Hacker News: gradientsrneat

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New comment by gradientsrneat in "$3 ChromeOS Flex stick will revive old and outdated computers"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

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

gradientsrneat — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:37:44 +0000

That was a CCP group compromising the Notepad++'s underlying hosting provider; not really much to be done there aside from switching hosting providers. The update validation was also improved, and there's also scoop if you don't trust the built-in updater. Fortunately the attack was narrowly targeted and the IOCs are known.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Super Bowl Ad for Ring Cameras Touted AI Surveillance Network"

gradientsrneat — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:40:00 +0000

I wonder to what extent these articles weren't written by principled tech freedom advocates and are just ads, because they can't seem to go more than a few paragraphs without mentioning the AI buzzword. It doesn't matter if the article is for or against AI, because AI doom makes the AI stock prices go up too. It's hardly relevant here; mass surveillance worked fine without the current hype.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Intel's Panther Lake Chip is its biggest win in years"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:39:40 +0000

Given the timing, it's unlikely this generation of Intel integrated graphics makes use of Nvidia RTX chips. So, the gain on integrated graphics this generation seems impressive, given that graphics isn't Intel's strong suit.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "US Government wants DNA and social media from visitors"

gradientsrneat — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:43:26 +0000

There is US precedence for this, for example IBM. They didn't have cheap genetic testing back then, but they made do with the technology they had.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Eat Real Food"

gradientsrneat — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:51:43 +0000

I've seen ultra-processed food mentioned in other countries as well. It's a buzzword with no meaning.

Pasteurization saves lives. Flash-frozen foods retain more nutrition in transit, while freezing seafood kills parasites. And even the best bread and butter are as processed as food can get.

I'm reading the "chemical additives" list and it's a mix of obviously harmful things with known safe things added in trace concentrations - there's no intellectual rigor and a lot of fearmomgering.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Spherical Cow"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:48:10 +0000

Mars does have an atmosphere. It's much less dense than Earth's, but its enough to have weather. Pretty good joke though.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor""

gradientsrneat — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:39:54 +0000

They still aren't honest about the fact that the official VSCode distribution isn't fully open source because, for example: you can't have VSCodium connect to the official plugin repository. It also isn't the only editor with AI integration, and more specifically these systems use LLMs.

It would therefore be more honest to say that VSCode is "a visible source LLM code editor".

New comment by gradientsrneat in "P-computers can solve spin-glass problems faster than quantum systems"

gradientsrneat — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:08:52 +0000

I know this is missing the point (qubits vs bits), but still I find it amusing that today's mass-produced computers are called "classical" even though transistor behavior is dependent on quantum tunneling of electrons.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:34:49 +0000

"poetic justice" is the same mentality as people writing articles glorifying rich Chinese criminals for using South America's drug trade for money laundering because something something Opium War.

In either case, it's not the same. The United States benefits greatly in the short term from larger agricultural output, and herbicide manufacturing centers still create significant health risks for their local communities wherever they are located. So, whether you're the buyer or the seller, you're losing.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Laying out the 404 Media zine"

gradientsrneat — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:22:59 +0000

Remember when the word, "zine" used to have the connotation of a hobbyist project, because most people couldn't afford/justify the cost of printing full-sized magazines at scale?

Rather than a tool of mass-distributed propaganda, in an internet medium where making digital copies is cheap, masquerading under the guise of the "little man"?