Hacker News: stefan_

New comment by stefan_ in "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"

stefan_ — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 15:35:25 +0000

And I immediately turned it off because that just invites utter churn and stupidity. Part of that is just CC though, their compaction is miles behind Codex.

New comment by stefan_ in "WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload"

stefan_ — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:53:42 +0000

I have no problem with WSL2 being a VM of sorts if thet at least had VirtualBox of 2010 vintage features like properly integrating USB devices, not whatever this usbipd crap is, or a window manager that doesn’t inexplicably die and require a full machine restart.

New comment by stefan_ in "Apple Pass Designer"

stefan_ — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:06:31 +0000

I suppose it's a fun insight, a solemn moment, a Fortune 10 company where AI doesn't exist and they make whimsical graphical design programs for their little AOL world.

New comment by stefan_ in "Pi 1.0"

stefan_ — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:55:56 +0000

They are not, Pi is the vim or mechanical keyboard of the pre-AI era. Didn't matter then, doesn't matter now. Will generate infinite discourse regardless.

New comment by stefan_ in "Gemini 4 Argon"

stefan_ — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:41:30 +0000

Nice idea, then they want to make a quick little kernel module, oops, you secure booted, this is not your system, can't load...

Since LLMs have been so successful at finding exploits it's been clearer than ever that the people so obsessed with enshittifying every system with ineffective (other than pissing you off and wasting your time) "secure boot" functionality were really just too ignorant to succeed at actual novel security work, so they focused on this make believe crap. Well, glad that's over.

New comment by stefan_ in "Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones"

stefan_ — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:18:43 +0000

The internet exists and can transfer your data with no customs and borders, so if you are at risk of being snatched, the correct choice is to not carry a phone (or laptop, or..) at all.

New comment by stefan_ in "DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)"

stefan_ — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:58:45 +0000

I don't understand why half the comments here are about the author list, this is very common practice in e.g. large-scale physics experiments and biology, and every new GPT release from OpenAI equally had papers with tons of authors

New comment by stefan_ in "The Copilot+ PC brand is dead"

stefan_ — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:51:40 +0000

We laugh at Google being deadly behind with Gemini but is there a place that has fumbled it like Microsoft? I guess Apple comes close, but with them you get the feeling they were never in it to begin with.

New comment by stefan_ in "I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB"

stefan_ — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:36:12 +0000

Citation needed. Have you read some of the skills slop Anthropic were pushing at some point? Here is "frontend design":

> Consider Chanel's advice: before leaving the house, take a look in the mirror and remove one accessory. Human creatives have memory and always try to do something new, so if you have a space to quickly jot down notes about what you've tried, it can help you in future passes.

How about "canvas design"?

> THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLE: The topic is a subtle, niche reference embedded within the art itself - not always literal, always sophisticated. Someone familiar with the subject should feel it intuitively, while others simply experience a masterful abstract composition. The design philosophy provides the aesthetic language. The deduced topic provides the soul - the quiet conceptual DNA woven invisibly into form, color, and composition.

New comment by stefan_ in "Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips"

stefan_ — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:16:51 +0000

Curiously NVIDIA have long allowed consumer GPUs to be upgraded with larger memory chips - they could very easily reject booting those configurations. This is something done almost exclusively by unsavory Chinese actors who then sell on the bare retail PCBs (core removed, since they use different PCBs and heatsinks) to various scammers that foist them upon unsuspecting retail buyers.

In short, someone at NVIDIA really hates retail, but loves Chinese sanction busters.

New comment by stefan_ in "Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death"

stefan_ — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:51:24 +0000

But.. they did have that? What a bizarre argument.

And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.

New comment by stefan_ in "I am often wrong"

stefan_ — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:50:23 +0000

The problem here is that the latest Claude models have gone off the deep end in their communication, and there seems to be neither awareness nor willingness to fix this. "Having your writing and talking turn into Claude is the risk nothing names" or what vapid strange meaningless thing would Opus say.

In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?

stefan_ — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:16:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-schools-black-students-segregation.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49778400

Points: 13

# Comments: 3

New comment by stefan_ in "Laya the open source version of Jev"

stefan_ — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:12:00 +0000

That's part of the irony here I guess. In specialized fields, think computer vision, there were lots of teams whose innovative state of the art model was essentially just a function of the limitless compute they could throw at the problem. Now there are just people with even bigger sticks.

There are lots of scenarios where specialized models still are the only option for real time, power efficiency, and so on. And transformers and other tech behind LLMs can equally produce better specialized models. But no sympathy for those who confused compute with innovation.

New comment by stefan_ in "Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen?"

stefan_ — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:23:11 +0000

While we are on this, is there a comprehensive guide on how to "theft-proof" your iPhone? Not in the sense of preventing the theft, but rather the fallout on all our various online service access.

Using the iPhone backup to setup a new phone is a good reminder every time that not half of the stuff comes back correctly..

New comment by stefan_ in "German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol"

stefan_ — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 09:11:47 +0000

Theres probably some tender that says it must be a "open platform" "open ecosystem" "modular vendor independent" whatever. So you upload some slop to GitHub and tick the box.

New comment by stefan_ in "Dario, Please"

stefan_ — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 21:40:24 +0000

How could agents take over the internet yet refuse to shutdown your PC when you prompt them to on your PC? Of course the answer is that the lobotomized version you run is not the same they are running. Which makes for "intent", certainly "negligence", but hell freezes over before anyone will prosecute a tech company.

New comment by stefan_ in "Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"

stefan_ — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:33:26 +0000

X has been the most shameless, after all brand name advertisers left. Here is one state-level actor campaign that has been going on for months:

https://imgur.com/a/HZwfyNH

It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.

This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.

New comment by stefan_ in "Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine"

stefan_ — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:13:22 +0000

This is pure sunk cost fallacy. CNNs were from the deep learning ImageNet heydays, but now everything in that domain is equally done better by transformers. All you are doing is wasting area and saddling software with outdated hardware, and myopic PMs insisting on its use will create inferior products. Now that sounds a lot like the Apple AI efforts..

New comment by stefan_ in "Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time"

stefan_ — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:39:36 +0000

Russia hasn't exported products in over a month now. If Diesel prices hit $6 today, it's purely because 6 months after the US president started his war on Iran, Iranian forces in Yemen have routed the Saudis and cut off the second of two SA oil export routes, damaging a vital pipeline in the process, sending crude to $100 and beyond.