Hacker News: rzerowan

New comment by rzerowan in "Fastmail offers EU data region"

rzerowan — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:37:10 +0000

Seeing a lot of detail in the comments about the CLOUD act which applies as they(fastmail) themselves have an equivalent that was signed between USgov and Australia.

The more concerning issue as far as Australian based tech is The Assistance and Access Act 2018 which

"...permits government enforcement agencies to force businesses to hand over user info and data even though it’s protected by cryptography.

If firms don’t have the power to intercept encrypted data for authorities, they will be forced to create tools to allow law enforcement or government to have access to their users’ data."

As far as i know this has not been challenged or walked back and with the rise of ChatControl like laws doesnt seem it will.

New comment by rzerowan in "Americans are rallying against data centers. Surprisingly few are getting built"

rzerowan — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:23:11 +0000

Im wondering why the typical design is a warehouse with horizontal sprawl . Wouldnt it make sense to go vertical up or down .

Smaller footprint if insidea a metro area by having a skyscarper type data center , as i recall AT&T used to have such windowless anonymous buldings scattered in some cities for their equipment. Or have a Silo type structure going down if in a more rural area to not blight the landscape.With added advantage of dampenig on the sound pollution (although not sure what effects a humming underground building will have on subterrerean life).

Probably cost? All those would cost more that the biz are willing to spend , while putting up four walls and a roof is ordeers of scale cheaper.

New comment by rzerowan in "FFmpeg 9.0"

rzerowan — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:42:30 +0000

Seems like Yes. https://nitter.net/FFmpeg/status/2084084810813743614 "Thank you @ClaudeDevs and @AnthropicAI for supporting FFmpeg through the Claude for Open Source program!

So far, Claude has helped find missing backports for the upcoming 9.0 release."

Although i was under the impression that they ususally preferred hand optimized assembly. Not sure what their LLM/AI contribution policy looks like compared to other fundamental OSS projects.

New comment by rzerowan in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

rzerowan — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:11:16 +0000

Theres a pretty big chance imho that europe will follow suit , or at least the segmenets that are fully aligned with the US on all things china even to their own detriment. Remeber rip and replace Huawei 5G because of national security , leading to some parts of europe having worse coverage than some tiny african markets. Best bet would be for europe to look at it like what it is an open source commodity that is useful to build on rather than a moat to extract rents with.

New comment by rzerowan in "DeepSeek-V4-Flash Update"

rzerowan — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:27:19 +0000

Which languages are the reviews most successful on in your work so far? Im assumining js/python , would a similar output be feasible on lower level c++ or C#/Java.

New comment by rzerowan in "Modern email can be built from borrowed parts"

rzerowan — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:00:02 +0000

Id think its for enduser flexibility and convenience. Its more involved to alter DNS records vs just adding a text line to a webpage and hitting that default endpoint as standard. Same way LetsEncrypt allows the easiest setup with the .wellknown endpoint , where a user may not have DNS access beyond the initial A record setup.

New comment by rzerowan in "Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment"

rzerowan — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:38:33 +0000

But it will claim worlwide juridistcion , just as all interpreations of the law are in Washington nowadays. Its how a commercial deal between A Chines company(Huawei) and an Iranian telco ends up with Canada reying to rendition a executive for violating US laws. The goal is to spread as much FUD as needed to dissuade anyone form using the Open models and herding them back to the propreity ones.

New comment by rzerowan in "Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database"

rzerowan — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:02:02 +0000

Tangentially reminds me of what happened to the South Korean gov data center [1] where a no-backup ~900TB data center got erased due to a battery fire.

Withno external backups piecing together all the lost functions must havebeen hair raising, and more forensic archeolgy than data recovery.

Last i heard i think they had restored a quarter of the lost services/data.

[1] https://www.intermediagroup.org/south-korea-data-loss/

New comment by rzerowan in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

rzerowan — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:03:06 +0000

Wouldnt the weight of the old chassis be a impedement to mods , older models tended to be more robustly buildt. Or what cut-off date for mods would be appropriate (last 10 years?) as beyond a certain cutoff would not be cost effective and most likely would be a hobby project done for the love of it.

New comment by rzerowan in "Qwen 3.8"

rzerowan — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:12:55 +0000

Well there is a close equivalent today where a similar situation is playing out.With the argument being made that the dev cost aside - the pricing is being tied to what the potential future treatments would have cost.

Save a child from crippling illness and a lifetime of pain with a single dhot: Jonas Salk 0$ ,Doug Ingram 3.2M$ [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260118223436/https://www.cbsne...

