<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: strangeattractr</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=strangeattractr</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:32:53 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=strangeattractr" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 03:26:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984560</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984560</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984560</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "AI behavior guardrails should be public"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Have you bothered to look at all? Read the output of the model when asked about why it has the behaviour it does. Look at the plethora of images it generates that are not just historically inaccurate but absurdly so. It tells you "heres a diverse X" when you ask for X. Yet asking for pictures of Koreans generates only Asian people but prompts for Scots or French people in historical periods generate mostly non-white people. You're being purposefully obtuse, Google has had racism complaints about previous models, talks often about AI safety and avoiding 'bias'. You're trying to argue that it's more likely that the training data had an inherent bias against generating white people in images purely by chance?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:11:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39461430</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39461430</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39461430</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Xstate: State machines and statecharts for the modern web"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use it for in component logic in vue. Used to have a collection of boolean or enum variables that represent the state of the component and change according to actions e.g. const isLoadingUser = ref(true). This works but often leads to unforeseen states being possible and just isn't very clear. In contrast, with xstate you define all states and legal transitions and wire everything up to send events, you can write guards that prevent transitions. I transitioned all my complicated multi stage forms to xstate and since doing so they've become substantially more robust. I highly recommend trying to out.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Mar 2023 22:46:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333871</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333871</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333871</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "The chat control proposal does not belong in democratic societies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But what if people are saying things we don’t like?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Mar 2023 03:16:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35322481</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35322481</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35322481</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> There was a lot of evidence supporting the wet market theory at the time and supporting that it wasn't made in a lab<p>You do realise that when people say it was a lab leak, they don't necessarily mean it was made in a lab. They are merely saying that the origin of the pandemic was a virus escaping the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology via one of the workers/researchers there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2023 01:28:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34951878</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34951878</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34951878</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah who cares about making needless changes to art. A lot of European art is white centric, maybe we should paint other races into it to make it more inclusive?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Feb 2023 13:53:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34846942</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34846942</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34846942</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Seawater electrolysis by adjusting the local reaction environment of a catalyst"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Pretty sure it usually produces chlorine gas and caustic soda, but I could be wrong.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2023 00:12:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635259</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635259</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635259</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Source? The Japanese have long-term contracts with LNG producers where did you see the threat of these being impacted by government policy?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:26:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100852</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100852</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100852</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Musk is clearly an incredibly brittle narcissist even by billionaire standards, he is probably the least suited person to owning a platform like Twitter because he seems to misunderstand the trade-offs inherent in the social media business. I find the cult of sycophants that idolise Musk as the real life Tony Stark nauseating. The hero worship of people claiming he's saving free speech by making the platform more restrictive than it's ever been has been hilarious to watch.<p>However, there was no viable EV market prior to Musk. The US wasn't launching rockets into space before SpaceX. Those are two things that many people thought weren't possible. Pretending that life is just a series of coin flips we can't influence and that all the people who've achieved more than us are merely more fortuitous rather than more deserving is just a coping mechanism. Almost nobody would have made the investments he made given the same opportunities.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:06:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34046152</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34046152</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34046152</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Many journalists are singularly obsessed with the eradication of 'harmful' or 'unsafe' accounts from Twitter. They are particularly concerned about doxxing when it happens to political figures they're sympathetic to or journalists. Technically all home addresses are public information, just as FAA data is. Yet people get rather nervous when their home address ends up on the internet and rightly so.<p>Their entire argument is about the prevention of the exact sort of thing that Musk alleges happened to a car carrying his child - real world harm from online activity. So why exactly are they upset about this change in policy that while clearly motivated by self-interest rather than any principle, technically aligns with some of their goals? It's because they want to be able to doxx people they think deserve it. Because when they doxx it's journalism, but when their enemies doxx it's stochastic terrorism.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:05:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34033629</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34033629</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34033629</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I want free speech, hence I think Elon is a tremendous hypocrite for enacting this policy. Once you start deciding whether or not things are 'safe' to say you will end up in the exact situation Jack, et al. were in when they were censoring just with different biases. He doesn't seem to understand that and is doomed to repeat their mistakes.