Hacker News: infotainment

New comment by infotainment in "GIMP 3.2 released"

infotainment — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:37:20 +0000

Don't worry, GIMP's UI never made any sense to anyone (Graphic Designer or otherwise), save for hardcore GIMP fans.

New comment by infotainment in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

infotainment — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:50:28 +0000

> Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?

Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.

New comment by infotainment in "Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years"

infotainment — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:42:21 +0000

> The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.

Wow, this is literally the plot of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video games. I'm sure it will go great with no downsides.

New comment by infotainment in "North Korea Was Right About Nuclear Weapons"

infotainment — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:43:32 +0000

This article misses a major point: even without nuclear weapons, NK has always had the option to shell Seoul with conventional artillery and completely destroy it.

That, above all else, is likely why no one tried to topple them before they were able to develop nuclear weapons.

New comment by infotainment in "Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes"

infotainment — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:05:55 +0000

I'd say if one has any interest in writing objectively about space technology, one will likely end up being perceived as having a "pro-Musk bias".

Elon himself is indeed questionable, but you really can't argue with his space-related achievements. Even other eccentric billionaires like Bezos haven't come close.

New comment by infotainment in "Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards"

infotainment — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:33:55 +0000

I do wish they'd release some open model weights though. Their attitude against open weight models in general is what's keeping me from subscribing.

New comment by infotainment in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

infotainment — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:14:38 +0000

Why should gambling be the exception? One could argue other app-based vices are just as bad, if not worse.

New comment by infotainment in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

infotainment — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:13:12 +0000

Device based attestation seems like the way to go largely; it doesn't solve the problem, but it's good enough that it would cover most cases.

New comment by infotainment in "Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts"

infotainment — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:22:40 +0000

This is such an entirely predictable outcome that people were warning about ever since the Patriot Act days and the creation of DHS.

Unfortunate, but the inevitable consequence of granting the kinds of powers that DHS was given.

New comment by infotainment in "Run Pebble OS in Browser via WASM"

infotainment — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:11:54 +0000

Really slow FPS for me (macOS, Firefox). Not really getting past 1fps...

New comment by infotainment in "NASA Will Let Its Astronauts Bring iPhones to the Moon"

infotainment — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:35:11 +0000

Should be an interesting test of camera performance!

New comment by infotainment in "Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub"

infotainment — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:05:15 +0000

On the plus side, the actually good mobile Anki client, AnkiDroid, remains out of the hands of this potentially questionable new entity.

(AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)

New comment by infotainment in "Netflix Ruined Korean Dramas Forever [video]"

infotainment — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 03:07:19 +0000

That comment was in response to an article; I feel like they may have a different view about a 40+ minute YouTube video.

New comment by infotainment in "My Gripes with Prolog"

infotainment — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:32:57 +0000

I always felt like Prolog's ability to execute programs was entirely accidental.

To me, it feels like a data description language that someone discovered could be tricked into performing computation.

New comment by infotainment in "Pebble Round 2"

infotainment — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:33:01 +0000

I get OP's point though -- yes, all smartphones do tend to end up as e-waste in the end, but would you buy a smartphone if it couldn't ever be charged?

If, every time you powered on the phone, you knew you were draining from its finite battery life? I would probably think twice before doing any kind of software updates at least!

New comment by infotainment in "Pebble Round 2"

infotainment — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:20:43 +0000

It shows them just fine -- the issue is that on iOS, only Apple Watches are permitted to perform notification "actions" (e.g., replying to a message, etc).

Recently, EU pressure might mean that Apple will open that ability up to non-Apple watches as well.

New comment by infotainment in "No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter"

infotainment — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:51:10 +0000

This 100% -- the AI features already in Firefox, for the most part, rely on local models. (Right now there is translation and tab-grouping, IIRC.)

Local based AI features are great and I wish they were used more often, instead of just offloading everything to cloud services with questionable privacy.

New comment by infotainment in "Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri"

infotainment — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:25:05 +0000

I still can’t believe they switched to Calibri at all; the only people who should be using Calibri are people who don’t realize that Microsoft Word lets you pick other fonts.

I do wish they’d gone for a classier serif though; Garamond was right there.

New comment by infotainment in "Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain"

infotainment — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:21:53 +0000

Wow, uh, it’s kind of astounding how poorly Eric is reading the room there.

A weird disposable(!) voice recorder ring seems to go against pretty much all of the “open and repairable” image that the Pebble brand has been cultivating.

This product should probably have been “Core” branded and kept on a different website entirely. Its very existence seems kind of toxic to the Pebble brand, IMO.

New comment by infotainment in "A fork of Calibre called Clbre, because the AI is stripped out"

infotainment — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:28:29 +0000

The AI integration in question, from the Calibre changelog:

- Allow asking AI questions about any book in your calibre library.

- Right click the "View" button and choose "Discuss selected book(s) with AI"

- AI: Allow asking AI what book to read next by right clicking on a book and using the "Similar books" menu

- AI: Add a new backend for "LM Studio" which allows running various AI models locally

It seems pretty harmless really.

I understand some people feel that AI is overhyped and don't particularly like it, but this level of weird knee-jerk "anything AI is the devil incarnate" response is just as ridiculous, IMO.