Hacker News: lrem

New comment by lrem in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

lrem — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:39:32 +0000

A better system is in beta in Switzerland. Government is the root of trust, but only signs your private cert regarding your ID. All the interaction with third parties is local to your device, the government doesn’t get to know you interacted with Discord. Discord gets a single bit “is the user of this device 16/18 (restricted/full legal autonomy age) years old?” With chain of trust to the government.

New comment by lrem in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

lrem — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 07:51:52 +0000

Realistically this would be another service attached to the government ID. Something like this does function in some European countries, doesn’t it?

New comment by lrem in "Why E cores make Apple silicon fast"

lrem — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:09:53 +0000

You can notice that memory bandwidth advantage even in workloads like photo editing and code compilation. That and the performance cores reserved for foreground compute, on top of the usual "Linux sucks at swap" (was it fixed? I haven't enabled swap on my Linux machines for ages by now), does make a day-to-day difference in my usage.

New comment by lrem in "Why E cores make Apple silicon fast"

lrem — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:01:28 +0000

It's slowly approaching what SRE has been dealing with for distributed systems... You just have to accept things won't be fully understood and whip out your statistical tooling, it's ok. And if they get the engineering right, you might still keep your low latency corner where only an understandable set of things are allowed.

New comment by lrem in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

lrem — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:53:38 +0000

Even online I get a lot of ads for goods/services I do use, or could see myself using.

New comment by lrem in "Why users cannot create Issues directly"

lrem — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:53:12 +0000

Don't worry, I'm willing to bet that there's an AI integration in the works for this...

New comment by lrem in "How America's "truck-driver shortage""

lrem — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 12:45:14 +0000

Society might care about cost _including externalities_. A truck running on discarded frying oil might offer a lower price and there’s no way to account for the resulting health outcomes. Exceeding capacity lowers unit price and usually doesn’t lead to an accident. Many industries around the world have shown that without functioning enforcement of reasonable rules you immediately get the tragedy of the commons.

New comment by lrem in "Leaving Intel"

lrem — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 10:34:23 +0000

No I don’t.

New comment by lrem in "Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander"

lrem — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 07:58:32 +0000

If only this had the F key row. Why is "fewer keys" the first decision that every fancy keyboard designer starts with :/

New comment by lrem in "Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war"

lrem — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:35:35 +0000

> all of the videos, [...], all of the user's search interest, ads, everything..

And privacy policies that are actually limiting what information gets used in what.

New comment by lrem in "Changes since congestion pricing started in New York"

lrem — Thu, 15 May 2025 05:45:02 +0000

Isn’t the surveillance battle already lost? For at least a couple years now? At least in Europe it feels like you’re passing a camera every couple minutes.

New comment by lrem in "Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash"

lrem — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 19:39:27 +0000

Not the only... But for many hobbyists the effort to relearn is too much to save a bit of money.

New comment by lrem in "The case against conversational interfaces"

lrem — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 05:26:04 +0000

Playing computer games since an early age made me who I am. It required learning English a decade earlier than my peers. It pulled me into programming around start of primary school. I wouldn’t be a staff engineer in a western country without these two.

New comment by lrem in "Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool"

lrem — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 06:38:39 +0000

There’s Darktable which is a pretty good alternative to Lightroom. When I looked into it a couple years back, a friend with Darktable was able to get the same results as I with Lightroom, with the same amount of effort. But when I tried, well… The effort to re-learn was too big, cheaper to just keep paying Apple. I imagine now they lag on AI features too.

New comment by lrem in "Moving away from US cloud services"

lrem — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 19:52:54 +0000

Um, after “simple” you’ve listed six different kinds of services. Just operating that any kind of nontrivial scale will require quite a bit of headcount.

New comment by lrem in "Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe's Digital Markets Act"

lrem — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 07:53:44 +0000

Switzerland - a public service collects a number of Boolean flags in the vein of “has ever refinanced a loan”, serves the raw set to the person or institutions that can request it according to the regulations.

Any EU country - regulations tend to be strict and vary from country to country. There is usually a central registry with either history of violated agreements and/or currently active loans. In pre-approval for a loan the borrower typically self-declares their credit capacity and the lender checks the registry for red flags. Before concluding the approval the lender will require supporting documentation (typically salary certificate, bank statement and/or tax returns).

New comment by lrem in "Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says"

lrem — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:25:25 +0000

Why locally? In practice many companies never lose any data. What they lose is the knowledge what the data is and/or how to use it.

New comment by lrem in "Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after reneging on promises to not sell their data"

lrem — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 14:11:15 +0000

Haven’t they abandoned that and laid off the team half a decade ago?

New comment by lrem in "Minimum effective dose"

lrem — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 07:48:31 +0000

You're lucky. I've clocked in almost 3000km and over 20'000m of elevation gain cycling last year. I also swim and hike. My resting heart rate dropped by about 1BPM and it's nowhere near as low as yours.

New comment by lrem in "What's happening inside the NIH and NSF"

lrem — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 07:10:42 +0000

Eh, that's not a unique set of strengths. In any European country I know about (at least a dozen) you can get all-English education from kindergarten to PhD. In some for free, in some that's paid, but probably not as expensive as in the US. Everything is really rather a matter of tradeoffs and bang-for-the buck rather than categorical differences. Some European passports offer more access, but without the downsides of the US one. The only matter in which I don't know how to compare is the racial issues, but I hear the US is not exactly free of those either.