News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

SllX

Cancel or Allow?
Re:Somebody please stop the spam texts on Monday October 26, 2026 @07:21PM (#50252574)
DoorDash is both better & worse (mostly worse with the slimmest silver lining) than you’ve portrayed. Inside the app settings you can turn off all the marketing notifications. They’ll even mostly respect that setting with the following caveats:

1) they will give you a recurring pop up banner when you open the app to turn on all notifications, making it sound like it’s just for delivery notifications, even if you already have those turned on. You have to ignore it.

2) at least once recently, they just toggled them all on, on my behalf, anyway. I found out after receiving a random marketing notification. Then I turned them back off & it hasn’t happened since.

3) there have been occasions where even with granular controls, I don’t receive the delivery notifications if I have the marketing ones turned off. Hasn’t happened in a while, but now I always keep that in mind that it’s a possibility.

Careful what you’re applying spatial terms to. “Information space” might sound clever to you, but you’re basically redefining hearts & minds in territorial terms, which is really no different than saying that people are the sovereign territory of their countries. Down that road lies a fork in the road, one path takes you back to serfdom, the other way straight to fascism. Neither is a particularly pleasant place to visit, and once you’re there, leaving is rather difficult.
Follow the usernames in the response chain. I have two phones for the exact same reason as well: work issued & personal. It would hold up just because it’s actually true. There’s no need to arrange anything beyond how they are naturally arranged.
Re:Apple HomeView on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @10:34PM (#50081680)
The app story is a bit weird. Jason Snell talks about it here:

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/10/third-party-homeview-apps...

> If you use apps that play audio or video and support CarPlay, though, you’re in luck: HomeView supports those apps, and just those apps, via projection from your iPhone. So if you’re a fan of Overcast or Spotify, you’re in luck.

Re:Apple HomeView on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @10:33PM (#50081675)
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/10/third-party-homeview-apps...

> If you use apps that play audio or video and support CarPlay, though, you’re in luck: HomeView supports those apps, and just those apps, via projection from your iPhone. So if you’re a fan of Overcast or Spotify, you’re in luck.

Meta is doing quite well in Europe. Q2 2026 they were up nearly $4 billion in Europe (their definition is Europe, but the footnote adds that they specifically include Russia & Turkey in this figure as well), and Q1 2026 they were up $6.5 billion in Europe.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/abad205... (page 13)

They are private companies. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in their best interest to maintain good relations with the people directing the nation’s sovereign power.

Never forget: sovereign power outranks corporate power. Corporations are better at making money. Sovereigns are better at violence.

So after reading your comment 17 minutes ago & doing a quick & dirty search to see if there were any tech companies having a particularly bad year in Europe, the net result is: not really, with the caveat that Europe often gets grouped in under EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, Africa) on financial reports.

Europe continues to remain one of America’s premier VIP Customers[1].

[1] https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2006/04/13/bofh-dear-val...

Being a democracy does not make countries immune from the phenomenon where under their own judgment, private actors decide with information provided to them in part by their own government, it’s more often than not in their best interest to be with them rather than against them.
Apple is not at Google’s level of surveillance-based adware. With these new changes to Maps, they now have new incentives to eventually catch up, but their targeting is bad because they suck at targeting, because they built their business around not collecting all that data & displaying targeted ads.

That said, if that’s the direction they’re going, I don’t need to help encourage them. I deleted Apple Maps off my phone & iPad, & switched back to Google Maps after like 10 years on Apple Maps. The hardware I buy is expensive enough & has profit margins high enough that Apple should never be trying to show me ads—targeted or otherwise—inside the basic functionality of their phones, and Maps is very much marketed as a feature of the hardware they sell. Also Google Maps is just better.

