Hacker News: RobMurray

New comment by RobMurray in "Influencers face backlash over Meta 'pervert glasses' content"

RobMurray — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:59:44 +0000

Can we maybe blame the people who use them irresponsibly instead of blaming the technology? These glasses have been a life changer for so many visually impaired people.

New comment by RobMurray in "Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA"

RobMurray — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:50:16 +0000

clearly not true. the weights are the preferred form for making modifications. Do you really think people should be downloading hundreds of TB of training data and running make to build the model on their own cluster of GPUs?

New comment by RobMurray in "Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly"

RobMurray — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:09:58 +0000

Why are you being so hostile?

New comment by RobMurray in "Codex Micro"

RobMurray — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:07:35 +0000

It also, and I would say more commonly, means a round thing that can be turned. I've never heard of anyone avoiding the term.

New comment by RobMurray in "How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps"

RobMurray — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:58 +0000

latency would be the killer. a very tiny delay between pressing a key and hearing a response can make a screen reader feel unresponsive.

New comment by RobMurray in "Swift Package Index joins Apple"

RobMurray — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:22:32 +0000

Yes, I have a passport which is accepted by every other company I have had to verify id with. Apple doesn't offer it as an option for UK accounts for some reason.

New comment by RobMurray in "Swift Package Index joins Apple"

RobMurray — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:20:02 +0000

I agree, but I just created anew Apple id, and got a developer subscription straight away on the web without it asking for id. I suppose they will probably require id if I submit to the app store, but the fact that I already paid should carry more weight I hope.

New comment by RobMurray in "UN commission of inquiry says Israel committing genocide by targeting children"

RobMurray — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:08:56 +0000

because it is Israel doing all the fucking mass murder of innocent people?

New comment by RobMurray in "Swift Package Index joins Apple"

RobMurray — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:48:52 +0000

I tried to get a personal developer account (I'm already a developer through an organisation). The app required a Driver's license as the only accepted ID. I don't drive because I'm blind. They did a screen share and talked me through applying on the web site. It failed. They never gave a reason and ignored me when I asked for one. They just said

"Hello Robert, Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.

Upon review, we have found that we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs.

You can still take advantage of great content using your Apple Account in Xcode to develop and test apps on your own device. Learn more about Xcode development.

I do apologise that I was not of more help to you in this situation but wish you the best of luck for the future. "

They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.

New comment by RobMurray in "Identity verification on Claude"

RobMurray — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:34:03 +0000

It can trigger it's self, when it decides it needs to try lots of different options to get clicks into an installer running as admin. There's basically nothing you can do to prevent it.

New comment by RobMurray in "Identity verification on Claude"

RobMurray — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:21:08 +0000

I didn't know this. Looks like I dodged a bullet - being totally blind meant the chance of issues was high but luckily it worked. It triggered the id check while trying to get computer use to work for an installer running as admin on windows. Actual reverse engineering I got it to do in the past didn't trigger it.

New comment by RobMurray in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

RobMurray — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:57:29 +0000

Apple could simply be ordered to include a hardware backdoor, and legally be prevented from talking about it. Everything else in the architecture could work exactly the way they claim in the PCC paper.

New comment by RobMurray in "Netanyahu orders Israeli army to seize 70% of Gaza Strip, violating ceasefire"

RobMurray — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:47:30 +0000

wow! are you really saying that Palestinian children should have no rights because of something their ancestors did? Should people get to violently remove them from their homes and land because of something written in history books?

It's honestly shocking to me that there are humans in the world who are comfortable defending such evil with some perceived amusing fact from history. This is happening today! The killing of people in their thousands based on their ethnicity is happening today. There is no defence for that. It's not war, it is genocide.

That isn't some wild internet conspiracy theory, it is a consensus of genocide scholars.

But I guess you will go on with being "amused" at any argument about stolen land, even though there isn't a human on earth who's ancestors haven't done terrible things.

We should be better than that in the 21st century.

New comment by RobMurray in "Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it"

RobMurray — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:18:11 +0000

No need to issue a recall, they could just release a firmware update that disables unauthenticated firmware updates over BLE.

New comment by RobMurray in "Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it"

RobMurray — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:57:07 +0000

wifi, bluetooth, and microphones. Yes microphones. I have a very cheap smart bulb with a mode that responds to music. That's not even unusual for smart bulbs.

New comment by RobMurray in "Netanyahu orders Israeli army to seize 70% of Gaza Strip, violating ceasefire"

RobMurray — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:06:50 +0000

Yeah, all Israel ever wanted was peace. That's why they stole land that was already populated, and continue to take more and more. Bomb women and children. confiscate baby formula. starve innocent people. destroy their homes and schools. Perfect way to keep peace.

New comment by RobMurray in "Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs"

RobMurray — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:48:45 +0000

ARIA is a solution to a specific problem, not something that should be used on every site. HTML is accessible out of the box when semantic elements are used as intended. If you are using a div as a button, you probably aren't hand writing HTML. It is likely part of a library. Adding the necessary ARIA attributes benefits every site using the library. Your boiling the ocean analogy implies that every web developer needs to scatter ARIA attributes all over their code, which just isn't true.

New comment by RobMurray in "Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs"

RobMurray — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:32:14 +0000

It's not a binary. most web sites are accessible to some degree. Just the fact that semantic elements exist at all makes a big difference. Popular frameworks have accessibility built in.

New comment by RobMurray in "Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs"

RobMurray — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:14:34 +0000

I'm glad that a large proportion of web developers are happy to boil the ocean then. I use the web every day with a screen reader. It works. 99% of what I want to access is fine. Often not perfect, but a whole lot better than what I could get out of AI.

I do use ChatGPT to research things, but I don't usually see that as accessibility solution. I completely agree that screen readers and browsers would benefit from AI, as they already are; Chrome and Edge can generate missing image descriptions. AI can certainly enhance accessibility, but it can't replace the existing technology that already works quite well a lot of the time.

The other positive about AI for accessibility is that the frontier models have a good understanding of what works. Instead of learning all the guidelines, you can just ask an agent to review the page for accessibility and fix any problems.

I realise I am only looking at it from a screen reader point of view, and yes, we are quite a small minority. But good universal design helps everyone, whether they just need to zoom the page for comfort without it breaking, their eyes are not that of a young person, they have dexterity issues using a mouse, and many more. Accessibility in general isn't serving a tiny minority,. I imagine most of us will come to appreciate it in some way.

New comment by RobMurray in "Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs"

RobMurray — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:34:30 +0000

Clients can't automatically fix all existing web pages, because the semantic information just isn't there. AI doesn't excuse web developers. It wouldn't even be a fix. Who wants to wait for an AI agent for each interaction?

Not all accessibility tools are expensive:

   - NVDA is free and open source
   - Narrator is included with windows
   - Voiceover is included with macOS and iOS
   - Orca is free and open source.
   - Talkback comes with Android
   - Chromevox comes with Chrome OS