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You've misunderstood. The blog post is not talking about running random binaries. It's talking about opening links and files using different programmes, like PDF viewers, video players, etc. There's a video of a talk that the developer gave, which I can't find the link to at the moment, where he demonstrates running a map programme (already installed on the machine, not just fetched from a random website) to open a link with lat/lon coordinates with an interactive map.

In general, Dillo follows the Unix philosophy. You use separate programmes to handle things that Dillo can't itself, like watching videos.

Hacker News is obviously a very corporate-centred website, so most of the posts in this thread are about profitability and economic value. If that's the lens through which you see things, forking the web seems like a waste of time. It's obviously not profitable.

I don't care about any of that, I just want to have fun on the internet. By that metric, most of the criticisms in this thread are irrelevant. It doesn't need to make money, it doesn't need to be used by more than a few nerds, and it doesn't need a zillion bells and whistles. Whether rdg (the author of the blog post) shares this goal, I don't know.

> So... I think scripting is actually really important -- otherwise not only are you stuck with the lowest common denominator of all browsers, but the browsers need to implement a billion bug-prone views -- that map view link mentioned? Now you need a map viewer!

In the browser? The map viewer could just be a separate programme entirely, like a PDF viewer, etc. I remember watching rdg (the current main Dillo developer) demonstrating this with a separate map programme.

Most of your post seems to assume this "everything must be in the browser" approach, which is actively not what Dillo is about. (I would know, I use Dillo regularly.) It adheres to the Unix philosophy.

EDIT: Looking at it closely, did I just respond to an LLM post?

Because the paragraphs are short, and the post is straight-forward and to the point.

Also, there are no em dashes.

I agree with the general sentiment. I treat anything running arbitrary machine code as if it has full access to a machine. I don't know where you get "run your services as root" from that, though. The principle of least privilege doesn't just apply to running malicious code, but running buggy code whose attack surface is exposed to evil-doers.

I didn't even notice it until you pointed it out, but I checked that account's comment history and it uses em dashes. Also, "the database history itself is the active distribution vector" Is just semantic nonsense.

I still have a basic assumption that if something I'm reading doesn't make much sense to me, I probably just don't understand it. Over the last few years I've had to get used to the new assumption that it's because I'm reading LLM output.

Maybe somewhat unrelated, but I'm reminded of the fact that people have deleted the main page on a few occasions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_delete_the_m...

I'm half-tempted to try and claim it myself for fun and profit, but I think I'll leave it for someone else.

What should we put there, anyway?

As someone on the Wikipediocracy forums pointed out, basemetrika.ru does not exist. I get an NXDomain response trying to resolve it. The plot thickens.

Here before someone says that it's because MediaWiki is written in PHP.

That's definitely an interesting argument I haven't seen before.

I suppose it depends on how effective these types of measures actually are, and also on how many adults refuse to identify themselves. I would assume governments are more interested in spying on adults than under-16s, so the adults are probably more relevant here.

I hope you're right, though. Maybe there'll be a renaissance of smaller platforms. Probably not, but I can hope.

I don't know about Australia, but there's a page here detailing some of the sites that got shut down because of the OSA in the UK: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/

You've basically just confirmed what I said at the end, that democracies have no immunity to mass surveillance. 24/7 surveillance may have been an exaggeration but not by much, really. Age verification, as it exists now, inevitably means mass surveillance, in particular tying real life identities to political beliefs and porn preferences on a mass, computerised scale. If you're too young to remember the Snowden leaks I can maybe understand why you'd think mass surveillance is not an inevitable consequence of age verification, but I'm old enough to remember them, so I think it is. The existence and impact of mass surveillance seem to be invisible to you.

> It’s not Orwellian. If it were, then not allowing kids to vote or drink before they become adults would be Orwellian.

To be clear: What do you think you're refuting? I don't think children should be on modern social media. I don't think anyone should be, but especially not children. There are plenty of ways of going about this. This is why I said:

> A lot of the arguments I see in this thread are about whether modern mainstream social media are bad for young people. When the debate becomes about that, it's very easy to defend these types of Orwellian laws. It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself.

You then claim that the tech industry, and by extension "tech circles", don't like this because it means they make less money. I'm not sure how forcing companies whose business model is based on surveillance capitalism to do even more surveillance would hurt them, but if it does, it's still not my concern anyway. And conflating random hackers like me with "big tech" seems to have become increasingly common recently.

A lot of the arguments I see in this thread are about whether modern mainstream social media are bad for young people. When the debate becomes about that, it's very easy to defend these types of Orwellian laws. It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself. I think this type of thinking is demonstrated, or perhaps exploited, very well by this article (I'm not implying the WEF is secretly behind everything, I'm just using this as an example):

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/davos-2025-special-a...

The first part of that article is an absolutely scathing, on-point criticism of mainstream social media. I find myself agreeing with everything said, and then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the article pivots to "therefore we need completely 24/7 mass surveillance of everyone at all times and we need to eradicate freedom of speech". That article is like a perfect microcosm of this entire international shift in internet privacy.

People and their governments seem to agree that modern social media is a problem. The difference is why. The people think it's a problem because it harms people; governments think it's a problem because they don't control it.