Re:Line Scan Photos from MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @12:20AM (#49811599)
The part that runs on Market Street is the useful part. The part that runs along the Embarcadero isn’t useless, but it’s more seasonally useful. I’d rather see the old PCC cars replaced with a solid modern low-floor LRV using more standardized parts & aggressive transit policing to keep freeloaders from abusing the system. It is partially redundant with the subway, but if you’re going to have a surface street railway anyway, I’d rather it be optimized for local use.

You could pull the J up from underground too using the same low-floor LRV model chosen for the new F, having it turn at Church & Market rather than making an awkward diversion to Church & Duboce first.

When iAd launched, it was a $1 million minimum spend just to get onto the platform, they wanted large corporate “lifestyle” brands, Apple exerted creative control over how ads were designed so they could enforce a bunch of user experience guardrails & marketers had no means of independently verifying campaign performance themselves. Their only source was whatever Apple told them. It did not do well. A few years later they tried to salvage it by dropping the minimum spend to $50, removing themselves from the process & making it closer to Google’s AdMob—or approximately as much as Apple was able to early last decade—but it was too little too late. They dropped it by 2016.

When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.

Yeah & they veered so hard into tying to make them tasteful & not suck that it failed. Turns out the real money is in spyware.
Re:Xbox continues its "reset" with dramatic restructuring on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @01:05PM (#49804537)
What is there to sacrifice? There hasn’t been a new Halo game since 2010. Just fan fiction, remakes & anthologies.
The parent’s characterization is fine. 9/10 times (more in my own experience) it is the functional equivalent of a sponsor blocker. That it technically isn’t that specifically is immaterial, because if it works, that’s because people are skipping the sponsor segments in large enough quantities for it to easily become that.

That said, I don’t think YouTube owes it to Premium subscribers to add a sponsor block. That’s part of the video’s content as it was provided to YouTube, and YouTube never advertised YouTube Premium as something which will block in-video sponsor reads. This is part of how YouTubers make a living & a Premium sub doesn’t replace the money they receive for those the way it does for YouTube’s own ads.

Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @06:02PM (#49650727)
> If you claim all war is morally equal

I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.

> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.

Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.

> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.

The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.

Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:56PM (#49650666)
If this comment doesn’t adequately answer your question, please feel free to ask your follow-up questions either here or there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394

I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.

Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:54PM (#49650643)
You’re right, what we choose to call things is important, but our calls should better reflect reality.

Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.

As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.

Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:37PM (#49650499)
> Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?

The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.

> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.

America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.

Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:34PM (#49650461)
I answered in response to a different comment about the level of patience I have with men that think changing one word in the title of the bureaucracy in charge of war somehow meaningfully changes the reality or meaning of war (spoiler: none).

I wanted to address this though:

> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.

The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.

But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.

Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:20PM (#49650296)
Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war. I don’t have a lot of patience for the romantic notions of men, that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself. Only how we actually prosecute our wars & handle the subsequent consequences of war will give them any meaning.
Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:57PM (#49649407)
I answered this in a sibling comment to yours.
Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:56PM (#49649394)
It was originally entitled “Department of War” and was changed after World War II for better PR. Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.

Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.

Re:Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:01PM (#49648708)
Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.
Re:iPhone Duo on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @05:32PM (#49634711)
I do hope John Ternus & his team change it up, but I wasn’t expecting it from this event. He’s only been CEO for 9 days & this was probably shot before then.
Re:iPhone Duo on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @05:25PM (#49634601)
That Wikipedia article was lacking citations so I dug some up with ChatGPT: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CPUB-101spub9/pdf/GP...

On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.

I also found this article from Time from January 15th 1979 that this was actually slightly cheaper despite using more paper: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0%2C33009%2...

The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.

> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."

Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:

> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120220192919/http://www.afandp...

Re:iPhone Duo on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @04:45PM (#49633997)
Like as a standard? No. But I can go to a stationery shop and buy an A4 notebook.
Re:LLMs as a Cognitive Virus on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @02:43PM (#49614820)
> Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally

Hakuna matata.

> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".

The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.

> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.

Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.

Older »