Hacker News: plausibility

New comment by plausibility in "EFF to 4th Circuit: Electronic Device Searches at the Border Require a Warrant"

plausibility — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:53:53 +0000

The rebrand here is because for something to be porn, the person in it has to be able to consent. Children can’t consent, thus it’s material showing sexual abuse.

I think this new name is generally accepted at wide and will stick around in perpetuity from now on.

New comment by plausibility in "Mythical Man Month"

plausibility — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:35:03 +0000

I feel like that’s tied to the hardware the companies are using. All the banks I’ve worked at run z/OS mainframes, can they even deploy modern run of the mill Go/Python/Rust code or is getting off COBOL reliant on hardware changes?

New comment by plausibility in "The reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI appears to be funding it"

plausibility — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:52:37 +0000

I think a lot of these simpler bots are simply karma farming to sell at a later date for astroturfing. If you want to shit stir politics on an election year, it’s easier to get past the AutoModerator gates if you’ve got a 5 year old account with a benign history and a few thousand comment karma.

New comment by plausibility in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

plausibility — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:38:26 +0000

If I was a hostile phone OS designer, I would make it use the time reference given by nearby cell networks, GPS, or an RTC in the motherboard rather than the local clock. That’s closer to ‘true’ time if you want to make sure a day has actually passed.

New comment by plausibility in "Meow.camera"

plausibility — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:45:33 +0000

If you have a premium Shodan[0] account, they have an ‘Images’ view which is filtered VNC and other Remote Desktop screenshots and links to view them directly with the IP. Lots of security cameras, some SCADA industrial access control screens, and lately seemingly people who I guess are hacking vulnerable Windows boxes and changing the wallpapers to anti Israel stuff.

[0]: https://shodan.io

New comment by plausibility in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

plausibility — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:30:48 +0000

When you’re trying to type a URL there’s a period next to the space bar where your right thumb usually hits space, but if you’re just texting iOS won’t show that. That’s my theory, just muscle memory.

New comment by plausibility in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

plausibility — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:23:15 +0000

The thing they’re describing is people hand holding lapel mics right up to their mouth, rather than clipping them to their lapel or shirt or anything (where I assume they’re designed to go still). Seems more ‘indie filmmaker’ where actually clipping it on seems too polished, and why would you trust someone who’s from Big Lapel Mic on TikTok.

This lead to other people clipping them onto random objects to make fun of the trend for a while.

New comment by plausibility in "Tech Independence"

plausibility — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:01:21 +0000

At the lower or easier end, there’s your standard containerisation tools like Docker Compose or the Podman equivalents. Just move your compose files and zip the mount folders and you can move stuff easily enough.

Middle ground you’ve got stuff like Ansible for if you want to install things without containers, but still want it to be scripted. I don’t use these much since they feel like the worst of both worlds.

Higher end in terms of effort is using something like NixOS, where you get basically Terraform for everything in your distro.

New comment by plausibility in "Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned"

plausibility — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 10:31:27 +0000

It’s pretty much table stakes to block or restrict or just investigate more closely if requests come from an IP address in a data centre provider or VPN provider ASN though.

I worked at a cloud company a while ago, and if free tier user requests came from another cloud providers IPs we’d have to double check it wasn’t fraud since that happened more often than residential ranges.

New comment by plausibility in "US Judge invalidates blood glucose sensor patent, opens door for Apple Watch"

plausibility — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 11:27:48 +0000

My understanding is it's like iPhone purchased in Japan always having the shutter noise no matter where they're taking a picture.

Apple Watches purchased and activated in USA after the patent lawsuit cut off date won't have the feature enabled, even if you travel or move.

New comment by plausibility in "I Don't Have Spotify"

plausibility — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 06:08:33 +0000

This is kind of the confusion I mean. Sometimes YouTube Music has audio tracks that you are seemingly different to the "X Artist - Topic" videos you can find on YouTube proper. I'll have to revisit this again to see if it's all the same now, because the last time I was looking into it a few years ago not everything I had organised in playlists on YTM was available via regular YouTube playlists I could rip with yt-dlp.

New comment by plausibility in "I Don't Have Spotify"

plausibility — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 03:15:47 +0000

Tidal has lots of downloader clients you can install due to its often technical but niche user base. May I suggest Tidal-Media-Downloader[0]?

