bediger4000
Re:The Mystery of the Snowden Saga – Solved
on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @11:41AM (#50354273)
And of course, the state-obedient journalists entrusted with Snowden's supposed knock-offs would be as jailable as the whistleblower himself if they'd published top secret information related to national security.
This part simply isn't true, or at least Before Trump it wasn't true. Snowden leaked in 2013. O think this article isn't a good conspiracy theory.
Re:Ask HN: Why is it so hard to promote/market even when the product s...
on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:29PM (#50347694)
I think that all the previous advertisers and marketers have poisoned the well, so to speak. A great deal of advertising and marketing is sleazy, lying or otherwise filled with falsehoods. Advertisers have on the whole over advertised, which ruins whatever medium carries the ads.look at Google: great search, corrupted by advertising before "AI" put a,stake through the heart of advertising.
We've all gotten ripped off by advertising marketing, so we tend to ignore it, or subvert it when we can. I personally don't care that you say you're earnest and of good faith. Every other sleazebag before you has said the same thing, then sold me shoddy goods.
Re:The US election could turn the country into chaos
on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:55PM (#50346548)
People need to say it instead of observing the journalistic customs of not assigning agency to political conservatives, and not naming Trump.
Re:My Favourite Laptop
on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:17PM (#50341098)
Alas, as a Linux user, X11 doesn't seem to do that sort of thing: a 2-finger tap is nothing at all according to xev. 2-finger and 3-finger trackpad clicks are basically unreliable left and right mouse button clicks.
I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.
Re:The US election could turn the country into chaos
on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:12PM (#50341023)
This article puts the blame for potential in the wrong place. It's not "the election" (which means "the voters") it's Trump that could cause chaos.
There are zero states, counties or municipalities experiencing political violence right now. Nothing appears to be terrifically amiss anywhere. Yes, Alaska has 2 "Dan Sullivan" candidates for governor, but they're carefully identified on the ballot for governor, it's been litigated to AK Supreme Court, and the federal government isn't in charge of elections, especially state elections.
Trump, one person, is the wild card, and the source of potential chaos. Not "elections" not "Democrats" not "right wing paramilitaries". Trump.
Trump can follow laws, regulations, the US constitution, and democratic norms and stay out of it. If there's chaos, he's the source and the cause.
Re:My Favourite Laptop
on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:10PM (#50340001)
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
Re:
on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:54AM (#50338591)
This is the third time this PII-stealing "quiz" has been posted. Spamming is evil, dude. Renounce sin, retire to a life of contemplation and penitence for your spamming.
Re:Slopstructions
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @02:42PM (#50328981)
Yes, this existed in the past. It didn't come in the form of a long winded essay full of jarring phrases that you have to decode. Also, you used to be able to go ask what a weird sentence or phrase means. Now, the human often has no idea and because Super Intelligence wrote it, assumes you're the fool for not understanding circuitous windy prose.
Re:Haley Stevens: I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Sen...
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @02:38PM (#50328931)
She lost the primary. This is just sore loser/sour grapes.
Re:What a mother's 1834 letter about measles tells us about MAHA
on Saturday October 31, 2026 @11:11PM (#50322394)
According to Politico, MAHA is “made up largely of women who followed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the MAGA fold.”
I think the "followed" part is important. It makes RFKJ the leader. It looks to me like RFKJ's motivations are not as pure or as sympathetic as his followers'. It looks to me like RFKJ wants to destroy "medicine" so that quacks who have no ethical obligations or duties in law, can peddle bullshit. All that is outside what this article deals with, however.
They discount a protection [measles vaccine] that works, because measles has become a stranger.
And that's where the article fails. Why do the "they" in this sentence (MAHA followers) discount the protection? Because RFKJ as a leader, as an authority, says so. The article fails to pin the blame on RFKJ or examine his motives.
Re:The Soft Machine (1961)
on Saturday October 31, 2026 @11:00PM (#50322350)
Every time I read something about "soft machine" in this essay, I was reminded of "meat proxy".
Re:Ask HN: Are you using AI to do election choices like Mayor, Special...
on Saturday October 31, 2026 @10:55PM (#50322333)
Even that use of "AI" is sus: when I have Claude write some code, it has goofy problems a lot of the time. Bit-fields off by 2, missing field structs, public enums and variables that aren't and shouldn't be used publicly. Why is use of "AI" in other contexts not as error prone? I stand by my answer. I'm not even going to offload my mistake-making to a program that gives wrong information every so often.
