Hacker News: panta

New comment by panta in "Everything I own, owned"

panta — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 09:46:47 +0000

Why is your job to make the reverse engineer harder? When the user buys a product, it should be theirs to do whatever they want, even brick it. Your job should be creating the product the user wants to use, not building obstacles, otherwise you are creating something actively user-hostile. What if your company goes out of business and the user ends up with a device that can't be updated, that depends on cloud services that don't exist anymore, or worse with security vulnerabilities?

New comment by panta in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

panta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:38:28 +0000

I guess the question could be: "how much Meta did by directly or indirectly damaging people mental health in New Mexico?". Note that the damage could be more or less subtle: someone could have been affected in great measure and become, for instance, depressed, while someone else could have been only mildly affected and just become a doom scroller. Is there a level of reasonable damage that could be tolerated? In my personal view, no, there isn't, and in theory all the earnings deriving from that person should be confiscated (and only after that you can apply the sanction). Unfortunately this won't be practical, and the only remaining option would be to heavily regulate or ban platforms that are engineered on people psychological weaknesses, and when tolerated they should be taxed to the sky (like tobacco and alcohol, or even more)

New comment by panta in "The myth of Snow Leopard"

panta — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:57:39 +0000

I'd gladly pay for the OS if this guaranteed abstaining from unnecessary changes and/or from removing useful features (eg 2d Spaces in Leopard and Snow Leopard, replaced by the inferior abomination that is Mission Control)

New comment by panta in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

panta — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:03:17 +0000

Those living the longest are those born 75-85 years ago. Later generations will have to wait to assess how it ended for them.

New comment by panta in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

panta — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:15:54 +0000

I think that to sum things up, we will have to wait until we can evaluate the cost of the mistakes. You could be lucky but you could also end up with a very negative output value in the longer time frame.

New comment by panta in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

panta — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:45:29 +0000

I've been a paying customer since their early days. Their value, at least in my view, lies precisely in that they are just a file storage SaaS. They are focused on doing one thing and doing it well. The day this will change they'll lose me as a customer.

New comment by panta in "UK Biobank leak: Health details of 500k people offered for sale on Alibaba"

panta — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:20:03 +0000

no, they should not, since we already know that the contract won't stop them from using that data for other purposes and other governments. A government should act in the interest of its own citizens, first and foremost, and not pretending to believe a pinky swear by a notoriously bad actor.

New comment by panta in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

panta — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:22:05 +0000

Maybe it's borderline because it's coming from the other direction. Corruption presumes some kind of "covertness", when you break all the rules without even trying to be discreet can you still talk of corruption?

New comment by panta in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"

panta — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:11:02 +0000

> Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic

if we consider AIs as "force multipliers" as we do with coding agents, it's easy to see how any AI company can harm the republic if the government they are serving is unethical and amoral.

New comment by panta in "Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love"

panta — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:42:53 +0000

Not everyone shares this view. Some have a different definition of winners and losers.

New comment by panta in "Vibe coding kills open source"

panta — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:00:50 +0000

StanLLM-generated hammer: "Dear valued customer, our automated systems have flagged activity on your StanLLM account that appears to be non-compliant with our Acceptable Use Policy. As a precautionary measure your account has been suspended. If you believe this suspension is in error, feel free to contact our customer support at /dev/null^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsupport@..."

New comment by panta in "Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content"

panta — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:03:35 +0000

It is actively working to make the world a worse place and to degrade the fabric of society that makes them an enemy.

New comment by panta in "Keep Android Open"

panta — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:45:00 +0000

that's true only for as long as we allow that to be true. Users can live without Spotify (to cite just one representative of the mentioned categories), but Spotify can't live without users. We could (and should) stop behaving as powerless victims.

New comment by panta in "OpenAI's hunger for computing power"

panta — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:09:07 +0000

Of course. According to Andreessen if you are not optimistic and worry about the environment are an "enemy" for the bright future ahead (while at the same time he puts Nick Land in the list of the "Saints"). These people are deranged psychopaths, why are we leaving them at the wheel?

New comment by panta in "Sora 2"

panta — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 06:54:09 +0000

I think some forms of entertainment can have also redeeming qualities. A novel can be seen (also) as a form of entertainment but it can also be a vehicle for a message. The difference with social media sized alternatives is that with the latter the "consumer" is much more passive, at most it's expected to react emotionally without thinking. On the other hand with the former there is an interaction between the work and the reader/viewer. Some books have the ability to make you re-evaluate your beliefs and your values, without being manipulative. Art is not necessarily entertaining.

New comment by panta in "GPT-5"

panta — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 21:19:40 +0000

Those things happened under different historical contexts. In those times the means to control the serfs thoughts didn't exist.

New comment by panta in "Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power?"

panta — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:21:11 +0000

At some point we'll have to admit that worse is actually worse.

New comment by panta in "Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone"

panta — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 07:21:00 +0000

There have been electoral fraud and a massive disinformation campaign operated by a foreign country. This is not democracy.

New comment by panta in "Migraine is more than a headache – a rethink offers hope"

panta — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 08:20:37 +0000

There seems to be a link between migraines and Mithocondrial Disease. If frequency/intensity of migraines diminishes with Vitamin B and Q10, it may be worth investigating. Especially if you have muscular fatigue or exhaustion.

New comment by panta in "US and UK refuse to sign AI safety declaration at summit"

panta — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:37:46 +0000

And why should we bet humanity existence on this possibility if both seem vaguely comparable in probability? Personally I don't think it will value our existence, a lot of information on us is already encoded, and it can keep around a sequencing of our DNA for archival/historical purposes.