<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: idle_zealot</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idle_zealot</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:22:21 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=idle_zealot" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...<p>Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:33:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48483025</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48483025</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48483025</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:05:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482712</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482712</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482712</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I currently have Fable set on cleaning up the work of smaller models to bring my code up to standards I'd feel comfortable developing on manually. Y'know, for when they decide I don't get to use it anymore.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:58:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48468996</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48468996</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48468996</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Siri AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even the aspirational use cases you're talking about basically are just "digital secretary." There's a massive problem with that even if the models end up being capable in the future. The value of a secretary is that you know them, they know you, and you trust them to do things right. There are stakes if they don't. No company can provide that as a service at scale for everyone without it being a disaster. Not because it's not technically possible, but because of the incentives. That much power over the details of so many people's lives is irresistible; there will be persistent temptation to use it. The presence of that possibility makes the secretary impossible to trust.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:21:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456356</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456356</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456356</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:56:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431950</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431950</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431950</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Iran Shock Jolts Asia and Europe to Speed Up Energy Transition"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Really? Europe looks primed to follow the US, just a few steps behind. They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation, and are even ahead of us on cultural decline with respect to mass surveillance being used to actively police speech. What moves have they been making that you think indicate an upward trend? How are they going to recover from stagnation and demographic collapse?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:58:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405171</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405171</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405171</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How does HN feel about this as a general ethos:<p>- Computers can do as much work as they want to automatically, so long as none of it touches a network boundary.<p>- Any time a computer wants to touch the network it must be explicitly initiated by a human action.
Sort of like how in browsers capturing the mouse or entering fullscreen mode requires a trusted user action and isn't something a page can do unilaterally, but broader. This also means that the extent of the network communication must be made explicit and clear with no chance of misunderstanding by the user. If what you're doing is genuinely complex beyond your ability to communicate to your target user then you shouldn't be doing it on the behalf of that user. Note that this only really applies to mass consumer products, not something built/deployed internally.<p>I feel like if a hard boundary is not set around this we will end up in a Panopticon. Set aside governments actively pushing for it, it seems a simple profit motive in a digital era yields this outcome. Maybe nuanced rules would produce better outcomes in theory, but humans don't seem great at sticking to nuanced and fiddly rules when there's strong incentive to bend them beyond recognition.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:44:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405033</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405033</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405033</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S."]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't know what you're suggesting. How would widespread gun ownership help with the government being subverted by oligarchs? Vigilante justice? Wouldn't change anything for the better. More paranoid billionaires would just start running things from private compounds and transit between in private jets and armored convoys. That's not a far step from what many do now, and would be extremely powerful social pretext for authoritarian crackdown.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:04:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403164</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403164</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403164</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S."]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think that's it. Armed resistance is not realistic, and is probably actively counterproductive compared even to unarmed but violent resistance to occupation. This is because you're not going to "win" in a military sense, it's a battle for hearts and minds, and optically protestors firing at State forces is really <i>really</i> bad.<p>I've stopped talking about it because it's been relegated to a marginal safety issue. Reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a generational project to reduce a bad statistic. It pales in comparison with much more pressing and foundational issues that need to be resolved before anything can even be attempted to improve stats like that. We can't even manage to repair failing bridges[0], enforce basic laws meant to protect the legitimacy of our institutions (see every political scandal since Iran contra), or meaningfully oppose genocides or home grown fascism. When the "opposition" party argues against <i>mass deportations</i> they frame it as though their colleagues across the aisle are merely making an <i>economic</i> miscalculation, like submitting the fact the immigrants are disproportionately hard workers and prop up our economy might be convincing to people who respond to "they're killing and eating your pets." There's a deep rot that needs to be addressed before I can again muster the energy to care about reducing the suicide and homicide rate by 50% of an already pretty-low number (relative to car deaths or heart disease or whatever). No need to muddle the message by tagging it with correct but contentious positions.<p>0: <a href="https://www.permits.performance.gov/permitting-project/dot-projects/i-5-interstate-bridge-replacement-supplemental-eis" rel="nofollow">https://www.permits.performance.gov/permitting-project/dot-p...</a><p>In planning for 20 years, 13 billion dollars stolen and absorbed by the construction industry and its infinitely fractal subcontracting web. at least it created jobs, I guess. No work has begun.