<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: salawat</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=salawat</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:24:08 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=salawat" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And the answer is monetization. We can't just solve a problem. It has to have a business model built around it. No exceptions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:31:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48404907</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48404907</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48404907</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>...You are using "wealth" in a way completely foreign to how I have ever seen it used linguistically. The abundance of resources available to an individual that we call "wealth" colloquially being transferable or tradable is basically the hallmark of a market economy. It can absolutely concentrate within one, because if it can be traded, it can absolutely be <i>not</i> traded decreasing the velocity of that value transfer to zero. So... Yes. If only one or a handful of people are buying, because everyone else is having to sell to stay alive, then wealth does, in fact, concentrate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:46:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394506</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394506</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394506</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "Does AI Make Totalitarianism More Likely?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes. Authoritarianism has largely been held at bay by ensuring power was distributed betwixt as many people as possible, ensuring the excesses and quirks, and abuses of one could be constrained by someone else in the effector chain with an opposing weighting. AI potentially upends that state of affairs. As one is enabled to surround themselves with sycophantic yes devices, the probability of reaching a critical mass where a single small group seizes power slowly edges closer to 1.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 15:33:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324523</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324523</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324523</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Well I really hope you put your money where your mouth. That means: Never use AI (obviously).<p>Way ahead of you.<p>> Never look up how to plant carrots on YouTube.<p>Books and trial and error are good too. In fact, old fashioned Boolean search engine worked just fine.<p>>Don't learn to play an instrument or paint.<p>Now you're just making yourself sound like a daft fool. We've been doing those things since long before the Internet, and none of the abuses of humanity I refuse to see pushed forward spur from growing in those directions.<p>>Anything that exploits public information and steals knowledge without compensation, like AI does, is off limits. Otherwise you'd be an incredible hypoctrite. Especially since you've already extracted your share of wealth from tech before you saw the light and converted to ludditism.<p>Your gotcha ain't landing. I ain't holding back anyone else. I'll share with anyone that wants it. Except the Sam A's, the Amodei's, the Trump's & their minions, and any other asshat who thinks their ambition and will to rule by default grants them entitlement to my shoulders. There comes a time in life where you look at what the rest of the world expects you to give, and a part of you looks at what the world is doing with it, and says "enough". I never sought to chain, or to bind, to automate kill chains, to decieve people into buying what they don't need, or to harm. Yet I look all around me, and that's all I see people around here get their jollies off doing some form of. You don't own me. You don't own my output. You don't get to lay claim to the precious little that is mine,  and that I seek to shepherd for the poor sod's down the road who have the misfortune of being born into the hellscapes you people seem to aspire to see brought into existence. Where your moats enrich you while extracting from them, where they own nothing, and have no chance too, because no one is selling.<p><i>I will make sure there is someone there to do for them what was done for me</i>.<p><i>I will make sure that they have as much of the same room to grow in as I did without the disgusting tendrils of a corrupted as fuck tree of knowledge being weaponized against them.</i><p>I don't give a damn if I'm inconvenient to your vision. I've walked that desert. I've dealt with that mirage. I have no delusions about what's underneath the hood of what's been built, or the countless lives that have been ploughed under to keep it trundling along. I have one damn choice I can make. I can chase a corpse of a future that's being smothered in it's cradle, or I can plant and cultivate a seed of what once was, and nourish it that maybe it can take root in more favorable soil. Point is, that means rescinding my consent to be leeched off of.<p>You call me a Luddite & a hypocrite. Doesn't bother me none. Called myself much worse, and would call myself much worse if I didn't draw the line somewhere. This is my line in the sand. Have fun calling me what you will. I don't have a damn thing to call you at all. Enough ugly things in the world without bothering to name another. Have a nice day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 11:46:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292785</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292785</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292785</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd think we'd have outgrown things like claims of "unstallibility" given prior experience with ships claimed to be "unsinkable". There's what the marketing says, and then there's reality. You will never build a technical system incapable of being coaxed into an error state. Period.