Hacker News: masfuerte

New comment by masfuerte in "Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight"

masfuerte — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:22:05 +0000

They are published on the old ones. The old ones don't all get shut down simultaneously.

New comment by masfuerte in "Schools Never Taught Critical Thinking: AI Exposed the Lie"

masfuerte — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:13:42 +0000

Even if a human author has learned to copy the style of AI writing, I still don't want to read it.

New comment by masfuerte in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

masfuerte — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:30:06 +0000

7za (the compression app) does blazingly fast iteration over any kind of folder. This doesn't require special code for git. Backblaze's backup app could do the same but rather than fix their code they excluded .git folders.

When I backup my computer the .git folders are among the most important things on there. Most of my personal projects aren't pushed to github or anywhere else.

Fortunately I don't use Backblaze. I guess the moral is don't use a backup solution where the vendor has an incentive to exclude things.

New comment by masfuerte in "In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue"

masfuerte — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:42:26 +0000

It works fine with js disabled.

New comment by masfuerte in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

masfuerte — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:39:43 +0000

It was in the UK in 1993, about the time the web was starting to take off. As the other commenter says, there was a much wider variety of shops then.

New comment by masfuerte in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

masfuerte — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:38:49 +0000

Many years ago one Saturday morning I happened upon a juggling shop. I could already do three balls so I asked if I could try the clubs. After about an hour of failing the shop owner said something like "some people never get it". So of course I bought a set. After 12 hours that day and 12 hours the next I got the hang of it. They are harder to learn than balls but still doable for an unsporty person like me. And, as you say, very satisfying.

New comment by masfuerte in "The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts"

masfuerte — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:22:10 +0000

This attitude of ignoring what is true in favour of what makes you happy is exactly how corporations made up of mostly good people can do bad things.

New comment by masfuerte in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

masfuerte — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:09:46 +0000

When making purchasing decisions lots of people look beyond the utility of the product to the broader behaviour of the corporation and how it impacts society. I know people who've been avoiding Nestlé for decades.

New comment by masfuerte in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

masfuerte — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:38:54 +0000

Why do you insist on reading and commenting on these articles that bore you so much?

New comment by masfuerte in "A new Postcrossing stamp from the USA"

masfuerte — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:49:53 +0000

In the UK it's £3.60, which is nearly $5!

New comment by masfuerte in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

masfuerte — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:31:27 +0000

How much does it weigh?

New comment by masfuerte in "Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?"

masfuerte — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:19:32 +0000

Windows and Linux both ask for your language and locale during setup and default to the typical matching keyboard. I'm nearly sure Debian also asks you to confirm the keyboard it picked, but it's always the right one so I just hit enter.

New comment by masfuerte in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

masfuerte — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:59:19 +0000

Inconsistent paywalls are a product now. The Times (the original) has shoe-horned in some kind of AI paywall [1] which claims to maximise conversions by varying how much you get to see and for how long. It pissed me off because I was logged-in to my subscription but it was blocking me anyway.

[1]: https://www.zuora.com/products/zephr/

New comment by masfuerte in "My Google Workspace account suspension"

masfuerte — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:23:51 +0000

An article here a couple of days ago said that the automation behind the scenes in Azure is piss poor and the whole thing is held together by thousands of contractors manually fixing the endless failures.

On the plus side, it does mean they have thousands of people who know how to fix problems.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

New comment by masfuerte in "Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1"

masfuerte — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 11:38:23 +0000

GIF playback should be efficient but...

About twenty years ago I was generating long animated GIFs. They worked fine in Firefox. In Internet Explorer they started fine but became jankier as playback progressed. I realised that every time IE displayed a frame it was rereading the entire file from the beginning to get to the current frame. Which took longer and longer as the current frame advanced.

It's just so easy to squander performance without noticing.

New comment by masfuerte in "12k AI-generated blog posts added in a single commit"

masfuerte — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:20:33 +0000

Google used to prioritise search quality. About six years ago they decided to enshittify. Slop with more adverts is promoted over quality with fewer adverts. This isn't speculation. It came out in emails released as part of antitrust discovery.

To reiterate: Google search is shit now because they want it to be.

New comment by masfuerte in "Roulette Computers: Hidden Devices That Predict Spins"

masfuerte — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:04:21 +0000

This is almost certainly unlawful in the UK. Phil Ivey lost a lawsuit just for edge sorting. Introducing a device is far more obviously dishonest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivey_v_Genting_Casinos

New comment by masfuerte in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

masfuerte — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:20:03 +0000

My first computer had 32KB. Reading the headline there's still a part of my brain that went "69KB? Luxury!".

New comment by masfuerte in "Say No to Palantir in Europe"

masfuerte — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:12:08 +0000

Do you have a reference for this? There's been a lot of talk from ministers about reviewing contracts when break clauses allow, but I haven't seen anything definitive and this still seems to be a matter for individual departments.

New comment by masfuerte in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

masfuerte — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:49:59 +0000

This is so true. When you log in to their website it bounces around through about fifteen different domains before it concludes. I'm nearly sure passport.com is still in there.