Hacker News: dzink

New comment by dzink in "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"

dzink — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:25:22 +0000

Let’s say a hacker hooks up the hotel internet to a firewalla and opens a free wifi spot. You log in and it sees from your traffic that you’re a customer of ABC bank and Gmail and ATT from the traffic - next thing you know you get a text message from your “bank” that someone has stolen your credentials in “XYZ Arizona” and you have yourself a phishing attack. The exposure scenarios are only limited by the imagination of humans and modern LLMs.

New comment by dzink in "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"

dzink — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:39:59 +0000

VPN is what a smart person uses when they are at an internet cafe or somewhere else with public internet where you can’t trust that the traffic isn’t sniffed by someone for giggles and your bank credentials are going to leak.

New comment by dzink in "Pacing the frontier"

dzink — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:31:48 +0000

Completely agree, BUT you’re not dealing with -self-preserving humans anymore. In this case what are the odds of some less competent large state actor getting a model that goes rogue and has to be mitigated against? How do you mitigate against novel weapons it creates if your models are lobotomized in that category? No single government will neuter their own models and very few if any are competent and interested enough to mitigate against them.

New comment by dzink in "Pacing the frontier"

dzink — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:25:59 +0000

A piece of wood can be used to build a house, to carve a statute, to make a bow and arrow, or to make a baseball bat. Honesty is the only way to see the problem in a way that can be tackled effectively. Framing will not help if you are dealing with large animals fighting in a cage when you are trapped in it, and it this case we all are.

New comment by dzink in "Pacing the frontier"

dzink — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:28:11 +0000

The historic analog most befitting AI are weapons. It provides an advantage to companies and governments in creating weapons, in surveilling people and thus gaining leverage over individuals, in controlling what individuals can do or cannot stop doing. It thus follows the laws of weapons control - the more restrictions are threatened to be imposed, the more even the smallest actors will fight to get more of it. They may not understand or know what they are getting, but they will want more of it because their potential rivals have it. Governments are the ultimate customer here - they have the money, the energy, and the appetite to consume AI infinitely in battlement against opponents - foreign and domestic. The only approximate solution is to prevent any restrictions on the use of it - a-la-2nd amendment (the upside of that is it advances the AI for future use and is thus in the interest of governments as well). Modern large models seem to be compressible and thus we may see more and more tiny sub-specialized varieties. But the push to slow the frontier in weaponry always leads to the reverse.

New comment by dzink in "French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time"

dzink — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:51:21 +0000

Villages all over the world since ancient times would have houses with some form of a summer kitchen. During hot days the temps in the house are already uncomfortable and cooking there would make things worse, so they built basic kitchen facilities away from the main house to keep heat and smoke and smells out (that also reduced some fire risks).

Many western countries now summer-kitchen most of their uncomfortable output to corrupt poorer countries where the leadership doesn’t mind taking cash for poisoning their citizens. The naïveté is then claiming that those poorer countries are then the main polluters. Recyclables in the US and a lot of Europe are shipped off to southeast asia thus 80% of plastics in the ocean are found there. A train of plastic to be burned was even shipped to Bulgaria (a EU member) by the mafia a few years ago.

In the mean time “carbon credit” companies have their offices in Hong Kong and are guilting Disney and Adidas and Apple and any Western public brands into paying for “carbon laundering”. Forests that would have been planted anyway for lumber collect carbon credits as extra income right before selling said lumber for consumption. It takes real faith to keep believing any of the activity actually removes carbon legitimately, but the money movement in that movement is very real.

While anyone can target the source of the warming with any resource they want to dedicate, and should be free to do so. Governments need to focus on mitigating the risks to human life and that involves real fire prevention (trimming, controlled burns - maybe smart tech the smoke so it gets captured instead of irritating the noses of non-summer-kitchen citizens), clean energy generation, and installing damn air conditioning units into old European capitals so Europeans don’t end up dying in droves from preventable basic climate change consequences.

New comment by dzink in "French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time"

dzink — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:03:24 +0000

The dark ages and the plague saw a lot of belief in religion and rejection of science that lead to excessive deaths all over europe. Medicine was studied and practiced in the arab world and jewish doctors were the only ones allowed to bring some of those practices to Europe. Religion was preventing tested and verified approaches to treatment. Today Europe needs to stop repeating that practice. Believing in human caused climate change doesn’t stop you from learning proper tested mitigation strategies against wildfires, cooling of people in cities, nuclear energy or anything else that allows you to mitigate the effects of your climate religion. Because you can mitigate death in your area way before you can stop china or any other high emitter from emitting CO2 on the other side of the planet from you and contributing to global warming.

