Hacker News: zzril

New comment by zzril in ".gitignore Everything by Default"

zzril — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:00:37 +0000

I'm doing that all the time. Starting with a .vim directory that contains vim-specific files, such as scripts / build commands to be run on certain key combinations, to ".misc" / ".scratch" / ".notes" / ".api-keys" directories... I wouldn't want to list them all in my global .gitignore because I'd certainly forget half of the names I tend to give to these...

New comment by zzril in ".gitignore Everything by Default"

zzril — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 15:45:27 +0000

I have a shell alias to create a folder containing a `.gitignore` with just `*`, so I don't depend on my project never using a directory of a specific name.

New comment by zzril in "I Don't Have a Smartphone"

zzril — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:17:31 +0000

The list is missing a couple of points, including: "My camera isn't working." "I don't have a QR code scanner app." - And, of course, since we've already shown we're fine with bending the truth a little if it helps our case: "I scanned the QR code. It leads to a porn video. Are you going to argue with me about that over a couple of pixels, or will you be so kind to give me the plain URL?"

New comment by zzril in "Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message"

zzril — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 19:18:25 +0000

It's called "Matrix".

New comment by zzril in "Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message"

zzril — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:53:14 +0000

When after an actual shooting, it its found that the shooter has, at some point in his life, made a post on social media that one could - if so inclined - interpret as an announcement of what he was about to do, people will go absolutely mad screaming: "Why did they not arrest him beforehand???!?!?!?!!!"

This must be exactly what those screamers are envisioning...

New comment by zzril in "VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents"

zzril — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:31:43 +0000

Maybe we should treat the agents like coworkers? I don't physically share my machine with my coworkers.

New comment by zzril in "Anthropic's 'watermark' text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

zzril — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:48:39 +0000

> Someone with the secret key can determine which list a word will be on at each token generation point (which is how the watermarking is detected); those without the secret key cannot.

How is this supposed to work in an actual lawsuit? Will Anthropic offer some sort of tool / (paid?) webservice to check for watermarks using that "secret key", and a judge is supposed to just believe whatever that tool's verdict is? And then it takes the EU another 20 years to understand what a silly idea this was?

New comment by zzril in "A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy"

zzril — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:26:21 +0000

That one was always worth its own function for me.

``` mkcd() { mkdir -p -- "$*" && cd -- "$*" } ```

New comment by zzril in "On non-rooted Android 17, ADB uninstall of system apps fails"

zzril — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:22:44 +0000

There is the PinePhone. It has 3GB of RAM and needs to be charged daily. It's barely enough for my use case, which is essentially "I need a browser and a shell".

Haven't tried an emulator yet. Don't think I will - they're slow enough on my laptop, and I'm not interested in spending my time on reversing anti-emulator checks all day. And I don't like being forced into having a Google account, so anything that goes beyond a calculator app won't run anyway.

New comment by zzril in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

zzril — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 23:54:44 +0000

Seems like the wrong spot to optimize for fairness / equal playing conditions when the weather itself affects the game in so many more ways.

New comment by zzril in "Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word"

zzril — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:53:02 +0000

Or split semantics and layout and work in markdown the whole time. (And only render it to PDF or similar at the very end - if you even need to publish it at all to someone who can't just make use of the same stylesheets for rendering as you.)

New comment by zzril in "Android may soon restrict on-device ADB"

zzril — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:55:31 +0000

I've paid 200€ for my PinePhone. It is underpowered, but at least it doesn't have to waste its resources on rendering ads.

Where Android/iPhone users have "apps", I mostly end up writing small shell scripts around existing linux tools. My alarm clock "app" is realized via cron jobs; my TOTP "app" is a one-liner around `oathtool`.

Messenger apps are a bit tricky; I'll probably end up hosting my own matrix homeserver and then have bridges running for Signal and the likes.

New comment by zzril in "Android May Soon Restrict On-Device ADB"

zzril — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:06:30 +0000

I use postmarketOS btw...

New comment by zzril in "Writing a Debugger from Scratch"

zzril — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:10:23 +0000

For linux, there's this excellent series of articles by Eli Bendersky:

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/01/23/how-debuggers-work-...

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/01/27/how-debuggers-work-...

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/02/07/how-debuggers-work-...

(Unfortunately, the articles don't include links to their respective follow-ups, but I'm pretty sure it ends after part 3...)

New comment by zzril in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

zzril — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:21:25 +0000

I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.)

Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...

New comment by zzril in "Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law"

zzril — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 23:43:37 +0000

More interesting would be the IP!

New comment by zzril in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

zzril — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:52:41 +0000

My PinePhone runs postmarketOS and can technically run every modern Linux desktop "app".

New comment by zzril in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

zzril — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:30:53 +0000

Yes, but the underlying problem is a lack of exact specification what the agent is allowed or not allowed to do. It must have access to some (most?) of my files (but I'm too lazy to specify which ones exactly, e. g. by setting appropriate filesystem permissions). It must have access to some servers (but not those that I consider "random", which again I'm too lazy to specify). It is even expected to upload files (e. g. by checking them into git and pushing, or to reason about them in case I'm not running a local version of Grok). But please - not to a server that I deem "random". (And again, I of course won't tell you what makes a "random" host via exact firewall rules or anything like that!)

We have a lot of implicit assumptions when it comes to security. If we leave out the step of formalizing these assumptions into exact rules and instead stick to ambiguous and unclear natural language all the time, then these things will happen.

(Addendum: But indeed, the failure to formalize our assumptions into enforcable rules isn't specific to agents / LLM-based applications. For any desktop app, we have implicit assumptions like "please only read and write your own config files", that we never care to enforce via filesystem permissions, running them in a vm or similar. But with these almighty agents that are supposed to guess our will from just a couple of words, the risk of them violating our unwritten assumptions gets so much higher...)

New comment by zzril in "Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop"

zzril — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:11:44 +0000

If your threat model is that of a malicious agent that will use a 0-day LPE to get root and exfiltrate all of your SSH keys, virtualization makes sense. But then, I wouldn't run such an agent at all, if not specifically in the context of malware analysis.

If you're just concerned about "agent messing up and taking the rules in some markdown files more laxly than I would have", then running it as a seperate user is totally enough...

New comment by zzril in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

zzril — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:58:58 +0000

Stories about copilot messing things up made into regular newspapers...

Do Anthropic users consider themselves clever enough to not make the same mistakes as Microsoft?