Hacker News: saintfire

New comment by saintfire in "I hate compilers"

saintfire — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:37:24 +0000

It chooses the challenge weight based on signals. If your phone looks like a phone from a residential IP you get a simple challenge.

If you then spam requests you might get another, harder, hallenge appear.

If you have a data center IP and look like bot traffic you get a hard challenge out the gate.

AFAIU after looking at their docs several months ago.

New comment by saintfire in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

saintfire — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:12:15 +0000

Push based, sure. Allowing SMS, I still hold, undermines all of this.

They "secure" this behind password which you entered to trigger the SMS push in the first place.

Offering an "out" to a more secure flow means your secure flow may as well not exist.

Additionally, phishing a pushed OTP is not really much harder since you can trigger the push and then just have the user finish off the flow for you, provided they don't read the IP or whatever you display them (they won't, they think they're signing in), effectively the same as a TOTP.

New comment by saintfire in "US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks"

saintfire — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:29:24 +0000

I can't tell if this is satire.

DeepSeek did the same thing the american companies did on a much smaller scale.

They took the output of one company and trained a model.

American companies took the output of all IP they could illegally* acquire and trained a model.

The world does need protection from abusers, you're right.

EDIT: illegal in some cases (see 82TB of torrented ebooks), immoral in most.

New comment by saintfire in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

saintfire — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:47:11 +0000

Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised.

Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy.

Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it.

60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.

New comment by saintfire in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

saintfire — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:23:49 +0000

I use a basic OTP password instead of Microsoft's ironically less secure (see SMS as 2FA) with my work MS account. Perhaps your org disabled it but it is definitely something a Microsoft account can do.

New comment by saintfire in "A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime"

saintfire — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 22:26:46 +0000

And yet, I incessantly get spoofed numbers calling me from the same "central office code". Also resulting in people with the same code "returning my calls" and then getting angry that I say I didn't call them.

Preventing number spoofing would help significantly with spam calling. At least the ones from local numbers.

New comment by saintfire in "Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass"

saintfire — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:12:06 +0000

I see everyone coming up with an arbitrary date of when Google lost their moral compass that aligns with their own moral compass. In that vein, I feel like when Brin and Page released a paper stating how PageRank could never be beneficial to a consumer with ads and then launched an ad company powered by page rank is when Google became evil.

New comment by saintfire in "Siri AI"

saintfire — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:42:41 +0000

Nor have they been keen on letting users OR devs customize the ui.

New comment by saintfire in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

saintfire — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:19:35 +0000

The unused variable error drives me insane

If they wanted the release build to be an error I wouldn't care. Having the current solution be "have the editor automatically change code to include or remove the underscore" is so wrong to me. Just invented a problem that needs tooling to modify source code to fix.

New comment by saintfire in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

saintfire — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:58:49 +0000

Maybe they already did and the answer was in some way lacking so they asked a peer.

Being mentored is infinitely better than a text box spitting out subtly wrong answers.

New comment by saintfire in "The Eternal Sloptember"

saintfire — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:51:09 +0000

I'm confused what else you think they are?

Its fundamentally how LLMs work.

New comment by saintfire in "I’ve banned query strings"

saintfire — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:41:33 +0000

> If I ever start using any query strings, I’ll allow only known parameters.

They aren't saying the concept of query strings are bad, They're saying unsolicited query strings during referal are the issue.

New comment by saintfire in "Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers"

saintfire — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:59:50 +0000

Doesn't look like that has been or will ever be (generally) learned.

New comment by saintfire in "Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters"

saintfire — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:54:43 +0000

And how much do they exhale over 8h of AI use?

New comment by saintfire in "This Month in Ladybird – April 2026"

saintfire — Sun, 03 May 2026 05:59:49 +0000

I've found widewine a blessing because news sites that autoplay trash seem to be the only group that uses it (other than paid media platforms like Netflix and Spotify).

The blessing is I can just reject it and it blocks all their videos from playing/downloading.

New comment by saintfire in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

saintfire — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:02:28 +0000

Its hyperbolic but hits the point.

I've helped multiple coworkers (in a non-computer related field) sideload F-Droid for a few spyware/ad free apps they liked the look of.

Id sideload my own phone using adb but I'd tell them theyre out of luck.

New comment by saintfire in "Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor"

saintfire — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:58:57 +0000

I'm in a similar boat, but I've found where I once habitually put things in the same workspace every time and was able to trivially recall them, I now end up all over the place.

Also I've been missing scratch deeply.

I'm sure it's solvable with some diligence and config changes, but I haven't invested the time yet.

New comment by saintfire in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

saintfire — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 04:01:47 +0000

Its just market euphoria.

New comment by saintfire in "Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero"

saintfire — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:51:19 +0000

Every self checkout around here has an employee staffing ~6 terminals. They're supposed to be watching for things like that. Usually theyre just staring vacantly into space, which I get, that job pays nothing and provides 0 mental stimulation.

When you see a TV being purchased, though, it wouldn't be hard to just watch that it in fact got checked in as such.

New comment by saintfire in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

saintfire — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:08:42 +0000

Sort of a funny example since "batterygate" centered on degraded iPhone batteries in which Apple argued the best possible move is to throttle phones so they don't shutdown unexpectedly.

Most people would argue the best outcome is spending <100$ and 1 min of your time to have your phone restored to like-new speed.