Hacker News: jstanley

New comment by jstanley in "Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible"

jstanley — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:41:12 +0000

I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.

Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.

You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.

Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?

And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.

New comment by jstanley in "Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible"

jstanley — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:45:53 +0000

That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"

The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?

New comment by jstanley in "Weave: Merging based on language structure and not lines"

jstanley — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:23:35 +0000

People will very often say they "had to" do something, when in reality they merely "chose to" do that thing.

New comment by jstanley in "Every Frame Perfect"

jstanley — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:52:10 +0000

I think this is actually a perfect example. The animations make it more complicated to follow, not less! If it just highlighted the stuff you were hovered over it would be easy to understand, I honestly don't get the motivation behind the animation.

New comment by jstanley in "Every Frame Perfect"

jstanley — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:45:12 +0000

True in 3d CAD when switching between work planes. I can't think of another application.

New comment by jstanley in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

jstanley — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:38:31 +0000

They're not useful as phones, because the battery, screen, radio, etc. are damaged; but they may still have a working CPU inside, which would be sufficient for this project.

New comment by jstanley in "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"

jstanley — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:49:41 +0000

Some of the ffmpeg developers were on Lex Fridman's podcast recently, and the topic of security came up.

They were talking about how there was a vulnerability in an extremely niche codec that is only used for one video game from the 90s or something, and were saying that the person who reported the vulnerability was acting like it was a big deal but it's really not because this codec is hardly ever used.

I was left wondering whether they were oblivious to the fact that an attacker who can supply a video file to you is free to use whatever video codec they want? It wouldn't matter if the developers thought the codec was never used at all; if it is still available then an attacker can use it.

Or was I just missing something? Is there a good reason why vulnerabilities in this codec are not a big deal after all?

New comment by jstanley in "The Alchemist of Flesh: The Man Who Turned Humans into Stone(2025)"

jstanley — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:40:40 +0000

A long and rambling article with lots of nagging popups, about a potentially interesting subject.

Wikipedia has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Segato

New comment by jstanley in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

jstanley — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:45:33 +0000

But couldn't someone copy out the mere listing of ingredients anyway?

New comment by jstanley in "Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones"

jstanley — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:11:35 +0000

If making holes in things that didn't have holes in them before is a sufficient condition for "violence", does that make drills violent too? Or is that taking words-mean-things too far?

Or perhaps can we accept that it is possible to make holes in things without doing violence, and that an object that can make holes in things is not inherently a violent object even though it would be violent if you made holes in things like people or animals, or in property without permission.

New comment by jstanley in "Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]"

jstanley — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:42:58 +0000

It may be the case that "most of" their sanctions-related blocks apply only to governments (let's say there are 100 such blocks), while they still disallow usage by persons located in a country or territory that is the target of comprehensive US sanctions (let's say there are 50).

New comment by jstanley in "Show HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted"

jstanley — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:04:09 +0000

I think "echo" is a fine word to use, they're hardly calling them "reincarnations".

New comment by jstanley in "Show HN: We post-trained a model that pen tests instead of refusing your code"

jstanley — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:24:35 +0000

Which text are you referring to? Because the text in this submission is (at least partly) LLM text.

New comment by jstanley in "xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab"

jstanley — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:24:18 +0000

> If the S&P 500 dropped 20%, that's about a year's growth.

But the S&P 500 is currently trading at over 2x its average long-term CAPE: https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe

So it can reasonably be expected to drop more than 50% to return to average long-term valuation levels.

And the "nonfinancial market cap to gross-value-added" ratio is even more insane, I have a site tracking this number: https://sharperatios.com/market-cap-gva.html

New comment by jstanley in "Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet"

jstanley — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:40:58 +0000

What evidence would it take to convince you that the name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista?

New comment by jstanley in "Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas"

jstanley — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:03:33 +0000

"LLMs are amazing, I'm so much more productive now"

"oh yeah? Show me what you made, you can't, nobody can, it's all just AI psychosis"

"I made a pixel perfect Office document viewer"

"well... I wish you hadn't"

New comment by jstanley in "Meta enables ADB on deprecated Portal devices [video]"

jstanley — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:22:46 +0000

> there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up.

Are these keys not functionally leaked as soon as you ship the device to customers?

New comment by jstanley in "Bias Compounds, Variance Washes Out"

jstanley — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:41:45 +0000

I'm curious if you can tell me whether you think I'm a crackpot because of the things I've said in this thread, or because of things I've said more broadly?

I am definitely high risk for crackpottery, but not sure I'm quite there yet.

New comment by jstanley in "Debug Project"

jstanley — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:28:54 +0000

Why does releasing infertile males prevent the fertile males from reproducing? Are mosquitoes pair-bonding??

New comment by jstanley in "Bias Compounds, Variance Washes Out"

jstanley — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:21:46 +0000

Noone is the actor there, that's the passive voice.