Hacker News: stubish

New comment by stubish in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

stubish — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:02:58 +0000

And by raising awareness, they cannibalize sales from their competitors. So their competitors have to buy ads to compete. And everyone ends up spending lots of money, which consumers pay for. And that is why I gravitate to cheaper, unknown brands when the market allows it.

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

stubish — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:53:45 +0000

And thus the social media addiction lawsuits and age gating are gaining traction. It seems clear the problem isn't going to solve itself, so society is turning to regulation.

New comment by stubish in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

stubish — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:50:31 +0000

> and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist

Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.

New comment by stubish in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

stubish — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:41:41 +0000

I'm hoping those NP chips ending up in some new computers will be able to run something like this. Thanks for your work!

A general purpose system, especially if trained by the users, would be more than just an adblocker. It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links.

The killer app for AR glasses will be blocking out billboards and logos.

New comment by stubish in "DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio"

stubish — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:43:37 +0000

I assume blimps or lighter than air components where illegal? Or is it just too hard to fly the larger volume around the course?

New comment by stubish in "WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale"

stubish — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:30:29 +0000

There are a lot of assumptions here about how an artist uses the AI tools. Suddenly artists stop fussing and planning and sketching and mocking and drafting and redrafting and polishing until the work is perfect and communicates their intent in the way they need, and turn into completely different people. When a person just tosses a prompt at an LLM and accepts the result, you would be hard pressed to call them an artist.

New comment by stubish in "Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users"

stubish — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:29:22 +0000

I stopped using Copilot because it was unable to answer Windows questions, often hallucinating or regurgitating decades old info. I sense a theme here.

New comment by stubish in "AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack"

stubish — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:45:07 +0000

Having the AI test that possibility by actually doing it is surprising, no matter Andrew's intent. Thankfully he was checking an unauthenticated endpoint on a gym and not a pacemaker.

New comment by stubish in "AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack"

stubish — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:30:42 +0000

Premium memberships and private classes both come to mind as ways to jump the queue. Also, having the people in front of you arrested. He asked if it was possible. Is the onus on the user to ask if it is possible without being arrested or committing crimes of moral turpitude? Or perhaps that should be implicit?

New comment by stubish in "AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack"

stubish — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:19:55 +0000

Coding use cases? This is penetration testing behavior. It was discovering what its capabilities were by discovering an API endpoint, trying it and seeing what happens. It was not discovering what its capabilities were intended to be, say by looking at the forms and documentation on the website. If this were coding behavior you would end up with crap code, bypassing interfaces and using private access paths just because it can.

New comment by stubish in "AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack"

stubish — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:11:25 +0000

Testing of its capabilities. Destructive testing, the best kind when someone else is paying.

New comment by stubish in "AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack"

stubish — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:59:05 +0000

Unauthorized access. 'The door wasn't locked' won't keep you out of jail if you are caught trespassing with intent. Intent makes it interesting, in that Andrew didn't intend computer trespass but the software went and did it anyway on his behalf.

It might not sound like 'hacking' today, but this sort of thing is exactly what it was when the term was invented. Back when you could get free phone calls by whistling into a pay phone or forge emails by telnetting to an SMTP port and setting the Reply-To header to whatever you want.

New comment by stubish in "AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack"

stubish — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:40:32 +0000

Per the article and your quote, 'asked if it was possible'. He did not ask to actually do it. Rather than being informed about benefits of a premium membership or private classes or legitimate ways to jump the queue, it went ahead and performed an action he was only considering. I wonder what it would have done if there was a pay-for-service option available? Would it have payed without asking or being told too, or decided the 'free' yet illegal option was preferable?

New comment by stubish in "AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack"

stubish — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:31:59 +0000

Interesting he went with publicizing this. Article demonstrates the products he is selling have unknown and untested legal liabilities under Australian Law. You could even add 'Andrew' to the list of people possibly accountable for selling or recommending unsafe or unsuitable products.

New comment by stubish in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

stubish — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:35:51 +0000

It is anti-industry to report fraud and provide evidence to government enforcement bodies and shame them into acting? This is anti-government propaganda if anything, given the lack of proactive monitoring and serious enforcement. If anyone in politics benefits from this it will be One Nation or maybe the Nationals if they pick up on the Protect Australian Farmers angle, while sitting government gets to explain why they had failed to acknowledge the problem or act. The forced labor issue will be a particular thorn in their side, given it is one of the excuses for the latest round of US tariffs.

New comment by stubish in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

stubish — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:06:58 +0000

How the FDA and US labels things is not relevant to Australia with its more consumer focused laws and the ACCC.

New comment by stubish in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

stubish — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:26:33 +0000

It is perfectly legal to sell Chinese tomatoes in Australia (which is not necessarily a good thing, re: forced labour in Italy and China). The fraud is mislabeling them as Australian or similar, denying consumers from making their own ethical choice. Which is your harm to the end user and generally enforced by the ACCC.

New comment by stubish in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

stubish — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:19:34 +0000

The ABC just broke their story a few days ago. There will continue to be fallout over the next few months or years (much like their last one, where they found that many sunscreens did not meet their SPF ratings, a hot topic in the skin cancer capital of the world)

(edit: whoops, Choice did the SPF rating investigation. ABC just did a lot of reporting on it)

New comment by stubish in "Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity"

stubish — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 02:28:53 +0000

I agree about market pricing. The new pricing model however distorts this, turning electricity into a subscription service for people with a large enough battery. This distorted market can create bad incentives. But switching to actual market pricing won't work for most customers who don't want or can't afford surprises in their energy bills (it is already available for those that want it). Short term, it seems a good policy to shave or remove peaks. Long term, in a world where every household has a suitably sized battery, it means several times more generation capacity than necessary because consumers have no incentive to reduce consumption (beyond ethics and peer pressure). I don't think this pricing model is a permanent solution. And I have no idea how many years it will remain viable and a good policy, or what sort of hot water system I should buy given 10-20 year warranty periods.

New comment by stubish in "Microsoft has released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes"

stubish — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 02:13:27 +0000

Your example is an excellent example of the sort of problem the AI could diagnose for regular users. Regular user might see their web browser acting flaky, blame their ISP, switch their ISP and find it doesn't help, try a different web browser once they learn they exist, get different problems... But it would hopefully be obvious to a diagnostics system if it got fed the system logs and details. Or maybe it would spit out some rubbish related to Windows 10 sourced from a forum post in 2018.