Hacker News: marcta

New comment by marcta in "Never Give Them Your Face"

marcta — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:35:27 +0000

I was going to say the same. Also, if you go to shops like Screwfix or Toolstation (in the UK), you have to give your postcode and name to them before they sell to you. I tried opting out once and they refused to sell to me. I give them fake postcodes and names instead now, but it's very invasive and completely unnecessary.

New comment by marcta in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

marcta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:49:20 +0000

Maybe it's like Formula 1: it's a purposefully-extreme goal, which drives new development and makes "lesser" goals feel more achievable.

New comment by marcta in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

marcta — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:52:17 +0000

The G in AI GPU stands for "grift"

New comment by marcta in "Airlines Can't Charge You for What You Wear"

marcta — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:13:38 +0000

There is a reason that luggage has to be weighed. If you watch Mentour Pilot, there's a not insignificant number of plane accidents (and outright disasters) that occur due to the plane weight being calculated incorrectly, and thereby running out of fuel.

https://www.evionica.com/blog/blog/how-much-the-passenger-we...

New comment by marcta in "The Eternal Sloptember"

marcta — Mon, 25 May 2026 06:49:37 +0000

Some "ai is bad" arguments come from the threat of losing one's livelihood, which is a monetary concern.

New comment by marcta in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

marcta — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:50:44 +0000

Yes Minister has something about this, I seem to remember. Because the government isn't profit motivated, they are instead motivated by the size of their budget and the number of employees.

New comment by marcta in "Using OR-Tools CP-SAT for Scheduling Problems"

marcta — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:09:03 +0000

The CP-SAT primer by Dr. Dominik Krupke is excellent for working with OR-Tools: https://d-krupke.github.io/cpsat-primer

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

marcta — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:26:30 +0000

LLMs are costing Google a ton of money in compute and storage right now. If they can farm any of that off to the users, it makes economical sense.

But yes, there is a 100% chance that logs will get sent back to Google too.

New comment by marcta in "I don't want your PRs anymore"

marcta — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:35:54 +0000

It's not really, because you now have the cost of maintaining that fork, even if it's just for yourself.

New comment by marcta in "Claude mixes up who said what"

marcta — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:59:07 +0000

This is Mr Meeseeks.

New comment by marcta in "Some things just take time"

marcta — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 11:23:27 +0000

Maybe their point is that the brands themselves have a lot of time embedded in them. Generally, status symbols (whatever they are) aren't things that are recently established.

New comment by marcta in "Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta's $2B Lobbying for Age Verification Tech"

marcta — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:46:11 +0000

If people have to go through OS auth flow each time they open a website, that will drive everyone mad. One of the key motivators for politicians is not making everyone mad, so the polls don't drop.

Also, I reckon most children know the password for their parent's phone or computer, and many more will find out if there is a highly motivational factor for doing so. How many exhausted parents just toss their phone to their child to stop them whining?

I suppose it could be a biometric sign-in with facial recognition or fingerprint, but again, that's a tonne of friction for the whole web.

New comment by marcta in "SSH Secret Menu"

marcta — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:37:02 +0000

I came across ProxyCommand earlier this week, funnily enough. I have Cloudflare Zero Trust set up with an SSH service[0], and have the server firewall drop all incoming traffic. That helps reduce my attack surface, since I don't have any incoming ports open.

[0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...

New comment by marcta in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

marcta — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:50:06 +0000

Goodhart's Law strikes again... "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."