Hacker News: nick486

New comment by nick486 in "France confirms data breach at government agency that manages citizens' IDs"

nick486 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:47:11 +0000

what would be the point of the government fining itself though?

Now that I'm thinking of it, it would create the need for an extra gaggle of bureaucrats to oversee the process,so I suppose someone might see a point to it ...

New comment by nick486 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

nick486 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:42:57 +0000

Nah, sorry, enshittification is not "just an excuse". My current 2020 phone(xperia 5-ii - I wanted that sd slot&jack) is noticeably slower than when I got it, even though the battery is holding up decently(it basically needs to last a day, and it usually does). Software shops seem to get focused on testing their stuff on "modern" devices. It looks like, once your device starts to slip out of that "testing pool", things get increasingly buggy until it eventually makes general use enough of a pain to require replacement.

I think last couple years' improvements to battery tech made software take over batteries as the bigger contributor to device obsolescence.

So this change, while welcome, is a bit late.

New comment by nick486 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

nick486 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:09:37 +0000

good. now do the software enshittification part, which is the real driver of device obsolescence. being able to replace the battery is nice, but if the new battery lasts half as long because the software needs twice as much resources to perform the same tasks - you're not really fixing anything.

New comment by nick486 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

nick486 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:00:34 +0000

You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.

Very few people do that. I don't. Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.

New comment by nick486 in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

nick486 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:20:13 +0000

its a question of degree. going to the barracks when you get called up by mail vs getting grabbed off the street, punched in the face and shoved into a bus headed for the training center.

New comment by nick486 in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

nick486 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 05:49:17 +0000

>Human responsibility is not the same as human decision making.

this is going to end up being interpreted as "well, the president signed off on the operation. see - there's a human in the loop!" - is it?

New comment by nick486 in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

nick486 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:45:13 +0000

I think its also important that while people may callously say "just nuke'em", if you were to hand them a red button and tell them to go ahead and do it - most wouldn't. But that latter part doesn't end up in the training data.

New comment by nick486 in "US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives"

nick486 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:32:44 +0000

>China...where you cannot criticize the CCP?

I'd be more worried about the data being stolen and resold even faster than elsewhere tbh. staying out of the way of the ccp as a random guy on the other end of the world should be doable.

New comment by nick486 in "US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives"

nick486 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:14:47 +0000

assuming the hegemon is benevolent. if the hegemon isnt, you have nowhere to run. welcome to the labor camp, please leave your belongings here, the showers are to the right.

saying unipolar is better is like saying absolute monarchy is better. sure it is, as long as the good king is alive.

New comment by nick486 in "Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout"

nick486 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:54:54 +0000

Fair enough, but so is 800cal/h exercise. And I'd rather overestimate the intake.

New comment by nick486 in "Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout"

nick486 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:24:41 +0000

I think it sort of depends on how you look at it. If 800 is an hour of running - that's probably "a lot" for quite a few people. But 800 is also just a sandwich. Which isn't all that much.

So if you view this from a time use perspective, just skipping that sandwich is way better than running for an hour. And many people can't spare an hour a day just to make up for a sandwich. Hence - "not a lot" - Its too expensive time-wise for the caloric balance effect it provides. Just skip the sandwich instead.

New comment by nick486 in "A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times"

nick486 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:00:42 +0000

this will arguably be worse.

you'll just get replication rings in addition to citation rings.

People who cheat in their papers will have no issues cheating in their replication studies too. All this does, is give them a new tool to attack papers they don't like by faking a failed replication.

New comment by nick486 in "Dead Internet Theory"

nick486 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 08:17:29 +0000

the alternative - not buying ads - is worse though. No one knows about you, and you sell nothing. so it ends up being seen as a cost of doing business. that is passed on to paying customers.

I'm really starting to wonder how much of the "ground level" inflation is actually caused by "passing on" the cost of anti-social behaviors to paying customers, as opposed to monetary policy shenanigans.

New comment by nick486 in "Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI"

nick486 — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 16:48:42 +0000

>you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.

this sort of assumes that most humans actually know what they want to do.

It is very untrue in my experience.

Its like most complaints I hear about AI art. yes, it is generic and bland. just like 90% of what human artists produce.

New comment by nick486 in "Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers"

nick486 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 07:48:56 +0000

people use aws despite it being 2x-10x the cost of self hosting. cost isnt everything.

New comment by nick486 in "Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial"

nick486 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:09:48 +0000

questioning someone's moral authority isnt equivalent to supporting his opponent.

New comment by nick486 in "Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial"

nick486 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:59:14 +0000

when evil dies, the need to pretend to be good in the face of it, dies as well.

New comment by nick486 in "Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?"

nick486 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:32:15 +0000

Its always been foggy. Even without AI, you were always at risk of having your field disrupted by some tech you didn't see coming.

AI will probably replace the bottom ~30-70%(depends who you ask) of dev jobs. Dont get caught in the dead zone when the bottom falls out.

Exactly how we'll train good devs in the future, if we don't give them a financially stable environment environment to learn in while they're bad, is an open question.

New comment by nick486 in "The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy"

nick486 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:29:54 +0000

> "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...

New comment by nick486 in "Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders"

nick486 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:32:07 +0000

>Update and Shutdown

and if you pick that, there's a high chance that it will reboot and leave your pc running anyway.