Hacker News: mmcwilliams

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:56:48 +0000

Not sure you're being clear about what you mean, here. Is OpenAI's company culture something you consider "low trust"?

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:40:17 +0000

That may be the case but the idea that non-technical people didn't pay cash for internet products before the dot com boom is fanciful. I would say AOL's acquisition of a legacy media company did signal the peak of a mania the way these IPOs are.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

mmcwilliams — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:05:24 +0000

This seems to ignore the fact that millions of non-technical people did pay cash for a product: AOL. And in fact the AOL buyout of Time Warner coincided almost exactly with burst of the dot com boom.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

mmcwilliams — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:38:14 +0000

What people are describing here is the colloquial definition of "server", being compute hosted in space. Not a broadcast signal that is interpreted on Earth.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

mmcwilliams — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:40:26 +0000

You believe that GPS is hosted on servers in space?

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:59:07 +0000

Can you provide a good example of something that is currently hosted in space and distributed via satellite?

New comment by mmcwilliams in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

mmcwilliams — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:06:56 +0000

There are plenty of exfiltration examples out there that could go through known, commonly-greenlit domains. Even exfil via DNS requests has been demonstrated.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

mmcwilliams — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:04:05 +0000

Seems potentially libelous to claim this person isn't actually blind.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants"

mmcwilliams — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:05:54 +0000

I deal regularly with landlords that owe government agencies hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for years or even decades. None of them are in jail or even at risk of it.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025"

mmcwilliams — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:14:45 +0000

Not that it's likely but there were publicly-released LLMs, like GPT-J, that were released in 2021.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT"

mmcwilliams — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:51:51 +0000

Odd, I've found that Gemini will completely fabricate the content of specific DOIs despite being corrected and even it providing a link to a paper which shows it is off about the title and subject of a paper it will cite. This obviously concerns me about its effectiveness as a research aide.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants"

mmcwilliams — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:46:53 +0000

Palantir holds over £1B in contracts with the UK government, some of them of an undisclosed nature. Must be some impressive CSV.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants"

mmcwilliams — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:42:56 +0000

You're under the belief that private actors can't influence state actors to use violence on their behalf, completely isolating them from responsibility? If a private business calls the police on a suspected trespasser and the police shoot that person, is the business held liable? Ever? Seems like they have the better end of the bargain than the state.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data"

mmcwilliams — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:43:12 +0000

Preserving the status quo is a political position.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Lock-Picking Robot"

mmcwilliams — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:51:05 +0000

This is a class of device usually called an "auto dialer" and have been around for quite some time. This one appears to be fairly low-featured. Newer devices will automatically send a text when a safe has been opened and the better ones are programmed with knowledge of the internal plate schematics so they can shorten the brute force process.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "More than one hundred years of Film Sizes"

mmcwilliams — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:40:15 +0000

This is true but it is far cheaper to scan and develop. Labs have to reset the machines to switch over to 65mm/70mm but are running 35mm every day.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "More than one hundred years of Film Sizes"

mmcwilliams — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:53:02 +0000

VistaVision is being used more often as a cheaper way to get to IMAX or 70mm projections sizes. The gear and filmstock is less expensive for production and you can laser out to the other formats at roughly the same resolution you capture at.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "The No Fakes Act has a “fingerprinting” trap that kills open source?"

mmcwilliams — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 13:59:23 +0000

The moat is building GPU infrastructure to serve inference at scale.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

mmcwilliams — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 14:29:14 +0000

NYT published confirmation from the USG that at least 40 people were killed.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 13:27:29 +0000

Videos from the event already show that civilians were targeted during the attack.