Hacker News: laserbeam

New comment by laserbeam in "Orion Browser by Kagi"

laserbeam — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:50:55 +0000

> Orion uses WebKit and _I assume_ they try to track as close to the release branch as possible. So if you trust WebKit, you can trust Orion.

The problem is you're stuck at assuming, but can't verify.

New comment by laserbeam in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

laserbeam — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:11:17 +0000

> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts.

If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.

New comment by laserbeam in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

laserbeam — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:21:51 +0000

This sidesteps xochitl and the normal remarkable display adapter. You should assume this thing can't render anything a remarkable normally renders, but does smooth fades instead.

New comment by laserbeam in "Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration (2025)"

laserbeam — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:58:46 +0000

I saw 2-3 flavors of this news. None of them include a basic “how do I check if I need to do anything” guide that a linux newbie can do.

New comment by laserbeam in "Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents"

laserbeam — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:53:35 +0000

> I really want to find reasons to like this

But why? Why would I want to like a project which seems to invent problems rather than solve any? I don’t want to like this.

New comment by laserbeam in "Midjourney Medical"

laserbeam — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:32:36 +0000

No, water filtration sounds like the first part the device will cheap out on to cut costs.

New comment by laserbeam in "Midjourney Medical"

laserbeam — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:26:14 +0000

Massive Theranos vibes.

You don't market medical imagery to the regular public and build a random wellness spa and talk about "shallow pools of golden light" if it actually works well. You write academic papers and sell to hospitals.

The tech may be good, but if you want me to trust you you shouldn't do what every snake oil salesman does.

New comment by laserbeam in "TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP"

laserbeam — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:37:51 +0000

> This is a bash feature, not POSIX. dash (Debian’s /bin/sh) and zsh don’t have it, so a #!/bin/sh script can’t use it. Call bash directly.

This is why we can’t have nice things. This feature is complex and obscure enough that you are unlikely to be able to use it manually without consulting a reference, and poorly supported that any script you write with it is unportable.

Bash is so powerful and so frustrating for this reason all the time :(

New comment by laserbeam in "Noroboto: Lying Fonts and Mitigation in Rust"

laserbeam — Mon, 25 May 2026 03:24:09 +0000

I’m fairly certain if you give any substitution cypher to an LLM it will decipher the message. And that’s all I see here, a substitution cypher in a private area of unicode.

At best this is an adversarial attack to poison LLM training data… at worst this screws up accessibility tools (like screen readers) and copy paste.

New comment by laserbeam in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

laserbeam — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:06:42 +0000

It's impossible to say. But as a reminder from Cory's first talk on enshittification... When Google and Facebook were small, they would argue for open protocols and competition. Facebook would reverse engineer MySpace's protocols to allow people to migrate away. Once FAANG became dominant, they went the opposite direction to built monopolistic practices.

GrapheneOS is still small and appears honest. Despite them being in the right in this fight and them deserving our support... We gotta keep them honest in the long run!

I don't think there's any way to tell if a small company will keep their values if they succeed in getting enough market share.

New comment by laserbeam in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

laserbeam — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:55:42 +0000

That's like saying users have no right to push against certain features. It's like saying Windows Recall was always ok and there was never any reason to demand it not be installed. The only difference is one can choose to use a different browser easier than they can choose a different OS.

You're right in the sense that practicality and consent are orthogonal issues. There are probably stronger arguments to complain about a feature than the disk use.

New comment by laserbeam in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

laserbeam — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:08:54 +0000

You use eID when explicitly interacting with a govt entity or bank or otherwise similar institution because you have to and want to prove who you are. Yes, I do want to prove who I am when I file taxes, vote or want to start a business...

You don't use it when just browsing randomly on the internet. You don't use it to buy games on steam. Your computer isn't forced to store it because a law arbitrarily says so.

New comment by laserbeam in "GTFOBins"

laserbeam — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:32:25 +0000

I just grabbed one of the examples there which was readable and didn't require the reader to know all the extra flags passed. One that would illustrate the purpose of the website. One that Linux newbies who read the question and further answers here could follow along with. Not one that tried to be optimal.

New comment by laserbeam in "GTFOBins"

laserbeam — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:28:29 +0000

Cool, so it is what I imagined, thanks!

New comment by laserbeam in "GTFOBins"

laserbeam — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:14:20 +0000

I am confused. Is this saying that if you don't have access to `cat`, instead of `cat /path/to/input-file` you can use `base64 /path/to/input-file | base64 --decode`?

Or is it saying that `base64 /path/to/input-file | base64 --decode` can bypass read file permission flags?

New comment by laserbeam in "Flipdiscs"

laserbeam — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:43:44 +0000

Damn, I really wish there was a T in "Quick jazzy vibe flows from exploding pixels", 'cause the sentence is just cool!

New comment by laserbeam in "Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine"

laserbeam — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:04:21 +0000

Ladybird is many years away from being usable by a casual human. The hope is it turns out to be a great browser eventually.

New comment by laserbeam in "Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor"

laserbeam — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:52:19 +0000

The first thing I tried to do is resize that rectangle in the default diagram... and the resize handles do not affect the height, only the width. What is this "better" than?

New comment by laserbeam in "Optimal Strategy for Connect 4"

laserbeam — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:16:58 +0000

1. The video is amazing. It does deserve a shoutout.

2. I actually prefer when HN links to articles rather than videos. I kind of expect interesting reads, not watches when I open this forum.

New comment by laserbeam in "Show HN: Tusk for macOS and Gnome"

laserbeam — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:39:33 +0000

If that's so, it's really poorly communicated. I strongly recommend full sentences for that.