Hacker News: gradientsrneat

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"

gradientsrneat — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:53:23 +0000

Related: Microsoft-owned GitHub recently switched to token-based billing:

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...

Claude tokens are priced by GitHub at a disproportionately premium price compared to Gemini and OpenAI. I wonder why?

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Surface laptop ships with 8GB RAM for $1299 despite pushing 16GB for Copilot PCs"

gradientsrneat — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:43:08 +0000

Surface laptops have always been overpriced, even before the RAM shortage.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Chewing gum restores dad's taste and smell years after Covid"

gradientsrneat — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:25:10 +0000

Hard to say without more info but most at-home COVID tests have a very high false negative rate due to the virus mutating and generally how the test is designed.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

gradientsrneat — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:56:09 +0000

FWIW it's feasible to make a "clone" of Notepad++ using the Scintilla library that Notepad++ is based on, but don't violate trademarks of course. That said, it's the details that make Notepad++ good.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Congressman Introduces Bill to Ban AI Chatbots in Children's Toys"

gradientsrneat — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:22:23 +0000

Current Usgov says they won't enforce COPPA, so I don't buy the idea that they care about privacy. Having the product call out to a fickle third-party service that could shut down at any time is a problem that could distress both children and adults, and can be subject to invasive tracking. This proposed bill does not solve that problem.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence"

gradientsrneat — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:04:47 +0000

Maybe if the LLM CEOs stopped spreading doomer narratives to sell their products, these people would chill out.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "War on Raze"

gradientsrneat — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:17:36 +0000

Sad that the Wikipedia page links to some specific commercial service rather than the actual programming language runtime (which appears to be AGPL-licensed).

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation"

gradientsrneat — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:34:19 +0000

I've opted in/not opted out to several class actions, and without saying the exact number, I'll say it was a lot more than that. Tech companies wouldn't be putting binding arbitration clauses/class action waivers/etc in their TOS if they weren't scared of being held accountable.

New comment by gradientsrneat in ""The new Copilot app for Windows 11 is really just Microsoft Edge""

gradientsrneat — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:13:07 +0000

busybox does a similar trick where it executes a different program based on the program's name. But it uses symlinks for the different names, so it doesn't use significantly more space by doing this.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Kiwi Farms challenges DMCA subpoenas as tools to unmask anonymous speech"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:57:53 +0000

There was a comment in this thread criticizing Kiwi Farms, but it was quickly removed. I'm not here to repeat their eloquent criticism, only add my own thoughts.

> anonymous speech

Kiwi Farms users are not anonymous. They are, at best, pseudonymous. There is comment history associated with their online identities. Some use their real names, although the extent this can be verified is questionable and undoubtedly some are impersonators.

Overall, I don't buy the slippery slope arguments of RTN and EFF here.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:04:16 +0000

Setting aside the obvious fact that it's morally wrong to harrass people, something tells me these harrassers never do the same to developers working on closed source software for companies, having the net effect of harming the FOSS movement overall.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters"

gradientsrneat — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:44:32 +0000

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805

The archive.today domains have also poisoned DNS lookups from some privacy-preserving DNS providers, and in rare cases have been caught tampering the archive data. Make of that what you will.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

gradientsrneat — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:53:49 +0000

As other commenters have alluded to, due to the timing, this is likely in response to the "Microslop" nickname catching on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047

Microsoft's PR team is in damage control mode right now.

Some commenters have pointed out that it's in response to the release of the Macbook Neo. I would argue that, if people were satisfied with the Windows OS, they wouldn't feel the need to jump ship. Ditto for Linux/SteamOS.

Other likely confounding factors:

The unnecessarily different hardware requirements of Windows 11, combined with Windows 10 Home reaching EOL in the United States, likely left some users feeling alienated.

The temporary-but-still-painful hardware cost crunch puts more pressure on software developers to improve their software on existing hardware rather than hoping their users will upgrade.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:18:45 +0000

Could this technique be used to reverse-engineer end-of-life Nvidia GPUs to improve Noveau on them?

New comment by gradientsrneat in "'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images"

gradientsrneat — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:27:52 +0000

Nintendo's brand means nothing.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "$3 ChromeOS Flex stick will revive old and outdated computers"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:32:28 +0000

A Google partner is selling 3000 USB sticks with Linux distribution (ChromeOS) installers?

Honestly that's not a lot. It probably won't make a dent in either ChromeOS or Linux without considerable marketing effort and the right user expectations.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

gradientsrneat — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:58:27 +0000

A middle ground would be to implement E2EE but have messages signed (and ideally organized in a Merkel tree), so that if a DM is reported there's cryptographic proof that the accounts sent the messages.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "A [Firefox, Chromium] extension that converts Microsoft to Microslop"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:49:32 +0000

Make sure you don't have add-ons like this enabled on any webpage you plan on inputting text, as depending on how the text input is implemented, you may have your words swapped without realizing it. But if those substitutions are appealing to you, then by all means use the add-on.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

gradientsrneat — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:40:24 +0000

> (g) This title does not impose liability on an operating system provider, a covered application store, or a developer that arises from the use of a device or application by a person who is not the user to whom a signal pertains.

So, this makes desktop Linux illegal, but all the software-as-a-service like Microsoft Azure and OpenAI get off scott-free?

Fantastic.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan"

gradientsrneat — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:10:26 +0000

Notch already sold Minecraft to Microsoft before 1.7.10 was released.