Hacker News: birdsongs

New comment by birdsongs in "Campus deplatformings hit record high"

birdsongs — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 08:42:04 +0000

So much ascribed intent to a comment I wrote in 30 seconds about shit statistics. The math is bad, the reporting and conclusions are bad.

That's it, really, I'm not some evil wordsmith with an agenda.

But okay man, sure.

New comment by birdsongs in "Campus deplatformings hit record high"

birdsongs — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 22:34:21 +0000

Ask me a question in good faith and I'll gladly answer.

New comment by birdsongs in "Campus deplatformings hit record high"

birdsongs — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:35:49 +0000

Oh good catch. Ok, so nationally, if each campus held only one event per week, we're saying 0.07% of all meetings had someone speak up against it. Less than a tenth of one percent.

I couldn't roll my eyes any harder. This certainly is a national crisis.

Math: 200/(50*6000)

New comment by birdsongs in "Campus deplatformings hit record high"

birdsongs — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:24:03 +0000

It's not deplatforming if campuses don't want to hear someone speak. This seems like a bonkers term to use.

200 deplatforms in a year? (There were 75 in 2003, the 30 year trend is gentle at best.)

There's almost 6000 higher education institutions in the US. This is fabricated outrage.

New comment by birdsongs in "Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents"

birdsongs — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:28:28 +0000

Seriously, I have no idea why the onus is on the generation, the framing should be "education is massively underfunded, teachers are abandoned with ever increasing class sizes and ever decreasing agency, and kids are left with smartphones to fend for themselves in an environment where they may be shot and killed at any moment".

We, the older generations, have failed them.

New comment by birdsongs in "Woman who rescued injured crow keeps getting 'thank-you gifts' from birds [video]"

birdsongs — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 09:38:59 +0000

This was such a good watch, thank you

New comment by birdsongs in "What I self-host"

birdsongs — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:36:58 +0000

Yeah they have integrated end to end encryption, this made me go digging, and I found they have a bridge app that handles it.

https://proton.me/support/bridge-for-linux

Excited to set this up, I had assumed it wasn't a possibility.

New comment by birdsongs in "What I self-host"

birdsongs — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:12:57 +0000

Like the other person said, proxmox allows containers or full VMs, and the base OS takes less than 2 GB RAM.

My jellyfin LXC idles at a few hundred megs of ram, shares the base debian kernel, and if anyone does ever break in, they don't get access to anything else, anywhere else on my server. (All media is also mounted read-only to the jellyfin LXC.)

I really, really like it, just set it up recently. Everything in its right place.

New comment by birdsongs in "What I self-host"

birdsongs — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:07:12 +0000

You can do this with Proton?? How does it handle decryption/encryption, etc?

Would absolutely love to do this, proton frontend annoys me at times.

New comment by birdsongs in "What I self-host"

birdsongs — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:04:36 +0000

I think it just sounds intimidating if one hasn't tried, but they are really well designed pieces of software, that are relatively simple to set up (just have to go through the motions and connect everything with API keys).

Highly recommend them to OP. My stack went down once in the past 4 years and it was my fault.

New comment by birdsongs in "Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots moved"

birdsongs — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:05:20 +0000

They use both, heavily. An outage, like the one recently, severely affects them.

> In October 2026, George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War said the network had become "the backbone of military communications in Ukraine", used by land, naval and air forces, with both Starlink and Starshield (the US DOD service) used depending on the application.[60]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...

New comment by birdsongs in "Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots moved"

birdsongs — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:31:23 +0000

Right? This is what prompted musk to take down Starlink, after everything else?

Look at what they do, not what they say.

New comment by birdsongs in "Sticky alpine flower confirms Darwin's 150-year-old carnivorous plant prediction"

birdsongs — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:28:17 +0000

This is really interesting, but they're not carnivorous. The decaying salmon deposit nutrients in the soil. Carnivorous plants actually digest the insects directly for nutrients, usually because the soil is inhospitable.

New comment by birdsongs in "Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts"

birdsongs — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:09:19 +0000

Garbage website that doesn't allow me to reject tracking cookies without paying.

> Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling

> Consent [required for free use]

New comment by birdsongs in "I Found a $90k Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google"

birdsongs — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 21:10:47 +0000

I'd rather skip, personally. I just don't have to read things these days, and I see enough Claude/GPT prose at work, it makes me resent seeing it elsewhere.

I have a backlog of books written by humans I'd much rather spend my time on.

But I love a good handwritten tech article.

New comment by birdsongs in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

birdsongs — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:18:51 +0000

> Humans serve them well enough

For now. Throw in climate change, food shortages, war, mass migration, and suddenly the ratio becomes 25 million : 1 for starving, angry people vs billionaires, globally.

New comment by birdsongs in "Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses"

birdsongs — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:26:40 +0000

Elder care really is bad, I know. I work in medical technology. I don't know why they're so frugal. I worry about getting old more than anything else.

New comment by birdsongs in "Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses"

birdsongs — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:55:48 +0000

Let's not exaggerate though, we have some of the best roads in the world. I have driven many, many places. Even the small fjord roads on the west coast are well paved, signed, and lit.

And we're building one of the most advanced tunnels in the world (deepest, longest, most complex), between Stavanger and Haugesund.

I agree the state could be less frugal, but it's hardly poverty conditions. It's not perfect, no where ever is. But I grew up in an actually corrupt nation and region. It is not like that here.

For healthcare, I don't know what you mean either. Specialists for non-time sensitive matters can take a while, but anything immediate (cancer, acute emergencies), is immediate access to some of the best healthcare on this planet, for free.

I saw family die in the US for our hospitals and healthcare. You have no idea how bad it is elsewhere if you think it's poor here.

I'm not saying things can't be better. But you're sitting on top of the mountain and complaining it's not tall enough. Look around you.

New comment by birdsongs in "In the wake of Tippett Studios’ closure, a digital archive appears online"

birdsongs — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:30:39 +0000

It's incredibly obvious they meant "to put it online", even if the content was already digital on the CDs. This kind of pedanticism is extremely tiring and antisocial. Grow up.

New comment by birdsongs in "US tells France and Germany to release diesel stocks or face US export ban"

birdsongs — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:54:08 +0000

> Mussolini, who loved his country

Um,