Hacker News: sterlind

New comment by sterlind in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

sterlind — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:43:37 +0000

alternatively, keep using ad blockers.

Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.

consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.

New comment by sterlind in "Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide"

sterlind — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:32:18 +0000

> Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.

I've been shouting this from the mountaintops.

New comment by sterlind in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

sterlind — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:42:33 +0000

interesting. so if you get a bacterial infection, you plan to succumb to it rather than take antibiotics?

New comment by sterlind in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

sterlind — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:19:48 +0000

also, you can do a lot to finetune or repurpose an open weight model. much more easily than you can mod closed source binaries.

New comment by sterlind in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

sterlind — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:17:34 +0000

llama was only three years ago? holy smokes! the industry is advancing so fast.

New comment by sterlind in "Datalog Disassembly"

sterlind — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:30:59 +0000

ooh souffle! wonder how they avoid saturation explosion. that's doomed my souffle projects in the past. but obviously they've found a way to partition (maybe by block?)

New comment by sterlind in "Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop"

sterlind — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:32:58 +0000

seems like:

- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.

- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.

- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.

thoughts:

- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.

- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)

- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?

New comment by sterlind in "Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%"

sterlind — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:21:08 +0000

bizarrely self-destructive behavior from XBox. they've been shooting themselves in the foot for years; apparently they've decided to exchange the gun for a flamethrower in hopes of cauterizing the stump.

New comment by sterlind in "Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM"

sterlind — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:04:01 +0000

it depends on your prompting. LLMs can generate beautiful code, or absolute slop.

New comment by sterlind in "Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor"

sterlind — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:45:20 +0000

again, you can easily prove me wrong by finding a single professional font designer who uses FontForge as their daily driver.

New comment by sterlind in "Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor"

sterlind — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:27:53 +0000

please find me a single professional font designer who uses FontForge. just one.

I use FontForge because I'm a pleb hobbyist without a Mac, but it's like comparing yachts and life rafts.

New comment by sterlind in "Show HN: Lean4 Datalog DSL Based on Google Zanzibar for AI Projects"

sterlind — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 05:02:18 +0000

as a lean noob but a datalog novice, could you explain how it ties to lean? I thought of lean as a proof language rather than a programming language. don't you have to write out every step yourself? or.. hrm. is lean actually a pure functional language with dependent types, and the tactics are just functions? or are tactics like type-level functions, but lean can support regular functions too?

New comment by sterlind in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"

sterlind — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:40:41 +0000

I think by "update" they mean "re-up," as in you need another depot injection every six months.

New comment by sterlind in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"

sterlind — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:36:55 +0000

assume you have a population of IV drug users. as a society, would you prefer to spend nothing and see them develop HIV, or to spend some and control the HIV?

you don't have to care about the drug users at all. even if you treat them as pests rather than humans, we frequently vaccinate pests for public health measures. pathogens will spill over to populations you do care about, they'll create a drain on the healthcare system, they'll harbor other opportunistic infections. it's not sanitary.

this is completely leaving aside that some drug addicts can and do turn their life around, and that HIV is a horrible illness nobody should have to deal with, even if it's "their fault."

New comment by sterlind in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

sterlind — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:40:00 +0000

what happens if the defendant pleads not guilty? does the public defender not bother to show up to trial? do they not represent the defendant? what is this charade?

I found the verdict here: https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp... but no transcript is given. it has to be requested, it seems.

New comment by sterlind in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

sterlind — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:25:15 +0000

does Canada not have public defenders? I know they're overworked but, c'mon, surely they can do better than they did?

I want to see the transcripts.

New comment by sterlind in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

sterlind — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:23:25 +0000

there's no time machine, but at least the charges are removed from the poor man's record.

he should probably try to seek damages from the state for his wrongful conviction (and get his lawyer disbarred for grossly incompetent counsel!)

New comment by sterlind in "Our position on open-weights models"

sterlind — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:16:10 +0000

wouldn't stop AI companies from continuing to develop using their current infrastructure.

the West could retaliate by halting shipments of photoresist and other materials to China.

meanwhile, Intel second-sources Nvidia and starts pumping out GPUs.

the economic fallout would be devastating as trade wars and export bans on both sides make Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs look like NAFTA.

New comment by sterlind in "Our position on open-weights models"

sterlind — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:13:12 +0000

cryptography, too. remember when that was regulated? strong cryptography had to be carefully controlled as a munition, for national security!

New comment by sterlind in "Our position on open-weights models"

sterlind — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:10:17 +0000

> The most compelling argument would be that by limiting the use of open-weight models in the US that it will reduce cases of accidents like the recent attack on Hugging Face.

an attack done by a closed-weight model (GPT-6) and defended against by an open-weight model (GLM-5.2) precisely because OAI positioned themselves as gatekeepers for cyber capabilities.

if anything, open-weight models shift the battle towards defenders because they can actually run them.