<p>There is some irony now seeing those that didn't believe the banning of accounts arbitrarily was an issue under previous management decrying this move by Elon.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2022 05:44:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010907</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010907</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010907</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "A software change allowed FTX to use client money"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Junk bonds are bonds with high credit risk, what’s wrong with selling them to customers who are after high yields?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Dec 2022 03:02:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33979517</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33979517</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33979517</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah I feel the same way about food, all food is the same now. I eat at McDonald's every day and the menu barely ever changes, they only ever seem to offer variations of this meat between two pieces of bread concept.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Dec 2022 06:17:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951498</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "Fuzzing ping(8) and finding a 24 year old bug"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What does the (8) mean after ping or in other command's man pages?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Dec 2022 04:38:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33940149</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33940149</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33940149</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "The Twitter Files"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a common delusion from people who want to believe it. Those pictures are all over my timeline all the time, he's doing a bad job banning people who post them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Dec 2022 22:06:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847918</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847918</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847918</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "UK ditches ban on 'legal but harmful' online content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> This guy was being g tracked down because he was a quarantine dodger during a time when everyone was trying hard to contain the virus so it didn't break out and kill people.<p>Are you capable of understanding nuance. Do you sincerely think my complaint is that a man was punished for breaking quarantine laws? My critique was of the sum total of the restrictions and the hysterical reaction of the public.<p>> The only banned Japanese porn is the kiddy stuff, but even then the law is around any kiddy porn stuff, filmed, animated, drawn, or otherwise.<p>Just simply false, all it requires is a google search [1]. The border force has blocked the import of any 18+ material from Japan. This ban probably affects less than a thousand Australians, but I included it to give people a taste of the Australian style of governance. Grant sweeping powers to enforcers and hope they don't abuse them.<p>> The backdooring of security was discussed at large in the media,<p>One particular bill in 2018 received attention, mostly from international media and orgs. This bill [1] passed last year and gave the AFP further ability to backdoor encryption as well as the power to modify your data and impersonate you. There were minor mentions prior to it being tabled. The day it was passed in parliament there wasn't an article about it on any major news provider. Most people are unaware this even happened.<p>> and to the best of anyone's knowledge hasn't even attempted to be implemented<p>Do you get much insight into what the AFP, ASIO and ASIS are working on usually? Yes, I'm sure that they make it public knowledge that they've implemented this. That wouldn't defeat the intended purpose at all. Can I clarify, they sought these powers just to have them they don't actually want to use them? And it's my viewpoint that's skewed?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgz8md/japanese-hentai-is-now-banned-in-australia" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgz8md/japanese-hentai-is-no...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/surveillance-legislation-amendment-identify-and-disrupt-act-2021" rel="nofollow">https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Dec 2022 00:32:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810438</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810438</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810438</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "UK ditches ban on 'legal but harmful' online content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>More people were dying from COVID in June and July in Melbourne than at any point during the pandemic. Case numbers look low because nobody even bothers getting the PCR anymore unless they work in health.<p>The public can't be trusted to do the right thing. Many people aren't getting additional doses of the vaccine so their immunity has weakened. Why are we not in lockdown right now? It's literally costing lives as we speak.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2022 22:55:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809194</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809194</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809194</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "UK ditches ban on 'legal but harmful' online content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They surely meant the booming of rubber bullets and riot shields. Victoria boomed like never before.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2022 04:49:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33797130</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33797130</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33797130</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "UK ditches ban on 'legal but harmful' online content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm genuinely confused by your point. Are you saying that because other countries have quarantine restrictions, that makes their pandemic approach equivalently restrictive as Australia was? Victoria spent over 250 days in lockdown between March 2020 and October 2021. We had curfews at 6pm for weeks and were allowed out of the house for 1 hour a day and not beyond 5km of our houses. Are you seriously asserting that if the US enacted these restrictions, I would be on here professing that these were the pinnacle of freedom?<p>What I will remark is that US citizens have certain constitutional protections which we do not that in theory inhibit their government's ability to enact restrictions like these i.e. "freedom of movement".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2022 01:32:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795805</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795805</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795805</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by strangeattractr in "UK ditches ban on 'legal but harmful' online content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Multiple police were out looking for him for days, they appealed to the public for info about his whereabouts. His face and name were plastered all over national media. I live in a different state and this guy was all anyone could talk about. People were desperate for him to be caught. If you saw this man, you were supposed to call the emergency services.<p>For context, I have never seen a murderer or armed robbery command this level of attention.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2022 01:11:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795645</link><dc:creator>strangeattractr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795645</guid></item></channel></rss>