Hacker News: a2128

New comment by a2128 in "Kumander Linux – A Linux Distro with a Windows 7 Desktop"

a2128 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:23:42 +0000

Don't be too alarmed by that notice, I use it daily on Wayland without any resulting issues as far as I can tell

New comment by a2128 in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

a2128 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:13:51 +0000

As someone who, at a point, would copy homework from someone else, copy book reports from online, and use the answer sheets to complete assignments, I can tell you this strategy is long known to accumulate and not prevent cognitive debt

New comment by a2128 in "Android may soon restrict on-device ADB"

a2128 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:19:44 +0000

It seems to me a lot of Google lately is to block things they don't like using ways that only look like side effects.

The introduction of Manifest V3 API in Chrome for extensions, and disabling Manifest V2 for security reasons. It just so happened that ad blockers were made incompatible with the Manifest V3 API. It's a little blatant considering this came right around the time that YouTube began showing warning messages to users with ad blockers...

Requiring developers to verify their apps via Google Play Developer Console and blocking any unverified APK installations. This is done in such a way that it just so happens to squash F-Droid and most FOSS apps for most people, and blocks any serious competition to Google Play or any apps they don't like.

Of course, there's all this talk about preventing malware, but it is a fact that if you download any random ringtone or PDF app on Google Play it's going to come with probably 25 trackers and send your data to every jurisdiction in the world, and many apps even fail to declare any of this via Google Play data safety or privacy policy. Let's not forget that spyware is a form of malware. Take a look at the leaderboard :) https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/list/?filte...

In my opinion, this would probably be an indication that maybe Google controls too much technology and that they may need to be broken up to ensure fair competition. For Christ's sake they almost broke up Microsoft not that long ago for shipping a browser with their operating system, and now Google is blatantly controlling the operating system, the platform and app store, the ecosystem, the browser, the ad network, and abusing their power over it however they can.

New comment by a2128 in "Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS"

a2128 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:11:06 +0000

My mistake, I just assumed their Byfron anti-cheat is kernel level because that's the most common reason why anticheats take issue with Wine. If their anti-cheat operates entirely in usermode, then their decision to block Wine is even more baffling to me.

New comment by a2128 in "Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS"

a2128 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:37:45 +0000

Roblox has a long history of not supporting Linux, and the game was rendered unplayable for many years. In 2022 it became possible following some Wine patches, but then they began to implement a kernel-level anticheat. Roblox initially committed to keeping Wine working but suddenly went back on that and blocked it without notice. Today, the last remaining way is through running the Android version of the game through an Android container or emulator. The TFA is about stopping this exact method of running the game though...

New comment by a2128 in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

a2128 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:24:54 +0000

In my opinion the whole "it's just a reference and national govs can decide" is a nonsense excuse to diffuse blame in a circle. The only outcome is that national governments will closely follow the reference and reuse the decision, the citizens of each country then have to manually complain to their own government individually, at which point they might get ignored because, well the reference implementation has it or talks about it, so they're just following the recommended security requirements, and who are you anyway to be demanding our system get less secure are you some kind of cybercriminal?

Play Integrity is still recommended to be evaluated in the documentation, with no mentions of its consequences. https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android...

New comment by a2128 in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

a2128 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:47:03 +0000

In the case of Roblox they have a horrible system where they estimate your age and only allow you to interact with people of a similar age, meaning if you verified your kid with your face then they'd only be able to interact with adults and not other kids. At least that's the theory. It doesn't take a lot of effort to figure out how a predator could misuse this system to their advantage (which is why I call it horrible)

Reference: https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/39143693116052-...

New comment by a2128 in "A better way to tie gym shorts (or any drawstring) [video]"

a2128 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 23:22:13 +0000

    Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot
    This helps protect our community. Learn more

We need to protect the community by checks notes restricting access to useful informational videos...

New comment by a2128 in "EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track"

a2128 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:24:12 +0000

Why should you have any right to look through everyone's private communications? Nobody really has any choice to reject your EULA if they want to stay in contact with someone on your service. I could force you to sign a ToS that includes "By using our service you owe us $10 million and agree to donate your kidney to our CEO" in order to reach your overseas grandma, but that doesn't mean it's actually enforceable or legal...

New comment by a2128 in "Microsoft Needs Windows Lite"

a2128 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:10:01 +0000

> Over time, Windows Lite becomes the main, and only, version of Windows. Development and maintenance costs fall, and somehow Microsoft makes more money than they ever did on an OS.

Looking from the outside, it doesn't seem that Microsoft treats Windows as an isolated product anymore with a balance sheet of sales versus development costs. Rather, it's an advertising billboard for their other money-making products like Edge, Copilot, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and at some point Candy Crush of all things(?). In fact this isn't isolated to just Windows or Microsoft either. SwiftKey pushes you to use OneDrive, Google (search engine) famously pushed Google products and there were antitrust discussions about that. Advertising was just some annoying thing that was necessary to power free web services but now it's infiltrated the very core of our day-to-day technology. Until we can get proper antitrust enforcement, we'll only see technological stagnation get worse as more products become boring billboard monopolies with little incentives to get better.

