Hacker News: Scrounger

New comment by Scrounger in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

Scrounger — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:43:36 +0000

I've been running qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M (22.3GB) via Ollama.

Is the 20.9GB GGUF version better or negligible in comparison?

New comment by Scrounger in "Claude Opus 4.7"

Scrounger — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:30:19 +0000

> Which open weights model?

Yes, I'm also wondering!

Currently I'm testing out gemma4:26b and qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M locally on my M2 Max Macbook Pro.

Not the fastest, but reasonable.

However, I am also interested in getting as close as possible in performance to Opus 4.6 while minimizing my costs.

New comment by Scrounger in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

Scrounger — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:20:52 +0000

Who remembers BlackICE Defender tho?

https://archive.org/details/BlackICE_Defender

New comment by Scrounger in "Hundreds of Millions of iPhones Can Be Hacked With a New Tool Found in the Wild"

Scrounger — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:58:09 +0000

I'm on regular Android but thinking about switching to GrapheneOS for my next phone.

New comment by Scrounger in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

Scrounger — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:45:11 +0000

This is what I do... I use Mullvad VPN with NextDNS.io for DNS.

New comment by Scrounger in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

Scrounger — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:42:53 +0000

> https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

I get "Our tests indicate that you have some protection against Web tracking, but it has some gaps." but nothing of too much importance I think.

I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

New comment by Scrounger in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

Scrounger — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:41:07 +0000

> I know it's a cliché, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"Kindly let me help you, or you will drown, said the monkey as it put the fish safely up a tree"

—Alan Watts

New comment by Scrounger in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

Scrounger — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:40:21 +0000

> Beginning to wonder if convenience is the root of all evil, and not money.

Self-deception is actually the root of all evil, not money nor convenience.

New comment by Scrounger in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

Scrounger — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:39:52 +0000

> Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

I beat it, I think... nothing much there. I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

New comment by Scrounger in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

Scrounger — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 04:29:31 +0000

> Many non technical people have ethical concerns.

100% correct.

I have many non-technical friends who want to De-Google but lack the knowledge and/or find the switch intimidating.

New comment by Scrounger in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

Scrounger — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 04:17:16 +0000

Google Fi will auto-switch between AT&T and T-Mobile but not Verizon, AFAIK.

New comment by Scrounger in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"

Scrounger — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 02:52:29 +0000

I don't think I agree with the following from this guide:

> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.

New comment by Scrounger in "This website is for humans"

Scrounger — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 02:38:46 +0000

> My issue is that crawlers aren’t respecting robots.txt

Cloudflare has a toggle switch to automatically block LLM's + scrapers etc:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

New comment by Scrounger in "Study: Social media probably can't be fixed"

Scrounger — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 02:35:50 +0000

> Bluesky

FWIW, I've been consistently posting quality stuff on Bluesky for the last year, and despite having a few hundred followers, I get ZERO engagement.

People in the Bluesky subreddit tell me it's not a "post and ghost" platform in that you have to constantly interact with people if you want to earn engagement, but that's too time consuming.

In other words, the discovery algorithm(s) on BlueSky sucks.

New comment by Scrounger in "Study: Social media probably can't be fixed"

Scrounger — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 02:33:41 +0000

> Whitelisting solves the problem for me. I curate every tweet I see with a browser extension. Strangers can't kick down the door. I only see content from my direct follows. It dramatically reduces the stress. Maybe a little like horse blinkers.

This extension? https://github.com/rxliuli/mass-block-twitter

New comment by Scrounger in "Study: Social media probably can't be fixed"

Scrounger — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 02:31:44 +0000

> Social media as a vessel for diverse discussion is a tall order. It’s too public, too tied to context, and ultimately a no-win game. No matter how carefully you present yourself, you’ll end up being the “bad guy” to someone. The moment a discussion touches even lightly on controversy, healthy dialogue becomes nearly impossible.

Worth reading Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now book:

https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accou...

New comment by Scrounger in "When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army"

Scrounger — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 02:20:57 +0000

> Feds and criminals

How does one tell the difference?

New comment by Scrounger in "GPT-5"

Scrounger — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 03:44:20 +0000

> But things will change, because of the scale

Yup!

Plus we can't ignore the inherent reflexive + emergent effects that are unpredictable.

I mean, people are already beginning to talk like and/or think like chatGPT:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01754

New comment by Scrounger in "GPT-5"

Scrounger — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 03:37:11 +0000

> That's remarkably short-sighted

I agree. Once these models get to a point of recursive self-improvement, advancement will only speed up even more exponentially than it already is...

New comment by Scrounger in "GPT-5"

Scrounger — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 03:35:20 +0000

> I remember reading that llm’s have consumed the internet text data

Not just the internet text data, but most major LLM models have been trained on millions of pirated books via Libgen:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/mark-zuckerberg-gave-metas...