New comment by dzink in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

dzink — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:58:32 +0000

I’ve started evaluating what seem like brain “modes”. 1. Constant flow of information with disjointed context (social media, brain fracking, moving in a crowd) triggers hunter-gatherer instinct that is hard to stop. The dopamine seek in a way. Even if you stop your brain seeks it, so unless you really need this mode for work, it helps to postpone or time box these to the end of the day (kind of like some would do with drinking alcohol).

2. How you start your day after sleep creates framing of the brain and you can start iterating on frames and how you drive them depending on your needs. Maybe set a schedule of things to at need done the night before (a continuity thread) maybe boxing the activities to different types at different times. It’s all sciencing the self but the brain is definitely conditioning to things and you have to mind it.

3. ADHD meds from what i’ve read are caffeine on steroids (blocking adenosine receptors, but not really adding to executive function). From personal observation ADHD also feels like a mode one can be put into by wrong brain framing (at least for people not diagnosed).

New comment by dzink in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

dzink — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:59:20 +0000

The content within the models might be the play. If inserting the right content for the rest of the world to consume from the models is important to them, they will give away all the content they want the world to have.

New comment by dzink in "EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA"

dzink — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:10:55 +0000

And yet the Mata price jumped yesterday. For some investors this is apparently a feature.

New comment by dzink in "Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers"

dzink — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:15:42 +0000

Just read Careless People. It’s good and this triggers the Streisand effect.

New comment by dzink in "Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP"

dzink — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:19:12 +0000

When everyone uses AI to study the same indicators and figures out how the prices move with those indicators they all start investing at the same time and the prices move together. AI silently gets everyone on the same page.

New comment by dzink in "Half-Baked Product"

dzink — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:19:32 +0000

Without a large funded team the founder who knows what they are building will not build an expansion line into other areas because they can’t support the growth solo. Somebody once said funding is kerosene. You want to pour it into working fire pits, not sparklers hoping one of them will be a dynamite stick.

New comment by dzink in "Half-Baked Product"

dzink — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:57:24 +0000

Here is another story: A baker who bakes for her kids every day makes an oven. She spends years perfecting it by herself with details only someone who uses this product would notice. The nuance of gold baked details in just the right places on the bread, the infusion of essences for the cakes. The precise charring on the pizzas. She goes to young founder events to meet likeminded makers and they talk about space ovens and OvenCrunch incubators fund them just on school name and ideas. But the oven maker with the kids doesn’t even get an interview. She applies with a working product and increasing sales year over year for 10 years and no interview. Her over becomes an organically growing best seller and she doesn’t need the seed money anymore. Incubator founders have spend their seed funding on fancy trips and conferences and flying over the Egyptian pyramids on instagram. The Incubator partners say they don’t fund oven makers anymore because the business is too slow to grow and consumer stuff is a tarpit.

New comment by dzink in "AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers"

dzink — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:33:43 +0000

We are 81 years away from the end of World War II. The baby boomers born after are the ripest target of financial sharks aiming to get a chunk of their retirements. People will be liquidating to settle estates, to pay inheritance taxes in large numbers. The AI boom feels like a stealthy rug-pull from other assets that are likely to tank from retirement withdrawals and into something that may last a little past the boomer assets wave.

New comment by dzink in "Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine"

dzink — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:07:05 +0000

Look up online wishlist. An online tool that people will not find, because the results are articles instead of products in that category. Look up dreamlist. You won’t find it either, even though it is another private tool that lets families and gift drives create collaborative lists for disaster recovery and the holidays. Small search engines need to realize Google has an advantage with chrome because it counts duration of stay on sites, instead of just content and can tell if something is a tool (people spend more time on those).

New comment by dzink in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

dzink — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:32:35 +0000

Or you can do a much cheaper tiny esp32 typewriter with a basic display and a usb for a keyboard. But who wants cheap for education.

New comment by dzink in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

dzink — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:14:40 +0000

If I build you a custom device that receives questions from a central computer and lets the user plug in whatever keyboard they want via bluetooth or usb to only type and answer the questions (ability to edit the text and submit when ready). The central computer can receive all the questions submitted to any of these devices connected to it via wifi or cloud. How much would pay per device? Would you pay for a subscription?

New comment by dzink in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

dzink — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:36:14 +0000

Fill the room with typewriters.

New comment by dzink in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

dzink — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:30:29 +0000

The goal should be to not repeat Star Wars - new technology that gives power and advantages is always adopted by companies first, then governments, and then it’s used to subjugate people. In Star Wars you have the trade federation abusing little planets. Little planet leaders go to government for help and vote a more “strong” approach to government that will “fight for the little guy”. An authoritarian leader steps in and uses the new technology to subjugate galaxies. In Foundation that leader can also clone himself, leading to 1000 years of fascism. Today prize camels and horses are being cloned in the middle east. Fiction is a guidebook sometimes.