Hacker News: alpaca128

New comment by alpaca128 in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

alpaca128 — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:29:27 +0000

That's not how the human mind works. People still get skewed views on body standards even when they know that what they are looking at is biased and/or photoshopped, for example. When an AI fake stirs emotions just right, half the people will not even care about the truth.

New comment by alpaca128 in "FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account"

alpaca128 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:01:38 +0000

On YouTube I reported bot accounts for a couple days, the only reaction I got was that at some point it showed a popup that told me too many false reports would lead to a ban. Not sure what Google gets out of it, but there is no way they could be that bad at fighting bots unless they're not even trying. Even trivial tricks like copy-pasted texts keep working.

New comment by alpaca128 in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

alpaca128 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:18:44 +0000

Great! So they'll fix the back button bugs on YouTube, and return me to the previous set of video recommendations when I use it on the homepage, right? Right? And let me return to the actual site when it detects that I lost the web connection for 0.01 seconds and hides all the content, and I then press the back button?

New comment by alpaca128 in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

alpaca128 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:02:51 +0000

Why would anyone with a sound mind envy billionaires?

New comment by alpaca128 in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

alpaca128 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:01:44 +0000

That you give random people on the internet the power to decide who you vote for is kind of sad. Calling them low intelligence for it even more so.

New comment by alpaca128 in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

alpaca128 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:53:01 +0000

He doesn't trust it for anything else either as far as I can tell. In an interview he's boasted about how he uses a paper notebook for everything all day.

New comment by alpaca128 in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

alpaca128 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:10:23 +0000

They probably want to avoid situations where a customer turns off backups, then loses data and makes it the problem of support.

But it would be nice to have a "don't ask again" option regardless, even if it's hidden in settings.

New comment by alpaca128 in "YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription"

alpaca128 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:45:41 +0000

The Amazon version of this story I heard was support advising to create a new account, and then the person got permabanned for creating multiple accounts which is against TOS.

New comment by alpaca128 in "Native Instant Space Switching on macOS"

alpaca128 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:32:21 +0000

> I'm still impressed when switching between programs isn't stuttery

It is stuttery when you use the magic touchpad via Bluetooth, same applies to the cursor. It's very noticeable with slow movements.

New comment by alpaca128 in "I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my billing issue"

alpaca128 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:14:49 +0000

I live in the EU and have read this in the terms for my region.

> they have no legal obligation to follow through and give you what they promised

Yes, they do. Contracts are contracts. They just don't promise you ownership of anything but a revocable license. Like every platform offering DRM protected content.

New comment by alpaca128 in "I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my billing issue"

alpaca128 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:18:44 +0000

Some companies like Activision clearly state in their terms that chargeback means you will be permanently banned, no exceptions. You'll lose your account and access to all digital "purchases" forever.

They don't need to prove anything to stop doing business with you.

New comment by alpaca128 in "John Deere to pay $99M in right-to-repair settlement"

alpaca128 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:09:46 +0000

Do you seriously expect other companies not following suit? People need lawnmowers, so this can quickly turn into the same situation we have with the inkjet printer market.

New comment by alpaca128 in "Microsoft terminated the account VeraCrypt used to sign Windows drivers"

alpaca128 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:12:33 +0000

MS could literally double their global employee count with a fraction of what they spend on AI annually.

New comment by alpaca128 in "The best tools for sending an email if you go silent"

alpaca128 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:47:44 +0000

This is for sending a message in case something happens to you and you're not able to send anything yourself anymore for whatever reason.

Hence the term "dead man's switch"

New comment by alpaca128 in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

alpaca128 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:55:06 +0000

I could get used to touch gestures if they were more consistent and tolerant enough for wrong inputs. It may work in one app but not another. One app expects me to swipe from left to right to go back, another wants me to swipe from top to bottom for the same thing. It may mark an email as unread if I start the swipe a pixel too far away from the screen edge. On Android swipe gestures may vary even on different phones from the same brand. In iOS, tapping the top edge of the screen means scroll to the top. Except in the Photo app, where it means "scroll to the top of the current section, or almost the top, or do nothing and make the user guess if they just tapped the wrong way".

Meanwhile when there's an X button or arrow to the left I always know what it's going to do aside from one or two overly creative Android apps.

New comment by alpaca128 in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

alpaca128 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:39:17 +0000

You kind of do need Emacs though, as far as I know it is the only existing fully compatible implementation. As soon as the file is outside that environment, all bets are off. I tried using org-mode instead of Markdown once, not for long.

New comment by alpaca128 in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

alpaca128 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:33:42 +0000

Yes, it's obviously "against common usage" given HTML support exists specifically for less common features that Markdown does not support. Like tables, which are supported by some implementations but not all, and iirc not even all Markdown variants that support tables use the same syntax for them. The only way to be 100% sure is to use HTML. Of course you wouldn't do that if you just have the file on Github, but in general HTML is supported in Markdown for a reason.

New comment by alpaca128 in "Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall"

alpaca128 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:12:45 +0000

This has been a thing long enough for online guides to exist that explain how to get rid of it. Fortunately, because setting the default program in a second place to get rid of a security barrier wasn't my first guess. When does a bug start to become an undocumented feature?

New comment by alpaca128 in "Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall"

alpaca128 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:06:05 +0000

Those examples are very reasonable. However I also had Mac OS suddenly treat all m4a files on the system as potential malware and it blocked any attempt at opening them. Why did it do that? Because I checked the "set as default app" option, one minute after I had already opened the same file using the same application. The only way to open the files was by entering the password in the settings app each time - but re-setting the same app as default in the file's Get Info dialog got rid of that "protection" system-wide without any password prompts or extra permissions. I don't see how that was supposed to help with security.

New comment by alpaca128 in "Working on Products People Hate"

alpaca128 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:25:58 +0000

> engineers work for the company, not for users

Honestly I don't see a big difference between that sentiment and "I was just following orders".

That kind of mindset eventually leads to situations like yesterday's headline about the Artemis astronauts finding out that their computer inexplicably runs two instances of Outlook which both do not work [0].

Situations like Windows updates causing data loss by updating and rebooting without the user's consent.

Or situations like one year ago when I had to help an elderly person after MS suddenly replaced the easy to use Mail app with an enshittified one that wasn't just much more complicated, but also had an untranslated English interface because MS couldn't be bothered to translate it before forcing it onto users worldwide.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615490