Hacker News: skygazer

New comment by skygazer in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

skygazer — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:02:54 +0000

I think their intent is actually safety. They employ two touch interaction models: Flexible while not moving and simplified while driving. For instance, keyboard input becomes unavailable while moving and you must rely on Siri. I personally find it irritating, particularly when I am a passenger, but I get it.

New comment by skygazer in "What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?"

skygazer — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:36:42 +0000

People confabulate. The setup further invites it. We mindlessly fill voids and call it opinion, and occassionally even believe ourselves. "Plausibility" is a really low bar. Rigor is tiring and we'd rather not invest as no one demands it, anyway.

New comment by skygazer in "Is my blue your blue?"

skygazer — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:06:10 +0000

I'm not sure what's going on, but in Chrome my median point is heavily on the blue side but in Safari it's on the Green side. Also, at least in Safari, reset leads to a series of perceptually unchanging turquois screens -- it seems a bug. Refreshing fixes it for the next run.

New comment by skygazer in "Apple Store Union Staff at Closing Location Accuse Company of Retaliation"

skygazer — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:51:29 +0000

Not paywalled for me: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/apple-store...

New comment by skygazer in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

skygazer — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:51:32 +0000

Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald? "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Holding contradictory ideas isn't the laudable skill. Any uncritical person can believe conflicting things without being troubled by them. The genius is holding such ideas in disbelief long enough to let evidence alter or evict them.

New comment by skygazer in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

skygazer — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:02:41 +0000

I always sort of speculated that sports existed to channel what would otherwise be human tendencies toward violence; an outlet enablining more stable civilization. Even though I largely ignore sports, I appreciate it over possible alternatives.

New comment by skygazer in "Robert Mueller Has Died"

skygazer — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:56:21 +0000

What I find most interesting is that HN posters seem to overwhelmingly skew liberal, but HN flaggers lean extremist “conservative”. They rarely post, but completely control the discourse of the posters. Thats a crazy dynamic.

New comment by skygazer in "Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes"

skygazer — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:24:32 +0000

Out of curiosity, if you asked for the same text extraction multiple times, each inside fresh contexts, is it likely to fabricate unique quotes each time? And if so, a) might that be a procedure we train humans to do to better understand LLM unreliability, and 2) and instrumentalize the behavior to measure answer overlap with non LLM statistical tools?

Also, quote-presence testing/linking against source would seem to be a trivial layer to build on a chat interface, no LLM required. Just highlight and link the longest common strings.

New comment by skygazer in "Hundreds of Millions of iPhones Can Be Hacked With a New Tool Found in the Wild"

skygazer — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:11:20 +0000

Edit: Oop, I misread! Right, yes, the change up was arguably not entirely boring. Some people were excited at least.

Originally: To be the annoying pedant, version numbers did still monotonically increase, even with the gap, because each version is >= to the last. The mono means a single direction, not a step size of one.

New comment by skygazer in "We were right about Havana syndrome"

skygazer — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 02:52:14 +0000

The rationale for rejecting the syndrome was the reported scientific consensus of the impossibility of such a device being smaller than a large truck. The revelation that such a device is possible, exists, works and is full of Russian parts seemed to change things. Further, the coincidental appearance of Russian agents on video within operational radius of incidents wearing backpacks sized to contain the device raises some questions.

New comment by skygazer in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

skygazer — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:58:28 +0000

Probably your DNS -- the archive.today guy is a stickler that dns must pass client subnet to partially deanonymize visitors, and for instance, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 server doesn't pass it. I think that's still the case.

New comment by skygazer in "Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep"

skygazer — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:45:27 +0000

I’ve had tinnitus since I was maybe 5 years old, maybe from my frequent ear infections at the time? I remember discovering it during nap time and noting that silence had a high-pitched, discordant set of tones to it. But I thought it receded when normal sounds, like people talking, tv or music, or wind occurred. It was just the sound of silence.

I still have it, and now I know what it is. I think it’s worse now, but I can still unconsciously ignore it most of the time, although knowing what it is and that it’s aberrant and not something everyone hears has made it psychologically more irritating than when I was young.

New comment by skygazer in "Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes"

skygazer — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 05:32:10 +0000

Is it “plagiarism” to misattribute hallucinated quotes? Not that a whole lot of sloppy, unprofessional shortcuts weren’t taken, but plagiarism doesn’t seem like the right word, as quotes are almost definitionally not plagiarism. But maybe these were paraphrasings masquerading as quotes, so maybe that’s the difference.

New comment by skygazer in "Apple AI servers unused in warehouses due to low Apple Intelligence usage"

skygazer — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:10:00 +0000

I don’t believe that’s true. Private Cloud Compute is restricted to newer phones that already support on device Apple Intelligence. It’s just that the on device model is basically limited to simple stuff. Safari page summarization and the text rewriting features are run in the cloud. You can tell because those features go away without a network connection, and don’t cause the phone to warm.

New comment by skygazer in "Claude becomes number one app on the U.S. App Store"

skygazer — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 03:43:50 +0000

I think people that aren’t objecting to AI mass surveillance of populations: haven’t recognized how thorough and invasive these technologies will become; think the current governments share their values and lists of enemies; naively think government priorities will never change, and that scopes will never increase.

New comment by skygazer in "Our Agreement with the Department of War"

skygazer — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 21:22:37 +0000

OAI: “If they stretch, reinterpret or beak the law with our systems, well, that’s on them. Good luck everybody!”

New comment by skygazer in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

skygazer — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 04:54:16 +0000

Perhaps Trump's DOD objects specifically to Anthropic models themselves declining to do immoral and illegal things, and not something just stipulated in an ignorable contract. That would give room for Sam to throw some public CYA into a contract, while neutering model safety to their requirements.

New comment by skygazer in "I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk"

skygazer — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:44:29 +0000

Don’t become numb. They want normal people to be depoliticized, silent, and withdrawn. We’re so much easier to subjugate and exploit that way: hopeless and spineless. They take more and more each day.

New comment by skygazer in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

skygazer — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 07:07:04 +0000

I haven’t noticed it consume any additional battery. It doesn’t actually connect to a vpn server, or reencrypt traffic. It’s just a hack to deny select connections. I often do end up turning it off after a few days, though, because some times I need tracking redirects to work, and I’m too lazy to always whitelist.

New comment by skygazer in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

skygazer — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:32:09 +0000

1Blocker, with their in-app tracker blocking turned on, will block Apple News ads on iOS/iPadOS and will also block ads in Google News and free to play games. I guess you can’t block tracking without also blocking the ads. It installs a local VPN profile that blocks connections to hosts typically blocked with dns based ad blockers. They’ve increasingly hidden the feature in the app, for some reason.