Hacker News: _factor

New comment by _factor in "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence"

_factor — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:37:21 +0000

You’re still free to walk to your destination instead of driving, it would just be a lot of time friction.

Funny how reducing the friction with technology eventually increased the friction of the older transportation methods.

New comment by _factor in "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing"

_factor — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:15:15 +0000

I have vivid dreams and smells from a surgery where the visions and feeling of them poking me are incredibly intense. The question is whether it’s a memory or a manifestation of fear. I rarely dream (every few years), but this vivid dream comes through on occasion.

New comment by _factor in "The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers"

_factor — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:37:31 +0000

And giving those same people more power makes it more difficult to fix the core problems.

New comment by _factor in "The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers"

_factor — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:32:32 +0000

So you audit the database and the access. Just because it exists doesn’t mean it has be available.

New comment by _factor in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"

_factor — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:24:16 +0000

I look at them as lab grown bacteria. We’re in the early days and still have a lot of contamination we still don’t understand. They don’t always produce a viable result, and sometimes they break test rigs.

Just because they’re not a pure extension of our bodies or minds like a hammer or pencil doesn’t mean they will magically break the concept of work.

New comment by _factor in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"

_factor — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:09:49 +0000

Did hammers obviate the technical mastery of finding a suitable rock? Or did they elevate the definition of “technical mastery”?

New comment by _factor in "AI slop is killing online communities"

_factor — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:22:34 +0000

Tell your TPM who you are and prove it with face and fingerprint ID that get matched to a real old person.

Leave them on the device, authorize the device to validate before age inappropriate content appears.

Website wants to know your age? Your face and fingerprint support your attestation signed by a trusted party.

Can it be tricked potentially? Sure, but then you’re probably a super genius kid and not the reason that these laws were created (as if).

Don’t let anyone tell you anonymity must die for safety to exist.

New comment by _factor in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"

_factor — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:50:55 +0000

They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.

New comment by _factor in "Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters"

_factor — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:08:09 +0000

Took 2x AMD MI50s to 50 t/s instead of 20 t/s for Q8 27B. Impressive.

New comment by _factor in "America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance"

_factor — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:02:10 +0000

And it will be public and someone can be held accountable. Heck put an AI in it that scans for a list of items and reports when they see it. An actual investigation will have public pressure to access data. Lax policies will show the increased usage.

Funding the police is the burden of vigilance already on tax-payers. We’re already approach the worst of worlds. Your perspective just points to human organizations being unsustainable, not this concept in particular.

New comment by _factor in "America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance"

_factor — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:22:00 +0000

An open source community driven surveillance network that alerts the community when it is accessed by a select list of “trusted” governing officials. Clearly outlined access rules that are policy driven, technically controlled and auditable.

Sure Flock, we buy your safety pitch. We just don’t trust you.

New comment by _factor in "Where the goblins came from"

_factor — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:51:31 +0000

Promoting and subtly suggesting are not the same thing. Suggestion is far more insidious.

New comment by _factor in "Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s"

_factor — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:46:01 +0000

I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you.

Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.

New comment by _factor in "Astronomers find the edge of the Milky Way"

_factor — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:01:23 +0000

Poorly phrased. The most recent stars are on the edges. The inner stars were first, hence the “working outwards”.

New comment by _factor in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

_factor — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:01:49 +0000

Being at a corporation normalizes sociopathy to some extent. The phrase: “It’s business, not personal”, outlines it well.

It is ok to harm another group of people financially and even personally because that’s what “business does”. Degradation being a ratchet that calcifies unethical behavior doesn’t help. Companies tend to get less ethical the older and larger they become.

New comment by _factor in "We accepted surveillance as default"

_factor — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:59:49 +0000

They took what should have been a browser on/off switch and turned it into something almost worse.

New comment by _factor in "Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app"

_factor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:41:22 +0000

You presumably had a working 2fa app already, but off the cuff decide to switch to new unvetted variant X; basically unknown auth system after reading a few paragraphs of text in an afternoon?

Does this seem sound?

New comment by _factor in "The normalization of corruption in organizations (2003) [pdf]"

_factor — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:49:50 +0000

The people who crave that money and influence tend to be control freak psycho/sociopaths. They need to feel superior to others because deep down they don’t/can’t value themselves. They don’t even know what they’re competing/fighting for anymore. They just can’t stop because they know no other way.

New comment by _factor in "Keep Android Open"

_factor — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 20:26:47 +0000

KDE Connect works just fine on iOS.

New comment by _factor in "Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial"

_factor — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:57:43 +0000

Parent was implying “all” humans crave this power over others. This is patently false.

“Most” people won’t act badly to attain this power, “some” will. Being placed into a position and choosing harm is not the same as pursuing it.