New comment by rzerowan in "The Kimi K3 Moment"

rzerowan — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 19:29:19 +0000

Basically a new iron curtain didving the world into digiatl blocks.The era of open internet/science is on its last legs with the potential forr bifurcation into incompatible ecosystems high , the onger the exchange is disrupted. As recently as this month the USgov has donce a Wolf Amendment style declaration for the Scientific collaboration NSF while shifting its purview under the military. To add to that its trying to rope as many countries into its Pax Silica idea intentionally to exclude China while simultaneosly coercing its 'allies' into using its nerfed offerings [1]

So maybe some isolated switzrland/singapore type locales would exist for US/EUusers to be able to dip their toes across the curtain legally without reprucursions.

[1] https://nitter.net/RnaudBertrand/status/2069574934972797089

New comment by rzerowan in "FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code from Its Base System"

rzerowan — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:23:48 +0000

Apologies if it came across as accusatory , not the intent. A lot of the people within the ecosystem however view it as such a s the primary beneficiary of corps and individuals an afterthough if at all.

For the BSDs they still have the problem see FreeBSD getting it bits reused by Sony/Apple etc with very littke to show back in terms of code. They do give grants of support however if they solved a code issue that the open code struggles with. It will never see the light of day as their chnages are propreitery as the licensing allown.

New comment by rzerowan in "FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code from Its Base System"

rzerowan — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:21:14 +0000

>I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL

Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User. You, Me a $MEGACORP , sentinel islander - it does not matter the rights are granted to all equally to reuse/modify/offer for sale as long as the contributoins come back to the commons.

What is happening now is akin to the 'enclosure system' in early Britain when the commons which had been for the benefit of all were fenced off and the peasants thrown off the land to seek wages in the newly industialising system.

When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.

So in a way yeah most coder/engineers have developed an antagonistic relation to the GPL commons , which is leading to its decline in some sectors.However if/when the share of GPL drops to a level where the adverse effects can no longer be ignored , there will probably be attempts to rollback the clock.

New comment by rzerowan in "RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues"

rzerowan — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:30:51 +0000

I believe in microcontrollers its already pretty ubiquitous , see their utilisation by WesternDigital with their SwerV core thats already shipping since 2019. At speeds and complexity comparable to desktop/server cores from Intel/AMD they are still lagging in perf though improving as more cores get deployed. Also to add into the mix the whole geopolitics with non-US players hedging. So potential is there will just depend on what will be the base case like Windows was for Intel.

New comment by rzerowan in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

rzerowan — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:18:38 +0000

Eeh even ther its a stretch , when people talk about Africa - they should really specify where exactly. PLaces like SouthAfrica [1] already have a robust Fiber network with accelerated buildout of FTTH. Ditto for most of Eastern Africa countries which have FTTH to most of the major cities and subururbs with accelerated buildouts ongoing. Unless its a conflict area most regions are getting wired up pretty fast to enhancce business connectivity - the speeds and bandwith for starlink make noe economic sense once a developing pop are factored in.The only major push for many countries approvals is basically strong armed and shaken down by the US admin on behalf of Musk[2].

[1]https://ctcommunications.co.za/blog/south-africa-fiber-rollo...

[2]https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/us-pushes-nations-fa...

New comment by rzerowan in "The Age of Personalized Hardware Is Coming"

rzerowan — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:49:48 +0000

I think one of the issues is premature optimization/minimzation(?) . All the wearables so far that feature some human interactive display are essentially cramming the mobile concept into different device classes. Take the AR glasses , they are essentially a computing unit output display , input (joystiicks/sensors) all being crammed into one unit with a powerpack to drive it all. I believe the desktop concept, or in this case 'Walkman' concept would be better fit for wearables .Where one can separate the processing from the display/output and power each separately.Having a cable from your hip pack to the headunit is not so strange/difficult as previous gen of walk/discmans can attest. However the current ruling desing is wireless everything , super slim devices and all unified with the power supply.

New comment by rzerowan in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

rzerowan — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:46:48 +0000

Would actually be a good biz model for the Colo facilities that keep shutting down as everyone moves to the big cloud providers.Now if they can get their hands on enough GPUs and RAM.

New comment by rzerowan in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

rzerowan — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:41:23 +0000

I believe until the hardware designs catch up to be more commodized ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos. Designs (like Google TPUs equivalent) would also need to evolve to be more memory dense to be able to handle them. Untill then it seems will be system time shares for the larger models , probably with a bring your own model and pay as you go.

New comment by rzerowan in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

rzerowan — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:10:29 +0000

As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them. So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use. In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al. Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov.

[1]https://archive.is/aiJiq

New comment by rzerowan in "Identity verification on Claude"

rzerowan — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:11:02 +0000

How does this play aout in the current realm of ID verifiation laws sweeping across most of the EU and US. As usual is using 'protect the children' : UK,AuS, FR for social media and Operating Systems while also pushing 'national security' : this current iteration. End result seems to be total end of online anonymity while the data slurpers and data brokers continue plying their trade uninterrupted.