Hacker News: infthi

New comment by infthi in "Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word"

infthi — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:33:34 +0000

My understanding of that comment is that "a generally intelligent system" also applies to humans. Which can also be targeted by social engineering which those prompt attacks are. (as in, I won't be surprised if it is possible to put an adversarial human-targeted prompt in a document which some people will execute).

So, like with self-driving cars, while having fool-proof agents would be nice, agents being better than an average user would already be an improvement. Of course, blast radius from an agent might be larger, this should be taken into account.

New comment by infthi in "Why the smart home bubble popped"

infthi — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:32:22 +0000

My setup: philips hue switches in 3dprinted boxes on top of (currently perma-on) dump switches.

Smart home works? good

Smart home dies? remove the smart switches (held in place by magnets) - and the buttons of dumb switches are exposed. Lights have power-on behavior configured, so they act as dumb lights in this case.

New comment by infthi in "Google Street View in 2026"

infthi — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:38:06 +0000

FWIW mobile maps rolled out "immersive view" (3d view of selected landmarks, e.g. Trafalgar Square, with model from desktop 3d view) a few years ago. That had camera just rotating around the object but now it seemingly allows free camera?

New comment by infthi in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

infthi — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:11:50 +0000

Wonder when will we get something other than a side view

New comment by infthi in "Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance"

infthi — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:15:57 +0000

There was this proof of concept in 2012: https://youtu.be/CXv1j3GbgLk?t=2483

(IIUC they did not actually transmit data, just fed it directly into an ADS-B receiver, but transmitting would've been trivial at this point)

Multiplying with a constant

infthi — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:12:00 +0000

Article URL: https://xania.org/202512/04-multiplying-integers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146771

Points: 17

# Comments: 0

New comment by infthi in "Nano Banana Pro"

infthi — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:19:21 +0000

Can't wait for a machine printing images on film by exposing it with a laser.

New comment by infthi in "Google Antigravity"

infthi — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:21:35 +0000

Kursor Klone

New comment by infthi in "SpaceX disables 2,500 Starlink terminals allegedly used by Asian scam centers"

infthi — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:13:05 +0000

The precedent seems to be that anyone can broadcast anything without caring what territories can receive your broadcast (see Voice of America broadcasts during the Cold War or GPS jamming in the Baltic nowadays). This seems to be extendable to broadcasting from space. The nominal group in power may ban/jam _receiving_ equipment on their territory though.

New comment by infthi in "The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain"

infthi — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 22:55:37 +0000

>it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible It is not the same, supply from gas turbines is more flexible/predictable, this might be worth an extra premium.

New comment by infthi in "Pixel 10 Phones"

infthi — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:29:31 +0000

Motorola did some A/B testing in 2011 with Droid RAZR and Droid RAZR MAXX. They had identical hardware, but first one was the thin one with a camera bump, second one was uniformly thick (thus no bump) and put an extra battery there (which doubled the capacity).

Given that 3 years later they have stopped producing phones with bumps, I guess people really prefer battery to bumps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New comment by infthi in "The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)"

infthi — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:05:48 +0000

Hackers could have redistributed their coins to the existing wallets in the same ratio their balances were at the time of attack, keeping some coins (say, 1/21) to themselves as a reward. The outcome would've been: the hackers become owners of 1/21 of all bitcoins ever; Satoshi either keeps his 1/21 or is left with 1/184000 (depends on the implementation); everyone else sees their balance increase 20k times overnight. bitcoin/fiat exchange rate drops the same 20k times, so noone has lost any fiat value. Block rewards immediately become essentially worthless; mining becomes 100% fee powered.

Imo not great, not terrible.

New comment by infthi in "Precision Clock Mk IV"

infthi — Sat, 31 May 2025 17:05:41 +0000

One possibility is to call 911 and ask what time is it.

New comment by infthi in "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip"

infthi — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 07:08:16 +0000

if someone gets Indiana on the suspiciously detailed request the author provided and it appears they wanted something else, they can clarify that to the chat bot, e.g. by copying this your comment.

I have a strong suspicion that many human artists would behave in a way the chat bot did (unless they start asking clarifying questions. Which chatbots should learn to do as well)

New comment by infthi in "US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago"

infthi — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 14:48:58 +0000

Those still seem to be projects years away from completion (and they also have projects for fusion powered data centers - which are 30 years away, I guess?), yet I've interpreted the chain of comments as "Nuclear workers which were laid off _now_ can easily be absorbed by data centers almost immediately".

New comment by infthi in "US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago"

infthi — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:54:40 +0000

> Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience

Could you elaborate why is that? They seem to be unrelated areas.

New comment by infthi in "US Cloud soon illegal in EU? US punches first hole in EU-US Data Deal"

infthi — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:01:26 +0000

One can already access AI with fax. What else would one need?

https://simple-fax.de/fax-ki

New comment by infthi in "Dragonsweeper — A minesweeper game that requires observation"

infthi — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 13:05:44 +0000

What device are you playing on? I have accidentally figured out that playing in a narrow browser window hides the right side of the board without any hint it is there (except for the health bar being cut mid-heart - I have initially thought remembering whether you already have 15 hearts or not was part of the game process). This partially visible/explored board might be the reason you did not get enough resources for lvlup

New comment by infthi in "GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house"

infthi — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 10:19:49 +0000

Have speed cameras with license plate recognition and add "is_av" bit associated with a license plate.

Or maybe just issue license plates with a different color to avs. Like taxis/public transport having yellow license plates in some jurisdictions.

New comment by infthi in "DNS traffic can leak outside the VPN tunnel on Android"

infthi — Fri, 03 May 2024 18:14:50 +0000

This depends on the firmware used. I am writing this comment from an Oneplus device which allows blocking internet access on a per-app basis - on a stock firmware.