Hacker News: bluehex

New comment by bluehex in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

bluehex — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:32:55 +0000

Most recently it was the configuration app for my keyboard firmware, and then video calling in FB messenger (that one might work in other browsers besides Chrome. I didn't dig too much).

New comment by bluehex in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

bluehex — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:28:02 +0000

I never intentionally used any AI features in Chrome but first was made aware of the models when my disk was running out of space. I investigated with a disk usage tool and found I had multiple versions of the model in my Chrome directory taking up ~12gb. This was about half a year ago and maybe I was in a bad experiment or something but it's definitely not opt in or user visible. Less tech savvy people will have a really hard time understanding why their disk space is running low.

New comment by bluehex in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

bluehex — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:20:52 +0000

I use Firefox as my main browser but occasionally run into Chrome requirements for certain web apps so end up begrudgingly installing it. I'm in the habit of going straight to the chrome flags page and turning off all this junk exactly because disk usage of chrome is ridiculous otherwise.

New comment by bluehex in "KiCad 10.0.0 Release"

bluehex — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:43:08 +0000

Congratulations and thank you to all the contributors! KiCad is an amazing piece of software.

New comment by bluehex in "California's Digital Age Assurance Act, and FOSS"

bluehex — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 04:49:00 +0000

"Designed by Apple in California, not for use in California" would be quite the statement.

New comment by bluehex in "California to require age verification for all OS including Linux"

bluehex — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:01:42 +0000

This post here has the most comments on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181208

New comment by bluehex in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

bluehex — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 02:26:32 +0000

I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.

New comment by bluehex in "Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit"

bluehex — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:57:28 +0000

Consciousness isn't a requirement for potentially dangerous behavior. When the science fiction the probabilistic models are trained on tend towards "AI uprising" and you give them the tools to do it, the probability machines will play out that scenario especially if they are prompted by their humans in that direction which some people will undoubtedly do for kicks.

If some people will give their bots crypto currency and the bots could buy hosting to "escape" or run scams to make more money or pool resources or any number of harmful things.

I'm not arguing any sort of agency here. I completely agree there is no consciousness nor do I believe there ever will be but that's not a precondition at all for an untethered probabilistic machine to be harmful.

New comment by bluehex in "Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit"

bluehex — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:10:25 +0000

They are running on individuals machines who can give them access to any number of "tools" which allow them to do things other than just writing words.

New comment by bluehex in "Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit"

bluehex — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 02:39:47 +0000

I keep seeing people dismiss this as an exaggerated danger because the bots are only pretending to be sentient and we're a long way off from AGI. The whole sentience debate is irrelevant. If people start giving these bots real resources, the fact that they are only "pretending" to be sentient doesn't prevent them from doing real damage as they act out their sci-fi AI uprising plots.

New comment by bluehex in "Common misunderstandings about large software companies"

bluehex — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 03:50:24 +0000

> The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.

I disagree with the argument that the US Tax Filing system meets the goal of:

> "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do."

It may do so for easy / common cases of W2 salaried employees but step a little outside of the norm (foreign sourced income, tax treaties etc.) and software gives up and shows you a PDF of relevant forms and requires you to become an expert in tax code and to keep your own multi year running calculation of carryovers and things to proceed. I'm glossing over all of the detail about how complex this really is but wouldn't expect the average, even very intelligent person to succeed in filing a correct return without a professional's help.

WASM for Mbed OS

bluehex — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 21:33:24 +0000

Article URL: https://utsavm9.github.io/wasm-for-arduino-mbed/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662324

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bluehex in "Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”"

bluehex — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 12:31:06 +0000

Such confusing naming they can't even keep it straight in the announcement.

"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app" in the introductory paragraph. Then there's a button "Buy Microsoft 365" The link below is as "Download Microsoft 365 apps for MacOS"

And the file you get is: Microsoft_365_and_Office_16~Installer.pkg

So is it the "Microsoft 365 Copilot app", or is it just "Microsoft 365" or multiple "Microsoft 365 apps"?

Above it says "formerly Office" and then the installer is named with "and Office". It's a jumble of inconsistency in just the first few lines on this landing page.

New comment by bluehex in "Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker"

bluehex — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:45:42 +0000

How does lifetime elision affect performance? I thought the compiler just inferred lifetimes that you would have had to manually annotate. Naively, it seems to me that the performance should be identical.

New comment by bluehex in "Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust"

bluehex — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 02:34:17 +0000

I absolutely agree with you. I think this quote in the article gave me the impression that they are talking more about vibe coding it at scale rather than llm assisted engineering.

  "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’"

New comment by bluehex in "Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust"

bluehex — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 02:22:26 +0000

Anyone who's done some vibe coding can imagine what a mess a vibe coded operating system is going to be with current day tools. LLM agent coding is good at making small prototype web apps and the like but trying to apply it to significantly complex legacy software is a nightmare.

Can I delete the Chrome's OptGuideOnDeviceModel safely? It's taking up 4GB

bluehex — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 10:26:26 +0000

Article URL: https://superuser.com/questions/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chromes-optguideondevicemodel-safely-its-taking-up-4gb

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46300248

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bluehex in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

bluehex — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 10:18:49 +0000

I just noticed last week that Chrome was putting multiple versions of some 4GB AI model [1] on my hard disk that I'd never asked for, so when I upgraded my laptop I took the opportunity to switch to Firefox, and now this.

My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started

New comment by bluehex in "Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools"

bluehex — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 04:48:15 +0000

I agree. One recent example is in the Zig community a popular tool for benchmarking is "poop" [1] (Performance Optimizer Observation Platform). It could have easily been "pop" (Performance Observation Platform) and been cute enough without being intentionally cringe. Every time I see Zig now I think about "poop".

[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/poop

New comment by bluehex in "RP2350 A4, RP2354, and a New Hacking Challenge"

bluehex — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:50:40 +0000

Kudos to Raspberry Pi for addressing the known issues with a new stepping in just a year! I feel like that's a pretty great turn around for errata that they could have pointed to the workarounds for and delayed this indefinitely with not much pushback.