Hacker News: mmcwilliams

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.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "The battle to stop clever people betting"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 13:46:00 +0000

After the platform takes its cut the actual percentage is not as appealing.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:01:42 +0000

They don't like tripping over their own gear, either.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:01:04 +0000

The point that people tape off cables to prevent tripping over them is irrelevant? Not sure that's the case. Just because you don't care about cabling doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. I've watched network engineers do marvelous work on short order.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

mmcwilliams — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 12:25:50 +0000

Why not? That's the standard on film shoots in locations that are absolutely "one-time events". People do that all the time.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "De minimis exemption ends"

mmcwilliams — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 13:32:49 +0000

The alternative here is the exploited worker will no longer have any job. Doesn't seem like that is a legitimate concern for their well-being.

New comment by mmcwilliams in "Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic"

mmcwilliams — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 10:36:41 +0000

Similar in the English model. Pretty clear they trained on YouTube videos where creators will put that in otherwise silent sections to ensure it shows up for people with CC on.