Hacker News: waterTanuki

New comment by waterTanuki in "Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model"

waterTanuki — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 02:32:35 +0000

I mean, China regularly executes its CEOs. The only sweet summer child here is you not understanding how Chinese politics works.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model"

waterTanuki — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 02:28:55 +0000

wiretaping an ISP is vastly different from say, ordering and forcing Anthropic or OpenAI to put malicious weights into their models. Not once in my reply did I ever imply the U.S. doesn't perform espionage. Look up Five Eyes.

New comment by waterTanuki in "New iMac with M6"

waterTanuki — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:31:14 +0000

People buy these instead of mac minis because of the pretty design. That's it. Consumers are a lot more irrational than most people give them credit for.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update"

waterTanuki — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 23:20:05 +0000

The vast majority of tailnets are just hobbyists on the generous free tier and probably don't use tailscale ssh, but rather ssh over a tailnet. Usually it's either just one person or a family sharing access to the tailnet. But for corporate accounts where ACLs are used for SSH yeah this is big.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model"

waterTanuki — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:40:30 +0000

> Anthropic is even considered security risk by the US.

You and everyone reading this knows that was a political statement, not a technical assessment because a certain SecDef who played fast and loose with Signal chats didn't like that anthropic refused to let them use their models with weapon systems.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model"

waterTanuki — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:36:34 +0000

It's much easier for the Chinese government to tell Alibaba they must perform espionage using their models than the US Government. Even if every last engineer there joined the company just for "AI Research and Development", they might be under scrutiny or forced to shutdown if they don't work with the CCP. Power is shared between corporations and the government in the west, the government is the power in China.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Gaming on Linux without cheating"

waterTanuki — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:52:14 +0000

Are you proposing putting the RAM or CPU on the server side and keeping GPU client side? I don't see how that would work because you need extremely low latency to coordinate all of these things, and a network barrier is the highest form of latency.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Gaming on Linux without cheating"

waterTanuki — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:50:01 +0000

I play BF6 on GeForce NOW (got the game before I made the full time switch to Linux) and the latency isn't perceptible at all. I suppose living in a country with extensive fibre optical links and a dedicated nvidia data center helps, so yes this isn't a solution for everyone, but I think it's better than the dilemma of letting cheaters proliferate or destroying privacy.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Websites Should Be Printable"

waterTanuki — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:47:11 +0000

Heavily depends on what your site is trying to accomplish. Marketing sites aren't supposed to be printable because we're very visual creatures. We see before we read, and so something like the iPhone product page shouldn't be printable, but something like arXiv where I'm trying to read something, not see it should.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote"

waterTanuki — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 02:53:33 +0000

The more comments I read on HN attempting to rationalize this as "normal behaviour" by banks, the more I believe that this is a massive bubble getting ready to pop

New comment by waterTanuki in "Gaming on Linux without cheating"

waterTanuki — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:45:11 +0000

You're right that these two goals are fundamentally incompatible, which means the only possible solution is to remove the clients' hardware from the equation for online competitive games.

For as much hate as cloud gaming gets (the whole "you will own nothing and be happy" schtick) I see it as the perfect solution to online competitive games:

- Even if you own physical media, you don't own the servers or data necessary to run the game.

- Games can be run by an accountable third party who runs signed kernels and hardware with attestation.

- None of your personal information ever touches this hardware.

There is a middle ground where instead of playing all of your games remotely, you only play the online competitive ones remotely in order to protect your data and ensure a fair environment. Too many companies have become rent-seekers to the detriment of their customers that this won't be seen as a viable solution because of the negative connotations.

Do not mistake this for complacency. I will gladly pick up a torch or pitchfork the moment NVIDIA suggests I rent their servers to play Minecraft or Stardew Valley, but for games like Battlefield 6 I think this solution works perfectly.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Passkeys are not a trap"

waterTanuki — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:18:36 +0000

>I've worked at places where we use a password manager to manage lots of passwords for random services that we subscribe to. The engineering manager always says "you can put your own passwords in for free" and I say "no thanks, they're going to get hacked" and then six months later... they get hacked.

There is heaps of context missing from this. Did the password manager itself get hacked, or did an employee leak a password for a single site that didn't use 2FA ?? The former strongly solidifies your point, the latter undermines it, and to be clear I don't think it's a good idea to use an employer sponsored password vault either.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

waterTanuki — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 01:12:49 +0000

Browser diversity is merely an after-effect of Apple having complete control over iOS, if it was profitable to let Google coup the entire web, they would do it in a heartbeat.

It's obvious Apple isn't doing this to "protect the open web" because if that was true, they wouldn't have stopped developing Safari for Windows.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

waterTanuki — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 01:04:49 +0000

> Apple is kicking off a new campaign today to promote Safari’s benefits over Chrome. With a new “Switch to Safari” page on its website and a pair of new YouTube videos.

The irony of using a Google platform to promote ditching another Google platform lol.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

waterTanuki — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:58:14 +0000

pick your poison. Splitting repositories multiplies CICD maintenance exponentially and even moreso if you're trying to share private ones that need secret keys to access. I know from experience. No single approach in this industry is flawless. Everything has tradeoffs.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Theranos.world"

waterTanuki — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:20:31 +0000

I checked the health app on the phone:

> No health data.

New comment by waterTanuki in "California closed the Montana license plate loophole"

waterTanuki — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:04:34 +0000

This is the cost of living in a federated republic. Power is diffuse across the states so they all have different opinions on how to go about things like vehicle registrations and insurance. The only alternative is for states to relinquish the power over vehicle registrations/plates/insurance requirements to the federal government which could enforce a universal standard, but I'm sure given current events you would see why that would be a terrible idea.

I think as programmers we naturally want a single, universal standard for everything, but there are genuine advantages to having the current system as well, even with all of its flaws.

New comment by waterTanuki in "Decisions API is in public beta"

waterTanuki — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:37:02 +0000

> The tulip became a luxury item and many varieties were introduced. The varieties were classified and the most sought-after, prized tulips were the streaked tulips, especially yellow or white streaks on a red or purple background. These flame-like tulips were highly sought after. Interestingly, the streaks or “flames” of the tulip petals were caused by a virus. The virus is the tulip breaking virus, or tulip mosaic virus.

Source: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/tulip_mania_the_history_of_the...

What's old is new.

New comment by waterTanuki in "America.gov"

waterTanuki — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:11:07 +0000

Let's bring the subject back into focus: This is an example of an LLM being used to search a massive database of scattered text and files. Are you saying LLM's are not suited for searching through text?

New comment by waterTanuki in "America.gov"

waterTanuki — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:29:58 +0000

You can disagree but the fact is people will take the path of least resistance. I'm not saying we shoudldn't strive for 100% accuracy but we also need to be realistic about what an LLM is. I'd rather we not pretend there's some magical combination of weights out there that will make it completely perfect.