Hacker News: pliny

New comment by pliny in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

pliny — Sun, 03 May 2026 09:17:39 +0000

>What was slow?

Everything, huge input delay in every interaction, clicking on anything, opening menus, typing, tabbing between windows, everything had 1-2s of delay.

>disable variable refresh rate

I think I tried this but dont recall, there were a few things related to monitor refresh I tried that probably included this

New comment by pliny in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

pliny — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:38:07 +0000

I got a new computer a couple weeks ago, with a 5070, and installed ubuntu on it and it was incredibly slow. I looked online and found some claim that 24.04 has some incompatability with nvidia, tried installing a bunch of different driver versions and nothing helped, tried turning everything off in gnome tweaks and still slow, tried installing 26.04 and 22.04 but the installer hangs forever in both, tried linux mint 24.04 still slow, gave up and installed windows with WSL :/

New comment by pliny in "Spyware maker NSO Group confirms acquisition by US investors"

pliny — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:33:44 +0000

I asked this (in a less accusatory tone) of an NSO employee once and he said something about how the big tech companies also spy on people and do unethical things.

New comment by pliny in "Potential issues in curl found using AI assisted tools"

pliny — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:18:44 +0000

There are already cheap, domestic robots for cleaning dishes, cleaning the floor, cleaning clothes, making coffee, heating and cooling food, turning screws, drilling holes and so on. All those robots represent a greater than 90 percent (and sometimes a greater than 99 percent) savings in time relative to doing the same tasks manually. You still have to move the objects they operate on around within your house but that's mostly the only part of the task you have to do.

New comment by pliny in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

pliny — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 14:40:32 +0000

>All photographs or videos you have seen have been placed there for you to see them

The source of most of the videos from both sides is random social media users.

Even the videos and info from the IDF I would regard as credible, since they released similar videos and info from the Lebanon operation last year that was consistently corroborated by evidence from social media (there was no internet blackout in Lebanon so every IDF strike on an urban area had multiple videos from different perspectives).

New comment by pliny in "Wiz's $32B GTM Playbook"

pliny — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:37:19 +0000

The network Assaf got from founding and selling a big cybersecurity company and then being a VP-equivalent at Microsoft for 5 years (immediately before found Wiz) is more relevant than what he had from being an IC in the army 15 before that.

New comment by pliny in "Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say"

pliny — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:02:41 +0000

The purpose is to injure enemy combatants

New comment by pliny in "Intel Brags of $152B in Stock Buybacks. Why Does It Need an $8B Subsidy?"

pliny — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:50:34 +0000

For public companies you don't need a heuristic, as the balance sheet is included in quarterly earnings reports.

New comment by pliny in "Intel Brags of $152B in Stock Buybacks. Why Does It Need an $8B Subsidy?"

pliny — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 12:32:39 +0000

The price of the share stays the same but there are fewer shares, so the market cap would go down.

New comment by pliny in "Claude 3 Opus suspects it is being tested from benchmark question"

pliny — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 10:20:13 +0000

I saw a comment (not in the linked thread) that notes that the system prompt probably includes something along the lines of "You are a helpful AI assistant...", which does feel like a bit of a giveaway in the sense that there are many documents on the internet that discuss testing AI assistants and therefore a document who's topic is an AI assistant is likely to contain discussion of testing the assistant (and if the document is written from a first person perspective, of the assistant, then it's likely to contain text from the perspective of the assistant discussing it's own testing).

New comment by pliny in "Finance worker pays out $25M after video call call with deepfake CFO"

pliny — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:19:01 +0000

The secret challenge exists and it is the phone number / email address / VC account of CFO. If CFO wants to order EMPLOYEE to send money, then EMPLOYEE should only do the action after making an outgoing call to CFO.

New comment by pliny in "Injection of "smart insulin" regulates blood glucose levels for one week"

pliny — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 18:36:01 +0000

This is a weird objection because if the expensive insulin did not exist (effective price = $inf) it would not apply.

New comment by pliny in "Israeli parliament passes law to limit judicial power"

pliny — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 13:39:32 +0000

This law was passed specifically to allow Aryeh Dery to ignore the terms of his plea agreement and serve as a minister. It's not related to the Jewish-Arab demographic balance (which, within the 67 borders, is about 85-15).

New comment by pliny in "Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports"

pliny — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 18:03:35 +0000

1. There seems to be some suggestion that X

2. ???

3. In no world can I imagine ¬X

New comment by pliny in "Starship Flight Test [video]"

pliny — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 13:12:12 +0000

launch scrubbed

New comment by pliny in "Tell HN: Google search is getting worse"

pliny — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 11:50:48 +0000

Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time. It used to be the case that if you search "foo" "bar" it would only return documents that had the words "foo" and "bar".

I will frequently search for z foo bar z, get documents that have synonyms of foo and bar (and the synonyms will be highlighted in the snippet), then I will search "foo" "bar" and get the same documents except now it doesn't highlight the synonyms in the snippet. Maybe I am in some awful cohort where this feature is intentionally broken to see if it reduces engagement.

New comment by pliny in "PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever"

pliny — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 18:41:15 +0000

If you ask ChatGPT to compose a layoff email with a quote from MLK that is the quote it uses (ref https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016)

New comment by pliny in "Aer Lingus Seeks Compensation For Data Center Chaos That Cancelled Flights"

pliny — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 18:47:32 +0000

I don't understand the article:

Posted October 07, 2022

Subtitle:

  An IT outage hit the airline's check-in and boarding systems \*last month\*

First sentence:

  Aer Lingus is seeking compensation after an outage to its IT systems led the airline to cancel more than 60 flights \*last night\*.

Which is it? Are there two separate incidents?

Then later:

  The flight cancellations occurred on September 10

New comment by pliny in "Musk's trial hasn't stopped, no matter what he told Twitter, says judge"

pliny — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 13:27:50 +0000

Given where the markets are today, Twitter is a ~$30B write down for him once the deal closes, so if he could pay $1B to make it go away he would have done so already.

New comment by pliny in "Why are McDonald’s Self Service Kiosks so hackable?"

pliny — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 09:15:57 +0000

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jury-rig