Hacker News: TheBicPen

New comment by TheBicPen in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

TheBicPen — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:58:54 +0000

Any creative work you create is copyrighted by default as soon as it is recorded onto some medium, at least in the US. https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/

New comment by TheBicPen in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

TheBicPen — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:51:40 +0000

Not OP, but I absolutely know people like this. Devs who don't even know what POSIX is, let alone care whether their OS is compliant.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

TheBicPen — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:50:05 +0000

People have preferences. Some preferences are shallow. That's it, really. All kinds of people exist in this world, and wanting to be perceived as high-status is practically quintessential human behaviour.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Nvidia's Risky Business"

TheBicPen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:34:48 +0000

An AGI doesn't need that level of detail to do most tasks effectively. To use the OP's example, a cat catching a bug out of the air does not need to run a fluid dynamics simulation of airflow over the bug's wings to be able to catch it. A cheap approximation of the flight path is sufficient. Perhaps some physical tasks will need that level of detail but many will not.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models"

TheBicPen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:09:45 +0000

There absolutely are laws restricting what hardware you are allowed to use. e.g. https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...

New comment by TheBicPen in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

TheBicPen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:09:11 +0000

Can these services not use the same fallback mechanism that already exists for non-passkey logins? i.e. an email with a 1-time code or similar. Yes that somewhat defeats the purpose of passkeys but that option is going to exist for a long time regardless of passkey adoption.

If you don't want to downgrade security, how about requiring confirmation from another session that is already logged in using a passkey? e.g. You try to log in on PC2. A prompt appears with something like "confirm this login from [PC1, etc.]". You log in on PC1 using your passkey. The service recognizes that the login id definitely you, or at least someone in possession of your physical device and login method for that device. Therefore, it then allows PC2 to register a new passkey. Kinda similar to how google confirms new logins by sending a notification to your phone.

New comment by TheBicPen in "I'm a USB-C Maximalist"

TheBicPen — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:04:17 +0000

I've had the opposite experience. Lightning was been far more fragile than USB-C.

New comment by TheBicPen in "I'm a USB-C Maximalist"

TheBicPen — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:59:44 +0000

> throw out all the ones that don’t

> encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables

One of the main advantages of a single standardized plug is reducing e-waste. This just sounds irresponsible. Having a single tool that covers every possible use case is rarely a good solution.

New comment by TheBicPen in "WebUSB Extension for Firefox"

TheBicPen — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:04:54 +0000

> I didn't have a way of running that code and only giving it access to a single USB device and nothing else.

To be honest I think that's the most compelling case for webUSB today. If desktop OSes had sandboxing tools (or more granular permissions in general) that are easily usable be everyday users, there would be no need to put webUSB in a browser sandbox. The cross-pltaform nature of it is nice, but that alone is not enough IMO. I think it would be interesting to see a Linux distribution where software that is not explicitly trusted (i.e. not installed by the system package manager) has no permissions by default. Interpreters make this more complicated but for binaries it could work.

New comment by TheBicPen in "A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines"

TheBicPen — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:50:35 +0000

I'm partial to "The AI is more A than I"

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team"

TheBicPen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:27:01 +0000

> you dont get that much karma if you are consistently posting bad takes.

I wonder how true that is. While this site doesn't have incentivize engagement-maximizing behaviour (posting ragebait) like some other sites do, I would imagine that simply posting more is the best way to accrue karma long-term.

New comment by TheBicPen in "MacBook Neo"

TheBicPen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:36:08 +0000

> Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.

How usable is an 8-year-old iPhone as a primary phone though? I agree that having 8 years of support is a good thing, but at that point the hardware is so degraded that it's not suitable for its original purpose anymore. At that point I'd rather have android just so I can root it and install Linux. Then again, with improvements to phones slowing down in recent years, this is becoming increasingly untrue.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

TheBicPen — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 05:30:19 +0000

Do you have a link to the agenda? The only Monday meeting I see on the mountain view site is a Board of Library Trustees meeting

New comment by TheBicPen in "Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron"

TheBicPen — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:56:32 +0000

The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.

New comment by TheBicPen in "High-Level Is the Goal"

TheBicPen — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 06:06:58 +0000

As 1 datapoint to support this, see Audacity moving from WxWidgets to Qt for 4.0.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

TheBicPen — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:26:14 +0000

https://thebicpen.ca

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

TheBicPen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:03:38 +0000

Maybe the real humanitarian failure is that the US didn't nuke everybody and start over from the stone age. Can't any societal problems if no societies exist, right?

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

TheBicPen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:00:26 +0000

Does any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

TheBicPen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 04:58:09 +0000

At least NK's human rights abuses are contained within their borders. I hope future generations will look back on the many US invasions of foreign countries over the years and all the war crimes that took place during those invasions with the scrutiny they deserve.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"

TheBicPen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:34:20 +0000

While I agree with you, I find it hard to argue against the view that politicians are elected for the views they held during their campaign. They may change their mind after being elected, but their constituents that voted for them will not all change their mind simultaneously. To the ones that don't change their mind, it does appear to be a betrayal of their principles. A rational politician would not want to gain that kind of reputation out of pure self-interest.