a one-sentence slogan the way the non-solution "kick out all the Xes" does. This has been an electoral tactic of right-wing populists for a long, long time.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Ask HN: Let's all sell our AI stocks, short Nvidia and pop the AI bubble"

JoshTriplett — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:34:45 +0000

Standing reminder: The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

JoshTriplett — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:03:54 +0000

Social sites aren't supposed to knowingly allow users under 13, but they're not required to proactively exclude them either, nor should they be.

And addictive feeds are a problem for everyone, of any age.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove"

JoshTriplett — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:53:42 +0000

Code submitted to a project should follow the formatting standards of that project and its programming language, which doesn't leave much room for flexibility in whitespace. However, there are many ways to write comments, and many ways to write PR descriptions and commit messages, and often many choices of words to name identifiers, and other potential sources of bits of entropy with no functional impact. It doesn't take that many bits to encode a robust "AI was here" indicator.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'"

JoshTriplett — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:49:00 +0000

Agreed. Put half of it in investments every year, and after a few years they'd have had enough to sustain a browser nearly indefinitely.

That said, the terms of the contract are not public, and it's possible that it was restricted in a fashion which did not permit such usage.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'"

JoshTriplett — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:48:08 +0000

We've seen what happens when almost everyone uses one browser engine (Internet Explorer): that vendor gets undue influence over the direction of the web, and their proprietary extensions make it difficult for others to compete.

We would end up in the same place if everything is based on Blink/WebKit; arguably we're partway there already.

Hopefully Servo will provide a competitive browser engine and full browser in the future as well, with the bonus of being great for embedding. But it's not quite there yet. And other potential competitors have their own problems. Firefox is, for the moment, the most popular and only viable browser not based on Blink/WebKit.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Flock updates privacy, accountability, security, and transparency safeguards"

JoshTriplett — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:13:55 +0000

> But the idea that you have a right to privacy while in public is wrong and bad.

On the contrary, you should absolutely have a right to not be pervasively tracked and surveilled.

New comment by JoshTriplett in "Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove"

JoshTriplett — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:04:19 +0000

Exactly. If this works on pull requests, for instance, it'd be really useful for projects trying to do a first-pass filter to close slop spam.