Hacker News: gradientsrneat

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Does average person understand that all disc media dies too?"

gradientsrneat — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 15:58:29 +0000

Rossman made a good point recently that the physical vs digital argument is mostly a distraction and DRM is the real issue that needs to be focused on.

That said, there are specific legal benefits to physical media such as the principle of first sale, which digital goods do not have.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "EFF letter to FTC on X consent order [pdf]"

gradientsrneat — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:46:40 +0000

EFF has, on multiple occasions, specifically defended Kiwifarms, a site which unabashedly exists to turn people into hate-celebrities, with some members having kept "kill counts" of harrassed targets who committed suicide. The site is also known for spreading absurd false accusations, which has at least as much negative impact as AI revenge porn.

The EFF is not consistent in its principles. It has partisan bias. However, it can still be worth situationally supporting for certain causes.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers"

gradientsrneat — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:54:42 +0000

I too do not understand the downvotes.

Unlike what Cory Doctorow implies, Facebook is not a Soviet Dictatorship. There is no Berlin wall. If you don't like it, you can just leave.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "White House app auto-downloads to government phones, can't be uninstalled"

gradientsrneat — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:43:32 +0000

Misleading. Scanning is related to a setting called "Sensitive Content Warnings" and it's disabled by default on most devices.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "My Mathematical Regression"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:22:32 +0000

Professional mathematicians and computer scientists use AI as well. Maybe that's not very reassuring from the standpoint of skills regression in modern adult work culture, but at least it demonstrates that skills and tool usage aren't mutually exclusive.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Moebius: 0.2B image inpainting model with 10B-level performance"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:13:23 +0000

Some smartphones have a feature that detects if you're taking a picture of a menu/letter/etc and will automatically crop and unskew it for you.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:04:25 +0000

Misogyny in government is a bellwether for authoritarianism. If a man doesn't respect women, you can bet they won't respect men or minorities either, although they may be less inclined to admit such in public.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese"

gradientsrneat — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 16:46:26 +0000

According to the poster, this is happening in Facebook's HQ, i.e. in Menlo Park, California, United States.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:48:49 +0000

Reminds me of a billboard I saw where Apple was touting the alleged privacy of the iPhone with a guy wearing clothes nearly the same color as his skin. I know iPhone isn't really private, and I'd rather not have a phone that isn't repairable, but I can appreciate the clever marketing in both cases.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "The iPhone's Last Stand?"

gradientsrneat — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:36:33 +0000

That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far.

I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "US House lawmakers release draft bill to prohibit state AI rules"

gradientsrneat — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:37:23 +0000

> Trump in December said he would withhold federal broadband funding from states whose laws to regulate AI are judged by his administration to be holding back American dominance in the technology.

Specifically, this is funding for BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment):

https://www.ntia.gov/funding-programs/high-speed-internet-pr...

Which among other things does "Deploying or upgrading internet infrastructure in unserved or underserved areas, or improving service to community anchor institutions".

From the executive order in December, withholding of funds could include residential internet repairs and bandwidth upgrades, assuming that falls under "non-deployment":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/12/fact-sheet-pr...

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Women are getting most of the new jobs. What's going on with men? – OPB"

gradientsrneat — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:09:33 +0000

YMMV based on the role, but some healthcare roles are highly stressful plus you're exposed to all sorts of infectious diseases. A more charitable interpretation is that these new new role openings are in response to high turnover.

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Notepad++ v8.9.6.4 Tiananmen Massacre Commemoration"

gradientsrneat — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:30:52 +0000

This is not the first time a Notepad++ release has supported human rights causes in China.

For example, here is "Notepad++ Stand with Hong Kong Edition":

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v789-stand-with-hong-kong...

And here's "Notepad++ v7.8.1 : Free Uyghur":

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/

In the latter (earlier) case, the Notepad++ issue tracker was bombarded by Chinese spam in response.

The Notepad++ releases have supported other causes too like "Je Suis Charlie", so special releases aren't confined to Chinese topics. Seems like they are concerned about free speech causes especially.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v674-je-suis-charlie-edit...

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Not just America, China's top scientists are dying mysteriously"

gradientsrneat — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:42:09 +0000

Food for thought: hundreds of thousands of Americans have top secret clearance. These deaths could be within statistical expectations for both countries.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyw9rpdl4po

New comment by gradientsrneat in "Avoid Using "< [Cdata[ ]]]]>" in RSS"

gradientsrneat — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:53:37 +0000

RSS is truly in its own little universe.

I recently became aware of RSS stylesheets. Apparently there is a specification for that called XSLT which is distinct from CSS in both form and function. However, there are plans by Google/Mozilla to remove XSLT from their browser engines for security/maintainability reasons. Apparently RSS supports javascript though, so it's possible to manipulate the RSS DOM that way. One could imagine a javascript polyfill that interprets XSLT, although I'm not sure if there's some cross-site security issues that would make that impractical.

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.