I think that the root cause of this shift to mass surveillance is that people in democratic countries still have a 20th-century concept of what authoritarianism looks like. Mass surveillance is like a novel disease that democracies don't yet have any immunity to; that's why you see all these "it's just like buying alcohol" style false equivalences, because an alarming number of people genuinely don't understand the difference between normal surveillance and mass surveillance.

I think this reflects one of the biggest fallacies behind LLM adoption; the idea that reducing costs for producers improves the state of affairs for consumers too. I've seen someone compare it to the steam engine.

With the steam engine, though, consumers made a trade-off: You pay less, and get (in most cases, I presume) a worse product. With LLMs and other machine learning technologies, maybe if you're paying for the software there's a trade-off (if the software is actually cheaper anyway), but otherwise it doesn't exist. It costs the same amount of money for you to read an LLM-generated article as to read a real one; your internet bill doesn't go down. Likewise for gratis software. It's just worse, with no benefit.

Hacker News is full of producers, in this sense, who often benefit from cutting corners, and LLMs allow them to cut corners, so obviously there are plenty of evangelists here. I saw someone else in this comment section mention that gamers who are not in the tech industry don't like "AI". That's to be expected; they're not the producers, so they're not the ones who benefit.

"This year, the UK also passed a mandate for age verification—the Online Safety Act—"

No we didn't. That was 2023, and it went into effect in multiple phases, the last of which I believe was July 25th this year.

Also, I can't help but wonder what young people now will think of these laws years later, as adults. In the UK, the OSA tries to prevent 17 year olds from watching porn, even though the age of consent here is 16. How will they remember contradictions like that?

I do something similar, although there's an added peculiarity when I do it. I lie down for 5 minutes and wake up 9 hours later.

I was incredibly surprised to find that this actually is a computer. Normally when you hear about a "computer" constructed in an unusual medium, it turns out to just be a binary adder or an analogue computer. I've learned to expect disappointment.

I don't think the author is wrong for saying that certain kinds of code should be written carefully. I object to the implication that other code shouldn't.

From TFA: "Write your auto-updater code very carefully. Actually, write any code that has the potential to generate costs carefully." So the focus is on code that "generate[s] costs". I think this is a common delusion programmers have; that some code is inherently unrelated to security (or cost), so they can get lazy with it. I see it like gun safety. You have to always treat a gun like it's loaded, not because it always is (although sometimes it may be loaded when you don't expect it), but because it teaches you to always be careful, so you don't absent-mindedly fall back into bad habits when you handle a loaded one.

Telling people to write code carefully sounds simplistic but I believe for some people it's genuinely the right advice.

It was probably written by the type of programmers who criticise programmers like me for using "unsafe" languages.

Logic in Doom is particularly interesting to me. Apparently you can fit ~64k logic gates in a map (using the method described). From [1]:

"As the DOOM engine was not designed to be an interpreter, there are some constraints on our programs written against it. The biggest one is how large our programs can be. Since each gate uses at least one tag, we can use this as a metric to derive an upper-bound on the size of a program. As the DOOM engine uses 16-bit tags, this means we can have, at most, 65535 gates. This is not a particularly large number. We may be able to implement a very small CPU but this limit will be hit pretty quickly I believe."

The z80 had ~8,500 transistors. The 8086 had ~29,000 (checking Wikipedia). You could get far fewer if you use a 1-bit microarchitecture, I'm sure. I think there was a DEC (PDP?) computer that used that trick to have a really low transistor count, but I don't remember what it was called.

The real problem is RAM; for this you may as well cheat and modify Doom's code to add a RAM chip, and I/O while you're at it.

You could create a CPU in Doom implementing an architecture for which a C compiler exists, capable of compiling Doom, and run it in the CPU in Doom. For "reasonable" speed you'd have to do more than one simulation step per frame render (in the host Doom). If you ran it for long enough maybe you could get a full frame of Doom in Doom.

[1]: https://calabi-yau.space/blog/doom.html

This is addressed in the second paragraph of TFA:

"Stuff which is somehow limited (stack overflows, arbitrary configuration, etc) is still considered Turing complete, since all "physical" Turing machines are resource limited."

In my opinion, worrying about infinite memory, in regards to Turing completeness, makes the task of implementing computation much less interesting.

Also, I'm pretty sure CSS only does one generation (or a finite number of them) before stopping anyway.

You basically just described the XPM format.

Welcome to Hacker News.

I see a bunch of people saying that Firefox "needs to make money" or something to that effect, like they've never heard of free software.

When Flash was killed, enthusiasts re-implemented it entirely from scratch. I'm sure if Mozilla exploded today people would take the source code and continue maintaining Firefox. I'm aware maintaining a browser is complicated, but maintaining an operating system is even more-so, and that never stopped GNU.

I feel like there should a law about this, but I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe companies should have to at least give a warning before they do it, so Archive Team (or the likes of them) can go into panic mode and archive everything before it gets deleted.

I think that's their point. I read it as explaining why the rule doesn't work, rather than defending it.

2025 will be the year in which a certain operating system is used on desktop machines.

My prediction is that the year will be a square number.