Hacker News: fmobus

New comment by fmobus in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

fmobus — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:38:37 +0000

How many transactions can you ran per second on major coins like BTC?

New comment by fmobus in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

fmobus — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:37:04 +0000

Whenever people start arguing about inefficient government they should be reminded that pix costs like 10M USD a year to run. An absolute bargain for what it delivers.

New comment by fmobus in "'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level"

fmobus — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:58:29 +0000

You talk about "blame". Were they the ones that made the decisions causing the current ecological disaster?

Society fucked up, and that fuck up is gonna affect a lot of people who are not able to move out. Some sort of bailout will be needed.

New comment by fmobus in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

fmobus — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:00:12 +0000

LLMs are modeled with Internet content so that they have a good model of human languages. When you use them via most UIs currently offered right now, however, they will first come up with a few search queries and use the result of those queries to augment their answer.

New comment by fmobus in "Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service"

fmobus — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:47:12 +0000

Now do the same calculations for the DOD

New comment by fmobus in "NIMBY Rails"

fmobus — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:10:29 +0000

This game is awesome, but I wish it had a "expand this already existing in real life network" mode. Like, I know I can simply trace over existing rails, but doing that manually is tedious and costs in-game dollars.

New comment by fmobus in "U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years"

fmobus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:00:22 +0000

If only this recession would make some pedos be punished...

New comment by fmobus in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

fmobus — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:48:55 +0000

"One bit away"

New comment by fmobus in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

fmobus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:44:06 +0000

You're saying they'd have to work without pay lest they loose their livelihoods? That's like one bit away from slavery.

New comment by fmobus in "What if the Hormuz closure will not be brief?"

fmobus — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:36:43 +0000

JCPOA was working, Trump cancelled it simply because it was Obama's.

New comment by fmobus in "US businesses and consumers pay 90% of tariff costs, New York Fed says"

fmobus — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:55:27 +0000

If the supplier is forced to leave the business, that is a form of paying. They are losing a source of income and will have to pick a different activity that they are not efficient at. In the case of tariffs on international trade, the supplier loses a chunk of market - in the case of the US, one that was wealthy - and that always means a loss for the business.

The burden of ALL taxes falls on both sides of the transaction. The proportion of the burden varies with market conditions, the most important being elasticity.

That's why studies like the OP are necessary, to determine how much the proportions are. Honestly I am not surprised with the result, tariffs are objectively bad. Curbing trade is bad by default.

New comment by fmobus in "Bitcoin gets a zero price target in wake of Burry warning"

fmobus — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:38:42 +0000

I hate having to defend Visa and MC, but at least they using that energy to enable day-to-day transactions that real people actually use.

Also, and a bit harder to overlook... Visa/MC are able to work thousands of transactions per second in the US alone. Bitcoin can do like 7. Not seven thousand, just seven. Worldwide.

It's not even a competition, really. BTC has no future without some radical changes.

New comment by fmobus in "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections"

fmobus — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:53:31 +0000

As the other reply noted, there were audits by multiple entities and parties, although I agree that it would be preferable for the code to be open sourced.

I do disagree with your other points. Paper confirmation is not necessarily the only way to audit, and may in fact introduce risks of voter reidentification and coercion (voto de cabresto). The other way of auditing the machines is the parallel voting procedure, which already takes place at every election and is honestly a brilliant piece of security engineering.

For those not aware, the parallel voting procedure works as follows:

1) the day before the election (when the software has already been loaded and locked into the machines for several days), a random sample of machines is selected for the procedure

2) those machines are then removed from the polling place they would ordinarily be assigned to, and replaced with a backup machine

3) the removed machine is then installed in a different room, and booted up normally on electionday. Since it is fully offline, the machine doesn't "know" it is being used in this mode

4) this room is setup so that there are cameras pointed to the machine, and people from all observing parties (and common citizens as well) are invited to "mock vote" in this room.

5) at the end of the day, the machine is closes, its report printed, and the result is checked against the known mock votes

Pretty solid method if you ask me, and much cheaper than upgrading the entire fleet to enable printing.

New comment by fmobus in "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections"

fmobus — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:32:53 +0000

Letting "entities" audit the code in a closed room is not enough for me. The entire codebase should be open sourced publicly.

New comment by fmobus in "Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds"

fmobus — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 10:34:03 +0000

I mean, not to discount the hard work that your grandparents would have to maintain a self-sustaining life but... it could only work out because they had land available for that. You live in a city and depend on salary because you don't own a parcel of fertile land from which you could be generating enough sustenance for yourself (estimates go from 1/10th to a full acre per person).

New comment by fmobus in "Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]"

fmobus — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:29:16 +0000

Luckily, the fleet is tightly managed and you can't install just anything.

New comment by fmobus in "Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]"

fmobus — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 11:07:47 +0000

Sure, but that still takes engineering. Extracting information and intelligence out of the data is not just throwing AI into a pile of data, it's real engineering that will always required months of design, experiments, computing and storage capacity planning, releases, maintenance, operations, etc.
That leaves a huge internal paper trail - the kind of thing that shows up during discovery in a lawsuit.
No, companies like that are not doing this kind of shit, it's not worth it.

New comment by fmobus in "Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]"

fmobus — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:28:02 +0000

You're putting too much faith in NDAs. All it takes is one disgruntled employee with a sense of ethics.
Also, evidence doesn't have to be externally visible. In a lawsuit discovery will dig through design docs, server logs, emails, chats, everything.

New comment by fmobus in "Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]"

fmobus — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 23:16:22 +0000

For that to be in anyway useful for those companies (as a means to spy on their competitors), they'd have to be actively looking into the information to derive intelligence. Not really practical without some serious engineering, which would leave tons of evidence. It's not worth it. That's just not how these companies operate.
> there's some people at Google using Edge
I'd be surprised if it's more than a handful of people with explicit exceptions for work-related tasks. Chrome is the norm.

New comment by fmobus in "Palisades Fire suspect's ChatGPT history to be used as evidence"

fmobus — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 21:23:42 +0000

And in a way, I see some mapping of this to the recent FCC vs Jimmy Kimmel situation. Sure, Kimmel's case was more overt, because the FCC guy was very obviously threatening a private company so that the company would do that the government wanted, and in this case, it's more like companies are "sponteneously" coming up to help, but I still think that such spontaneity can be suspicious, specially if we are talking about companies with large contracts with the government, or interest in influencing policy.
In other words: if it's Joe Schmoe's Haberdashery forwarding CCTV footage to police to elucidate a crime right in front of their door, sure, it's fine and dandy, they do have an interest in not having crime in front of their door. But when Revolving Door MegaCorp builds a dragnet of surveillance AND is also selling cloud contracts to the government by the billion, it becomes a lot more murky if they just start snitching on everything they see.