Hacker News: x3sphere

New comment by x3sphere in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

x3sphere — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:14:41 +0000

I ditched reCaptcha and switched to Cloudflare Turnstile recently. It’s been a lot more effective. Not sure about this but I won’t be switching back for the time being.

New comment by x3sphere in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

x3sphere — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 06:12:36 +0000

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.

But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.

It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.

New comment by x3sphere in "My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4"

x3sphere — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 02:09:02 +0000

Even if you are buying at the low end, hardware simply doesn't age that quickly nowadays. Comparing against of the M series chips, I'd be surprised if anyone found an M1 Air unbearably slow in a blind test. In contrast, there was a huge leap in going from say the Pentium 4 to a Core 2 Duo.

I actually find M1 Air class performance still more acceptable for all my usual dev tasks. I might only need a beefier machine for the extra RAM if I'm spinning up a lot of VMs. Otherwise though, the raw CPU performance is still quite fine.

New comment by x3sphere in "Paxlovid: You'd have expected more"

x3sphere — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 02:35:53 +0000

Same here. I got really sick the second time I had Covid (despite it being a more “mild” strain - Omicron I believe). Was bedridden for almost two weeks and had a rebound fever. With Paxlovid however, most of my symptoms subsided after a few days of taking it and I didn’t have a fever. This was the third time I got Covid.

Obviously I don’t know for sure how much I can attribute to the medication, but I will be taking it again if I catch Covid.

New comment by x3sphere in "Pornhub Is Now Blocked in Almost All of the U.S. South"

x3sphere — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 19:21:49 +0000

Well, let's also ban alcohol consumption since it's bad for you. Let's also ban all forms of violent media since that could potentially be bad for you when viewed in excess (similar to porn). It's a slippery slope. At what point do we just start monitoring people's thoughts when that tech comes available?

New comment by x3sphere in "WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic"

x3sphere — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 03:06:29 +0000

Wordpress.com would be the equivalent. That said, they don't exactly offer an unmodified WP experience either at least not without upgrading to the higher tier plans. The base plan has plugins disabled for example. Not even sure how it's different from what Matt is accusing WP Engine of.

New comment by x3sphere in "The Value of Milk.com"

x3sphere — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 03:51:21 +0000

I agree it’s not as important. There have still been some rather high .com sales though… Ai.com sold for 11M recently. Now personally, I have never accessed ChatGPT through that domain and never seen it even linked from that.

New comment by x3sphere in "The Value of Milk.com"

x3sphere — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 03:32:58 +0000

Looking at sales of other domains I don’t think 10M is insane for the right buyer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_..., Beer.com sold for 7M in 2004.

New comment by x3sphere in "Nvidia announces financial results for first quarter fiscal 2025"

x3sphere — Thu, 23 May 2024 03:39:09 +0000

MSFT went sideways for like a decade too. Who knows... Intel is doing something the others aren't with building its own fabs. Which arguably carries a lot of risk but it could pay off.

New comment by x3sphere in "iPad Pro M4 review: ludicrously good hardware that's total overkill for most"

x3sphere — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:41:58 +0000

Yeah, they should really unlock the virtualization capabilities. That IMO would make a lot of power users happy. I would love for them to also offer some sort of dual boot option for running macOS on bare metal but that's likely not going to happen.

I'd be happy enough with virtualization, at least then I could make proper use of the hardware.

New comment by x3sphere in "iPad Pro M4 review: ludicrously good hardware that's total overkill for most"

x3sphere — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:23:08 +0000

They should just unlock the iPad's virtualization capabilities. That would let power users run a desktop OS without them really needing to support it.

Also I don't particularly care how any of the touch stuff works in a hypothetical desktop mode as long as I can hook it up to external display with KB+mouse.

New comment by x3sphere in "Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal"

x3sphere — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 05:39:51 +0000

The irony is Meta have a draconian stance against site scrapers, and have been known to sue over it.

Yet they go and do this. Which is much worse than just scraping public pages.

New comment by x3sphere in "I recorded a screen capture of a task. Gemini generated code to replicate it"

x3sphere — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:05:06 +0000

Well, I hold crypto, but admittedly it's kind of failed as far as payments are concerned.

I used to use BTC quite regularly for payments back in like 2014-2015. But now, it's too expensive to move around due to fees so I just hold it. The same can be said even of ETH - the fees are too high to interact with a lot of the DeFi stuff.

There are 'layer 2' solutions that tackle the fees issue but uptake of these has been slow.

It's why they pivoted to calling BTC a store of value years ago. The payments side of crypto is kind of disappointing.

New comment by x3sphere in "E3 Is Officially Dead"

x3sphere — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 18:57:19 +0000

I think E3 was on its way out regardless. Nintendo dropped out of E3 years before COVID even happened. I attended a few years and it seemed like the bigger publishers such as Activision kept downsizing their presence at the event. COVID accelerated things for sure, but I imagine the end result would be the same.

New comment by x3sphere in "The wealth of the 25 richest families in the world soared 43% in the last year"

x3sphere — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 17:46:15 +0000

Wages are definitely up, but if you factor in all the price increases of rent and groceries, I don't see how anything is better for the poorest. I've seen fast food places here hiring @ $20-25 an hour - that would maybe be enough to buy a 1 bedroom condo 4 years ago in less expensive areas, but you certainly can't on that salary now, not at current mortgage rates anyway. So they're basically in the same place it seems.

And if we're strictly speaking about the poorest - they also don't have a 401k or retirement savings, so they aren't benefiting from the increase in asset prices.

New comment by x3sphere in "The housing market is starting to crack – Sellers are cutting prices"

x3sphere — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 22:11:32 +0000

Will they be able to buy though if they lose their job? Rate cuts usually come with a spike in unemployment, so...

That said I still don't think there will be a collapse unless there is like, worse unemployment than 2008. But - prices could still easily drop 10-15% if this is a more mild recession.

New comment by x3sphere in "The housing market is starting to crack – Sellers are cutting prices"

x3sphere — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 21:47:33 +0000

Rate cuts are usually done in response to unemployment spiking. It could take things awhile to recover once they start cutting as that likely means the economy has entered a recession.

That being said - it could be the best time to buy, but not for those that lose their job.

New comment by x3sphere in "RetroAchievements: Adding achievements to retro games"

x3sphere — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 03:23:17 +0000

Yea uh... I don't think it's for telemetry. These aren't the original developers of the games and most aren't even professional devs, they probably just think it's cool to add those achievements.

New comment by x3sphere in "Show HN: WordPress, Ghost alternative at $29/Year"

x3sphere — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 21:00:23 +0000

WordPress itself offers managed hosting plans on wordpress.com. They have a free ad-supported plan, and the cheapest paid starts at $48/year.

That's what they are competing against.

New comment by x3sphere in "Update on Twitter's Rate Limits"

x3sphere — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 07:07:05 +0000

Too many people worth following still are using Twitter. Until they leave and there isn’t a reason to go on the site then there won’t be any mass exodus. I doubt the forced login is having a huge impact so far. Maybe Meta’s alternative will have a bigger impact.

It’s interesting, I’ve seen ton of my people I follow complain about Twitter yet they still keep posting. The site is only going to go under if people start if actually leaving.