Now if only there was a way to download things from YouTube Music with a Premium subscription. It's practically impossible to search for "YouTube Music download" without falling into the 'youtube-dl YouTube mp3 audio tracks!' SEO hole. Vague naming on Google's part.

[0]: https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader

New comment by plausibility in "Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)"

plausibility — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 23:51:24 +0000

The English language version of that saying rhymes better I think: > Buy once, cry once.

I used to have a large Honeywell air purifier I special ordered to Australia that required a step down voltage transformer, it's really surprising how much better the air feels when it's truly clean.

New comment by plausibility in "Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)"

plausibility — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 23:39:02 +0000

The usual problem with toothbrush bristles is they become microscopically worn down, so they don't scrape off plaque as effectively. Even if you can't see the problem, it might not be working as well as a fresh head will.

You can find electron microscope scans of fresh toothbrushes and worn ones in this[0] Applied Science YouTube video.

[0]: https://youtu.be/cwN983PnJoA

New comment by plausibility in "Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site"

plausibility — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:01:22 +0000

There was something similar shown here on HN a few months back (but for current Googlers) [0]. Apparently this counts as commercial bribery. I guess ex Google Ads folk giving their market expertise to another company as an SEO Consultant might not be a problem, unless somehow they're breaking an NDA about divulging company secrets or special sauce?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431126 "Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions (plsfix.co)"

New comment by plausibility in "Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones"

plausibility — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 05:07:53 +0000

Look no further for evidence than New Zealand. There are two major grocery store chains (Foodstuffs, who own New World, Four Square, and Pak n Save) and Woolworths Group -- obviously we have the smaller Asian marts and produce stores too, but most people only have one of the big stores nearby to their towns.

There are two major building materials suppliers (Carters and Fletchers). There's one manufacturer of drywall (Gib) that is easier to get council plan approval for than any other cheaper manufacturers of drywall because they provide some material strength documents that saves the councils some engineering review time and effort.

We technically have 4 major banks, but 3 of them are just offshoots of big Australian banks and siphon the insane profits offshore.

The government keeps making investigation commissions into breaking these up, but doesn't do anything. The companies just point fingers back and forth at each other blaming "the competition" for price gouging. Meanwhile the recommendation from the politicians is we cut back on avocado toast, lattes, and our Netflix subscription.

New comment by plausibility in "Open source AI is the path forward"

plausibility — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 20:54:34 +0000

It is more common when it comes to numbers I guess. There are ~5 ancestors in this comment chain, if I would agree roughly 4-6 is acceptable.

New comment by plausibility in "Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma Silently Enables iCloud Keychain"

plausibility — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:52:06 +0000

Huh, that was a pretty quick turn around for Apple, glad to know.

Now if only they'd stop trying to get me to enable iCloud Drive just because I use an iPhone for work.

New comment by plausibility in "Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma Silently Enables iCloud Keychain"

plausibility — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:43:09 +0000

One thing I learned from using Little Snitch is that a lot of Apple apps are seemingly immune from these types of firewalls, due to Apple shenanigans around k-ext signing etc [0].

Ref also [1]: > In Big Sur Apple decided to exempt many of its apps from being routed thru the frameworks they now require 3rd-party firewalls to use (LuLu, Little Snitch, etc.) > Q: Could this be (ab)used by malware to also bypass such firewalls? > A: Apparently yes, and trivially so

[0] https://x.com/patrickwardle/status/1318437929497235457 [1] https://x.com/patrickwardle/status/1327726496203476992

New comment by plausibility in "Peter Jackson on how Tolkien stopped a Beatles LOTR film (2021)"

plausibility — Mon, 13 May 2024 00:16:12 +0000

I think it's just because he had no illusions as to the good and bad uses it would bring. I've used Palantir Foundry heavily at work, and it is good for remotely viewing events and communicating mind-to-mind to executives with pretty dashboards. Definitely nicer optics than their Gotham platform used by USA law enforcement since e.g. it helps Airbus identify issues on their plane fleets before they occur.

Plus from talking to the Palantir engineers, the CEO and Thiel are both weirdo nerds, so it's fitting.