Hacker News: pinkwah

New comment by pinkwah in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

pinkwah — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:32:12 +0000

Byte-matching has been a side-effect of gaining an understanding of how the software works. With this you are skipping the understanding and you will not get people like Kaze Emanuar on YouTube who have dedicated a lot of time to building upon this understanding to create something better.

I don't think it's motivating to solve a black box by having AI generate another black box if what you want is to understand how the thing worked.

New comment by pinkwah in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

pinkwah — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:17:00 +0000

macOS does this for select directories. You either give access to all of `Documents` or none. It's also not great for notification fatigue, as you get like 8 popups at once in iTerm2. If you choose not to give access to a directory, you'll need to go to system settings to change this.

So, for a "better" system, we'd need to ask for every directory and you better hope the program doesn't try to glob all files in every directory and overload the user in prompts. Or you can "Allow all" or something, and then we're back at square one where the program has too much access.

New comment by pinkwah in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

pinkwah — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:37:49 +0000

By default, software has a sandboxed location that is exposed to the host in `~/.var/app/[APP]`.

Most software needs access to user files. Since most applications aren't written with Flatpak in mind, they will attempt to load files using their own file browser, meaning that for the application to function at all it needs to have access to swaths of extra data. You can see what data the application can access either via FlatSeal or in whatever "app store" you're using. Often it'll be your entire home directory.

The software that is designed with Flatpak in mind will use XDG Desktop Portals, where the host displays a file browser and then hooks it up to the sandboxed app so it has access only to that file or directory.

Note that you can't magic your way out of this. You can't eg. wait for the program to request access to a file before displaying a "Program wants access to this file. Allow/Deny" because the program doesn't know if this file exists, and the user wouldn't be able to navigate to it via the program's bespoke file browser since it doesn't have access to directories or their contents.