Hacker News: snarg

New comment by snarg in "Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable"

snarg — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 09:38:25 +0000

> If they can be used like that, why couldn't they be used... as phones?

To facilitate planned obsolescence, manufacturers stop providing OS updates after a relatively short time. And then they cease providing security patches after a... still relatively short time.

If you unlock the device and install a custom ROM, which may or may not function adequately for you to begin with, then you're probably also compromising secure boot, which is a problem for the security model of how many people use phones -- and many apps simply refuse to work with this setup (whereas the obsolete OS with no security patches is considered fine, apparently).

New comment by snarg in "Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after"

snarg — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:51:29 +0000

I honestly thought that we were agreed on the definition of AGI. My understanding classified it as a model that can build on its knowledge and better itself, teaching itself new tasks and techniques, adapting as necessary. I.e., not simply knowing enough techniques to impress some humans. By this definition, it doesn't matter if it's super-intelligent or if its knowledge is rudimentary, because given enough add-on hardware and power, it could become super-intelligent over time.

New comment by snarg in "Substance in broccoli, celery inhibits graying of black hair"

snarg — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:35:38 +0000

It ignores the practicality of human consumption, too.

New comment by snarg in "Substance in broccoli, celery inhibits graying of black hair"

snarg — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 11:30:47 +0000

What kind of insane metric is mg/kcal when comparing foods like radicchio vs. sweet green peppers?

New comment by snarg in "Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace"

snarg — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 05:43:45 +0000

"students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills."

So... not a biased assessment, or anything.

New comment by snarg in "When muscles work out, they help neurons to grow, a new study shows"

snarg — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 15:11:41 +0000

You jest, but when i was in school, i used to do pushups, situps, planks, curls, etc. while studying. It helped quite a lot with data retention.

New comment by snarg in "Using SQLite as storage for web server static content"

snarg — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:50:34 +0000

Using sqlite keeps a persistent open database connection, so you only have to send requests for content that sqlite has probably cached. When reading static files, you open, read, and close a file with every request, meaning more context switches, even though the filesystem layer will have cached the file content. If you want to speed this up, the appropriate solution is to add a caching front-end, not to turn everything into a database. It will be faster than using sqlite and easier to maintain and troubleshoot.

New comment by snarg in "What Visa earnings tell us about the state of the payments industry"

snarg — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 17:00:28 +0000

So do "fact"/"faction" and "hostel"/"hospital". Mixing these up would be confusing and incorrect. Seems like a silly argument to make.

New comment by snarg in "GMC made a motorhome that pumped sewage through its exhaust on purpose"

snarg — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 06:07:37 +0000

I don't know about where you live, but in my town, people are required to pick up their dogs' poop, wherever it may be.

New comment by snarg in "GMC made a motorhome that pumped sewage through its exhaust on purpose"

snarg — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 06:07:37 +0000

I don't know about where you live, but in my town, people are required to pick up their dogs' poop, wherever it may be.

New comment by snarg in "The Alaska Supreme Court takes aerial surveillance's threat to privacy seriously"

snarg — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 17:45:22 +0000

It's not about what is or isn't a public thoroughfare. It's about what is or isn't "a reasonable expectation of privacy." It just turns out that, because people are expected to walk/drive on streets, and people are also generally expected to have functional eyes, your front yard doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

New comment by snarg in "How to compare two packed bitfields without having to unpack each field (2019)"

snarg — Wed, 22 May 2024 19:07:56 +0000

Those branches are unnecessary and easily avoided.

New comment by snarg in "Google Podcasts is gone – and so is my faith in Google"

snarg — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 16:58:59 +0000

No, it means what it said: plain YouTube. One of YouTube Music's main selling points (vs. say, the old Google Play Music) is that it incorporates YouTube, so you can, say, add YT mixes to your YTM playlists.

New comment by snarg in "Research suggests gut microbiome plays crucial role in COPD"

snarg — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 08:26:30 +0000

It seems like this could be explained by something as banal as sinus congestion causing/worsening COPD. And the link between gut health and general sinus congestion seems natural to me.

Articles like this tend to paint gut health effects in some kind of supernatural light.

New comment by snarg in "LLaVA-1.6: Improved reasoning, OCR, and world knowledge"

snarg — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 07:58:47 +0000

I used it in, what, 2004? 2005? It was pretty good, especially compared to today's typical corporate on-prem search options, e.g. Sharepoint or Confluence, both of which are almost certainly inferior to a physical filing cabinet.

New comment by snarg in "Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars"

snarg — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 06:35:28 +0000

I wholeheartedly disagree that rental companies are a bad place for EVs.

When I'm traveling and I know that I'm going to have to do a week of heavy driving, I prefer an EV to save on gas. I've rented a Tesla Model 3 from Hertz a couple of times for this purpose: when I did the calculations, the cheaper per-mile cost of using superchargers more than made up for the difference in rental price vs. an economy rental (the addition of free destination chargers when i found them was a bonus). The general driving experience was obviously better than an economy rental, as well.

I know it's not the case everywhere, but along my routes, I was able to find convenient superchargers in parking lots of stores that I wanted to visit (bubble tea, Target, etc), and the car was usually finished charging before i was finished in the store. The couple of times that i stopped at superchargers that didn't have a useful establishment nearby, i was able to appease the kids with the built-in video games.

When it was time to return the car, there was no run-around trying to find a gas station to fill up near the rental center: you can return the car with a quarter charge, and it's no problem, Hertz doesn't charge any additional charging fee.

It would have been nice if i didn't have to use key cards, and if i could use the app to, say, precondition the car. It also would have been nice if the videos saved by "sentry mode" were easier to batch clear. But these are quibbles; the rentals were absolutely worth it for me.

New comment by snarg in "Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs"

snarg — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 23:29:10 +0000

libnaw uses it to wrap and authenticate connect() and accept() calls.

frida uses it to wrap and inject... anything.

These programs have all been around for quite a long time. I think libnaw has been around since early 2000s at least.

New comment by snarg in "Google promised to delete sensitive data. It logged my abortion clinic visit"

snarg — Tue, 09 May 2023 14:27:07 +0000

This is a ridiculous argument. Google Maps is all but useless with location history turned off. Google offers the illusion of choice because the option makes it sound like they respect your privacy, while they're strongly motivated to convince you to hand over your data.

New comment by snarg in "System76 AMD-Only Laptop Returns"

snarg — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 06:11:03 +0000

I have trouble understanding why every Linux-friendly laptop vendor insists on this godawful arrow key layout. It was a bad idea when Apple did it, and it was a bad idea when you copied them. Apple has even backtracked on this terrible design, but the copycats never got the memo.

I'm never, ever buying a laptop with full-height horizontal keys but half-height vertical keys.

New comment by snarg in "I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)"

snarg — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:27:07 +0000

I think, once you've reached terminal velocity, all fall distances are equally impressive. At that point, it's probably best to judge by outcome.