Hacker News: jmholla

New comment by jmholla in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

jmholla — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:49:52 +0000

Sure, not system-wide in rote. It opens with "based at least partially on content of the interactive software application". It's not a far leap from that to screen and audio monitoring. Luckily we don't need to make that leap; the rest of the patent makes explicit demonstration of those capabilities:

* "contextual cues from or based on the interactive software application" [0035]

* "OPTIONALLY in communication with an event detection module" (emphasis mine) [0035]

* "In some embodiments the content management system can receive user inputs from a user interacting with the interactive software application to interpret the content of the interactive software application" [0053]

* Regarding inputs to the event detection systems (which are expressly say don't need to run locally): "video information, audio information, game state data, or other information provided by or from the interactive software application" [0065]

* "FIG. 10 is an embodiment of a frame of video information received from the interactive software application that may be used for identifying events within the user's gameplay." [0073] (Note the patent does not limit itself to video games, just interactive software applications; this is just an example in that context.) [0073]

* "In some embodiments, the video information include user input information." [0092]

And, the design explicitly allows remote processing of this information:

* "The content management system may be stored and/or executed remotely to the client device" [0033]

* "the event detection module may be local to or remote from the content management system." [0036]

You're right, it doesn't include the whole screen and systems audio. Just the parts in the application. But Microsoft just adds this functionality to all software, and then there's no effective difference.

And that is extremely likely to me. And feasible. The patent doesn't say this has to be embedded in applications. Microsoft can implement this on any application. And Microsoft is well beyond the benefit of the doubt when it comes to privacy concerns.

New comment by jmholla in "Working with Git Worktrees in Magit"

jmholla — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:16:39 +0000

The difference here is that git objects don't change. When you do a `git gc`, you do get new objects at new inodes, but they don't get written to the existing ones. Try this out and you'll see local git clones do indeed create hardlinks:

``` cd $(mktemp -d) git init test ( cd test; touch README.md; git add README.md; git commit -m "Test"; ) git clone test/.git test_clone find test_clone/.git/objects test/.git/objects -type f -printf "%i\t%p\n" | sort ```

You'll see the same inodes used in both clones.

New comment by jmholla in ".gitignore Everything by Default"

jmholla — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 15:54:42 +0000

I do use this, but when I'm collaborating with others, especially a lot of people, I still duplicate it across projects. It pays to be defensive and you can't always get everyone on board with this strategy. Being defensive within your repository prevents issues before they happen.

New comment by jmholla in "California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law"

jmholla — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:16:58 +0000

Colorado has a similar carve-out. I can't comment on Brazil, though.

New comment by jmholla in "US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers"

jmholla — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:09:01 +0000

The write by your shell through the redirect won't get those elevated privileges. You need to use something like tee:

    echo "127.0.0.1    www.reddit.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

New comment by jmholla in "Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code"

jmholla — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:04:50 +0000

That's a bit difference that Boris's claim that they don't charge for this as a "principle".

New comment by jmholla in "What if the RAM/GPU shortage is deliberate?"

jmholla — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:28:51 +0000

From the opposite angle, there's apparently evidence that the RAM companies themselves are price fixing: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/samsung-sk-hynix-...

New comment by jmholla in "Patreon laying off 20% of staff"

jmholla — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:12:46 +0000

Twitter is nothing like it used to be.

New comment by jmholla in "The git history command"

jmholla — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 05:34:15 +0000

Woah! That feels like a huge oversight and like it bypasses standard commit logic. The man pages do say `git history` is experimental. Sounds worth a bug report.

New comment by jmholla in "The git history command"

jmholla — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 05:31:02 +0000

Fun fact: you don't even need the `-n`. `git log -1` does the same thing, for any number.

    -, -n , --max-count=
        Limit the output to  commits.

New comment by jmholla in "I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M"

jmholla — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:40:53 +0000

I don't think that logic works. In your vein, if I say " If it gets hotter, I'll want it to be colder" that would imply that if it gets colder I'll want it to be hotter. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case thought.

If they made a profit and I want them to pay more than the base fine doesn't mean if they made a loss I want them to pay less than the base fine.

I think the rest of your come t stands though. There is difficulty I proving profit and Hollywood accounting can probably change those numbers.

New comment by jmholla in "Airlines Uses AI to Fake Empathy Rather Than Fix Problems: Passenger Sent Prompt"

jmholla — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:52:58 +0000

Yea. A lot of them grew wise to this and just hung up on you. Some had no way to get through the tree to a real person. Or, the real person couldn't do anything (e.g., Public Storage).

New comment by jmholla in "Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion"

jmholla — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:21:57 +0000

Don Quixote feels like a bad analogy. These are real dragons. Just, more difficult to fight against.

New comment by jmholla in "Stop MitM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider"

jmholla — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:05:20 +0000

I've been thinking of setting up a simple server that publishes the public keys at a known endpoints. You point an A record for one of your subdomains at the machine and it can provision a TLS cert. Then you can be reasonably confident your connection hasn't been MitM (assuming your trust your cert provider) when you query for those public keys.

The one presented in the article has fewer moving parts though. I'm also curious what ideas are bouncing around your head if you're willing to share.

New comment by jmholla in "Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged"

jmholla — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:03:17 +0000

Safari isn't based on Chromium.

New comment by jmholla in "Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs"

jmholla — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:15:23 +0000

Ostracization has worked before. And ostracization can lead to decreased sales, which they will definitely notice. If engaging with people to talk about privacy implications involves sacrificing your privacy, I feel that it is reasonable approach.

It's like if I had to be punched by someone to talk to them about why them punching people all the time wasn't alright, then I'd find it very reasonable to just not associate with that person.

I think you're outlining a relationship with people who actually want to actively engage in these concerns in a responsible manner, and these platforms have definitely demonstrated the opposite and a willingness to use that engagement to inflict the very behavior you want to moderate.

New comment by jmholla in "Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs"

jmholla — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:39:00 +0000

You're aware of the privacy implications but think people talking about avoiding people who use them are proposing dumb arguments? I don't follow your logic.

New comment by jmholla in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

jmholla — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:17:33 +0000

Or device battery life was shorter because we hadn't developed better battery technology or better power management

You talk about the misaligned incentives of replaceable batteries but fail to point out the incentive built-in batteries: need to replace a battery, buy a whole new device.

New comment by jmholla in "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"

jmholla — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:06:05 +0000

You should actually read the text of the bill. It basically tells anyone who asks what your birthday is. It places no limitations on how your age should be verified, or how requesters can use your information. And if you think this is where this kind of de-anonymization will stop, I have a bridge to sell you.

New comment by jmholla in "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"

jmholla — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:12:39 +0000

So this bill creates a commission to ensure that the information cannot be stolen or breached from operating systems, but says nothing about how the applications querying this information must protect or leverage it. I basically requires that any application get to know a user's birthday, as long as it's "necessary". What a fucking joke! I'm so sick and tired of this bullshit.

Direct link to the bill: https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/parents-decide-act-os-age-ver...

Edit: Oh, and the commission gets to make up the rules on how ages should be verified. So, prepare for a whole other level of PII leakage that isn't even captured by the text of the bill.