Hacker News: novok

New comment by novok in "Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare"

novok — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:58:11 +0000

These things will keep on popping up until they destroy the careers of the politicians and civil servants who do. This is how you stop it. And you make this happen by getting organized and acting.

New comment by novok in "Starship V3"

novok — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:42:07 +0000

He is talking about energy costs.

New comment by novok in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

novok — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:00:17 +0000

10/10

New comment by novok in "France moves to break encrypted messaging"

novok — Sun, 10 May 2026 02:08:08 +0000

Stalin & Mao would like to have a word with you.

New comment by novok in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

novok — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:57:57 +0000

homebrew voluntarily applies the quarantine flag on casks (ex: apps) so you still need to pay the apple dev tax to distribute your mini app that way, itch.io does not so you don't get the lying scarewall

New comment by novok in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

novok — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:56:42 +0000

you need to pay the tax, they are doing the 'pay money to reduce spam' solution

New comment by novok in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

novok — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:55:07 +0000

can they also not buy tea, coffee or coca cola then? oh no, they might drink the caffeination amount of... 2 cans of pepsi!

New comment by novok in "Zig → Rust porting guide"

novok — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:39:14 +0000

With AI agents and how good they are in doing "language translation" tasks against an identical target with a comprehensive test suite, you end up doing these things out of curiosity. The AI agent has the originals to test it's assumptions with too.

I've had surprisingly good results from getting AI agents to take a script in shell, python or typescript and have it translate it into those other programming languages, including rust versions. Or swapping from one build system to another.

New comment by novok in "Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew"

novok — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:44:27 +0000

Ruby doesn't have to be the slow part, bazel uses starlark which is mostly python and it's very fast.

New comment by novok in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

novok — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:43:38 +0000

IMO instead of age gating everything, it should've been the other way around, which is making unrestricted smartphones or similar an 18 or 16+ device, much like cars.

New comment by novok in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

novok — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:42:41 +0000

When financial institutions in the USA are not even adding basic things like... approve transaction on phone, keeping most things pull based based on knowing a few magic numbers vs. push based and other really basic things, this really doesn't hold water. Things being anon doesn't even register in the day to day of what is bad with the internet, vast majority of it is from very non-anonymous sources, influencers, apps or institutions.

New comment by novok in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

novok — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:11:55 +0000

But why is it a tough job? Partially it's the shift hours, they could offer it with less hours and more nurses for example. But they don't due to undersupply, and on it goes.

New comment by novok in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

novok — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:17:40 +0000

When you really dig into the difference it's metabolic health that is driving most of it, and that will be fixed by agricultural and food regulation for the most of it, starting with going with the whitelist system that japan and the EU have for food additives & manufacturing processes vs. the wild west that is GRAS in the USA, and way more strict food quality / inspection standards than you would think.

New comment by novok in "Can I run AI locally?"

novok — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:15:49 +0000

IMO the fact that spam detection has devolved into reputation management vs. being able to work on the content themselves makes me think there is a lot of alpha between an llm process vs. the most traditional processes we have now.

New comment by novok in "Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP"

novok — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:02:51 +0000

IMO if you want a metadata registry of how actions work so you can make complicated, fragile, ACL rule systems of actions, then make that. That doesn't need to be loaded into a context window to make that work and can be expanded to general API usage, tool usage, cli usage, and so on. You can load a gh cli metadata description system and so on.

MCPs are clunky, difficult to work with and token inefficient and security orgs often have bad incentive design to mostly ignore what the business and devs need to actually do their job, leading to "endpoint management" systems that eat half the system resources and a lot of fig leaf security theatre to systematically disable whatever those systems are doing so people can do their job in an IT equivalent that feels like the TSA.

Thank god we moving away from giving security orgs these fragile tools to attach ball and chains to everyone.

New comment by novok in "Your phone is an entire computer"

novok — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 04:11:30 +0000

iMessage lives as a sqlite db at ~/Library/Messages/chat.db , I wouldn't call a sqlite db proprietary per say.

New comment by novok in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

novok — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:53:44 +0000

Man if the EU made GDPR a 45M+ user platform thing most of the issues with it would've gone away.

New comment by novok in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

novok — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:43:40 +0000

I did a research project of cars that actually have decent auto lane following distance keeping cruise control for my 1hr highway commute, and tried out a few in a rental cars (hyundai and kia) and a tesla model y and tesla really is the best that is out there unless you want to potentially spend a lot more to get something that comes close. A friend of mine has done many long cross country road trips no problem with just autopilot.

GM Supercruise and Ford Bluecruise are the current competition it seems, with BMW, subaru and mercedes being behind those 2. I haven't driven with them although to personally compare yet.

Even though the interior is a bit lower quality, there isn't very much quite like it on the market. It also fits an almost 7 ft surfboard inside comfortably, is a nice car to sleep in for car camping and you can get a model Y for less than $20k used now.

New comment by novok in "Can I run AI locally?"

novok — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:27:21 +0000

Oh man you just gave me an idea to use something like qwen 3.5 to categorize a lot of emails. You can keep the context small, do it per email and just churn through a lot of crap.

New comment by novok in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

novok — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:08:45 +0000

From what I've seen, the bad effects don't necessarily just come from free access to the internet, but that everyone around them in their social group has a video camera that can covertly record, they're all immature children and thus you cannot slip up once or you get kid cancelled, and they start doing a collective dissociative freeze response in a self-imposed emergent panopticon as a result.

So if the teen phone turned into a restricted "call mom" device with no cameras and with neon yellow obvious fuck you coloring and a restricted set of apps, and police took away a full phone much like they take away cigs and beer it might be enough to break the critical mass to create this issue. They can have dedicated cameras for video club, use the family computer, have an xbox or switch and have whatever tech experience that millenials had, the last generation to not have exponential increases in anxiety , depression and sexlessness.

It's the covert camera + internet that it's the key issue.