Hacker News: gigel82

New comment by gigel82 in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

gigel82 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:38:39 +0000

Good. I wish the US had some privacy regulations as well. I can't believe how much credit folks are still giving Apple after all the BS they pulled (I mean direct Ad revenue is a $9 billion (and growing) business for Apple, and that's just the stuff they make public, not including search share revenue and other such deals).

Apparently their "Verifiable Transparency" claim just means Apple invited unnamed outside security experts and independent researchers to inspect and verify the integrity of (what they claim to be) its Private Cloud Compute code... LOL :)

I'll believe it when I can run the "private cloud compute" on my own hardware that I can firewall in my rack and monitor its network outputs.

New comment by gigel82 in "Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank"

gigel82 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:11:09 +0000

We're not right back where we started, we're in far far worse place where all online activity of every single person is de-anonymized (associated with their full legal ID). Tech companies are salivating at the thought.

New comment by gigel82 in "Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas"

gigel82 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:05:01 +0000

I would be very surprised if that's the case. I heard from a buddy that used to work in Office back when SDETs were a thing. They had labs of random machines rendering the same files (out of a library of thousands) and comparing the actual pixels for regressions.

Of course, that was a decade ago, so who knows.

New comment by gigel82 in "Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser"

gigel82 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:27:14 +0000

If someone actually got "pixel-faithful" Office documents rendering correctly, MS would be screwed. That's actually really important for a lot of companies that carry around decades-old templates that never look exactly right in LibreOffice or any other software that attempted to replicate it.

The slightest misalignment of a paragraph means a line on page 27 of 120 now moved down by 2 pixels, screwing everything else out of alignment. Yes, plenty of companies pay Microsoft 365 subscriptions because of exactly this reason; it sounds ludicrous when you think they could just pay someone to replicate the formatting in a different suite a lot less than the subscription costs, but that's not how it works...

New comment by gigel82 in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

gigel82 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:56:19 +0000

I think we need legislation. The "no expectations of privacy" probably was ok when little old ladies were spending time outside their home watching passerbys, but not when everyone's movements are tracked and saved by fully autonomous systems.

New comment by gigel82 in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

gigel82 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:09:00 +0000

Fudge... we can de-flock all we want but if naive people walk around with the portable surveillance cameras on their face, there's nothing we can do about that.

We need privacy regulation...

New comment by gigel82 in "Rootshell: A new E2EE email service hosted in Iceland"

gigel82 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:23:11 +0000

There is no such thing as E2EE email. You can encrypt your storage or some of the hops, but the plain-text email contents goes through between every layer, unless you're talking about PGP, or some similar scheme you built on top of the email protocol (where obviously both the sender and the recipient must participate).

New comment by gigel82 in "Microsoft announces Scout, an autonomous AI agent built on OpenClaw"

gigel82 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:20:48 +0000

Are you high on your own supply, or did you genuinely hallucinate a reality where a $3 trillion company is dying because a handful of Redditors learned how to use Proton?

New comment by gigel82 in "Microsoft launches Project Solara, device platform for AI"

gigel82 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:17:02 +0000

I'm guessing that "Enterprise Alexa" thing is dead on arrival, but the badge is quite interesting.

You have to carry a badge around the office anyway and if you get company stuff on the badge it means you don't need to pollute your personal phone with corporate BS (MDM, apps, VPN profiles, etc.)

New comment by gigel82 in "Coreutils for Windows"

gigel82 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:55:11 +0000

Native Coreutils for Windows is genuinely some good news coming from Microsoft.

Coreutils for Windows

gigel82 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:55:11 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/microsoft/coreutils

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48372853

Points: 227

# Comments: 247

New comment by gigel82 in "A powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by Nvidia RTX Spark"

gigel82 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:45:32 +0000

I just want a new NVIDIA Shield Pro; can't believe that 7 year old device is still the best media player on the market.

New comment by gigel82 in "Fully in-browser container builds"

gigel82 — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:20:09 +0000

I don't understand what this does. How can it "build" anything without a VM capable of running actual code?

Is "build" being used here in the sense of assembling pre-existing layers into an image? What would be the purpose of that?

New comment by gigel82 in "Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM"

gigel82 — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:12:48 +0000

An interesting learning project, but not actually usable.

https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine looks interesting in this space, but unfortunately it can't really run anything remotely modern in practice (though if you're looking at 20th century Windows software it will likely be capable of running it).

New comment by gigel82 in "Improving Windows quality: Making Taskbar and Start more personal"

gigel82 — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:59:08 +0000

If you want to "Put me in control of Start", how about you let me permanently kill SearchHost.exe and StartMenuExperienceHost.exe (not to mention widget*.exe) if I don't use your ad-ridden start menu (and replace it with something like Start11 instead).

These processes automatically restart if you terminate them and you can't uninstall the "CBS system app" they come from. They take about ~300Mb RAM and constantly talk over the network while providing literally no user value (I know because I suspended them and could continue using my computer with no ill effect).

New comment by gigel82 in "Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site"

gigel82 — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:16:42 +0000

I do, but this still uses the Bitwarden app and browser extensions. I'm now worried that in pursuit of monetization they'll start screwing with those. After all, the code in the clients have access to all recorded secrets and there would be nothing stopping them from accessing that unencrypted data.

New comment by gigel82 in "Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

gigel82 — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:17:46 +0000

Damn, all schools in our district in Washington moved to Instructure last year.

They moved away from Teams because it objectively sucked, but I haven't heard of widespread compromises like this in Microsoft's systems so...

New comment by gigel82 in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

gigel82 — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:00:45 +0000

"If those kids could read they'd be very upset"

New comment by gigel82 in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

gigel82 — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:15:43 +0000

The "sense of pride" bit makes me think they're not even taking it seriously... either that, or they hired EA's PR person that managed this record voted comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...

New comment by gigel82 in "California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws"

gigel82 — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:51:23 +0000

If there aren't serious consequences for driverless cars committing crimes (I mean jail time for executives serious), what's to stop someone for starting a hitman business?

We'll just run someone over with our "driverless" car and pay a fine - capitalism, baby!