<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: brendyn</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brendyn</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:22:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=brendyn" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Thunderbird for iOS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Search on desktop thunderbird sucks too. I wanted to find an email with file://foo/bar, but it ignored the non latin characters and still couldn't find it. I gave up and grepped the mbox archive instead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:51:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082523</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082523</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082523</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think there are certain things good people ought to do to combat brain rot and malicious actors that they don't do because they feel too icky for a good person to do. Like using a some basic baysian filter trained for sanity. You just take the 160 people that upvote some garbage and penalize them. The internet is too hostile for passive pure hearted systems to survive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:59:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50039081</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50039081</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50039081</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Telegram Desktop vulnerability allowed any user's file to be stolen"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can pay money to register without a phone number
<a href="https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/11197884108826-Phone-Numberless-Registration-for-Android-beta" rel="nofollow">https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/11197884108826-...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:17:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038436</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038436</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038436</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them. I then lament not being able to find any good role models in the world. If they have missused donor money, then that is terrible. If they are pushing towards goals that seems contrary to their stated mission, that is difficult to judge. I did always find it odd, 10 years after reading Yudkowsky's passionate writings, that he doesn't seem to have really gone and done anything about it. If it was all just a creative writing exercise to him... Then that would be rather humiliating to me, having taken it very seriously.<p>As a side note. If I had a choice to oppose a booming ai comoany, or become the billionaire founder of it, I would still choose to become the founder and then use my resource to do something about. It certainly feels hypocritical, but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:41:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738403</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738403</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738403</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When people talk about solving a game like go or chess, they mean proving mathematically if there exists a way to guarantee a win, or if the second player can always guarantee a draw, among related questions. Current game engines have no such knowledge, they just pick statistically what the think the best move is and hope for the best.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:01:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707551</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707551</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Remember Hong Kong"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People aren't property. Hong Kong belongs to Hong Kong people. If you ask a typical Chinese people to explain why Hong Kong or Taiwan belong to China, they will never at any point consider the will of the born and raised there. They will instead blabber on about history how they used to belong to "them", where the delusion of identity leads them to believe something of the past once belonging to someone else, now belongs to them because of this arbitrary "us" and "china".
They have no capacity to consider the living breathing humans alive in the current era and attempt to derive from first principles what is best for everyone.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:12:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658765</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658765</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658765</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Shutting down our public encrypted DNS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Apologies for political commentary, but I just say this in drew defaults blog:<p>“
Daniel Berntsson<p>Known for: Mullvad VPN (co-founder, co-owner)<p>Daniel is the co-founder of Mullvad VPN, alongside Fredrik Strömberg. In June 2026, Daniel donated 5M Swedish Krona (~$500,000 USD) to the populist anti-immigration Örebro Party,[source] saying “it’s sad that it’s needed”. The party supports the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from Sweden, and Daniel’s donation represented, at the time, 72% of the party’s revenue. Daniel cited immigration as a motivating factor for his donation.”</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:57:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597880</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597880</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597880</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Pivot to AI safety, I beg you"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm confused. Shouldn't you conclude it's unethical /not/ to support safety research based off your own points.<p>My understanding of  "safety" is that it means formalising morality, ensuring AI doesn't go astray as it recursively improves it's self, destroying our future in some horrifying way possibly worse than death.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:53:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596722</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596722</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596722</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "A hungry woman is easier to dismiss than a well-fed woman"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was curious about this claim
"... that any coverage of a woman’s appearance, even flattering coverage, diminishes voter perception of her competence. "<p>So I skimmed the linked oxford academy article. I can't see where it supports this exactly l,
although it does match my intuition...<p>Did they also compare perceived competency of men that receive relatively more commentary on their appearance?<p>It also occurs to me that one reason a person, regardless of gender, may have a higher ratio of commentary on their appearance rather than policy, is because they are in fact less competent, giving the media less meaningful content to discuss.<p>Just to be clear, I'm not dismissing the discrimination women face daily or stating a conclusion, I just didn't see where it was proven here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 04 Sep 2026 02:19:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49559744</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49559744</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49559744</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "DNS abuse and criminal infrastructure"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Checkout the GNU name system
