Hacker News: NoGravitas

New comment by NoGravitas in "Get your passwords out of Bitwarden while you still can"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:52:03 +0000

Merge conflicts on NextCloud are terrible, but for a KeePass file, I don't think this comes up very much. My laptop syncs from Nextcloud whenever it's online, and my phone syncs whenever it opens or modifies the file. Nobody else is using my laptop or phone, and certainly not my keepass vault. I would probably have to go out of my way to use both my laptop and my phone offline and add/change passwords during that time in order to get a merge conflict.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Get your passwords out of Bitwarden while you still can"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:47:35 +0000

Weird. I keep my KeePass database on NextCloud, and the only difference between home and phone is that on a bad network I may need a few seconds for KeePassDX on the phone to decide to use its cached copy of the database rather than the latest one. It would probably be even smoother if I used Syncthing. I assume non-technical people ought at least be able to put their KeePass files on DropBox?

New comment by NoGravitas in "Vivaldi 8.0"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:16:15 +0000

Vivaldi is almost certainly the best Blink browser, and I'd certainly use it if only Blink browsers were viable. As long as that's not the case, I am, like you, using something based on Firefox; in my case, Zen.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:05:11 +0000

I'll tell. It's you. You personally, and no one else. Not a category of people that includes you. Just you.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:03:14 +0000

He's actually pulling that from about 70 years of anthropology and anthropological archaeology; it wasn't in any way original to him.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:00:21 +0000

I think the klept can maintain their "just desserts" mentality longer than you and I can maintain our metabolic integrity.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:58:55 +0000

You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

NoGravitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:36:59 +0000

Yep, it's all driven by Moloch, and nothing but.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25"

NoGravitas — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:53:30 +0000

They have, but you don't need to let them get away with it.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Googlebook"

NoGravitas — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:44:43 +0000

Surveys show otherwise. As does the viral video of that lady giving the AI-booster commencement speech and getting booed.

New comment by NoGravitas in "YC's Biggest Scandals"

NoGravitas — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:36:48 +0000

I didn't read all of them, but none of the ones I read were simply business failures; most of them were selling snake oil or non-existent software as a service, or were productizing someone else's open source project while violating their license. That is to say, they were committing various kinds of fraud. Now, it's arguable whether YC could have detected all of these frauds or had a duty to do so, but the page is, to me, extremely valuable for providing examples of the ways in which the tech economy is basically a grift nowadays.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

NoGravitas — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:13:09 +0000

Honestly, I'm looking forward to the supported Motorola (Lenovo) phones in 2027.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

NoGravitas — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:47:50 +0000

That's next; Sam Altman's Worldcoin is now pivoting to identity verification.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Japan is building cardboard suicide drones"

NoGravitas — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 18:32:50 +0000

> I wonder what would be the military usefulness of such a drone

To deplete anti-drone defenses; to provide cover for heavier Shahed type drones.

> it could even glide with the motor off, so it could sneak towards manned positions, especially in the dark.

Return of the Night Witches.

New comment by NoGravitas in "The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It"

NoGravitas — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 18:12:22 +0000

If only Ed Wood had had access to this technology. Bela Lugosi's character in Plan 9 from Outer Space could have appeared without covering his face with his cape.

New comment by NoGravitas in "China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus"

NoGravitas — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:56:01 +0000

Oh, you mean ICE? No, NatSec ghouls are more bipartisan than that.

New comment by NoGravitas in "I have officially retired from Emacs"

NoGravitas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:39:12 +0000

You know, economics are made by people and can be changed by them. They're historically contingent, not laws of physics.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Waymo in Portland"

NoGravitas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:15:16 +0000

Most of this is just that the US rail system is amazingly shitty by global standards.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Waymo in Portland"

NoGravitas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:14:01 +0000

I fucking love trains.

New comment by NoGravitas in "Warp is now open-source"

NoGravitas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:10:41 +0000

Was hoping this was about OS/2. Nope, all AI grifts.