New comment by a2128 in "Steam Machine launches today"

a2128 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:31:58 +0000

Sure and maybe Google also subsidizes the Pixel phones because they'll make up for it with Google Play transaction fees. But what if I don't want something that's arguably illegal price dumping, and would rather pay a bit extra to actually own my hardware and be able to run what I want, even after it's discontinued? We don't get such an option.

Quickly more and more companies are adopting the model of finding ways to trap the user into continuously paying them more money after the sale, then locking down hardware and software to ensure the customer is properly trapped, and maybe price cutting their competitors a bit. The death of mobile computing is actively happening right before our eyes as Google completes the trap by restricting users ability to install apks. Ultimately customers end up paying more and having a shittier experience as a result of this.

I think it needs to be applauded when a company refuses to engage with this model and simply lets you own what you bought and paid for, and brings this idea to a market that has long been infected with lockdownitis. (Unfortunately in this case the price is not "a little bit higher", but what can you do when component prices have become crazy...)

New comment by a2128 in "Steam Machine launches today"

a2128 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:59:08 +0000

Every console on the market right now is locked-down proprietary garbage, that's the basic reality. The PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, they are also technically x86 PCs as they run on x86 processors, but they are specifically locked down to prevent any use outside of their narrow use cases that are optimized to make them money. Valve is really the only company that's developing proper consoles with a custom operating system and custom AMD chips while not locking down the hardware, despite the strong incentives of locking people into paying them 30% forever and preventing access to competing game stores

New comment by a2128 in "Never Give Them Your Face"

a2128 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:54:34 +0000

I made an account on LinkedIn while forgetting my VPN was enabled and set up my profile. They immediately flagged me as suspicious and restricted my account, and demanded I upload an ID to remove the restriction, to which I complied and they lifted the restriction. Then about a month later I tried to add my sibling as a connection and they didn't get any notification, then my sibling tried to search up my name to add me and I wasn't showing as a search result. Seems I was shadowbanned even after providing my ID, which seems insane to me that the main professional social network can just do that to someone without due process or any indication. This type of thing could sabotage someone's entire professional career or ruin their self-confidence as everyone ignores all of their messages and activity

New comment by a2128 in "Sakana Fugu"

a2128 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:47:11 +0000

I used to have a $20/mo ChatGPT subscription and now I spend $12 per year using Kimi models on OpenRouter, and that's with zero-data-retention-only providers (some models sometimes have free providers with scary tracking). Maybe I just don't use that many tokens, I don't fill the context with more than what's needed for a specific request, but it goes to show how these subscriptions can be an absolute ripoff. The thought of spending 200x that is insane to me

New comment by a2128 in "NLnet announces funding for 67 more open-source projects"

a2128 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:43:27 +0000

I think the point of funding this stuff is not just to produce projects but also invest in the people building them, and to encourage a more resilient and open internet. So it seems entirely understandable if they'd want to prioritize funding people developing skills to understand and work with certain technologies, over funding people who will mainly send the money to some foreign AI giant for an AI that at any point may be taken away (see Anthropic Fable 5 export restrictions), get some specific use case suddenly restricted or quietly sabotaged (see Anthropic Fable 5 on LLM development), or get its price hiked beyond what's viable for an open-source project.

Also, the prompts and dates is for writing the grant proposal itself, and not for coding. Maybe they receive too many AI generated proposals. It feels rather rude anyway to be asking for 5,000 to 50,000 euros funding for your project if you can't even fill in the six free-form fields yourself.

New comment by a2128 in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

a2128 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:09:55 +0000

AWS wasn't the only thing consuming power, there was also the LLM which must've wasted an ungodly amount of tokens on this pointless endeavour

New comment by a2128 in "GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)"

a2128 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:04:19 +0000

Yet it's 2026 and we see extreme examples of spam content and misinformation to the point that it's killing the internet, but AI companies have collectively decided to not care

New comment by a2128 in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

a2128 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:27:43 +0000

In a circle of irony, reuters.com is denying my request to read the article about Apple deciding to deny rolling out Siri in EU due to being denied their request for an exemption to law

    Access Denied
    
    Our apologies, the content you requested cannot be accessed.

New comment by a2128 in "Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism"

a2128 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:59:01 +0000

There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

New comment by a2128 in "Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training"

a2128 — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:45:37 +0000

What incentives does OpenAI have to make sure the AI actually works well with Norwegian beyond capturing a (small) Norwegian market? What incentives do they have to take Norwegian values into consideration, or to preserve Norwegian culture into the future? The matter is also a question of national sovereignty, so to simply release the data and nicely ask foreign companies to solve the problem for you, would be a fool's move