Hacker News: zerotolerance

New comment by zerotolerance in "Waymo in Portland"

zerotolerance — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:49:23 +0000

I feel like this post and most (if not all these comments) are an ad.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms"

zerotolerance — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:16:24 +0000

The other "real reason" is the solution will end up looking like a super cookie and enable machine-level tracking across every app.

New comment by zerotolerance in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

zerotolerance — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:05:29 +0000

The best way to protect citizens of the UK from material online might be to sever their international network connections.

New comment by zerotolerance in "ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

zerotolerance — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:22:04 +0000

"will" being the operative word here. High school level Econ makes no promises about WHEN prices adjust. Price setting is a whole science highly susceptible to collusion pressure. Prices generally drop only when the main competition point is price (commodities). In this case the main issue is that AI is commoditizing many if not all types of labor AND product. In a world where nothing has value how does anything get done?

New comment by zerotolerance in "System76 on Age Verification Laws"

zerotolerance — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:20:49 +0000

The children are a distraction. They're a secondary justification. Don't lose the plot. This law serves only one outcome: enablement of further authoritarianism.

New comment by zerotolerance in "A simple web we own"

zerotolerance — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:23:20 +0000

We do not have a supply side issue. We have a worsening discovery and discoverability issue. People publish on platforms because that is where they might be FOUND / or pushed by the algorithm into the feeds of others. RSS is subscription, not discovery. Search / suggest / IR requires scaled centralization. Then there are the network effects and activation cost to moving.

Yeah, sure we need this. The time for it was back in like 2005 at the latest.

The real issue is more existential. Right now we're about to lose the war that requires digital connectivity to live and use modern services. We're going to lose cash payments. If you're going to fight a fight, that is where the effort matters in 2026.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

zerotolerance — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:24:25 +0000

"Community" might be the hook, not the content itself. That's the way it works right now even in the pure editorial garbage piles. They might not always pay for the content directly, but they get revenue through high-margin merchandise, advertising, and scams. But you might imagine positioning as "I'm a XYZ reader." Still feels weak, but that's all we've got. The internet killed content scarcity. The product is not the content. The product is the way reading / watching / paying for it makes you feel. It is church. It is a tithing. A community subscription service.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock"

zerotolerance — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:09:09 +0000

They're an ads company now. Not a store. Not a device vendor.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps"

zerotolerance — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:06:41 +0000

Yes. Right wing.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Eight more months of agents"

zerotolerance — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:10:54 +0000

There is a lot of "my" floating around in this article. I always love getting peeks into experiences with this sort of thing, but I think the "mys" highlight something I've seen every day. These agents are really great at bespoke personal flows that build up a TON of almost personal tribal knowledge about how things get done if there is any consistency to those flows at all. Doing this in larger theaters is much more difficult because tribal knowledge is death for larger teams. It drives up the cost of everything which is why individuals or extremely new small teams feel so much more productive. Everything is new here and consistency doesn't matter yet.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Apple patches decade-old iOS zero-day, possibly exploited by commercial spyware"

zerotolerance — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:31:28 +0000

Apple has some of my favorite vulnerabilities, most notably GOTO Fail: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html

New comment by zerotolerance in "Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years"

zerotolerance — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:14:46 +0000

But today people can just vibe code their own sudo "with blackjack and hookers!"

Really though, it is remarkable just how high we've built this towering house of cards on the selfless works of individuals. The geek in me immediately begins meditating on OSS funding mechanisms I've seen in the past, and what might work today. Then I remember that I don't believe it can work, but hope desperately that people like Todd can keep paying rent and continue getting some satisfaction from the efforts.

New comment by zerotolerance in "I tried Gleam for Advent of Code"

zerotolerance — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:56:37 +0000

Pure anecdote. Over the last year I've taken the opportunity to compare app development in Swift (+ SwiftUI and SwiftData) for iOS with React Native via Expo. I used Cursor with both OpenAI and Anthropic models. The difference was stark. With Swift the pace of development was painfully slow with confused outputs and frequent hallucinations. With React and Expo the AI was able to generate from the first few short prompts what it took me a month to produce with Swift. AI in development is all about force multipliers, speed of delivery, and driving down cost per product iteration. IMO There is absolutely no reason to choose languages, frameworks, or ecosystems with weaker open corpuses.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Building small Docker images faster"

zerotolerance — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 23:57:30 +0000

I always like finding people advocating for older sage knowledge and bringing it forward for new audiences. That said, as someone who wrote a book about Docker and has lived the full container journey I tend to skip the containerized build all together. Docker makes for great packaging. But containerizing ever step of the build process or even just doing it in one big container is a bit extra. Positioning it as a build scripting solution was silly.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Wall Street races to protect itself from AI bubble"

zerotolerance — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 20:20:27 +0000

Google created two kinds of value: content discovery via connection (value to the consumer), and market reachability for advertisers. Oh, and also the world's most inconvenient spell check.

AI proposes to solve: a content supply side problem which does not exist, and an analysis problem which also only maybe exists. Really what it does in the best of cases (assuming everything actually works) is drive the cost to produce content to zero, make discovery less trustworthy, make the discovery problem worse, and launder IP. In the best case it is a net negative economic force.

All that said, I believe the original comment is about the fact that the economy exists to serve market participants and AI is not a market participant. It can act as a proxy, but it doesn't buy or sell things in the economic sense. Through that lens, also in the best case the technology erodes demand by reducing economic power of the consumer.

That said, I'm stoked to hear about the next AI web site generator or spam email campaign manager. Lets setup an SPV to get it backed off-balance sheet.

New comment by zerotolerance in "AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering"

zerotolerance — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 16:58:47 +0000

It is such a pure thing when an engineer looks at the world and is surprised, frustrated, or disappointed at behavior at scale. This is a finance game which in itself is a storytelling / belief based system. It might seem like math, but when you're playing on the growth edges valuation is really is about the story you tell and the character of the players. Thats only worse when people stop caring about cashflows or only expect them to happen "in the future" because that makes it someone else's problem.

New comment by zerotolerance in "Tesla is at risk of losing subsidies in Korea over widespread battery failures"

zerotolerance — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 17:42:28 +0000

Because it isn't a car company, it feels more like a fraud funnel for retail investor funds into multi-billion special dividends and bonuses for Musk.

New comment by zerotolerance in "The obstacles to scaling up humanoids"

zerotolerance — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:28:16 +0000

Nobody is buying them today. But these shaky clumsy versions didn't exist even a few years ago. The hype promises these things tomorrow, which is obvious BS. But the better they look today the more investment will be poured into their R&D which accelerates real improvement, which accelerates investment, etc.

Generalist robotics are all about minimizing or at least front loading some portion of retooling cost, minimizing overhead associated with safety and compliance, and being able to capitalize what would have otherwise been human opex. Those pressures aren't going anywhere.

New comment by zerotolerance in "I solved a distributed queue problem after 15 years"

zerotolerance — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 23:16:57 +0000

The most difficult part is managing the delivered / processed state and ordered delivery. Consistent ordering of receipt into a distributed buffer is a great challenge. Most stacks do that pretty well. But deciding when a message has been processed and when you can safely decide not to deliver it again it is especially challenging in a distributed environment.

That is sort of danced around a bit in this article where the author is talking about dropped messages, etc. It is tempting to say "use a stream server" but ultimately stream servers make head-of-line accounting the consumer's responsibility. That's usually solved with some kind of (not distributed) lock.

New comment by zerotolerance in "I solved a distributed queue problem after 15 years"

zerotolerance — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:52:18 +0000

Kafka is a wonderful technology that punts on the most difficult part of distributed stream processing and makes it the consumer's problem.