Hacker News: ratelimitsteve

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

ratelimitsteve — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:23:26 +0000

i like the way that when ai does something good of course the people who built it should make a lot of money but when it does something bad no one is responsible

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:36:56 +0000

this. was it LG that shipped an update to their TVs that made it play ads and bricked the TV if you didn't agree?

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:34:46 +0000

it's not true anywhere in america, at the very least.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:34:28 +0000

here's the thing about that: it's absolutely not true at all. once again, in the place where this ruling took place (and, therefore, the place we're talking about) the people who accuse you of a crime have to prove that it was definitely you that did it. an accusation doesn't put the burden of proof on you to prove that you didn't, or to find who actually did. this isn't a phoenix wright game, or an argument with your mom. if the state can't prove that it was you, then it wasn't.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:33:21 +0000

> If it wasn't you driving, you know who.

I don't have to prove who was driving. I don't have to prove I wasn't the one driving. The state has to prove that I was the one driving.

>If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further?

I don't expect them not to question me further and that's not what this is about. This is about whether your car running a red light is proof, in and of itself absent any other facts, that you ran a red light in your car.

>This is how it works in Poland

This is not how it works in the US

>I assume, most/all of EU and the rest of the world.

You assume incorrectly

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:30:52 +0000

they sincerely think that the primary problem they're facing is one of PR, don't they?

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away.""

ratelimitsteve — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:58:22 +0000

>claude build a plugin to do the above

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away.""

ratelimitsteve — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:57:59 +0000

you'd be amazed what you can believe when eating food and sleeping indoors depends on that belief

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Burger King will use AI to check if employees say 'please' and 'thank you'"

ratelimitsteve — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:38:26 +0000

I love that we're inventing jobs for computers to do automatically at great expense with no real value added. The "burning investor money for heat" phase of AI development is really bringing out the weirdo in everyone.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Using a Microwave to Reanimate Rats"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:50:57 +0000

(Herbert West, et al)

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "99% of adults over 40 have shoulder "abnormalities" on an MRI, study finds"

ratelimitsteve — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:04:57 +0000

if they all have the same abnormality yeah but if they all have different abnormalities then they're still abnormalities.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "“Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work"

ratelimitsteve — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:50:48 +0000

I feel like there was a whole Clean Desk movement long enough ago that I remember reading about it in Dilbert back when that comic was very of-the-moment and present in the culture

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon security assessment reports"

ratelimitsteve — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:58:35 +0000

goomba fallacy. the government isn't one person with one position. i agree with you that the backdoor should never have been installed in the first place but accusing them of hypocrisy because a group of lawmakers passed a law a while ago and a different group of lawmakers want a report on what went wrong and why is silliness. It seems as though the person spearheading this effort, Senator Cantwell, is in fact one of the better people that you propose we should elect but here you are shitting on her for trying to shed light on the pitfalls of the very policy you seem to be against in the first place.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "How ICE knows who Minneapolis protesters are"

ratelimitsteve — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:10:25 +0000

I wasn't outraged until ICE kidnapped two US citizens at gunpoint from their jobs at target, refused to verify citizenship, dragged them away in unmarked vans, beat the shit out of them and dumped them in the snow.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "House of Lords Votes to Ban UK Children from Using Internet VPNs"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:06:11 +0000

the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it purports to do. doubly so, if it does what it purports to do poorly but does something else very well. this system purports to protect children from adult content online but what it does is offer a legal justification for eliminating any and all anonymity.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand"

ratelimitsteve — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:00:20 +0000

2006: "If I can just write the specs so that the engineer understands them it will write me code that works."

2026: "If I can just write the specs so that the machine understands them it will write me code that works."

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops"

ratelimitsteve — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:37:21 +0000

>can compel Microsoft to provide the keys

can they compel testimony? keys, passcodes and the like are usually considered testimony. did they try? the usual story here is that they don't have to, that the big corporations will turn over any info they have on request because they can and the government makes a better friend than a single user. the article mentions 20 "requests" per year on average but doesn't say anything about the government using force.

I agree with your conclusion though: data you share with anyone is data you've shared with everyone and that includes your encryption keys. if that matters to you, then you need to take active steps to ensure your own security because compelled or not, the cloud providers aren't here to help keep you safe.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Scientists used the same data, but their politics predicted the results"

ratelimitsteve — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:14:59 +0000

when i took stats in high school our final had one set of data and two questions. one was to use that set of data to prove a hypothesis, and the other to use that same set of data to disprove it. the trick was manipulating confidence, and the real trick was realizing that this was almost certainly happening any time we allow someone else to make the critical decisions for how to crunch any particular dataset. there seems to be an unspoken translation layer: you ask a question in english, then use statistics as the process of translating that question from english to math, then apply the translated question to the dataset and get an answer. if translation were mechanical that would be fine, but often the english has to go through interpretation. How confident do we have to be in a "yes" answer? 99%? 95%? 50/50? What constitutes an outlier? Sometimes a very slight shift in the line between good and bad data will include or exclude a single data point that can shift the calculations. The problem seems to be standardization of this translation layer as much as anything else, which is to say that everyone is ostensibly trying to answer the same question but under the hood they're asking very different questions of the data.

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

ratelimitsteve — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:43:08 +0000

you're absolutely right, they're not positioned for expansion or growth. you're very close to seeing the private capital dark pattern that's become a huge part of our economics lately. let me illustrate for you how they make money by decoupling the company's success from the investors' success

1) borrow a bunch of money to buy the company - this is called a leveraged buyout

2) once you're in control, have the company assume the debt you took on in order to buy it. you as the buyer are now free and clear, and the company is now responsible for paying back the money you borrowed to buy it. the end result of this transaction is that the company now owns stock that is less desirable because the company is more leveraged

3) make huge cuts everywhere and use the money "saved" by divesting from your own future to pay yourself as a consultant

The company is now in the extremely fragile position of not being able to spend to respond to the market because all of their income is going to servicing debt and paying the members of the private capital group. the "investors" aren't actually invested at all because even if the stock they hold becomes worthless they didn't pay anything for it in the first place, the company did. the thing limps along for as long as it can keep bringing in some small amount of income for the "investors" to skim off the top of, then it inevitably dies like anything riddled with parasites will, the company declares bankruptcy and they sell the copper out of the walls in order to pay back the loan used to take the company private in the first place

New comment by ratelimitsteve in "Europe could 'weaponize' $10T of US assets over Greenland"

ratelimitsteve — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:01:30 +0000

"They" don't exist. There are no Russians who replied to me in any manner when I said "You need to just overthrow your government" because I never said such a thing to anyone. Nothing I said was sarcastic, it was all meant to be taken extremely literally. You're trying to catch me out as a hypocrite but I didn't do what you said I did.