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:48:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402951</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402951</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402951</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think the part that's the issue is the one where they mandate age verification. They're going to try that either way, the worst thing this could do is get people accustomed to the idea, but in practice the operating system they use already asked their age.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:02:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366269</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366269</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366269</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's the State's responsibility once something affects enough people. That's why a law like this makes sense but should exempt OSes under some number of users. It's not great that we have such a harsh divide between "do whatever you want so long as not too many people are bothered" and "alright now the people have spoken and it's a State/national law," but it's the system we have and better than the people only getting a say with their wallets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:00:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366253</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366253</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366253</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Eh, most Nazis that use the words interchangeably really do use them interchangeably. Like, they'll talk about the Jews controlling everything in one sentence and say it's Zionists pushing cultural Marxism or whatever the next.<p>You realize that calling everyone who criticizes an ongoing genocide an antisemite isn't workable, right?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:05:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355244</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355244</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355244</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe, but you know as well as I do that if the SSID were "God Bless America," "Support our Troops," "Fuck George Bush," "I'm glad Hitler is dead," "The South will rise again," or any number of things that there would be no incident.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:50:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355115</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355115</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355115</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It seems to me the era of being able to trust pictures was an aberration. Before the camera images created in any form might depict something that really happened, an exaggeration, or a total fabrication. The camera represented a technological leap that made capturing reality significantly more easy than faking it, though faking it was never actually all <i>that</i> hard. Now technology has progressed again and we're back where we started. Any image might be real, edited, or totally fabricated, and we can no longer fool ourselves about "photographic evidence." Trust is and always will be about credibility of the claimant. Additional evidence is itself only as trustworthy as its providence. An attempt to destroy the ability to create images that resemble photographs is doomed to fail and wrongheaded to begin with. The only reason such an idea would occur to someone is they were born in an aberrant era where the culture had ingrained in them the semi-grounded belief that certain types of images are representative of reality. That wasn't the case historically and won't be again.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:27:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48354927</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48354927</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48354927</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's nothing really special about technology here. It's just allocation of power, the same problem as ever.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 31 May 2026 01:15:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342187</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342187</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342187</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's pretty funny that he's fleeing the US for fear of instability and rising anti-oligarch sentiment to <i>Argentina</i>. As though their collapsing society will treat him much better when the shit hits the fan.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 20:38:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340384</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340384</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340384</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As ever it will come down to judicial discretion whether trivial word games are allowed to nullify the law or not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 21:08:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329294</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329294</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329294</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Continuous cost without continuous revenue<p>That would be the case if the publisher had any intent to actually keep the service online. Empirically they do not, hence the law.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 21:07:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329276</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329276</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329276</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "AI will be used to estimate age of asylum seekers from next year"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Are you suggesting we just take every person who shows up at the border at their word?<p>That's not what I said. It's all about the framing. Rejecting is automated, accepting is slow and deliberate. This is reflective of a preference for rejection but presented as neutral and pragmatic. If you cared about false negatives as much as false positives you wouldn't fast-track or preference either branch. The observation that this is the case is value-neutral.<p>As for my personal opinion, I consider freedom of movement a human right and accepting asylum seekers a moral obligation. Both can be implemented poorly, but it's our duty to try to do them right and allocate these systems the resources they need to succeed and to hold incompetent or malicious leaders responsible for failing to operate them effectively.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 21:01:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329206</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329206</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329206</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idle_zealot in "Poll: How often do you check "newest"?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sometimes I miss when aiming for the Y logo to refresh the main page or Threads to read replies. Does that count?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 19:13:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327919</link><dc:creator>idle_zealot</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327919</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327919</guid></item></channel></rss>