Hacker News: flkiwi

New comment by flkiwi in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

flkiwi — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:42:39 +0000

LLMs write like that because people wrote like that. Enough, unfortunately for my remaining love of humanity, to cause the LLMs to adopt the quirk.

New comment by flkiwi in "US v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026) no attorney-client privilege for AI chats [pdf]"

flkiwi — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 20:23:16 +0000

I didn’t say he said it was privileged because he consulted with Claude for legal purposes so I’m not sure where that came from.

Re: Mitsui, it’s not the same case. It’s the same paragraph. And it’s pretty clear from the context that, if I send my lawyer an email requesting legal advice, the contents of that email are privileged, but if I attach pre-existing documents those documents are not, because they had no privilege to begin with. That’s not controversial. The challenge comes from the interplay between the court’s description of the privilege test, the reasonable expectations of a technology user, and the underlying, possibly obfuscated, reality of that technology’s function. Read literally, this case undermines privilege for a wide range of laypeople and attorneys doing a wide range of normal activities that have nothing to do with asking Claude for trial strategy.

New comment by flkiwi in "Open Source Isn't Dead. Cal.com Just Learned the Wrong Lesson"

flkiwi — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:46:49 +0000

I gave it a good minute of reading and re-reading because I thought it SURELY was meant tongue in cheek, but I couldn’t make it work.

New comment by flkiwi in "US v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026) no attorney-client privilege for AI chats [pdf]"

flkiwi — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:39:23 +0000

I agree with you, but I actually understand the issue they're raising. Counsel sends a draft demand letter to client and says "Please review and let me know of any issues with my description of the underlying claims." Client responds with an inline note stating that she feels the claim is overstated but that she wants to leave it in for leverage. The draft is, transparently and without notice, processed through the user's O365 Copilot integration in both Word and Outlook. Hell, let's assume the attorney is a sole practitioner using a regular O365 account, and the outbound request to the client is silently run through Copilot. What is the status of privilege in this situation? Both seem to fail the confidentiality test. Does that mean that privilege exists only for big law firms that negotiate enterprise O365 licenses with no training clauses? There's definitely tension here.

But both your scenario and the OOP behavior of the client are not particularly hard ones to resolve.

New comment by flkiwi in "Open Source Isn't Dead"

flkiwi — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:59:56 +0000

> My code is perfectly secure and bug-free.

I mean, bold statement but statistically speaking it's almost certainly incorrect. I will say that, irrespective of whether source is open or closed, I would be deeply skeptical of a project that made this assertion.

New comment by flkiwi in "US v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026) no attorney-client privilege for AI chats [pdf]"

flkiwi — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:31:35 +0000

Obviously this (along with the original unwritten order a few weeks ago) is causing a stir, but this decision isn't as weird as it sounds. The defendant's assertion was essentially a retroactive application of privilege: he didn't use Claude to draft documents at his attorney's request but instead used Claude effectively in lieu of an attorney and later provided the Claude-drafted materials to his attorney (heavily paraphrasing here). Privilege is not a bandage that closes self-inflicted wounds.

I have some concerns about some of the reasoning, namely the practical implications of referencing Claude's TOS in a world where public AI features are creeping into everything, but I expect some of the reasoning is based on this particular defendant likely being more sophisticated than an average person.

New comment by flkiwi in "Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file"

flkiwi — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:06:32 +0000

There was an old flash game called, I think, curveball that was kind of like 3d perspective, 2d plane Pong. I could play that gave for so, so long and not get tired of it. This might end up being a replacement.

EDIT: Uh oh. I found it again. I'm screwed.

New comment by flkiwi in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

flkiwi — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:16:34 +0000

The number of times I find myself saying to beginning photographers that babying their camera is the surest way to hate photography, whether as a hobby or a profession… I get particularly testy about handwringing about weather sealing or protecting the finish on their kit. Just take the camera places and use it. It’s probably going to be fine. It’s going to get scars. That’s just stories.

New comment by flkiwi in "Take better notes, by hand"

flkiwi — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:21:48 +0000

Same principle applies to, e.g., Leica cameras. Yes, they're pricey (absurdly so), but the lack of features, the slow speed, and the lack of configuration contributes to me improving my photography. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but it gives me the time and space to focus on being one, rather than just firehosing my camera at whatever is in front of me. It makes my photography intentional rather than reactive.

New comment by flkiwi in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

flkiwi — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:00:06 +0000

It's ... weirdly validating that what I ended up with is what I actually use (Source Code Pro).

New comment by flkiwi in "Why I love NixOS"

flkiwi — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:58:04 +0000

I literally just fixed a couple of nagging config issues that I couldn't be bothered to find in my (admittedly complex) set of NixOS and HM config files by asking Claude to find and fix them.

I had Claude do the grunt work of shifting parts of my config to a new structure I started but didn't have time to fully implement.

Based on examples I provided, I had Claude use specialisations to set up a couple of different WM and DE test environments.

And the thing is that, now that I have everything set up the way I want, I don't really have to DO anything to keep the system running, other than occasionally update (I'm on unstable, so I do that manually).

Could I turn Claude loose on my .config directory, give it access to apt or dnf (etc.), and let it set up a non-NixOS environment for me? Probably, and it would probably work reasonably well, but I wouldn't trust it the way I trust NixOS.

New comment by flkiwi in "MacBook Neo"

flkiwi — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:34:55 +0000

First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.

New comment by flkiwi in "DialUp95 – A 90s inspired nostalgia hit"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:46:28 +0000

Me, before clicking: Man, I remember I had this USR modem that did this weird BONG sound during handshake. I wonder if anyone else in the comments remembers that.

Comments: YUP.

New comment by flkiwi in "AI uBlock Blacklist"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:04:28 +0000

Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.

New comment by flkiwi in "AI uBlock Blacklist"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:02:14 +0000

Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.

New comment by flkiwi in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:34:01 +0000

Remote, multi location workforces, supervisors and workers thousands of miles apart.

New comment by flkiwi in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:23:38 +0000

This is only going to become more common. Companies are implementing checks using similar services (a) to prevent employment scams (where the person who interviews is not the person who works; usually the latter is a low-paid offshore individual) and (b) basic security authentication. It won’t be long before this sort of biometric validation starts showing up to authenticate users on regular websites and similar services, if it hasn’t already. I think the last one I had to do was to authenticate when activating a bank card.

New comment by flkiwi in "AI uBlock Blacklist"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:22:09 +0000

One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.

New comment by flkiwi in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

flkiwi — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:55:24 +0000

I read things like this, which I absolutely agree is happening, but then compare it to my ongoing, multi-day failures to create a child account on a Samsung device (which also involves a child account on Google, which is where the workflow is failing) and I wonder if the entire technology industry has simply given up. Every mobile experience is awful lately, nothing seems to work, errors pile up, and people just quit.

New comment by flkiwi in "British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years"

flkiwi — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:09:19 +0000

Well the obvious solution is take away the vote for over-65s!

/s … maybe