Hacker News: gavinsyancey

New comment by gavinsyancey in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

gavinsyancey — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:01:29 +0000

I believe it's not strictly necessary, but the project recommends that you do.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

gavinsyancey — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:52:44 +0000

FYI -- You can configure your system to ignore the sleep key (without disabling sleep altogether) by setting

HandleSuspendKey=ignore

in /etc/systemd/logind.conf

(No idea how if you're on Windows/Mac/Devuan but it's probably possible there as well)

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?"

gavinsyancey — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:18:03 +0000

What I suspect is more likely (given the couple of comments saying "you have to pay to run it on a server") -- Some higher-up in AMD's marketing department has the misconception that Linux isn't a real desktop operating system but is only run on servers. Therefore, all their Linux users are probably companies running Vivaldi on a server, likely using a LLM to do designs. And they should be paying for that.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

gavinsyancey — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:02:10 +0000

Sure, but if my bank's ToS says it's not their responsibility then their customer service agents will probably say the same thing, and it's going to be a lot harder to get them to take responsibility even if they are legally required to. But thanks for the info; that's good to know.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "What political censorship looks like inside an LLM's weights (Qwen 3.5)"

gavinsyancey — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:59:23 +0000

Giving dramatic-sounding but meaningless titles to random concepts, generally overdramatizing and overemphasizing things, excessive italics / bold / formatting. The sentance that gave it away for me was "It falls into a different trained template: denial or propaganda."

New comment by gavinsyancey in "My domain got abused on GitHub Pages"

gavinsyancey — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:48:44 +0000

Thank you; just did that for my domain I use with GH Pages. They should really mention that in the setup instructions.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Apple Silicon costs less than OpenRouter"

gavinsyancey — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:58:24 +0000

You managed to reverse the title somehow.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "What political censorship looks like inside an LLM's weights (Qwen 3.5)"

gavinsyancey — Tue, 19 May 2026 01:20:33 +0000

Seems mildly interesting, but clearly written by an LLM.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

gavinsyancey — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:35:37 +0000

The same info is also on checks, and there's an established story around fraud there -- if I didn't authorize an ACH withdrawal then my bank is legally required to make me whole. If I hand over my username+password to a third party, I'm on my own.

Also, the routing+account numbers just let them deposit/withdraw money, not snoop on all my transactions and harvest my data...

New comment by gavinsyancey in "New Nginx Exploit"

gavinsyancey — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:47:21 +0000

So you're not vulnerable to script-kiddies running the published PoC. Still probably vulnerable to to a sufficiently-motivated attacker.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

gavinsyancey — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:43:07 +0000

No, it's the mark of "many people no longer carry exact change." An unattended box of produce and a sign saying "please pay this code" still requires trust that people won't take the produce without paying.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

gavinsyancey — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:28:45 +0000

Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?

It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "When “idle” isn't idle: how a Linux kernel optimization became a QUIC bug"

gavinsyancey — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:07:09 +0000

a Congestion Control Algorithm -- which uses various signals (mostly dropped packets) to try to estimate the available bandwidth and avoid network connection.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal"

gavinsyancey — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:16:19 +0000

Is this Intel Foundry Services fabbing apple-designed chips, or Apple using Intel-designed chips in their products? I would assume the former but don't see where in the article it says either way.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to"

gavinsyancey — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:59:16 +0000

I wonder if you're in a region that requires that, while the original commenter isn't?

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

gavinsyancey — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:23:21 +0000

Degradation is usually nonlinear.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Southwest Headquarters Tour"

gavinsyancey — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:41:58 +0000

The Oakland wastewater treatment plant offers tours open to the general public: https://www.ebmud.com/wastewater/collection-treatment/wastew...

Wouldn't be surprised if others do as well, or would be willing to if you asked the right person nicely.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)"

gavinsyancey — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:52:13 +0000

You don't have to use it.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon"

gavinsyancey — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:51:47 +0000

> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.

The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.

New comment by gavinsyancey in "NASA uses Mars Helicopter's SoC for rover navigation upgrade"

gavinsyancey — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:27:29 +0000

How do you propose to install them in the rover, which is already on Mars? The helicopter base station CPU is already in the rover, since it was included to communicate with the helicopter. And it's no longer needed for that purpose, since the helicopter crashed and broke a propeller.