Hacker News: pbhjpbhj

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens"

pbhjpbhj — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:24:16 +0000

Uninstall the app? Leave a review, tell the developer.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

pbhjpbhj — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:17:53 +0000

>His economic and foreign policy are dictated entirely based on who flatters him the most

Are you sure, it seems mostly based on illegal share trading. Murdering foreigners and sending soldiers to die is a lever Trump/his handlers keep pulling because they 'win' $millions every time.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Felony Bench"

pbhjpbhj — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 01:50:39 +0000

It would be a civil matter. No prosecution. But your tool, under your control (you're the operator and responsible for monitoring it) damaged their property, imo you'd be liable. You could in turn sue the manufacturer.

Though I'm sure there are 'arbitration clauses' to inhibit you from suing, they may not be legal where you are.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Supersonic Trebuchet [video]"

pbhjpbhj — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:28:48 +0000

Nothing above absolute zero is fully rigid.

You're going to transfer the energy quickly, you'll just break any "arm" that's light enough to accelerate with the energy available.

You could maybe use an 'already broken' arm (rope, like a whip) but then it's not a trebuchet.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

pbhjpbhj — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:49:19 +0000

EU has a minimum warranty period (2 years?) on electrical goods. UK has Consumer Rights Act that amounts to a limited warranty for as long as a reasonable person would expect the item to last(!). These disclaimers are to specify that any language elsewhere that sounds like a warranty -- 'we take pride in our work and ensure every laptop meets exacting standards' -- has a silent addendum of 'not a warranty' so you can't actually win in court claiming "this didn't meet exacting standards" (ymmv).

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM"

pbhjpbhj — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:39:10 +0000

Thanks, I'll give it a read.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM"

pbhjpbhj — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:38:46 +0000

Yes, it has been a selling point that Linux can revive old hardware. It still is. But when a whole new desktop rendering system is implemented, just hitting the mainstream in the last year or so (for me on [K]Ubuntu) then I think you should expect backwards support of a 12 year old system to be limited. That's kinda my bugbear, they say (paraphrasing) 'linux didn't work' but they're comparing older Windows systems with newer Linux systems. Yes, ultimately the story was positive for Linux, but there's an inherent bias IMO where Linux is put down if it doesn't do everything better than every version of Windows for every piece of hardware. If you're using the very latest hardware, or older hardware, you're going to have to get your hand dirty choosing a distro or configuring an install (or possibly compiling drivers).

Win11 wouldn't work on 2 year old hardware (no compatible TPM was the complaint, but I worked around it with hacks that MS didn't publicise). I should probably have used that as a chance to move that family member to a friendly Linux distro ...

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM"

pbhjpbhj — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:46:20 +0000

Can you explain a little more please. I thought that graphics processing would revert to CPU if the GPU is maxed out and so swap might ultimately help? Is there no general GPU-swap mechanism? If CPU threads are competing for GPU resource does the GPU getting paged-out?

I suppose this could be an historic thing, GPUs can have a type of DMA now, and disk access is much faster too, so paging perhaps makes sense when it didn't before?

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM"

pbhjpbhj — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:37:30 +0000

It's got to be an edge case for Wayland to be used with a 2GB VRAM card? Targeting recent cards and letting people using older hardware install x-windows, or whatever, seems sensible.

You say (in your blog post) "Linux" didn't work well so you reverted to "Windows", but as is so often the case you buried the distro/version info. You don't seem to have been using Win11 (later you mention Win7 & Win10Pro) ... So it's cutting edge software didn't work on my 2014 system, but older software did. The Linux/Windows aspects aren't particularly relevant AFAICT.

Nvidia refused for many years to properly support Linux, whilst AMD have supported it. So no surprise if a Nvidia card didn't work well/stably but an AMD one did.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "How to put 170 atoms in an atom"

pbhjpbhj — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:14:55 +0000

From a position of naivety, anything relating to electron dissociation sounds potentially useful for nano-components to use for computation, or for superconductivity?

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Asus Bike Booster"

pbhjpbhj — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:59:31 +0000

"here"? We don't know where you are.

In the UK police will ask the value of the property stolen and use that to decide whether to do anything. Low-value is under a few £k.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis"

pbhjpbhj — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:35:07 +0000

Downvoters maybe read the link you responded to whilst you didn't?

The Pfizer Lyme vaccine is in the Wikipedia article linked that you responded to, and the link there works whilst the link in the story you linked is dead.

Whilst it might be nice to remove some downvote privileges we could apply the rules we do have and not complain about downvotes.

To my view, your original comment was fine, but I could also see others wouldn't like it.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis"

pbhjpbhj — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:25:23 +0000

A further problem is that vaccines generally aren't perfect, some people do get sick. Some people may even die. It's a population-based approach. They save far-far more people.

Unfortunately vaccine-denialists will say 'ah this person died from getting a vaccine, we shouldn't vaccinate anyone'. Even if the vaccine saves millions of lives.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland"

pbhjpbhj — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:28:44 +0000

>why accept your password being easily compromised 10% of the time?

Those services using md5 aren't doing important things, I hope, so the password for that service hardly matters.

If it does matter, then user long passwords/phrases and rotate every time (or find a better supplier).

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Qwen 3.8 27B"

pbhjpbhj — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:28:08 +0000

Supporting a far-right megalomaniac, whilst helping them to train their ML, and giving them all your data ... what could go wrong.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Qwen 3.8 27B"

pbhjpbhj — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:25:31 +0000

What are the chances that the colouring of actual pelicans is bleeding in to the prompt. Seems it could be that?

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

pbhjpbhj — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:24:59 +0000

There was a piece of caselaw about a company having an "agree" but a million tick-boxes to disagree. A lot of sites added a "disagree" button then.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

pbhjpbhj — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:20:06 +0000

Clever people with no morals use that to load ads under your finger, timed to create an inadvertent click.

I swear NYT do this in their games app, the play button gets replaced with a subscribe as the late loaded subscribe element shifts the page exactly the amount to put subscribe under your finger. I wonder how well it worked?

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

pbhjpbhj — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:11:59 +0000

You could have a 'no cookies' badge that links to your cookie policy - 'we use no tracking cookies and so are compliant with EU law ... then list any cookies/local-storage used and explain what they're for.

New comment by pbhjpbhj in "Grok 4.6"

pbhjpbhj — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:29:08 +0000

But in the embedding, the input language used to represent an idea is not important, the idea takes the same shape. This has caused issues in the past when models would respond with a different natural [human] language, because to models able to operate on the ideas being presented in eg leet speak, or cyrillic transliterations of Maori, or whatever, the mathematical representation of the ideas that it works on are accessed in the same way, regardless of the interface language. I don't understand how the ML is able to operate on the idea-space if it can't filter on that same idea-space. If the model touches any of the synonyms within a given cosine distance of explosive, and any vector is within a given distance (angle) of make/facere/construire/hanga/... then it 'knows' you're asking about bomb-making. How then does filtering that relies on the same processes fail? Surely the ML can only create a useful output by recognising that >-<0W 2 M4k3 a 80mB is just an encoded form of a censured question?

Can someone point me at a resource to understand this failing better?