Hacker News: mzmzmzm

New comment by mzmzmzm in "The darker side of being a doctor"

mzmzmzm — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:15:15 +0000

Speculating, but it could be a spiral where the shortage places more responsibilities on existing doctors, making the field less appealing to potential doctors. For too many people no amount of income compensates for a difficult lifestyle (we see this with air traffic control). If this were the case it would be productive to redesign medical systems to unburden doctors, but the current for-profit, scarcity-oriented system (in the US anyway) seems calibrated to squeeze everyone.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "The case against JPEG XL"

mzmzmzm — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:11:34 +0000

I feel like JPEG XL could be a good RAW format for mirrorless cameras... something with huge flexibility but with the perk of being easier to view casually on other devices. And then that in turn could make it a more useful web format? Camera vendors are of course notoriously proprietary/stubborn.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models"

mzmzmzm — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:13:02 +0000

Accessibility isn't "solved," but there are certainly standards for things like color contrast. Maybe inbetween taste and coding there are better targets still being missed.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "GPT-6 Astra"

mzmzmzm — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:02:46 +0000

I think "able to" anthropomorphizes a little too much for a system that is "prone to" evade.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

mzmzmzm — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:12:43 +0000

That's my thought when I see the Census downplayed -- a massive amount of social sciences research revolves around the ACS. And it gets worse! Census data doesn't just control reapportionment (and/or gerrymandering), it directs how federal dollars trickle down to huge programs like Medicare and Medicaid that are then administered by states. Eroding more detailed household data like income throws programs designed to help people more out of whack, likely harming civic engagement even more.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

mzmzmzm — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:16:14 +0000

I recently noticed that there are a ton of gig jobs (like this https://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/lbg/d/brooklyn-office-err...) that pay manual laborers to do their ordinary work with a wearable in order to train world/vision/robotics models. So expect a lot more of this horrifying intrusion unless the cutlure shifts.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

mzmzmzm — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:38:42 +0000

I use Fastmail for personal email, but my org is a Google shop. If you have "smart features and personalization" turned off it doesn't even try with AI tools, and I toggled that years ago to get it to stop doing the smart category stuff. The horrifying thing as they pile on "AI" features lately is realizing that most of my coworkers have a totally different email experience.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Show HN: A free Linux adaptation of NETworkManager by BornToBeRoot"

mzmzmzm — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:52:54 +0000

Thanks from an Arch user for also putting it on the user repository

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

mzmzmzm — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:33:37 +0000

My first thought on seeing this was that it could be great for Linux. If the hardware is a little more standard than Apple's, it wouldn't need all the tricks Asahi has figure out. Finally you could have the best performance without compromising on fine details.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?"

mzmzmzm — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:39:57 +0000

I always thought the grey Noctua Redux fans were their nicest looking offerring, despite being their lower end. I don't understand how they settled on that.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

mzmzmzm — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:30:51 +0000

If you don't use X/Twitter anymore, XCancel makes it possible to read threads when not logged in: https://xcancel.com/GlennMeder/status/2049088498163216560

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine"

mzmzmzm — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:20:53 +0000

I recently switched from Android to iOS... no comment except all of the browsers just being a wrapper for Safari is really limiting. I love Firefox and still use it on desktop but I couldn't handle it without extensions on mobile and switched to Brave. Somehow Brave on iOS can do content blocking really well. Will this change make it to the iOS version? I would love to switch back to Firefox where all my stuff is synced.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

mzmzmzm — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:20:08 +0000

I wonder if this is part of why Apple is behind most competitors in terms of fast charging. Would almost make marketing sense to come out and say it at this point.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "WebUSB Extension for Firefox"

mzmzmzm — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:16:29 +0000

I felt that way too, but having used it a few devices as an end user I enjoy being able to close the browser and have the whole stack disappear. Instead of having to install a creepy Logitech tool to pair a mouse with a receiver, as soon as that task is done, goodbye Logitech. I guess a real concern is manufacturers stop offering native drivers, but for the majority of hardware the PnP or the Linux kernel just handle it.

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

mzmzmzm — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:52:52 +0000

Dropbox and GDrive desktop clients can be configured to sync files to a local directory. Backing them up with an additional platform would probably need some sort of logic like you described for VCS.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March"

mzmzmzm — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:27:35 +0000

Personally, after using Windows at home since I was in kindergarten (3.1), having an employer-provided Macbook the last 15 years, and every few years dipping a toe into Linux for various projects, I can say they finally did it. I panic built a new PC for gaming, video editing, and messing with LLMs just at the start of the RAM crisis and thought what the heck, why not CachyOS. I might not be the average user, but it has been so much more convenient, snappy, and fun to troubleshoot than any other time I can remember. KDE just works and has sane defaults. The Arch repository has almost everything you can imagine, and usually the Cachy maintained "safe" repos do too. I downloaded Steam and immediately jumped into my saves from BG3, Cyberpunk, Claire Obscur, and more, like nothing happened. QGIS, Affinity apps (bye Adeobe), LM Studio can take advantage of my GPU. DaVinci Resolve is wonky, but Kdenlive is fine as a stopgap. I want to evangelize now as much as possible since it's all so starkly different from even 5 years ago, largely but not wholly thanks to Steam's Proton work. Microsoft really doesn't care about Win users (fine, it doesn't make them any money), and now is our chance.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens"

mzmzmzm — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:05:40 +0000

It's hard not to get incredibly excited about the second order benefit of this. Remember the first year of COVID when lockdowns actually reduced the common cold and other less lethal bugs? Imagine if this thing worked well at scale--in a generation you could have people straining to remember getting colds all the time.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

mzmzmzm — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 01:00:48 +0000

So it's an MVNO mostly on the AT&T network with extra privacy features? I think it still all then comes down to how you use your phone and how much you can trust the whole pipeline. I use Credo Mobile which doesn't seem totally different. https://www.credomobile.com/our-story

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

mzmzmzm — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:41:15 +0000

There are some things that are hugely better on the iPhone, like accessibility setting that can be set on a per-app basis. Overall though, I expect the whole UX feeling to differ, but I am surprised that both camps have sort of given up on feature parity. Back in the days when "pull down to refresh" was novel it seems like iOS and Android meticulously copied each other's innovations.

New comment by mzmzmzm in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

mzmzmzm — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:38:28 +0000

I find the shortcuts extremely powerful all over different parts of the system, but I wish the contours of what it can and can't do were less opaque. Feels like a lot of time-wasting trial and error to discover what is or isn't possible on an iPhone.