Hacker News: shadowfacts

New comment by shadowfacts in "Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

shadowfacts — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:32:29 +0000

It’s listed on the agenda here as “Automated License Plate Reader Contract.” https://mountainview.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352...

New comment by shadowfacts in "Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online"

shadowfacts — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 05:09:45 +0000

> The Constitution of the United States was a layman's document, not a lawyer's contract. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-constituti...

The Supreme Court is not the ultimate decider of what the layman's document means. It was wrong when it decided, for instance, Plessy v. Ferguson. The law that the Court upheld patently violated the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court was simply wrong.

New comment by shadowfacts in "Linda Yaccarino is leaving X"

shadowfacts — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:09:59 +0000

... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.

New comment by shadowfacts in "Should we design for iffy internet?"

shadowfacts — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 22:23:27 +0000

The big digital music stores are DRM-free these days (iTunes and Amazon both are). There's also Qobuz if you want to avoid the tech giants (though most of your money ends up going to record labels, so does it really matter?).

New comment by shadowfacts in "The 12-bit rainbow palette"

shadowfacts — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 01:27:21 +0000

Four characters counting the pound sign.

New comment by shadowfacts in "Out of the Fog"

shadowfacts — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 15:58:04 +0000

The Verge has been publishing non-tech related stories for ages. Technology still seems to be their main focus, but this isn't new.

New comment by shadowfacts in "Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data"

shadowfacts — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:44:08 +0000

They did not have "every right to remove him." As the article you linked says, Abrego Garcia was specifically granted a withholding of removal order.

New comment by shadowfacts in "Obituary for Cyc"

shadowfacts — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 03:26:47 +0000

A beanbag is a chair? Perhaps a chair should be something on which one can comfortably sit without breaking that has a back and four legs. I suppose then a horse would be a chair.

New comment by shadowfacts in "FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies"

shadowfacts — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:59:59 +0000

In my case, no small fraction of the traffic was from OpenAI and Anthropic. There were also other user agents that literally said "AI".

New comment by shadowfacts in "I ate and reviewed every snack in our office kitchen"

shadowfacts — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 01:18:37 +0000

> He straight-up ate someone else's salad?

... no, it's clearly a joke.

New comment by shadowfacts in "Apple squandered the Holy Grail"

shadowfacts — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:32:03 +0000

Soulver has indeed been doing this without large language models (so far as I know) for many years: https://soulver.app/

New comment by shadowfacts in "Why is Apple Rosetta 2 fast? (2022)"

shadowfacts — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 23:07:36 +0000

It is not directly accessible from user-space. Making it so requires kernel support. Apple published a set of patches for doing this on Linux: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/acc...

Without that kernel support, all processes in the VM (not just Rosetta-translated ones) are opted-in to TSO:

> Without selective enablement, the system opts all processes into this memory mode [TSO], which degrades performance for native ARM processes that don’t need it.

New comment by shadowfacts in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

shadowfacts — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:13:15 +0000

There is a separate, ongoing antitrust lawsuit over Google’s adtech business. Closing arguments in that case are scheduled for Nov. 25, next week: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/google-antitru...

New comment by shadowfacts in "Maybe Bluesky has "won""

shadowfacts — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:11:55 +0000

> When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison.

That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.

New comment by shadowfacts in "OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards"

shadowfacts — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 02:45:12 +0000

Yes. This is how, for example, Tailscale implements bring-your-own identity provider: https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc

It is, to date, the only non-selfhosted service with which I can use my self-hosted SSO setup.

New comment by shadowfacts in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

shadowfacts — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 01:24:00 +0000

If you genuinely believe that number, you have fallen for the propaganda. Ten million people did not enter the country in such a short time. DHS estimates the _total_ unauthorized immigrant population at around 11 million as of 2022.

https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/2024_0418_o...

New comment by shadowfacts in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

shadowfacts — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 01:01:30 +0000

> Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago?

Sure I can: "mass deportation now"

New comment by shadowfacts in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

shadowfacts — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 15:31:09 +0000

In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.

Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:

- A Texas teenager died after going to three emergency rooms and being misdiagnosed and denied treatment: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...

- Another Texas woman died after a miscarriage as a result of doctors not treating her due to the state's fetal heartbeat law: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...

- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...

- Another Georgia woman died because doctors delayed 20 hours after she arrived at a hospital—9 hours after she was diagnosed with sepsis—before treating her: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...

New comment by shadowfacts in "Lawsuit challenges Virginia City's use of cameras for warrantless surveillance"

shadowfacts — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:07:28 +0000

The police following one person’s car isn’t unconstitutional, but following everyone’s cars very much is. The IJ press release mentions this: the 4th Circuit (which covers Virginia) ruled several years ago that Baltimore’s near-continuous aerial surveillance was unconstitutional in part because it “ transcends mere augmentation of ordinary police capabilities.” I think there’s an entirely reasonable argument to be made that what the City of Norfolk is doing by contracting Flock to create a database of where every car has been for the past 30 days similarly crosses that line.

https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.p.pdf

New comment by shadowfacts in "US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash"

shadowfacts — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 15:01:20 +0000

It's not a random blog making some conjectures, Rick Hasen is a law professor who is an expert in this area and, moreover, he cites specifics statutes and DOJ information that's not all that ambiguous.