Hacker News: mossTechnician

New comment by mossTechnician in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

mossTechnician — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:41:17 +0000

Even intelligent people have demonstrated they are not immune to the damaging effects of AI sycophancy. The most recent example that comes to mind is Hank Green.

New comment by mossTechnician in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"

mossTechnician — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 02:28:35 +0000

Mozilla lost trust rewriting their policy, and even more trust when they blamed their users for being "confused"[0] IMO. They're the ones with the lawyers and the sponsorships. All blame for "confusion" rests upon the party with the legal upper hand.

[0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2025/02/27/mozillas-new-terms-of-use-...

New comment by mossTechnician in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

mossTechnician — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:05:22 +0000

I don't think that the ability to record and transcribe people's words will encourage manufacturers to remove Wi-Fi functionality. If anything, that would encourage them to keep it. Imagine the marketing possibilities.

New comment by mossTechnician in "Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts"

mossTechnician — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:52:17 +0000

What specifically is that agenda?

New comment by mossTechnician in "Htmx 4.0, the first JavaScript library to release exclusively on the Game Boy"

mossTechnician — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:38:19 +0000

My hat's off to you for finding and shouting out an artist to complete the look!

New comment by mossTechnician in "The state of open source AI"

mossTechnician — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:40:54 +0000

At their current trajectory, absolutely. But if they focused their development efforts, cut down on careless spending especially to third parties, and looked for alternative sources of funding (it is presently not possible for users to donate to Firefox development, for example), I feel like they could survive without Google for at least a little while. Frankly, I think these things should be started on now, while they still have Google's backing.

New comment by mossTechnician in "Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source"

mossTechnician — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:58:21 +0000

Microsoft also apparently "rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022"[0], causing a lot of confusion about what "Microsoft 365 Copilot" on their homepage meant, but I think it would translate to "Cloud Office Suite + Cloud AI"

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...

New comment by mossTechnician in "Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal"

mossTechnician — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:26:37 +0000

Conversion therapy advocates have disproportionate influence in book banning, for example. We know that's a form of torture.

New comment by mossTechnician in "Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal"

mossTechnician — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:14:23 +0000

The specific examples I provided included domestic abuse; most sexual abuse is done by a family member. I hope it's not contentious to say that parental control should not be as authoritarian as to allow that, let alone suppress the victim's knowledge of what it is.

New comment by mossTechnician in "Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal"

mossTechnician — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:48:37 +0000

Is it really that cut and dry? A technically competent person might easily access a book while living in an authoritarian country, while someone who grows up in an authoritarian family in a "free" country might be prevented from reading a book both at home and at the school where their parents lobbied to ban the book. (It's quite hard to access suppressed information if you lack the knowledge it exists in the first place.)

New comment by mossTechnician in "Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal"

mossTechnician — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:54:57 +0000

I don't understand the scare quotes: per my previous reply, is a ban not a ban regardless of who does it? Maus has nudity and curse words; that's why it was banned in Tennessee. 1984 has multiple sex scenes - the well-funded Christian publication PluggedIn[0] rates it 18+.

Two things can be true at the same time: a book can be both banned in one place, and used to promote someone's brand in another. Somebody in a deeply repressive and abusive home will not have a better or worse life if Dua Lipa did not exist.

[0]: https://www.pluggedin.com/book-reviews/1984/

New comment by mossTechnician in "Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal"

mossTechnician — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:26:11 +0000

Banning a book in a school district still signifies a form of authoritarianism. If someone is prevented from reading Maus[0] (or finding out they are in a cult, or a victim of domestic abuse), what is the effective difference to them between an authoritarian censoring it at the national level or the local one?

[0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/holocaust-novel-maus-banne...

New comment by mossTechnician in "Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal"

mossTechnician — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:12:09 +0000

Can you list some of these books you want removed from school libraries, along with why?

New comment by mossTechnician in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

mossTechnician — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:56:51 +0000

I am wholeheartedly against identity verification, especially when it comes to giving up privacy. And I hope these "think of the children" arguments can be pushed back at from multiple angles. If the danger is real, then by the time a child is online, 4 out of 5 in them in Australia can apparently access social media anyway. So even if everyone's privacy was somehow an acceptable price to pay, these requirements do nothing.

New comment by mossTechnician in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

mossTechnician — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:25:32 +0000

I appreciate the wealth of technical solutions that don't violate privacy, but isn't this overlooking an important point: that children don't need to be connected to the Internet at all times from such an early age? Many internet and cell phone providers seem to take it for granted that children must be online, which is already a net loss for their privacy as they mature.

New comment by mossTechnician in "For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward"

mossTechnician — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:16:54 +0000

> LeCun framed AI as an infrastructure-level platform that will soon mediate "all of our interaction with the digital world with information more generally"

This doesn't read as revolutionary, it reads as accepting a premise without explaining how and why it will and must be the case.

Some of my favorite parts of the internet - wikis and forums and blogs - are special to me because there is no procedurally generated mediator between me and the information. I don't want a summary that was never intended by the author. I don't want the rough edges shaved off every blog until they all sound like they were written with an identical voice. Maybe some people would like that some of the time, but all?

New comment by mossTechnician in "Mozilla.org – The web is evolving. So are we"

mossTechnician — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:59:32 +0000

The structure here is confusing me too. I gather from the Wiki that at the top is the Mozilla Project, described as a parent of everything Mozilla does (including the Mozilla Foundation). One level lower, we have the Foundation. And the new Mozilla.org is "within [its] umbrella".

I don't understand why the responsibilities apparently delegated to Mozilla.org wouldn't be more appropriate for one of its parent entities, which already exist.

New comment by mossTechnician in "The Permanent Upper Crow"

mossTechnician — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:26:55 +0000

> 77 percent of low-income households can cover an unexpected $400 expense, though many must cover it with disposable income or short-term credit... 43 percent of low-income households unable to weather small expense shocks might be able to pay them with access to additional credit.

I'm not sure if credit is the ideal solution, nor if additional credit would be beneficial.

New comment by mossTechnician in "The Permanent Upper Crow"

mossTechnician — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:21:37 +0000

How does that go for Americans who cannot afford to pay for a $400 surprise expense out of pocket?

https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/sheddata...

New comment by mossTechnician in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

mossTechnician — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:22:20 +0000

noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.