Hacker News: alex1138

New comment by alex1138 in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

alex1138 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:34:21 +0000

PS - sorry. I love a great many things about HN. I'm glad the site does sometimes insist on decorum

New comment by alex1138 in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

alex1138 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:02:23 +0000

You're not wrong and I do think that specific dead comment is dead for a reason. I just get a bit bristly when I do see legitimate comments buried under flags

New comment by alex1138 in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

alex1138 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:50:39 +0000

re: dead, I agree. I'm so tired of flags killing discussion. This site is highly regimented

What I want, as someone who vaguely leaned left and has gotten... less so, since certain revelations, are platforms that work. Where you can't just get booted off for things that are not-boot-off-worthy (sorry. wording sucks). In that view, Bluesky is something I'm interested in as a protocol. It should be something the Left and Right can both use, regardless of the people it tends to attract

New comment by alex1138 in "Apple's App Tracking Transparency treated its own apps better than rivals"

alex1138 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:33:15 +0000

There are arguments about how Apple has too much power and we need better app stores and anecdotes about I-built-an-app-it-was-a-nightmare

...but Meta is exactly the reason why IMO it's needed. Because of people like Zuckerberg who treat the internet and people's phones like his personal plaything. No granularity. Contacts uploaded whenever anyone does the slightest thing

New comment by alex1138 in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

alex1138 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:46:23 +0000

This is not an excuse. He needs to be better. He seems pretty scummy

New comment by alex1138 in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

alex1138 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:08:50 +0000

Yes but it's like saying the only social media you need is email

That's great if you already can reach everyone. But Facebook in theory is meant to cater to the lost-touch-with-person years ago thing

New comment by alex1138 in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

alex1138 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:34:23 +0000

I've been told Zuckerberg - as opposed to murdering competition in the crib, despite him being ON RECORD IN EMAILS as saying 'they can hurt us' - bought a company that was barely anything. It "had 12 employees" or whatever. How they've "grown it" or whatever. Not what I see. I see it as competition killing. People really liked IG... in 2012. Now it's a poster child (or is that Whatsapp?) for antitrust

New comment by alex1138 in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

alex1138 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:40:17 +0000

"They're enforcing GDPR so here's malicious compliance and our own little template verbiage about how much we do actually 'care' about your privacy. Now click me to deny or blindly accept like you have with EVERY OTHER SITE you've visited since this morning"

New comment by alex1138 in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

alex1138 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:37:51 +0000

Tribunals at the Hague.

(Not for this website, which is obviously a joke/telling commentary. I mean for real 'fucking websites'.)

New comment by alex1138 in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

alex1138 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:33:10 +0000

And then Yahoo shut down Geocities and fought archivers and then shut down Yahoo Groups and fought archivers

New comment by alex1138 in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"

alex1138 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:43:54 +0000

I like Gemini (I'm just a dumb person without knowledge of 'benchmarks' or how x compares to y) while understanding that shoving it into Google auto summaries has been a bad idea and produces inaccurate results

New comment by alex1138 in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

alex1138 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:43:03 +0000

This is literally true. I've heard their AI scrapers are especially vicious. I can imagine (I don't know this for sure, it's just what I assume) Gemini (or others, idk) kind of are classy about it. When Google pre-LLM was scraping the internet, I don't remember too many complaints about "Google is pinging my server so often it's a strain on resources"

Facebook? They've always been the worst at this. By "this" I guess I mean the internet

New comment by alex1138 in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

alex1138 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:41:11 +0000

Yeah because how dare people actually connect with family and friends and "just get phone numbers/emails" or "just build their own"

Stop. Blaming. Users.

New comment by alex1138 in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

alex1138 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:04:08 +0000

I want someone to actually smack Steve Huffman. Not hard, but enough to get through the veneer of We Take Your Feedback Very Seriously And-

No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you

Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site

New comment by alex1138 in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

alex1138 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:14:04 +0000

> not leaving

It's hard to leave a monopoly, and you can't contact your friends any other way https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

Anecdotally, someone I know deleted their account, had it reactivated (the site did this) and now they show up on People You May Know. Plenty of other people have tried deleting it and found it nigh impossible

New comment by alex1138 in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

alex1138 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:40:10 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg is the ultimate mendacious prick

We know they want to be a monopoly. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

Site doesn't work. Posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 Messages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger... (or any thread about this)

He doesn't see human beings as people

New comment by alex1138 in "Grok Bot by SpaceXAI"

alex1138 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:04:49 +0000

Again, the site needs more transparency. The amount of censorship is shocking with how bad it is. This stuff needs much more manual review

New comment by alex1138 in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

alex1138 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:01:44 +0000

'Closed because scraping' is a big problem of hypocrisy

Let's say in a pretend world where Facebook gives a shit about anything (so, they combat marketplace scams, they don't randomly ban users, they faithfully show you posts from friends, they don't extort businesses) they want to protect privacy. So they close the site off, because scraping means there's no privacy. If I scrape your profile and export it to any number of sites, then it's not private. Ergo: closed. Sign up to view things, so we know who you are

But of course in the actual world that's not what they do. They purely want to do this to get more people to sign up so they 'have more users'. You can tell, because of who MZ is. You can tell because of how aggressive their own AI scrapers are on other sites. I've even heard they made a tool for Myspace that would enable you to transfer your contacts over to Facebook - but not the other way around

New comment by alex1138 in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

alex1138 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 06:27:38 +0000

Zuck's DNA is clear. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4

New comment by alex1138 in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

alex1138 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:37:54 +0000

I know full well what sarcasm is and I don't think he was being sarcastic given the rest of his behavior