Hacker News: notabee

New comment by notabee in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"

notabee — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:25:58 +0000

The U.S. has done that kind of thing before, and that's probably why it's so paranoid about having the same kind of thing done to it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

New comment by notabee in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"

notabee — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:17:04 +0000

The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.

New comment by notabee in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

notabee — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:25:18 +0000

It's baked into the foundations of the U.S. While perhaps not a cult as we describe it today, even the first puritans that settled here were considered extremists not welcome in their home countries. For such a young country, we have always had a burgeoning industry in upstart cults, grifts, and religions (but I repeat myself).

New comment by notabee in "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"

notabee — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:25:17 +0000

I had a situation like that with an undocumented behavior and systemd-tmpfiles. I wanted it to clean up a directory in /var/tmp/ occasionally. The automation using that directory kept breaking, however, because instead of either finding a whole intact git repo to update or a deleted repo, it instead found only a scattering of files that were root-owned with read-only permissions. There was yet another undocumented feature in systemd-tmpfiles where it would ignore root-owned, read-only files regardless of explicit configuration telling it to clean up the contents of those directories. Eventually this feature was quietly removed:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1780979

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/a083b4875e8dec5ce5...

That was far from the only time that the systemd developers decided to just break norms or do weird things because they felt like it, and then poorly communicate that change. Change itself is fine, it's how we progress. But part of that arrogance that you mentioned was always framing people who didn't like capricious or poorly communicated changes as being against progress, and that's always been the most annoying part of the whole thing.

New comment by notabee in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

notabee — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:33:35 +0000

Billionaires are buying up and consolidating all of the media outlets just as a hobby, I'm sure.

New comment by notabee in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

notabee — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:29:27 +0000

I'm pretty much always disappointed these days reading online discussions, and I sometimes think about how intentionally devolving most online conversations into petty slapfights is one of the very effective astroturfing techniques. It's basically signal jamming anything substantive or cooperative because people get tired sifting through all the noise and get mad reading all the bad takes. Though I have no doubt that many of them are still 100% genuine foolish humans.

New comment by notabee in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

notabee — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:24:19 +0000

I really wish people would stop fixating on one nation-state or other entity when it comes to the astroturfing problem. It's something that's going to have all sorts of hands stirring the pot since it's basically just a very pernicious new form of marketing and propaganda. Any sizeable countries or corporations are going to be utilizing this new tool of manipulation, regardless of how scummy that may be.

New comment by notabee in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

notabee — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:05:45 +0000

The longstanding existence of religions and the continual birth of new cults, the popularity of extremist political groups of all types, and the ubiquity of fortune-telling across cultures, seem to stand in opposition to your assertion that people hate being manipulated. At least, people enjoy belonging to something far more than they hate being manipulated. Most successful versions of fortune-telling, religious conversion, and cult recruitment do utilize confirmation bias affirmation, love-bombing, and other techniques to increase people's agreeableness before getting to the manipulation part, but they still successfully do that. It's also like saying that advertising is pointless because it's manipulating people into buying things, and while people dislike ads it's also still a very successful part of getting people to buy products or else corporations wouldn't still spend vast amounts of money on marketing.

New comment by notabee in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"

notabee — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:24:03 +0000

It's also a social coordination problem. For example a neighborhood where all the homes have to be fire resistant is going to fare a lot better, and probably be cheaper for the individual home owners to build and insure, than the one fire-resistant home in a neighborhood of tinder boxes. I don't think the prognosis is good for the U.S. in that regard. We have very little social cohesion and a lot of parties interested in making the situation worse for their own benefit.

New comment by notabee in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"

notabee — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 15:52:11 +0000

That's not really true. The introduction of so much extra energy into the atmosphere is going to make weather extremes worse all over the world, and harder to predict as historical models become less relevant. Large scale pattern changes like the AMOC shutting down are going to completely change many local weather patterns so that e.g. places that have little history of tornados will start having them, or places that used to be too wet for wildfires will suddenly experience them in extreme drought conditions. Despite scientists' best efforts, we're running a global experiment with no control group and predictions will only become more difficult the harder we push the system into a new state.

New comment by notabee in "Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages"

notabee — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 15:59:05 +0000

But then it's harder to shim in the money-makers like microtransactions, loot boxes, and all the other recent "innovations" in the gaming industry.

New comment by notabee in "Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages"

notabee — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 15:53:02 +0000

Or more likely, listening to background noise to spy on what family members are saying and listening for marketing/brand trigger words. It may not be very human audible but if it's machine audible it will probably be scraped.

New comment by notabee in "How CERN serves 1EB of data via FUSE [video]"

notabee — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:12:32 +0000

Considering how massively in bed with the U.S. government and other governments that Microsoft is, and said government has been known for keeping tabs even on allies(1), I'm sure that certain parties have a keen interest in keeping up with what's going on at CERN that's not just scientific curiosity. Strangely these Microsoft evangelists manage to pop up in organizations all the time to reverse any open source initiatives. Could just be a coincidence though.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

New comment by notabee in "NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon"

notabee — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 15:06:03 +0000

The blame should honestly go to Congress, because they keep interfering in the process to force NASA to stick with SLS. NASA has tried several times to ditch this albatross around their necks only to be scolded by influential senators determined to keep money flowing into their states despite the overall project failing wildly.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/so-long-senator-shel...

New comment by notabee in "NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon"

notabee — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 14:25:57 +0000

People have been talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 for so long now (the "Fight for 15" movement started in 2012) that the inflation-adjusted value of that would now have to be almost $21/hr. However, the minimum wage is still $7.25 and seems to be likely to remain so.

New comment by notabee in "NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon"

notabee — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 14:12:48 +0000

This has been posted here a good bit before, but adding it in as relevant.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...

We've let everything go to rot for the sake of a giant financial ponzi scheme that we call the U.S. economy.

New comment by notabee in "CrowdStrike debacle provides road map of American vulnerabilities to adversaries"

notabee — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 16:51:57 +0000

It's not harsh. The tide went out and it turns out a lot of people were swimming naked.

New comment by notabee in "The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters?"

notabee — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 19:56:36 +0000

Without delving into any kind of specific conspiratorial thinking, I think people should also include the possibility that this was malicious. It's much more likely to be incompetence and hubris, but ever since I found out that this is basically an authorized rootkit, I've been concerned about what happens if another Solarwinds incident occurs with Crowdstrike or another such tool. And either way, we have the answer to that question now: it has extreme consequences. We really need to end this blind checkbox compliance culture and start doing real security.

New comment by notabee in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

notabee — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 13:55:25 +0000

Just perhaps the idea of sticking everyone's retirement funds into massive passive vehicles was a bad one and has an unhealthy effect on the market, as you illustrate here. It is the way of things now so I see your point and it would be harmful to people, but getting in this situation has seemingly removed what could be a natural lever of consequence. We can't really hold companies accountable lest all the "regular folks" that can't actively supervise what they're investing in become collateral damage.

New comment by notabee in "Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine"

notabee — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:56:04 +0000

Unless the way elections are handled changes, such as doing anything that selects for expertise instead of partisan hackery, all this is going to do is accelerate the gridlock, corruption, and dysfunction. It just does not logically follow that putting more pressure on the legislative branch to be functional is going to work when its functionality or lack thereof is based largely on a very gerrymandered population being blasted non-stop by a completely co-opted, corrupt media. When the corruption and control is so thoroughly embedded already, the difference between "unelected official" and "party-and-special-interest-approved elected official" becomes a silly fig leaf of a difference.