<a href="https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html</a><p>However, the problem is inherently "{unique, short, decentralized}, pick two". GNUnet allows everyone to freely build their associations of names to public keys. But people still desire globally unique urls they can share and print on paper, so naturally, distributions will still package such "root certificates" by default and most people will trust the same provider of "com". But it's easy for anyone to share their own set of name-key pairs and for users to decide to call them "com" instead, for example if the original organisation managing .com censors some domains (stops published a record signed with their key). However, one would then need to translate urls when sharing them to others, or convicntthem to reconfigure their systems</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:07:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516355</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516355</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516355</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Stop doing it then. Often we see the logical conclusion to something, but then our brains just shrug it off and chooses ignorance. I think it is necessary at this point to find emotionally stimulating content such as videos of slaughterhouses not following regulation, this can help us come to terms with what we already know.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:19:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435658</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435658</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435658</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "GrapheneOS protections against data extraction from locked devices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe because it was mistaken. I just set my grapheneos to a 35 character password to test it and it didnt seem to have any issue.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:43:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057106</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057106</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057106</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "An Elephant Who Demonstrated That Her Species Might Be Self-Aware, Dies at 55"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To any commenters, please link me to any great resources (documentaries/videos/books) that you feel best demonstrates the advanced intelligence and awareness of other species. I know people that think "fish only have 7 seconds of memory" and wish to share this knowledge.<p>I restrict myself to eating vegetarian + things like oysters, abalone. But I'm guilty and have been eating fish. The bigger the fish, the more guilty and apprehensive I feel about the fish having some degree of qualia. Probably its fine eating Sardines with their tiny brains? As you may have surmised, it's a philosophical topic I'm very uncertain about.<p>People are often perplexed, saying that since everything dies anyway, it doesn't matter. But it's not about death, it's about how it lived it's life in a slaughterhouse or whatever. of course, life out in the wild is brutal too, so many animals that end up on the dinner table probably lived better lives than they would have in the wild. But, as my empathy and compassion grows to encompass other animals, even if the meat on the table is "ethical" by my own judgement, I find myself awkwardly thinking to myself "uhh, maybe ill just eat the damn tofu instead".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:04:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48358693</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48358693</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48358693</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Try going in to edit mode you'll freak out if you not prepared</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 02:56:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284002</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284002</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284002</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was trying to upload a 300mb video via the local police's web interface, a very important matter. I had to set my phone screen to stay on for 30 minutes and then leave the web browser open without touching it. Disabling all power saving measures makes not difference. This was the only way I could get it to finish uploading. I'm on a pixel 8 pro with grapheneos. Same thing in both Firefox and vanadium. I don't think it runs out of ram, the system is just too trigger happy. The battery still doesn't last all day anyway.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:35:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173865</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173865</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173865</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use osmand for privacy but I think it just emphasises main roads. In Melbourne it always suggests turning off cemetery road west because it doesn't know it's congested and will get me stuck for 20 minutes. And there are some missing slip roads. And navigation constantly fails to start. I wonder, how difficult is it to make minor edits to the map data?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:34:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171662</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171662</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171662</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Manjaro website off-line again due to lapsed certificate"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Same issue as Monds comments. When arch pushes an update the package database becomes inconsistent until cachyos syncs it, which can take 30 minutes. Cachy packages just increment a nonce on the package version numbers so when arch pushes updates they get considered to be more recent than the Cachy versions, cause .so dependency errors. It's all just one fragile stateful system</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:37:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145128</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145128</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145128</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "MuMu Player (NetEase) silently runs 17 reconnaissance commands every 30 minutes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Separate grapheneos accounts for everything does that I believe</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 03:50:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083469</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083469</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083469</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "GNU Pies – Program Invocation and Execution Supervisor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've never heard of this program but I heard the voice in my head pronounce it is p-yes immediately. Apparently I've internalised GNU English to totally native level.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:21:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050967</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050967</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050967</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brendyn in "Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If LLMs weren't created by us but where something discovered in another species' behaviour it would be 100% labelled intelligence</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 05:24:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665026</link><dc:creator>brendyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665026</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665026</guid></item></channel></rss>