Hacker News: Semaphor

New comment by Semaphor in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

Semaphor — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:24:56 +0000

Yeah, it's the same for me, but luckily those are very rare

New comment by Semaphor in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

Semaphor — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:05:21 +0000

> This is quite common if you have full on aphantasia.

Is it? I’ve never really researched common aphantasia behavior, but I’ve seen many mentions of aphantasia in fantasy/scifi subreddits where those of us with it still love reading. I can imagine (heh) it, but I wonder if there’s some kind of data regarding it?

New comment by Semaphor in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

Semaphor — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:03:08 +0000

FWIW, there’s a famous(-ish) fantasy author with aphantasia (Mark Lawrence), and I also have aphantasia, yet I absolutely love reading and if I would have to choose only one entertainment for the rest of my live, it’d be reading.

But I can’t stand elaborate descriptions (it’s almost always landscapes, rarely do authors feel the need to describe anything in as excruciating details as landscapes), which might be related to those descriptions not building up to some kind of image in my head.

New comment by Semaphor in "Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts"

Semaphor — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:39:42 +0000

Ohh, conditional comments. We had so many IE holdouts on our site, I think only around 2021 I removed the last IE specific fallbacks, and I think some conditional comments were a thing until 2020.

I’m not sure when I removed a bunch of `msapplication-` fields, but probably after 2021 ;)

I guess I can remove `apple-touch-` and `application-name` stuff next…

New comment by Semaphor in "My practical approach to surfing the web safely"

Semaphor — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:25:51 +0000

People clearly like lying… or just maybe their experience is different than yours for a multitude of reasons. I have absolutely no clear difference.

New comment by Semaphor in "Sony makes bold claim about game ownership"

Semaphor — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:31:11 +0000

> Gamers will refuse to buy a PS6 if there's not an ironclad guarantee that they own the games they purchase, be it digital or disc form.

I highly doubt that. I’d say 99%, probably more, won’t care either way. People barely care on PC, and people on consoles are generally used to more abuse.

New comment by Semaphor in "ChatGPT Is Throwing 404"

Semaphor — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:34:53 +0000

Was troubleshooting a strange SSD issue with ChatGPT. Apparently this outage resulted in losing the latter half of it. My uploaded files it requested are still in the library, but the actual conversation is gone.

New comment by Semaphor in "Play Store blocks AuroraStore, hurting GrapheneOS users"

Semaphor — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:43:00 +0000

I really like the Firefox usability. For what I do it works great. It has uBo and a bunch of other extensions, and if course it can sync with desktop.

New comment by Semaphor in "Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom"

Semaphor — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:17:40 +0000

Thanks, I did read articles about it back then, but while PRISM was mentioned always and everywhere, none of those I read mentioned the other ones, or if they did, just as an aside.

New comment by Semaphor in "Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO"

Semaphor — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:07:46 +0000

As someone working for a small publisher: The amount of "don’t care" is amazing. We tried 2 different big and popular "programmatic bidding" platforms. The amount of scams and extra-shoddy ads was crazy. And for each we realized after talking to our partner manager that caring about that is not expected. There are no or not enough controls to prevent it.

We managed to get into google ad exchange (via a personal connection as we’d normally be too small to get there directly, it’s essentially adsense with more control and more money), and compared to the other players we saw, they are much better by default already. But then you can also set minimums etc. This will lower your payout, but significantly raise the quality of your ads.

So when a publisher has all those scam ads, it’s either lack of knowledge and care, or a choice.

New comment by Semaphor in "Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom"

Semaphor — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:44:46 +0000

I must say I find it interesting you say "cannot have missed" as I never heard of stateroom or bullrun before

New comment by Semaphor in "Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU"

Semaphor — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:37:51 +0000

Including a very healthy metal scene, Martröð (50 % icelandic) and Nexion were recent favorites of mine.

New comment by Semaphor in "You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It"

Semaphor — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:27:31 +0000

The idea is to make people think about what they say, and maybe not declare themselves the winner in advance. Kinda like you do by declaring what my intentions were.

New comment by Semaphor in "You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It"

Semaphor — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:25:59 +0000

That’s what OP did. "Again, not some weird controversial point." OP already declared their statements as axioms.

New comment by Semaphor in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

Semaphor — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 05:58:00 +0000

I wouldn’t be afraid, but I also wouldn’t reverse a legit one. When you do that, you get sent to collections, which makes sense.

New comment by Semaphor in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

Semaphor — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:49:09 +0000

Wero is just starting on B2C, many business accounts still don't offer it. Not yet comparable to PayPal when talking purchases.

New comment by Semaphor in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

Semaphor — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:47:08 +0000

The thing is, burden of proof is with the bank. For a lastschrift, you have 8 weeks to reverse it, if you didn't actually sign the Ermächtigung, you have 13 months.

Unless you don't care what transfers happen, that's pretty much always enough time

New comment by Semaphor in "Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms"

Semaphor — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:55:55 +0000

One thing I’ve not seen mentioned: encoding speed. Encoding to webp (and I think Avif) is really slow, while at lower effort levels, JXL should easily be fast enough for on-the-fly.

New comment by Semaphor in "Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence"

Semaphor — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:30:20 +0000

FWIW, I think I had to fight a bit to figure out setting everything up correctly for uploads to work. But as I said in sibling, nothing too problematic.

New comment by Semaphor in "Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are"

Semaphor — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 03:13:01 +0000

So it tells me I’m unique and it can track me across different browsers. It also tells me that in a different browser with a different fingerprint. Even private browsing shows more unique fingerprints that are completely different. I don’t think this site is very useful except looking at fancy data.