Hacker News: prussia

New comment by prussia in "Gentoo on Codeberg"

prussia — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 04:33:04 +0000

Whatever the motivations are, at least the end result is moving to freer (non-proprietary) and sometimes self-hosted solutions. If virtue signaling is what it takes to get there, I would like more of it. Virtue signaling gave us quality universities and museums, after all...

New comment by prussia in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

prussia — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:02:40 +0000

The kind of people to use LLM to write news article for them tend not to be the people who care about mundane things like reading sources or ensuring what they write has any resemblance to the truth.

New comment by prussia in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

prussia — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:06:38 +0000

For large public servers it would be pointless. But for DMs and small private servers, it would be meaningful. Most people in DMs and small private servers would not appreciate their messages being publicly accessible like HN comments are.

New comment by prussia in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

prussia — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 03:43:32 +0000

Discord also calculates a whole lot of (inferred) demographic information. Estimated age, gender, and surely much more. They also feed all the messages into a ML model, which guesses what people are talking about, and pushes a notification to other users. This is probably the culmination of all that, this is why they refuse to be e2e like every other reasonable messaging app...

New comment by prussia in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

prussia — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 03:31:01 +0000

The pendulum has swung a little too far that way, for sure. But when the so-called "cryptocurrency" industry either have business models that are barely concealed ponzis/rugpulls, or run their own "cryptocurrencies" that are only marginally better than a centralised database, it's hard to blame the critics.

Satoshi Nakamoto must be rolling in his grave.

New comment by prussia in "Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media"

prussia — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:52:06 +0000

There's no profit for the platform. As of now, both the "influencer" and platform are aligned in that they want children to consume more slop. If the platform doesn't have any incentive anymore, maybe most of those "influencers" will fall away, if the algorithm starts deprioritising content geared toward children. As you say, policing the "influencers" is difficult, but at least it is quite easy and simple to target the platform. Better than nothing.

New comment by prussia in "Proton spam and the AI consent problem"

prussia — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:12:58 +0000

Terrorist attacks and perverts are every government's excuse to crack down on freedom. Refusing to comply with an authoritarian government like India's is a plus in my book.

New comment by prussia in "U.S. Court Order Against Anna's Archive Spells More Trouble for the Site"

prussia — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 08:24:46 +0000

Yes, seriously. The vast majority of people who read books or scholarly articles wouldn't have a clue how to bypass internet censorship (the "normies" in your definition).

If you copy ebooks to a USB and put it at the summit of a tall mountain, for anyone to take, the authorities and "rights"holders will not give a damn. Convenience and scale matters, and that is why Anna's Archive is a target.

New comment by prussia in "U.S. Court Order Against Anna's Archive Spells More Trouble for the Site"

prussia — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 08:06:42 +0000

Sure, ultimately technical/knowledgeable people will be able to get around it. But preventing normies from accessing Anna's Archive is what they care about, because most people are normies.

New comment by prussia in "Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro"

prussia — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 07:45:54 +0000

To give them the benefit of the doubt, people who talk to AI too much probably start mimicking its style.

New comment by prussia in "LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet"

prussia — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:15:53 +0000

I think the worst of the crypto people are probably the worst of the AI people too. Power/money-hungry grifters naturally move on to the most profitable grift when the old one peters out.

New comment by prussia in "GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source"

prussia — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 01:43:48 +0000

Amen, GitHub is already a faustian bargain for FOSS projects, this kind of thing will just entrench it further.

New comment by prussia in "GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source"

prussia — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 01:41:14 +0000

Chrome is not FOSS btw. Google Chrome is proprietary software based on the open-source Chromium (also created by Google), which in turn is a fork of Webkit (by Apple, and with many corporate and non-corporate contributors), which itself is a fork of KHTML/KJS from the KDE project.

You are still right that corporations found and contribute to countless open source projects though.

New comment by prussia in "How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips"

prussia — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:15:04 +0000

Based on the population size and school system, I'd conjecture there's more... though there is brain drain and emigration to consider.

New comment by prussia in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"

prussia — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:37:52 +0000

I would wager some VP at YouTube in charge of shorts has their performance evaluations tied to how many hours of shorts are watched. So that's one incentive. Another is customer retention. Make current paying users addicted to shorts, and maybe they'll be more likely to keep paying.

New comment by prussia in "ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web"

prussia — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 05:59:47 +0000

It's quite funny to me to frame Spotify as an underdog, though I suppose there's truth to that, because of the sheer size of Apple and Google. I've never thought of it that way.

New comment by prussia in "PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases"

prussia — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 05:46:12 +0000

> if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that?

Key word here is "liked". Seems like OP liked the company when it had a free tier, and no longer does after it axed the tier. They don't owe your company anything, in the same way your company doesn't owe anything to the non-paying "customers" it stopped subsidising. No foul play by either party. I wouldn't take it too personally.

New comment by prussia in "ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web"

prussia — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:41:07 +0000

I'm not familiar with YouTube or Spotify premium, so this may be a dumb question.

But, doesn't Youtube Premium include Youtube Music? So why pay for Spotify premium too?

New comment by prussia in "Eleven Music"

prussia — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:41:03 +0000

> what I made

But did you really make it? Or was it the AI? If someone commissions a piece of art from an artist, I don't think the commissioner would be able to truthfully say they made it, even if they had a specific vision for what the piece of art should look like. But if you've edited or changed the track enough yourself, maybe it would be fair to call yourself a co-author...

New comment by prussia in "High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers"

prussia — Sun, 11 May 2025 23:17:36 +0000

Not OP, and I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but why? Reddit now blocks many IPs (requires login/signup to see the page now). Plus the site takes a few years to load, if you don't know about old.reddit.com. I imagine many people no longer go to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc anymore because of this. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.