Hacker News: tweetle_beetle

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "120 days until Google restricts side-loading, declaring war on Android freedom"

tweetle_beetle — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:18:24 +0000

Sideloading is a type of installing defined by the source of the file(s) being installed. Google will still allow installing from the Play store. The distinction is valid.

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

tweetle_beetle — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:53:35 +0000

I'm pretty sure that Google replaced a shortcut for the hardware buttons on my phone to open some kind of Gemini interface in a security update and I had to change it back. And Gemini was auto-migrated from Google Assistant as the default digital assistant at a similar time(?) That alone would account for millions of users interacting with the app accidentally/unwittingly.

So as usual with these type of consumer choice/preference claims, it's sensible to be cynical. At least the Pepsi Challenge couldn't secretly swap out your water tap at home for a soda fountain, record you drinking it and claiming you prefer it to Coke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "DEF CON crowd suspected in fake-hotspot attack on Delta flight"

tweetle_beetle — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:40:36 +0000

Can SSIDs really infringe trademarks? Clearly the context is a bit different in a truly isolated environment like a cabin at cruising altitude where alternatives are not reasonably expected, but am I not allowed to call a network I run from an apartment in a densely populated area where others could acces it `BigCorp is crap`?

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

tweetle_beetle — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:58:09 +0000

It is well known that all true investors are born with innate instincts for entrepreneurship and do not distract themselves with other careers, skills or knowledge.

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Bulldozers Plow Through Big Bend National Park, Sparking Fury in Texas"

tweetle_beetle — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:08:24 +0000

Animals in Australia are suffering due to a lack of automobile infrastructure?

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux"

tweetle_beetle — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:38:34 +0000

I find it interesting to track the reality of using these free-er devices well after launch. Sadly it always seems incredibly painful and hinted at post-launch improvements tend to be small if they come at all.

https://forums.puri.sm/t/each-update-makes-my-librem5-worse/...

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "KOReader"

tweetle_beetle — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:07:31 +0000

I've been on both sides of the most common comments in this thread. I tried it ages ago and struggled with unintuitive interface. After getting fed up with software on my Tolino - slow page turns, soft crashing regularly (stuck in a loop of 5ish pages until a restart) and being stuck with publishers type setting because the Tolino special customisation system is terrible, I decided to give it another go.

It's like a new device. I can connect to WebDAV, I can customise almost anything, I can have better dictionaries, I even found a plugin that lets me use my local library through Libby with minimal friction. And it's fast!

But... all of that was despite the documentation, which in my humble opinion is very hard to make use of. The front end styling overloads the text with colours, styles and mixed capitalisation. And the entire documentation is a single web with anchor links. Maybe this makes it marginally easier to maintain and allows it to be loaded in KOreader itself, but it's a poor design choice for web-based documentation. A basic SSG with pre-generated search would make it much more user friendly.

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Work out daily? OK, but how socially fit are you? (2023)"

tweetle_beetle — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:09:48 +0000

A church in that sense is basically just a (social) club. There are many, many other options for social clubs that don't come with the religious baggage.

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "VLC for Unity now supported on Linux"

tweetle_beetle — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:52:08 +0000

On Android https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader - no account required

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Pizza, pasta, potatoes, protein – how Italian children became so overweight"

tweetle_beetle — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:07:54 +0000

The hypermarket concept was more or less invented in France in 1963. Clearly joining the EU allowed greater trade options which suit large scale market leaders, but their growth would have happened anyway.

A lazy illustration, but there is not a single mention of the EU, the introduction of the Euro, or the single market on the extensive Wikipedia about the topic in the context of France, suggesting minimal impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_retail_in_France

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS"

tweetle_beetle — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:56:10 +0000

Realistically there isn't really any commercial value left in it though. While there were some notable unique games made with it (Titanfall 1 & 2, E.Y.E, The Stanley Parable, etc), these were made over a decade ago and the majority of games made with it are reworks/mods/adaptations of Half-Life related material.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/List_of_third-party...

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events"

tweetle_beetle — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:31:05 +0000

Not sure the page rank style algorithm is that useful from my limited browsing. Apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellie%27s_Castle is the most significant entry in human history.

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "The HTML Element"

tweetle_beetle — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:40:51 +0000

So when would that be exactly? Firefox was first released in 2004 and Mozilla Corporation was founded in 2005.

According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2014-... the high point for adoption was 2010 and it has been falling since then. (However, they only have data from 2010 onwards, so the high point could have been even earlier.) This coincidentally [sic] aligns to the launch of Chrome with a massive marketing push in 2008, promising speed, ease of use and security.

I find it hard to believe that there are enough people who closely follow the drama around the internal financial management and politics of Mozilla Corporation that they can be measured in the tens of percentage points of total internet market share.

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

tweetle_beetle — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:08:18 +0000

Things have moved from "no one got fired for buying IBM" to "no one got fired for buying AI".

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike"

tweetle_beetle — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:54:55 +0000

You're right, it's just a puzzle game. Strange to use the theme of chess and change a queen into a prince too.

Pawnbarian is more chess-inspired than a chess themed, but actually rogue(lite)-like and very good.

https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian/

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer"

tweetle_beetle — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:49:30 +0000

LinkedIn didn't even disavow people pretending to work for LinkedIn until someone had too much fun with it - https://chrisduffycomedy.com/blog/2016/11/2/6-months-as-the-...

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Job: Head of Stonehenge"

tweetle_beetle — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:50:36 +0000

A salary of £180k put you in the 98th percentile of UK salaries in 2024 (99th percentile was only a little higher at £207k) [1]. With a household income approximately doubling that, i'd suggest your friend is in an even smaller minority.

The average house price in London in July 2025 was £565k [pp33 - 2].

There is not being able to afford something and then there is not being able to afford exactly what you want.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/personal-incomes-s... [2] https://data.london.gov.uk/download/24rpx/37w/Housing%20in%2...

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models"

tweetle_beetle — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:24:10 +0000

A very large and powerful government puts an awful lot of effort into making sure people don't reference a particular time their military vehicle made contact with a person standing still decades ago.

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent"

tweetle_beetle — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:15:07 +0000

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

New comment by tweetle_beetle in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

tweetle_beetle — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:06:02 +0000

> My client was a utility company

> Adding a lot of pressure, this was a regulated monopoly

> Some requirements I derived: > ... > We had to meet WCAG accessibility (the team settled on AA rather than AAA)

The author doesn't doxx their employer by giving any dates, but if we take the story at face value and assume it took place in last few years, it is pretty shocking.

How does it take a single hero to be fighting for AA compliance as an afterthought for a project with this scope in the 2020s?

I've worked on much more niche projects that treated this with the respect it deserves as a quasi-legal requirement.