Hacker News: capitainenemo

New comment by capitainenemo in "Giving up on smart rings"

capitainenemo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 18:19:51 +0000

... oh, and the pebble watch only does steps/sleep/heart, not all the other more dubious measurements, but frankly, I didn't trust those anyway.

New comment by capitainenemo in "Giving up on smart rings"

capitainenemo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 02:14:34 +0000

Bit of an update to myself. My dipping toes in water with the cheap device convinced me to try the Pebble Time 2, and man it's an enormous difference in accuracy and real-time feedback. So, if I was going to be spending a significant amount of money on a fitness device I'd definitely recommend the watch. Has a lot more alternate uses too. But ofc if you're looking to stay more in the <$50 range, a ring probably still makes sense.

New comment by capitainenemo in "Giving up on smart rings"

capitainenemo — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:51:01 +0000

No idea how it compares, but my local Lidl was selling a smart ring for $15 so I decided to give it a shot. I assume half the measurements are "for entertainment purposes only" (glucose, blood pressure, stress [heart rate variability proxy?], blood oxygenation [might be ok with my skin tone, not sure I'd trust it]) but the others seem fairly accurate. Again, no idea how it compares to the pricier ones, but seems to match my pulse measured at neck and what I remember of my nightly sleep pretty well.

And yeah, I'm certainly not going to worry about it getting scratched or slightly wet. Actually, it got dropped and stepped on, and is slightly dented but still seems to run fine - the epoxy sealant for the electronics seems intact and while I was a bit concerned for the battery, that's been a while with no issues.

And, while I have no idea whether the app is quietly collecting data and pushing it to a server in china (if it is, it is doing it in a way that is sneaking past the firewall), at least it does not require creating an account to use.

So in that sense it is maybe more private than oura or samsung ?

New comment by capitainenemo in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

capitainenemo — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:34:25 +0000

They do mention that in the "Concurrent Work" section.

    Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. At that point we found out that they had a resolution of the forced Euler problem. In these discussions we offered them visibility into all of the prompts we used and later to see the proof. We recognize the priority of their work on forced Euler and congratulate them on their remarkable mathematical achievement.

New comment by capitainenemo in "Introducing MicroLighter"

capitainenemo — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:49:55 +0000

That seems like it could also mess with mouse selections if the text moved when selected. maybe even causing endless jitter.

I kinda wonder if "page scrolled 'cause X was selected" type data extraction attacks might play a slight role too. Although I suppose if you've managed to inject CSS all bets are off..

New comment by capitainenemo in "Introducing MicroLighter"

capitainenemo — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:01:09 +0000

yeah, although text-stroke and text-shadow probably work even better with fixed width code since it avoids changing line lengths.

New comment by capitainenemo in "Worms: The Future of Yesterday's Worms Today"

capitainenemo — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:15:37 +0000

Hedgewars has a mac build. It's at least in the genre... Although with these old games I feel they'd probably play fine in a VM...

New comment by capitainenemo in "Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload"

capitainenemo — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:00:38 +0000

Hedgewars had to lock down its bugzilla and repo too, for the exact same reason. So far the really simple method used (basic auth with the creds posted on the main site) seems to have resisted the scrapers. Presumably if they are too stupid to scrape correctly they are also too stupid to incorporate a trivial auth.

New comment by capitainenemo in "A quine in Piet – a GIF image that prints itself [video]"

capitainenemo — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:45:14 +0000

Ah. missed those when reading the intro page. thanks.

New comment by capitainenemo in "A quine in Piet – a GIF image that prints itself [video]"

capitainenemo — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:13:33 +0000

The esolang wiki has a few simpler to grasp piet examples too. https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

New comment by capitainenemo in "Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?"

capitainenemo — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:33:25 +0000

And was still not really possible without some really unlikely conditions. Not that car fires aren't dangerous, regardless of whether the vehicle is ICE or otherwise, but the fireball thing doesn't really happen.

New comment by capitainenemo in "The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You"

capitainenemo — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:32:00 +0000

I don't see why it's either/or. There are a lot more legacy doors and stairs especially around the world, than there are people who could be helped with a climbing wheelchair or exoskeleton frame. And there's some infrastructure that might not be possible to upgrade, for historical preservation reasons.

Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.

New comment by capitainenemo in "Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?"

capitainenemo — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:16:45 +0000

Requires a good mix though. The parent is still correct. Mythbusters spent a long time trying to get cars to blow up in a dramatic hollywood fashion in various episodes and determined that under most conditions it wouldn't happen.

They did get it to happen, they just had to try really hard.

In most accidents the gas tank will not blow up.

New comment by capitainenemo in "GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN"

capitainenemo — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:33:28 +0000

You're right. I have no idea what it's for, but I'm guessing for distinguishing between deployment images. I'm certainly not going to get too concerned about it.

The issue with the microsoft account was not unique IDs - tons of unique things on a machine.... it was a unique thing tied to an account and shipped to remote places.

New comment by capitainenemo in "GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN"

capitainenemo — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:30:06 +0000

I mean, there's a ton of unique identifiers on machines already tied to hardware and disks, but that must be a systemd thing since my Devuan machine does not have it.

But given there's no cloud accounts on linux I would imagine it's trivially changed just like a NIC's MAC

Also, seems unlikely it would be used for any single-signon with cloud services.

New comment by capitainenemo in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

capitainenemo — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:24:48 +0000

I bet most of 'em also have minecraft, but fair 'nuff.

New comment by capitainenemo in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

capitainenemo — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:39:48 +0000

Self-hosting a minecraft server is still an option. And tons of customisability there and you aren't turning everything over to a centralised server.

New comment by capitainenemo in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

capitainenemo — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:26:37 +0000

Many rust nightly versions + no clean / sweep / clean-all?

New comment by capitainenemo in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

capitainenemo — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:29:47 +0000

I thought this was well put. https://web.archive.org/web/20160301022121/http://www.revisi...

A now defunct site discussing why ORM is a poor map.

New comment by capitainenemo in "Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science"

capitainenemo — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:44:09 +0000

yeah, as the other comment noted, I wondered if it was related to that "meme" of total heartbeats. regular exercise reducing total resting heartrate, but excessive exercise overwhelming that gain with excessive stresses and high rates. dunno. just random speculation, I have no expertise in this...