Hacker News: penchant

New comment by penchant in "Haiku R1/beta6 has been released"

penchant — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:35:09 +0000

I wish Haiku all the best. It's always great to see some diversity in the FOSS OS landscape. Hope it finds its niche eventually like the BSDs did after the lawsuit drama.

New comment by penchant in "Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions"

penchant — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:38:27 +0000

Thank you for a valuable response; I did not know this.

New comment by penchant in "Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions"

penchant — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:37:42 +0000

Obviously not, you misunderstood my point. And the election programs comparison makes no sense.

New comment by penchant in "Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions"

penchant — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:39:46 +0000

The choices are oddly and not consistently worded. "Ban LLM contributions from Debian via Social Contract", "A cautious approach to generative AI", "Debian is created by humans" and "Avoid the use of LLM: climate destruction is a deal breaker" all in one list? Sounds like several people wrote them and did not agree on the form.

New comment by penchant in "I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone"

penchant — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:35:22 +0000

I did this for a while when I was learning Spanish! I used Calibre's CLI on my Raspi which generated the epubs from RSS feeds I'd chosen (Spanish-language media like El País, ABC — I speak in the Peninsular variety) and sent it to my Kindle via e-mail. It did this every morning. Can't stress how much this has helped me with the language. Unfortunately, my Rapsi died some months ago and I haven't gotten around to somehow replicate this workflow without it.

New comment by penchant in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"

penchant — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:21:46 +0000

Sounds great, but doesn't this come at a price of maintaing the whole of MV2 support which is inherently insecure? If yes, then it's not a great look.

New comment by penchant in "Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium"

penchant — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:19:15 +0000

This may also be affected my the conditions I've grown up with (lower middle class, borderline poverty at times) but I find myself to be much frugal by default when compared to my friends from Western Europe. For example: I barely every get coffee from a coffee shop because in Poland the prices are ridiculous (≈$4.5/€3.7 for a flat white cup is standard). If I'm desperate for coffee when out (and didn't bring my own) I look for the nearest vending machine or, at worst, a Żabka (a 7-Eleven equivalent). The people I know from Belgium but also Germany or France just go to a Starbucks or Costa without hesitation. Just little habits like this are what makes me feel the difference in both mentality and income. PS Sorry for the late response.

New comment by penchant in "Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium"

penchant — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:30:33 +0000

I don't get the hype around nominal GDP at all – looks great, but tells you little to none about the actual living conditions. Living in Poland, I don't feel richer than an average Belgian person (and I've had contact with many of them across the years).

New comment by penchant in "The 3,000-year-old story hidden in the @ sign"

penchant — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 06:01:47 +0000

In Polish it's called małpa (monkey). I always thought of this as weird — turns out the Poles were not alone in noticing the resemblance :D

New comment by penchant in "Resurrect the Old Web"

penchant — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 13:29:52 +0000

I wonder why some people that are aware of how detrimental social media are blame all the evil on "algorithms" instead of just… ceasing to use social media at all? Seriously, you are not FORCED to use social media unless it's a part of your job (and even then nobody can make you use them in your free time). Portaying yourself as a martyr who's helpless when trying to escape from all of these vile big companies when doing nothing to get yourself out of this is hilarious. Gizmondo also has written about it: https://gizmodo.com/the-gizmodo-guide-to-stopping-algorithms...

New comment by penchant in "Helium Browser"

penchant — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 13:08:00 +0000

The thing is, Gecko is really insecure when compared to Chromium. Its sandboxing is asinine. Additionally, due to lack of WebView implementation, on mobile you have to use Chromium either way, leaving you with two completely separate attack surfaces.

Quoting GrapheneOS developers[1]:

> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.

IronFox (an FF fork) developers[2]:

> While we do as much as possible to improve the situation, it should be noted that Firefox-based web browsers, including IronFox, have security deficiencies when compared to Chromium. This is especially notable on Android.

[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

[2] https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/blob/dev/docs/Limit...

An in-depth examination of this topic and a plethora of other sources can also be found here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

New comment by penchant in "Helium Browser"

penchant — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 13:03:35 +0000

Quoting GrapheneOS developers[1]:

IronFox (an FF fork) developers[2]:

[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

[2] https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/blob/dev/docs/Limit...

An in-depth examination of this topic and a plethora of other sources can also be found here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...