Hacker News: fyltr

New comment by fyltr in "How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads"

fyltr — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:54:34 +0000

non-existing? if we mean the same ads (mainly the cartoonish knight with bluish-black hair, though I've seen a caveman variant from another game) the game does exist. I played it about ten years ago, back when their ads were still the puzzles you supposedly need an IQ of 300 to solve. (kudos for keeping up with the times, I suppose.) /s it's a gacha money-pump, but I don't think the developers are strictly guilty of false advertising: from memory, the game does include one minigame or another reproducing the ad's loop.

New comment by fyltr in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

fyltr — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:24:15 +0000

Nitpicking but your examples all have a clear etymology that may even help you deduce the purpose of a thing. Hamburger means 'from Hamburg' and can be short for 'in the style of Hamburg', which sounds perfectly normal to a native. This is, would I say, less strange than if it was named 'Hamburg', which seems to be the case of IKEA furniture. Photoshop, in the same way, seems to refer to a photo workshop, which once again has an etymology, as it refers to the initial purpose of that program, reworking pictures. On the opposite, if things are just named 'for the lulz', and my desk is called Boston, my text editor 'golden retriever' and my lamp acorn, confusion may at some point arise.

New comment by fyltr in "A controversial Alzheimer's surgery is said to reverse symptoms"

fyltr — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:33:40 +0000

Western medicine has been lax on ethos and rigor in the past and we ended up exterminating and neutering large amounts of the population to 'keep the genetic heritage pure'. That is still a major traumatism that forces us to approach medicine with a very strong ethos.

New comment by fyltr in "Bioengineered chewing gum may offer a way to fight HPV and other microbes"

fyltr — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:08:32 +0000

Natural selection had a say in female mammals leaking blood trails every month, which is, mildly said, fcking stupid. Natural selection does not create optimal beings, it creates stuff that, somehow, kinda, works. If you have the time for it, I highly recommend the lecture series on behavioral evolution by Robert Sapolsky, it's on the Stanford YouTube channel.

New comment by fyltr in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

fyltr — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:23:50 +0000

The parent comment links to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0

New comment by fyltr in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

fyltr — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:02:58 +0000

They just died that night in the video, being woken up destroys the remains.

New comment by fyltr in "Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'"

fyltr — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:45:05 +0000

isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases. Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y. Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-depth research and risking your own rep every time you put more than 'facts' out there just don't give any incentive to do more than pick out the quotes you want to use.

New comment by fyltr in "Anthropic updates their terms to verify age or identity"

fyltr — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:23:35 +0000

there are claims that llms might be taxing on the planet to run BUT that they will solve [some, all] problems including climate change and therefore be beneficial in the long run.

New comment by fyltr in "Anthropic updates their terms to verify age or identity"

fyltr — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:09:11 +0000

Wasn't the parent post referring to 'legitimate' demands? I often use them to get a broad overview of a technical field before reading human stuff on it, and it might be me but those clankers tend to spend half their reasoning on whether they are allowed to reply to my request. Censorship is an annoying waste of capacity for certain use cases, although it certainly has its boons when shipping commercial models.

New comment by fyltr in "France moves to break encrypted messaging"

fyltr — Sun, 10 May 2026 13:28:14 +0000

I would love to take the time to inspect your answer more thoroughly as soon as I have the time, but your premise is wrong. Most CSAM creators are neither teachers nor coaches, but parents i). The French state is not some cynical entre-soi that protects child abusers who are on their payroll. In my personal experience, which, while it isn't generalizable does prove the existence of consequences, I've come across three teachers accused of incorrect behavior with children ii). All three disappeared from the schools within months.

i)> Research suggests that a significant proportion of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is produced and distributed by parents who victimise their children. An online convenience sample of 150 adult survivors of CSAM found that, of those abused by a single perpetrator, 42% identified their biological or adoptive father or stepfather as the offender; and of those abused by multiple perpetrators, 67% identified their biological or adoptive parents or step-parents as the primary perpetrators (Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP), 2017). https://bravehearts.org.au/research-lobbying/stats-facts/onl...

ii) the first one had us do sexual education at age 8 and was gone five weeks after he began, the second had been on the radar for racism and was gone two months after complaints of staring at girls skirts, the third, a sport teacher, disappeared at the end of the semester for systematically correcting girl's stances while squatting and such. In the two last cases, the schools were relatively big and rumors of worse offenses were around, but I don't know if those were true.

New comment by fyltr in "France moves to break encrypted messaging"

fyltr — Sun, 10 May 2026 13:07:52 +0000

It seems so, yes. While I do trust eff, it seems to me that their article barely skims over the explanation of why this is a problem, although the second one does mention the ability to arbitrarily decide what triggers the filters. I would however like to point out that in France, the police cannot arbitrarily arrest people for more than 24 hours, after which they need an investigating judge's approval to prolongate detention. They also need those judges' permission to access a device. Free access to any channels of communication has never been on the table, but extrapolation of that technology to other kinds of governments with more liberal law-enforcement remains the obvious issue.

Still, I kind of fail to see how full privacy as a default is a necessity, if and only if it remains a possibility. Furthermore, by using non open source messengers such as WhatsApp, we are blindly trusting Zuckerberg, a random dude who got lucky and rich and wishes to remain on good terms with Trump, to keep our data as safe and as unreachable as he pretends.

New comment by fyltr in "France moves to break encrypted messaging"

fyltr — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:39:54 +0000

I have talked about it with a high-ranking french policeman. That person is mostly active in fighting sex-crimes on children, which is the angle I will mostly be referring to. From what I understood, it is very clear to them that even if these laws comes to pass, a good amount of criminal activities will move to other safer options. However, the general criminal is not technically competent. Currently, with WhatsApp providing end-to-end by default, access to pedophilic content is extremely simple. By suppressing these simple means of end to end encryption, the goal is to reduce the amount of people accessing these networks due to a higher entry bar.

What's of course concerning is that it renders anyone using encryption suspect, which includes pedophiles and narcotrafficants, but also activists and co.

Also, if we're only targetting pedophile networks, one option that comes to mind to me is the following : Most of those images are known and have been circulating for a while. By hashing any sent images and comparing them to the checksum of known ones, one could easily flag suspicions senders and proceed to access the phones of those users. Does that seem feasible to you or am I missing something?

New comment by fyltr in "France moves to break encrypted messaging"

fyltr — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:35:34 +0000

New comment by fyltr in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

fyltr — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:39:39 +0000

Might choux hit that dark breakfast abyss? They aren't breakfast per se, but it might show that you can do things with those proportions.

New comment by fyltr in "The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)"

fyltr — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:23:02 +0000

Would you mind rectifying the wrong parts then?

New comment by fyltr in "'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)"

fyltr — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:29:55 +0000

a link to the non-paywalled article is at the top of the hn post

New comment by fyltr in "Ai, Japanese chimpanzee who counted and painted dies at 49"

fyltr — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:18:34 +0000

There are some of them in this article https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-017-0604-0

New comment by fyltr in "Advent of Sysadmin 2025"

fyltr — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:22:46 +0000

Well, 12+12=24, so now we can complete two advents

New comment by fyltr in "The realities of being a pop star"

fyltr — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 11:08:57 +0000

For the record, eskimo is a derrogatory term meaning "raw meat eater". The term Inuit is nowadays preferred.