Hacker News: nerdsniper

New comment by nerdsniper in "O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11"

nerdsniper — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:05:19 +0000

Windows LTSC / IoT comes pretty damned close. It's the only version I install. I'm always shocked by the <20 processes running in Task Manager on a clean install.

New comment by nerdsniper in "O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11"

nerdsniper — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:10:54 +0000

> There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately.

FWIW, O&O ShutUp10 dates back to 2015, with the launch of Windows 10. This isn't v10, it's "Shut Up, [Windows] 10!".

O&O Defrag has been a trusted tool since 1998.

That said, I largely agree with "No source code? No thanks." as I don't want to worry about a private equity group buying O&O Software and doing with it what they will.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out"

nerdsniper — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:42:58 +0000

Google was pretty amazing for about 15 years, not 1 to 2. Google rocked from its launch (1999ish) until around the time it shut down Google Reader (2013ish).

New comment by nerdsniper in "GLP-1s are being linked to fewer serious infections, including TB"

nerdsniper — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:02:02 +0000

It's 30mg per vial. In addition to that being the going rate for 300mg total...the calculations and final price for 20 weeks match up to 300mg total, not 300mg per vial.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones"

nerdsniper — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:30:38 +0000

Clearly you don’t have a family member who uses CGM’s. They are extremely sensitive to RF disruptions, and often fail for mind bogglingly dumb reasons.

2s on / 2s off would completely disable all of their functionality until the interference was gone. And possibly much longer - they are finicky.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Google Maps renames "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" faster than US Government"

nerdsniper — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:12:28 +0000

Interestingly, Executive Order 12770, signed in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush, established the metric system as the official system of measurement in the USA.

Google still defaults to miles for some reason.

I get that these cases have their differences, but I think it’s reasonably thought provoking and worth at least a single moment of attention if we’re already on the topic.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

nerdsniper — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:14:01 +0000

This is completely incapable of measuring individual milligrams. Just because it claims to and shows a digit for it doesn’t mean it can.

Even $500 analytical balances like [0] can struggle with 1mg resolution, but I’d trust them a lot more. Generally you need to throw away the least significant digit of precision with digital scales.

0: https://ussolid.com/products/u-s-solid-0-1-mg-analytical-bal...

New comment by nerdsniper in "Two German airport workers die of malaria after 'mosquito arrives on plane'"

nerdsniper — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:59:12 +0000

USA wiped out malaria in the 50s using DDT which also made the California condor go extinct in the wild. During the 70s-90s DDT became illegal to use in most countries around the globe.

I’m not sure the USA would have been successful eradicating malaria without using DDT or something similar.

DDT caused the Bald Eagle population to drop from about 400,000 birds to just 47 nesting pairs.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Meta Just Paid Nearly $17B to Write the Kid Safety Rules for Every Platform"

nerdsniper — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:35:04 +0000

I heard that this is to be paid out over 10 years. If that’s true, then they actually are only paying $12.6B in present value, assuming a 9% WACC.

New comment by nerdsniper in "OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell"

nerdsniper — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:57:13 +0000

> Maybe once LLM improvements asymptote further?

Maybe! But it also doesn't require the rate of improvement to slow down. As long as some current model is eventually "good enough" for general use, it could still be a market-killer at a very low marginal price thanks to ASIC. Even if slower, much more expensive models are 10x better, that doesn't actually diminish the utility of the ASIC model, as long as it's "good enough".

New comment by nerdsniper in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

nerdsniper — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:29:32 +0000

People who aren’t logged in are still (very arguably) users, IMHO. They see ads, and make Reddit money with their eyeballs.

New comment by nerdsniper in "FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels"

nerdsniper — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:24:54 +0000

In fairness, that’s still massive.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded"

nerdsniper — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:53:45 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424924

New comment by nerdsniper in "Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded"

nerdsniper — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:40:29 +0000

Heard and fixed. Thanks Dan.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded"

nerdsniper — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:33:42 +0000

I don’t either, but these are the only benchmarks Xiaomi provided!

New comment by nerdsniper in "Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded"

nerdsniper — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:37:08 +0000

M5 (iPad) AnTuTu: 3.5 million

XRing O3 AnTuTu: 5.5 million

---

M5 iPad Geekbench Single-Core: 3,556

M5 Max Geekbench Single-Core: 4,300

XRing O3 Geekbench Single-Core: 3,945

---

M5 iPad Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,285

M5 Max Geekbench Multi-Core: 29,200

XRing O3 Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,221

New comment by nerdsniper in "Your Open Source Model Could Have a Hidden Time-Release Backdoor"

nerdsniper — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:38:27 +0000

They’re talking about open-weight models you host yourself. Which are fundamentally incapable of spying on you unless you give them network access. We also haven’t seen any evidence of open-weight models exfiltrating data over side channels (DNS/steganography/etc) yet, so at this time internet access still seems safe enough to grant without worrying about spying.

New comment by nerdsniper in "The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]"

nerdsniper — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 02:57:23 +0000

Defcon was always the most government-aligned conference. Historically, BlackHat was Defcon's slightly more counter-culture counterpart/foil. These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Artificial Intelligence Policy"

nerdsniper — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 02:54:24 +0000

These days there’s often a tiny neural net inside good hearing aids which decides which frequencies to amplify by how much. That way they can dynamically detect and remove background noise and isolate actual speech. Among many other features.

New comment by nerdsniper in "Artificial Intelligence Policy"

nerdsniper — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 02:50:43 +0000

ADA accommodations regularly change what can and cannot be used during an exam. This is not the “gotcha” you think it is. Any lawyer making an argument along these lines probably used AI to pass the bar.

For example, a blind person could still get an accommodation to use a AI vision tool which reads the exam to them. Or the school could give them a human who reads the exam to them. Either would meet the ADA accommodation requirements, and neither would actually be blocked by UC Berkeley’s new “no AI” rule because the ADA supersedes this “no AI” rule.