Hacker News: aorth

New comment by aorth in "Firefox 153.0 Beta"

aorth — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:02:00 +0000

Awesome! JPEG-XL support is here. I enabled it via the new "Firefox Labs" section in the settings, then tested on https://jpegxl.info/resources/jpeg-xl-test-page.html without a restart.

New comment by aorth in "An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation"

aorth — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 07:29:07 +0000

The excessive scraping and ignoring robots.txt only breaks the informal social contract established over the past decades of the open internet.

The real problem is the companies offering money to developers if they include unrelated SDKs in their calculator or flashlight (for example) applications. Those SDKs add functionality to incorporate those devices into a network that can be used for scraping. The traffic is little, but is distributed over millions of residential devices all over the world, making it difficult to categorize or block. That should be illegal, and that's what Google et al can be expected to be policing on their app stores.

New comment by aorth in "Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines"

aorth — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:57:12 +0000

Reminds me of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

New comment by aorth in "The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams"

aorth — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:40:19 +0000

In season 1 episode 2 of The Audacity JoAnne tells Duncan that "information is not insight" and that's a similar argument to this.

New comment by aorth in "Underarm bowling incident of 1981"

aorth — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:03:20 +0000

I was reminded of this hilarious skit about English sports. https://youtu.be/E_6d3JBBo4s

New comment by aorth in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

aorth — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:27:29 +0000

In web Outlook I *very" often begin typing as some element is loading a popover and end up hitting some key that archives the message and leaves me scrambling to click Undo. I guess it's usually some contact comes into focus of my mouse and starts trying to load the org chart or whatever. Ughhhhhh.

New comment by aorth in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

aorth — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:53:18 +0000

Ah interesting. They use the "FUTO source first" license. https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/blob/master/LIC...

Open source with limitations on commercial use.

New comment by aorth in "Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable"

aorth — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:23:49 +0000

What are "guardrails" in an LLM? Is it part of the system prompt, like a long list of "if the user asks about xxxx, xxxx, or xxxx, tell them xxxx"?

On a related note, I don't use LLMs at all, but I tried to use DeepSeek last week to help me fix a webpack dependency issue in an Angular project. After two queries or so I got logged out and banned. Is that "guardrails"?

New comment by aorth in "Nordstjernen 1.0"

aorth — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:11:42 +0000

Strictly commenting on the license: it's my understanding that, if an LLM like Claude wrote it, it's not copyrightable. Isn't that the consensus these days?

New comment by aorth in "Changing how we develop Ladybird"

aorth — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:44:07 +0000

Yes, and there was a good post about exactly this social contract last week https://jola.dev/posts/the-social-contract-of-writing. I find the argument compelling on the face of it and true in my experience with colleagues and the broader digital landscape recently.

New comment by aorth in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

aorth — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:20:18 +0000

I wasn't familiar with the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). Apparently they were acquired by Morningstar in February 2026. I also found this press release from Vanguard announcing they will be updating fund names (including VTI) to reflect the acquisition https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/corporatesite/us/en/c... but nothing on the fund composition or rule changes.

New comment by aorth in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

aorth — Thu, 28 May 2026 04:40:14 +0000

Last year a non-technical friend sent me a YouTube video about a niche history topic that we had been discussing. I was surprised because there wasn't much information online. The video was clearly AI generated, with that sheen on the pictures and that perfect voice. I couldn't listen to it. I told my friend and he was adamant it was original. Yikes...

New comment by aorth in "Last.fm is now independent"

aorth — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:29:24 +0000

You could scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz to track your personal library listens.

New comment by aorth in "Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game"

aorth — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:14:06 +0000

> Celebrated designer Clint Hocking – him wot worked on Far Cry 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Watch Dogs Legion, and the forthcoming Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe

Is this "him wot worked on" a typo or a deliberate style of speaking, presumably for dramatic effect?

New comment by aorth in "Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess"

aorth — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:09:06 +0000

> Manually edit pyproject.toml to add upper bounds for every single dependency.

Hah! I thought I was the only one. Still very happy with uv though.

New comment by aorth in "The quiet renovation at Bitwarden"

aorth — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:54:11 +0000

Another vote for pass. I've been using it for ten years with a git repository. I sync to all my machines and use https://github.com/agrahn/Android-Password-Store on Android. Not a solution for non-technical people though...

New comment by aorth in "A desktop made for one"

aorth — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:10:17 +0000

Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full-on into AI-assisted everything and lost their critical thinking capacity, programming skills, knowledge of Unix command line, etc.

There is part of me that understands the appeal of the all-in on AI and personalized software approach. It's a bit cyberpunk! In terms of open-source software, the downsides outweigh the benefits in my opinion, though. Important principles like community ownership and commitment are absent, and this approach is even radically antisocial. And then there's the inevitable issues with maintainability, to say noting about dependence on big tech companies.

To each their own, but this is not for me.

New comment by aorth in "This Month in Ladybird – April 2026"

aorth — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:29:44 +0000

> GTK4 / libadwaita frontend

Nice! Looks good. I prefer GTK UI/UX over Qt. Looking forward to seeing the development progress on that.

New comment by aorth in "Zed 1.0"

aorth — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:50:17 +0000

Massive congratulations to the team and the community. Thanks for the solid product. It's fast and native on Linux with Wayland. I don't use any of the AI stuff, though, so I'm glad there is a switch to disable it.

New comment by aorth in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

aorth — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 06:25:06 +0000

I know gitea / forgejo will be a popular suggestion, either self-hosted or via something like Codeberg. Despite also being a GitHub user since 2010 and also "doomscrolling" issues for projects I am involved in, I do host a gitea for personal projects where I don't need the GitHub network effect. It works well and is surprisingly capable!

Having said that, I stumbled upon this curious blog post about a security issues in Forgejo: https://dustri.org/b/carrot-disclosure-forgejo.html