Hacker News: brians

New comment by brians in "Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac"

brians — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:48:13 +0000

I think any browser will allow it but not allow data read back.

New comment by brians in "Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac"

brians — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:47:48 +0000

They offer it as an option but default it to false! This is still a --footgun option but it’s the least unsafe version I’ve seen yet! Well done, Apfel authors.

New comment by brians in "Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac"

brians — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:43:51 +0000

I’ve seen several projects like this that offer a network server with access to these Apple models. The danger is when they expose that, even on a loop port, to every other application on your system, including the browser. Random webpages are now shipping with JavaScript that will post to that port. Same-origin restrictions will stop data flow back to the webpage, but that doesn’t stop them from issuing commands to make changes.

Some such projects use CORS to allow read back as well. I haven’t read Apfel’s code yet, but I’m registering the experiment before performing it.

New comment by brians in "Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite"

brians — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:01:18 +0000

I do not agree with your interpretation of copyright law. It does ban copies: there has to be information flow from the original to the copy for it to be a "copy." Spontaneous generation of the same content is often taken by the courts to be a sign that it's purely functional, derived from requirements by mathematical laws.

Patent law is different and doesn't rely on information flow in the same way.

New comment by brians in "Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)"

brians — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:49:11 +0000

The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.

You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.

New comment by brians in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

brians — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:27:49 +0000

A major difference is when we have to read and understand it because of a bug. Perhaps the LLM can help us find it! But abstraction provides a mental scaffold

New comment by brians in "Gpg.fail"

brians — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 02:36:48 +0000

No. You can always take the MIT-licensed source. And GnuPG got used through a CLI “API” anyway.

New comment by brians in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

brians — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:22:20 +0000

Having something that read everything I read and could talk with me about it, help remember things and synthesize? That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.

New comment by brians in "10 Years of Let's Encrypt"

brians — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:47:58 +0000

Having run an EV issuing practice… they were required to contact you at a D&B listed number or address.

New comment by brians in "Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview"

brians — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 16:18:48 +0000

…all of them. Which is why the scene in Ralph Breaks the Internet works. And why some of the Shrek jokes work.

New comment by brians in "All praise to the lunch ladies"

brians — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 22:42:44 +0000

And now every kid in Massachusetts gets free lunch—funded through the millionaire’s tax. Unfortunately, the food is in general pretty gross. It has to conform to Federal guidelines, which means low fat, low sodium, high sugar to hit calorie targets.

New comment by brians in "Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams"

brians — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 17:04:05 +0000

The permitted number of rat parts per pound of breakfast cereal is not zero.

New comment by brians in "Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark"

brians — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 20:52:54 +0000

There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!

New comment by brians in "My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4"

brians — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 22:37:36 +0000

We have different eyes and different purposes, I think.

New comment by brians in "Amber Room"

brians — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 15:24:32 +0000

What an amazing construction. It reminds me of a story from the metallurgist who visited the Breakers, the elaborate mansion complex of the Vanderbilt family, and on a tour was shown the Morning Room. The guide said the brilliant silver-white walls were silver plate. “How do you keep it from tarnishing?” He asked. The guide didn’t know, so the scientist asked for permission to test it.

Stories vary on whether he tested it or someone stopped him before taking a sample, but all agree on the technology used: that’s not silver. They coated an entire room with platinum.

New comment by brians in "About the security content of iOS 15.8.5 and iPadOS 15.8.5"

brians — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 12:14:39 +0000

From first sale, right? The interesting date to me is years of support from last sale—when a company would still sell you a device as new.

New comment by brians in "Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership"

brians — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:19:05 +0000

It’s a language for communicating about decisions. It doesn’t make the decisions for you

New comment by brians in "Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership"

brians — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:15:30 +0000

I had lunch with the Amazon leader most responsible for ensuring all staff in the fast-moving-cardboard half of the company had health insurance from day one of employment, no waiting time. Of a decades long career, that was the one thing I saw most animate her—care for fellow humans.

When the 90th percentile employee has a GED and works warehouse or delivery, actions to earn “best employer” may be invisible or worse to the 5% who are software people. I’ve worked at Meta too, and Meta absolutely had better coffee. And WAY better health insurance. But Amazon’s health insurance is uniform for all staff, and that means something.

New comment by brians in "Internet Access Providers Aren't Bound by DMCA Unmasking Subpoenas–In Re Cox"

brians — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 13:19:34 +0000

Electronic communications privacy act, to start.

New comment by brians in "Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery"

brians — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:19:10 +0000

There’s a current product that does simple mechanical remodeling: sleep with this chunky contact lens in and the next morning you see better. But it wears off in ten hours or less.