<p>Too many years as Quality Assurance grinds into you that when engineers claim perfection, you start questioning their assumptions, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down shortly thereafter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 15:43:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281308</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281308</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281308</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No. That requires information disclosure to a third party. The point is enabling device admins better control over local device behavior. We're trying to keep conscientious parents able to do their thing. Not further enable the ability to manage the populace with official registries. If a kid can figure out how to install their own OS without their parent's help, odds are the kid is with it enough to start dipping their toes in the deep end. Or at least until they out themselves in front of their parents. In that case though it's a home problem, not a rest of the Internet problem.<p>It's still a stupid unconstitutional law, but I see what the aim is, even without strawmanning it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 19:15:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270521</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270521</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270521</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can bucket me wherever you want hombre. Whatever makes you feel better. I <i>walked away from tech voluntarily</i> because I refuse to associate with or put my time toward a morally bankrupt industry, even if it is where my talents happen to align. I'm more than happy to be a subsistence humanitarian even if it requires me to sacrifice the gilt and opulence that comes with a tech salary.<p>I won't abuse humanity. Nor will I enable those who ultimately intend to do so using my work as a proxy. Maybe you should consider doing the same. You might learn something by stepping out of the bubble about all the problems you're creating.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 16:13:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268520</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268520</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268520</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "Magnifica Humanitas"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, he's talking to you too. The Sam Altman's can't be a threat without useful idiots to cooperate with and doing work for them. You don't get out of your own culpability because you locked on a set of golden handcuffs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 15:21:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48267918</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48267918</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48267918</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>But I suspect it's a front because the posters don't want to admit #2. Hence my question.<p>And that's why you're getting reflexively downvoted. Because we can already tell by the way you telegraphed the question you aren't worth wasting time on. As it turns out, some of us don't think our youth shouldn't be able to have the same opportunities we did because a bunch of techies got the financial sector to go all in on greedmaxing. Those of us that actually believe in keeping society functional find very little to be recommended by blind "believer" types who just think you can yank the rug out from under your descendants, and force them to have to shape their life around choices <i>you</i> think are cool.<p>One can be a tech enthusiast and still see that AI is crack cocaine to the type of people who'd set society on fire given they can find someone to help them think through the implementation details, which before AI, was basically the last control the professional caste had over the Capital class. The kids can understand this. Strangely, there is a surprising number of adults who don't seem to ever make the jump to understanding not everyone has entirely benevolent intentions hidden behind their smile.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 19:57:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260499</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260499</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260499</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Regulation didn't cause mergers. Non-enforcement of anti-trust law did. M&A's simply should not have been approved over the last few decades the way they were. You're trying to say it was the regulations that were the problem, but it is unironically the size of the regulated compared to manpower of the regulator that was the problem, which becomes a non-issue when you don't keep allowing mergers and acquisitions. Many small redundant competitors is manageable and a veritable incubator for innovation. One massive Leviathan conglomerate is a vehicle for regulatory capture and public abuse. You complain about the FAA, when the true culprit was the FTC approving mergers time after time freeing up capital that'd otherwise have needed to be put to use gaining competitive advantage and innovating for use to muck with the political landscape. Get where you're coming from, but you're blind as to the cure. A regulation could 100% have avoided the MAX situation. That regulation had nothing to do with airplanes, but maintaining a healthy and competitive domestic civil air transport industry, rather than a massively conglomerated one. We know corporate hierarchies attract psychopaths. The aim is to have as many slots at the top so that enough of them can be filled with the non-psychopathic so that society isn't held hostage by a handful of TBTF's all governed by psychopaths. If it is in threat of being TBTF, it should unironically be priority 1 to split, subdivide, and duplicate until redundancy allows part of it to be able to safely fail. Only then can it safely managed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 16:38:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258762</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258762</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258762</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not as part of a domestic police action (Posse Comitatus), and under the constraint of at least directing it against enemy combatants & regulars (conventions of international warfare). Now, if either of those two are violated the calculus changes, and I leave it as an exercise to the student to decide which side one's sympathies should lay with. I damn well know where my lines are drawn.