Hacker News: Nathanba

New comment by Nathanba in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

Nathanba — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:28:16 +0000

I agree that AI audio interfaces will be the future but not because they are better UIs for users as we understand the term "user" today. The future users of UI are not users of UI at all, they want nothing to do with learning UI or what buttons to press or where to type something. They want to go to the shopping site and instead of typing anything into a search field they want to say "Find me some boots for the summer, I wanna look fresh" and then tell it to complete the purchase via voice as well once it found something. At most they'll still click some filters in the results page and on individual results but that will be it.

New comment by Nathanba in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

Nathanba — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:20:24 +0000

Kind of incredible how consistently terrible Google is at everything they do in the AI space. So they choose this demo and write a big blog post and advertise.. and the demo is horrible, doesn't work. Doesn't track what I circle with the mouse, just apparently where the mouse pointer landed at the end and only exactly where it landed. Multiple times it said "Got it, I'll move this empty space between the clouds over here" or "Got it, I'll convert this empty area to a sunhat" despite my mouse only being a few pixels next to an actual hat.

New comment by Nathanba in "The Rise of the Bullshittery"

Nathanba — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:58:42 +0000

I think bullshittery is generally underestimated as a threat and not new at all. There are entire global organizations like Scientology who are founded on bullshitting. Entire product lines, food categories and industries made for no benefit to you except the thinnest layer of taste to bullshit your senses into accepting the trash into your body or life. Bullshitting just like lying isn't merely something a few percent of bad people do, the majority of individuals seems to do it every single day. It's pervasive in all of society, it's on every level, up from the lowest to the highest levels of political office.

New comment by Nathanba in "AI slop is killing online communities"

Nathanba — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:02:45 +0000

I'm in many public chat communities as well and the issue whether someone is an AI or not is not really coming up, I've not seen any actual AI chatters and the only AI spam that exists is the one that humans regurgitate. The more real impact AI has on chat communities in my opinion is that people are shifting some of their chatting to AI bots via voice or text on other platforms, resulting in fewer chatters.

New comment by Nathanba in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

Nathanba — Fri, 08 May 2026 03:21:40 +0000

well then let's wait a month or even two months. The point of the wait period is primarily to avoid the new installation of exploits, not the execution of already installed exploits.

New comment by Nathanba in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

Nathanba — Fri, 08 May 2026 03:07:40 +0000

Sharing banking information is not safe in Europe, decades ago a phone scammer convinced me to give them my information and they were able to pull money from my account without any permission from me whatsoever, they just acted like I already signed up to their scam service when I never did. That was a completely foreign and insane idea to me (and it is still insane and should not be allowed) that someone can simply withdraw money from my account. They sent me some contract in the mail that I had to apparently reject and otherwise it was automatically approved. Which itself is surely also not legal but the point is that they were able to take money from my account just with my information.

New comment by Nathanba in "Meetings are forcing functions"

Nathanba — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:01:31 +0000

I think it seems tautological to us because it's obvious to us. But other people do not understand or care to understand or even care to think about it. You can see it in this very comment section that there are people swearing how amazingly helpful fixed standups supposedly are even on a whole org level. It's obviously absurd but they have different jobs and priorities, they don't have to understand the inner workings of the product and for them it's invisible that the meetings are almost entirely worthless for the actual workers. The meetings are helping them in their job and so it must be great for the org, that's how many people managers think.

New comment by Nathanba in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

Nathanba — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:32:34 +0000

The LLM can use the secret manager API too, it sees how it's used in the application

New comment by Nathanba in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

Nathanba — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:41:16 +0000

how do you think the LLM will do required operations when the secrets are stored somewhere other than the disk? It will still need to get them just like the application gets them when it has to do work.

New comment by Nathanba in "Atlassian enables default data collection to train AI"

Nathanba — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:37:25 +0000

they sent out an email with this: https://dam-cdn.atl.orangelogic.com/CDNLink/AT12MW17.pdf

New comment by Nathanba in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

Nathanba — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 04:55:42 +0000

good point, we think of these OAuth logins as so safe and yet they may be the exact opposite because it's more like logging in with your master password. I think these oauth providers like Microsoft and Google need to start mandating 2FA for every company login, it's just too dangerous otherwise.

New comment by Nathanba in "€54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs"

Nathanba — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:47:02 +0000

Why would it be hard to calculate cost? Multiply a fixed price * requests/time ? It doesn't have to be exact in real time, it just has to report something approximately useful in realtime.

It's absolutely not fine to be at the mercy of other people, that's what we buy cloud products or really any products for: So that we are not at the mercy of hardware faults, bad weather, bad teeth, hunger, thirst, [insert anything]

New comment by Nathanba in "Nowhere is safe"

Nathanba — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:44:37 +0000

I don't think that the prospect of getting hit under battlefield conditions is the problem here because that's always the problem and the tunnel is supposed to be the thing that helps you avoid getting hit. Tunneling under battlefield conditions has also been a thing in military conquest of castles for a very long time. These days you don't really have to tunnel towards an enemy, you just have to create underground spaces for your missiles, aircraft, etc. and as safer bases so the situation is vastly easier.

New comment by Nathanba in "Nowhere is safe"

Nathanba — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:28:33 +0000

I was also thinking about this and I think it has to go a step further: Assets don't just need to be underground, they need to be on mobile rails underground. They need to constantly be moveable and pop out of one of thousands of holes to attack or if it comes to defensive e.g SAM sites they need to be moveable so that when an incoming missile is not interceptable that it can simply move away to a different underground location, pop out somewhere else and be able to keep defending. All you should be losing when a missile hits is a one of the underground exit holes. And of course to defeat such underground networks you need vast armies of small intelligent drones that can go in there and explore every tunnel where no human wants to risk setting foot in.

New comment by Nathanba in "Core JavaScript and TypeScript Features Become Free in IntelliJ Idea"

Nathanba — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:27:04 +0000

Still no support for web components in any of their IDEs,.it's crazy to me

New comment by Nathanba in "An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD"

Nathanba — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:03:43 +0000

there are more platforms for searching for games: youtube, google, chatgpt... it's not so dire that if steam bans you then there is no way to find a game

New comment by Nathanba in "Mozilla to launch free built-in VPN in upcoming Firefox 149"

Nathanba — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:41:44 +0000

I'd love to have a free VPN directly integrated into the browser, it's not a distraction. It's a developer tool for website developers.

New comment by Nathanba in "Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules"

Nathanba — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:24:35 +0000

it's not an either or, they can easily let me configure any kind of behavior that I want. No cap, a hard cap, a soft cap, a cap that I program with a python script, a cap where I throttle, a cap where I opt in to deleting certain machines to save money. It can all be done. People are complaining because obvious features are not provided. People would not be complaining if they had all the options that we needed to control how to scale resources in response to load, not just technical load but also financial load.

New comment by Nathanba in "Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules"

Nathanba — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:18:03 +0000

let's hope it happens soon, I'm pretty sick of this reality where companies get to charge you whatever they want and it's designed to always be your fault

New comment by Nathanba in "Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation"

Nathanba — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:12:20 +0000

it's far worse than that, people don't even agree on the definition of words. In this example what a 'child' is.