Hacker News: jasonfarnon

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

jasonfarnon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:12:18 +0000

" if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments."

Who knows, maybe the good stuff is locked up. If one of these corporations had something very special they may very well find it more profitable to enjoy the competitive advantage of using it for themselves than marketing it.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

jasonfarnon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:56:10 +0000

I'd forgotten all the government attempts at controlling crypto like PGP in the early internet days. It is one straightforward way to look at what's happening here without resorting to speculation about this administration's motives.

New comment by jasonfarnon in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

jasonfarnon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:04:14 +0000

"Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped."

Well, once folks like Linus Torvalds concede, this doesn't carry much sting.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

jasonfarnon — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:44:05 +0000

Many Internet technologies like Youtube or soundcloud gave content creators direct access to an audience. If you were funny/creative/talented/attractive/in the right place at the right time/etc you could cut out the middlemen and capitalize on that directly. What is the hidden talent these Spielbergs possess that AI will enable? It's doing the writing, videography, etc. I imagine at most these hidden Spielbergs will be filtering output, like looking at a book of wallpapers and choosing what they like. Maybe some great movies get made, but it will just be the result of selection effects on the sheer number being made.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

jasonfarnon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:09:10 +0000

I can't get my ipad to shut up about iCloud storage. At least with windows I know how to turn that stuff off (worse case registry fix). I have no idea how to hack Apple's stuff.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid"

jasonfarnon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:23:28 +0000

One possible exception, do you consider youtube an "intended method"? (A legit question for those of us who remember what a legal gray area they were in, in the 2000s.) Because the convenience of youtube replaced downloading music torrents, for me at least (who don't really care much audio quality). I only wish they would let me hear the music when I turn my phone's screen off.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

jasonfarnon — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:33:34 +0000

"literally no one would be surprised" Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility. For the proposition that once you have purchased one of their products, you didn't have to maintain any further relationship with the company. This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots"

jasonfarnon — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:58:31 +0000

Maybe things have changed but finances mostly forced my kids and those in the neighborhood to grow up this way. No dishwasher, bidet (we're in the US anyway), electric toothbrush, and definitely cooked all meals. Maybe takeout pizza or chinese every couple months? Is this really so outlandish to you?

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Cars collect a startling amount of data about you"

jasonfarnon — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:41:33 +0000

"Leaving my bike unlocked in Shanghai 10+ years ago, it was stolen about once every one or two months." Seriously? How many times until you started locking it up?

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Cars collect a startling amount of data about you"

jasonfarnon — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:40:10 +0000

"then no amount of surveillance could possibly help prevent crimes, petty and otherwise. just look at the UK."

I don't understand your argument. Are you suggesting surveillance cameras are somehow less effective in diverse societies? Are you claiming UK has as effective a surveillance network as China?

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:39:54 +0000

do we know the debt is "imaginary"? Was this inventory seized in satisfaction of some debt.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:35:45 +0000

Do you know all these involved parties aren't mormons in some mormon area/mormon company? Eg the old guy, the franchisee?

New comment by jasonfarnon in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:44:16 +0000

Actually I was on the defensive. About a month after it happened he said, "Oh I was on your computer and saw a bunch of files where you saved our chats...wtf?" "Um, I just thought,, in the future...it might be interesting to have". Unfortunately that kind of comes off as a blackmail threat.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:26:38 +0000

I logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 28 May 2026 04:36:57 +0000

"your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy"

Actually it seems to me like what the friend was doing required a lot more effort than "searching for new music". This isn't the 80s where you have to get in with the "in crowd" to listen to bootlegs or limited prints. You're talking about going through search results at a computer, right? She's actually involving herself in the music creation process, in some small way.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop"

jasonfarnon — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:39:54 +0000

Did you prefer the Yahoo/internet frontpage approach to google search though? I didn't, but I remember a time when it was a live debate. It has been interesting to see some sites like youtube or wikipedia evolve a quasi-hierarchical frontpage though.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline"

jasonfarnon — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:33:36 +0000

You must not have spent much time looking at derivative lawsuits if you think this is weird. Anyway if ABC could convincingly classify this as a business decision, e.g., a question of the maintaining goodwill, maybe they're OK. If this came down to some exec feeling personally insulted, like the quote hints, a classic breach of fiduciary duty.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:39:08 +0000

I'm not defending the honor code or anything, but photocopying students' exams seems like an end-run around the policy.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Scorched Earth 2000 – Web"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:37:00 +0000

It would be a nice thread on here, to see what people's first hacks were, especially from that era when people were usually just alone and stumbling on these things.

New comment by jasonfarnon in "Scorched Earth 2000 – Web"

jasonfarnon — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:34:58 +0000

Don't I remember doom developing pretty organically from wolfenstein and a few other (what would now be called) first person shooters around that time? The name "hexen" is coming to mind too. I would put that whole era as the start of something new, so different from the strategy games and side-scrollers that preceded it. Those first person games were the first time I thought computer games were actually more fun than the console systems, which didn't really have anything similar.