Hacker News: irenaeus

New comment by irenaeus in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

irenaeus — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:01:36 +0000

This is what I was missing. Demanding that porn sites block VPN traffic (or only accept residential traffic) would mean that everyone everywhere using a VPN gets blocked not just in Utah.

I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.

Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.

New comment by irenaeus in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

irenaeus — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:54:14 +0000

Yeah but the state of Utah could just tell them to knock it off because they're the state.

New comment by irenaeus in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

irenaeus — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:53:27 +0000

So it would be possible if the state demanded that VPN companies provide adult sites with continuously updated lists of their exit nodes.

It also seems to me like Utah could just demand that adult sites only accept traffic from residential ips.

New comment by irenaeus in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

irenaeus — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:48:15 +0000

This requires a lot of extra work though, and extra work is downward pressure on the behavior (underage people looking at pornography) that the state of Utah is trying to exert downward pressure on.

The inability to immediately and perfectly eliminate a behavior is not a good enough reason to be against any attempt to eliminate that behavior.

New comment by irenaeus in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

irenaeus — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:45:02 +0000

Not sure what the impossibility is. VPN's have a set of exit relays. If traffic is coming from one of those exit relays, it's coming from a VPN, so adult websites can be required to block traffic from those exit relays. What am I missing?

New comment by irenaeus in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

irenaeus — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:35:56 +0000

I am aware and mostly agree with the dogma about how decision-making power should be delegated to those with the most relevant information to that decision. In fact, that to me seems a bit tautological and beside the point.

My point is essentially that there are situations where a monopoly is the best system available especially if you can rely on those involved to act in good faith. For example, I think the government holding a monopoly on policing power is the best available system. Within that monopoly power can be delegated a whole manner of ways, but ultimately the public good of policing is distributed through a manner of sub-institutions all answerable to a single institution.

I think the real delta in our views is I see the values of the people within a system as of equal or more importance to the structure of the system itself. It seems to me that you reason about this topic in an almost purely abstract manner, attempting to posit a "perfect" system which could work no matter who was actually implementing it, and indeed would be the best no matter who was actually implementing it. I used to think this way, but came to the conclusion that it was impossible.

New comment by irenaeus in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

irenaeus — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:46:13 +0000

"In a high trust society people aren't trying to con you but they're still subject to structural constraints."

In a high trust society people are not, generally, trying to con you whether or not they are subject to structural constraints.

New comment by irenaeus in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

irenaeus — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:37:53 +0000

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

New comment by irenaeus in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

irenaeus — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:37:28 +0000

The Book of the New Sun is probably my favorite "sci fi" series. It's so incredibly different in terms of tone, content, philosophy, and style. How's "Chronicle"?

New comment by irenaeus in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

irenaeus — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:09:24 +0000

"A high trust society doesn't cause a monopoly to become efficient."

Actually it very literally does.

New comment by irenaeus in "Our position on open-weights models"

irenaeus — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:37:40 +0000

We are not talking about chainsaws and excavators, we are talking about LLMs. LLMs have different risks in terms of scale and kind and must be considered differently.

New comment by irenaeus in "Our position on open-weights models"

irenaeus — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:39:57 +0000

Banning hardware and banning software are very different things, and the latter is orders of magnitude easier than the former. Physical and non-physical things are different!

New comment by irenaeus in "Our position on open-weights models"

irenaeus — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:38:25 +0000

I must have missed the part of the letter where China's cooperation was necessary.

New comment by irenaeus in "Our position on open-weights models"

irenaeus — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:37:49 +0000

I thought his points were legitimate and well argued. I think that it's very easy to say "X should be unrestricted". I also think that eventually one of these models will be used to do something truly destructive and insane and that some level of "compelled responsibility" to the open-weight model ecosystem is inevitable.

New comment by irenaeus in "Why malloc always does more than I asked for?"

irenaeus — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:09:10 +0000

I've read some allocator walkthroughs before but I thought that this line stood out:

"to get individual free() working, the allocator needs to remember something about every allocation it handed out. and that’s the moment metadata stops being optional."

That's just a very nice distillation of an important concept.

New comment by irenaeus in "1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored"

irenaeus — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:05:02 +0000

My man (https://www.c82.net/images/naturalists-library/vol-4/plates/...) is having a bad day.

New comment by irenaeus in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

irenaeus — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:02:34 +0000

It's strange to me that adolescents are (or seem to be) wired to want to wake late and sleep late, since waking early and sleeping early is a predictor of a predictor of lower all cause mortality!

New comment by irenaeus in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

irenaeus — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:31:14 +0000

I read the abstract, pretty interesting. I did a word search for "wake" looking for if they talked at all about early waking times being correlated with overall regularity, as that has been my personal experience. Unfortunately they didn't talk about it, or if they did I couldn't find it.

New comment by irenaeus in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

irenaeus — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:28:26 +0000

Good for you. Personally I just take four zzzquil ultras every night.