Hacker News: stubish

New comment by stubish in "Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet"

stubish — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 02:11:46 +0000

A bot owners enshittification is a site admins salvation. The toggle is trivial to turn on or off. What will site admins do I wonder?

New comment by stubish in "Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet"

stubish — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 02:07:07 +0000

Capitalism, starting the moment TLD registrars first bid for the monopoly to charge rent. And continuing today, where I think only Cloudflare offer below or at cost domain registration, charging nothing themselves and just passing on the other mandatory fees to the rent seekers. It has had centralization at its heart since the beginning, when someone had to allocate IP addresses and everyone else had to agree (or we would have internets and not The Internet), which enabled this. I wonder if it would have turned out differently if, instead of central IP address allocation, clients had generated a UUID and it was accepted on The Internet unless consensus agreed it wasn't unique? But I don't think we knew how to do that then and technical limitations. Heck, crypto export laws would have killed it and required a central authority to prove that a UUID was you and not an imposter.

New comment by stubish in "McDonald's Is Using AI to Dynamically Price Its Burgers"

stubish — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:29:06 +0000

I'm surprised the market accepted this sort of franchisee set pricing. When I saw how airport prices differed from regular prices, I just tried harder to avoid airport food. Its a world where people drive distances for a cent per liter in petrol, but they don't pay attention to where they can get their same dinner cheaper?

New comment by stubish in "McDonald's Is Using AI to Dynamically Price Its Burgers"

stubish — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:22:50 +0000

"always free to determine the final price" indicates they are aware they are forcing collusion and creating an illegal cartel. Head office telling two competing franchises how much to charge is essentially the same as two competing franchisees agreeing to pricing over a round of golf. If it gets that far, will be interesting to see who ends up holding that bag.

New comment by stubish in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

stubish — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:06:35 +0000

Once you change the artwork and branding, why is there no legal right to sell? Your defense against cloning are trademark, patent, copyright and trade secret. And the lawyers and money to enforce it and the courts to agree. And if the AI does it, rather than you feeding it copyrighted or trademarked assets, then did you violate copyright or trademark law or did the AI company or does this no longer make sense in a post AI world? The article touches on how current AI services launder copyright and trademark in the 'choose one' section.

New comment by stubish in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

stubish — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:44:07 +0000

The article gives the timeframe at a decade or more. But I think it is safe to say that when it can happen, it will happen. IBM PC popular? Clone it and get in on the profits. Flappy Birds becomes popular? Hundreds of copies get released trying to get in on the money. Wordle? Even more. Article talks about moats to stop this and how changes in IP law enforcement are eroding them. We already have AI companies complaining about competitors stealing their efforts, unable to appreciate the irony on how the models were initially created and the precedents they set. Maybe the sinophobes will be right and Deepseek just a cheap knockoff of American AI, but will you care if the price is right?

New comment by stubish in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

stubish — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:28:49 +0000

Recreating the IBM PC bios, enabling clone PCs and changing the market completely?

One of the points the article makes is that copying is now essentially free. So if you spend money building something, someone else can copy it and use all the money they didn't spend marketing their version. And why license software anyway, when you can just clone it and even tweak it better towards your business cases? Will you be paying your Adobe subscription or buying the knockoff version of Photoshop?

New comment by stubish in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

stubish — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:14:44 +0000

He is mentioning GTA a lot because the article is a warning to the big players. Today, you can repeatably clone games from 90s. Next year, Rockstar's moat against clones might be down to branding, lawyers and money. And the way the IP laws are going, lawyers might not be much help. And money might not help either if the clone is made by a behemoth like 10cent or Meta. Maybe Meta wants the Fortnight ecosystem but doesn't want to pay for Epic. Maybe 10cent wants a share of that GTA6 money and tweaks a GTA6 clone for the Asian market.

New comment by stubish in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

stubish — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 02:55:43 +0000

This is one of the points he is making. It might not be legal, but it is certainly allowed with precedents being set in courts and policies being turned into law by politicians. He seems quite explicit in stating that what he is doing now with multiple 90s era games will be what happens with this years games next year, and IP protections are getting eroded at such a rate that even the big budget games get cloned with impunity. One of the quotes is about Rockstar's defense being a brand fortress and money.

New comment by stubish in "An OpenAI agent escaped its sandbox by hiding questions in DNS lookups"

stubish — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:06:17 +0000

It doesn't even need to be prison. Just that someone needs to be responsible. If you are using an AI agent and nobody else has taken responsibility, then it is you. So far no individual or group of individuals are responsible for these actions. As it stands nobody is responsible, or 'the company' is responsible, or worse 'the model' is responsible. And if you defer responsibility to a multibillion dollar corp, nothing happens for all practical purposes with legal issues just the cost of doing business and dragged out for decades. All the individuals in a position to be responsible are shielded by the company and money and apparently have no need to worry because they are just following orders. It is hardly surprising AI popularity is so low in English speaking countries using American for-profit AI.

New comment by stubish in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

stubish — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:50:38 +0000

Yes, how can a bot determine that? Humans make a judgement call and take responsibility. And maybe a judge makes a judgement if it was a crime or a mistake.

New comment by stubish in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

stubish — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:13:55 +0000

It seems pretty fundamental concept in most modern civilizations. Pick pocketing and purse snatching is illegal despite the property being publicly accessible. We do need reliable courts to determine intent.

New comment by stubish in "US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'"

stubish — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 03:15:36 +0000

Brilliant move by the Australian Government to combine the algorithm opt-out with other restrictions. All the headlines are just about opt-out, and the assumption is the US is complaining about opt-out and claiming it is censorship. I suspect the actual claim of censorship is about putting the "onus on platforms to stop harmful content, such as illegal pornography and videos promoting disordered eating, from being shared" (from another BBC article, and similar in AU news sources). I expect manosphere stuff and maybe Nazi will end up in there too, or added later once laws are in place.

New comment by stubish in "Executive order on H-1B nonimmigrant visa administration"

stubish — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:22:51 +0000

Messaging over here does not ignore that. A big chunk in Australia is about stopping exports of oil and coal, or at the very least taxing the exports more and making it more expensive. You might have to listen to people and organizations actually concerned though, rather than politicians intent on doing the bare minimum to capture the climate vote.

New comment by stubish in "Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres"

stubish — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:28:05 +0000

This is about getting the planner to more effectively use your 'proper indexes', concerned with the edge cases where it currently does not.

New comment by stubish in "Creatine improves muscle mass and cognitive function even without exercise"

stubish — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 01:26:15 +0000

Locked up and waiting for signals to release doesn't do much good.

New comment by stubish in "Microsoft Brings "Age Verification" System to Windows"

stubish — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 07:22:32 +0000

The more times people equate age checks with ID checks the more likely that age checks will be ID checks. Like here, even though the diagram explicitly shows a check purely for age and the system the OS uses still an unknown and likely region specific.

New comment by stubish in "My Feed, My Way"

stubish — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:31:34 +0000

In countries with public health care and social security, harm to the individual is direct harm to other taxpayers. You must wear seat belts or wear bike helmets because the rest of us don't want to pay your rehabilitation bills.

New comment by stubish in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

stubish — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:27:13 +0000

Could be. Pity there is no way to donate to Firefox. You can only donate to Mozilla for 'mission to keep the Web open and free', with an unknown fraction going to Firefox development. People have been deliberately disenfranchised from voting with their wallets for decades.

New comment by stubish in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

stubish — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:15:17 +0000

'lifetime'

The last lifetime license I bought expired when the developer was bought, stopped releasing updates, and the software stopped working the next major OS upgrade. It is on a clock, and you don't know when it runs out so you can't value it.