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 16:16:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258500</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's no fucking training to mitigate a slot machine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 18:11:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239338</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239338</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239338</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It still is oppression. What many of us object to now is how starkly it's revealed the 2 tier illegitimate judicial system that on the one hand ruins grandmas and teenagers, but gives multinationals a free pass for charging everyone to get access to the human corpora. Anna's Archive, while equally illegal in a sense, but at least operates itself in a way compatible with uplifting everyone is getting more backlash than these tech companies that are dead set on "renting out access to intelligence". At this point, if you can't see the absurdity of the System as it functions past the "bing bing wahooness" of AI, I don't know what to tell ya.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 16:56:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238459</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238459</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238459</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The point is that you can't escape side-channel applications of security metadata being weaponized the more you try to force ubiquity of "security" everywhere. As long as there are motivated, profit seeking attackers, you have to take into account the toxic nature of metadata. This is another example of "A System Is What It Does" proving the pointlessness of "POSIWID". Intent doesn't matter. Certificate transparency was intended to clue us into bad cert issuing, but it is also a list of potential targets where AI crawlers can be directed to scrape new data. Intent doesn't change what it is. Cert transparency is certainly transparency + a "training data might end end up here" list.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 23:37:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230109</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230109</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230109</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A group of private investigators and strike breakers engaged by the wealthy to quell the rabble. When you hear someone talking about it being cheaper to pay 10% of the working class to keep the other 90% down, shit like the Pinkertons is always the answer as to how.<p><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-pinkertons" rel="nofollow">https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-pinkertons</a><p><a href="https://daily.jstor.org/how-steelworkers-stopped-a-paramilitary-movement/" rel="nofollow">https://daily.jstor.org/how-steelworkers-stopped-a-paramilit...</a><p>Not hard to find.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 17:21:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226140</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226140</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226140</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>....Yet another vector through which "security experts" has caused a waterbed problem. Let's secure the Internet, oh no! We made a centralized list of operating domains for hostile actors to guide attacks with!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 16:55:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225788</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225788</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225788</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Never let a crisis go to waste, huh?<p>We've had the solution to shit like this, and it's called the SecurityManager in Java. No one wants to configure the damn thing, but it is there. Also, <i>auditing the code you pull in</i>. Yeah. Reading code sucks. Yeah. It's a lotta work. But if you don't check, you don't effing know.<p>All y'all want the fun of unprotected sex (rawdogging the ecosystem) and are starting to get burned by the VD's we old-timers have been hollerin' at you telling you will be coming the more you do this promiscuous dependency inclusion.<p>But hey. Enjoy it I guess. No skin off my nose.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 02:59:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217304</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217304</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217304</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you are blinded by an unprecedented optimism the rest of us simply cannot afford to entertain.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 02:29:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217084</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217084</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217084</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet, Phone Ban"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Narcissist's first strike: insist that the people preventing them from getting what they want are the problem, and setting the frame. All you can do is refuse to engage them in the frame, and deny them the luxury of shaping the engagement, which tends to fluster them even more.<p>Hopefully whoever elected this person will have second thoughts and boot them. It's quite clear they are more interested in aggregating power and creating edifi through which to abuse the public than representing them in good faith.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 23:43:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215905</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215905</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215905</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by salawat in "Claude Code may now request webcam access to assure user is present"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Then you must get one to monitor yourself for our corporatic overlord's benefit, pleb, or welcome to the enviable place known as "not their target demographic".<p>Where "target demographic" is a euphemism for "compliant people".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 15:12:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194422</link><dc:creator>salawat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194422</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194422</guid></item></channel></rss>