Re:Ask HN: Are you using AI to do election choices like Mayor, Special...
on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:29PM (#50318125)
No. I think it would be unethical of me to offload decisions that important to programs that create output on a statistical basis.
Re:Fair Use Benefits Everyone
on Friday October 30, 2026 @09:47PM (#50312464)
But you haven't. You've had maybe 40 years to read books, web pages, watch movies listen to music etc. Every LLM has millions of books, nearly every web page ever written, and every image available on the web. There's not even a rough order of magnitude comparison, your content consumption is not even a rounding error on the amount of text every LLM has in its weights.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
Re:Democrats' Secret Effort to Stack Alaska's Ballot
on Friday October 30, 2026 @06:42PM (#50311053)
Slight correction:
NYT: omg Democrats did something devious! stop them! Don't look at the Trump rape allegations while you're at it.
Re:Reddit shares drop and it plans login requirement as search traffic...
on Thursday October 29, 2026 @10:49PM (#50299314)
Why was reddit ever ranked? Every time I asked a question, I'd get stale jokes and pedantry. I learned to not expect anything useful from redditors.
Re:Reed Hastings says Big Tech should get used to being hated – like B...
on Thursday October 29, 2026 @10:45PM (#50299274)
Don't forget make one by 3D printing.
Re:Democrats' Secret Effort to Stack Alaska's Ballot
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @08:40PM (#50282942)
This is almost ex post facto. In January, every Dem was very gloomy. They said they could probably win the House majority, but a Senate majority is out of reach.
Beyond that, what law was broken? This has been litigated in Alaska (elections are still the province of the states, not Trump) and found legal. This is a conservative biased NYT hit piece, trying to gin up an October Surprise Scandal.
As far as Trump deciding to tip over the election chess board and eat a bishop, if it doesn't go his way, he'll do anything. Democrats aren't morally responsible for Trump, Trump has agency of his own. Trump can do the adult, ethical, legal thing and let Alaska run its own elections. If he does otherwise, that's totally on him.
Re:The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @08:35PM (#50282904)
Why do this? Isn't the old such agency, the NSA, good enough?
Re:Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers–Including Undercover ...
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:42PM (#50281336)
Again, let's think of two children fighting over their shares of a cookie. Child A says he should get all of the cookie. Child B says that wouldn't be fair, the cookie should be split evenly, half and half.
The adult in the room decides to promote common ground, and gives 75% of the cookie to A and 25% to B.
Re:ADHD quiz no account or credit card required
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:39PM (#50281290)
These kinds of quizzes are mostly attempts to get PII out of you, aren't they? At least that's what I've been taught.
Re:ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US ...
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @04:17PM (#50280281)
This is an illegitimate argument in the context of Second Amendment. The "second amendment people" are pretty vocal proponents of strict adherence to the US constitution - hence the name of the group.
Whatever reasons Trump was voted in for, second amendment people should insist on him following the constitution. He's not. That's not even arguable on rhetorical grounds. Trump regularly defies court orders, spends money on things not authorized by Congress, and impounds money allocated by Congress. That behavior is the constitutional definition of tyranny. Therefore second amendment people should be at least metaphorically, if not literally, up in arms about him.
Again inarguably, they are not. Therefore their self proclaimed basis is a lie. They are just blowhards and we should disarm them ASAP. They have no sound reason for existing as an armed group.
Re:Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @12:44PM (#50276567)
No obvious date but it says: Computer recently visited Ken Thompson at Lucent's Bell Labs
Maybe early dotcom boom days?
Re:Anthropic Threw Away Git
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @12:41PM (#50276525)
Client/server asymmetry is what will sell big companies on Scion. Central control is important to build an organization around which is how managers become directors become Vice presidents. Also licensing is better this way. Got the choice of giving away clients and charging like crazy for servers, or charging for both.
Re:ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US ...
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @10:00AM (#50273691)
Freedom of speech is a first amendment issue, my friend. The "second amendment types" OP refers to are the people who claim that citizen ownership of any and all types of firearms is a buttress against tyrannical government. Since the Trump admin is at least arguably a tyrannical government, it seems legit to at least ask where the previously vociferously pro-gun people are right now. Many should be at least warning of potential tyranny, but appear not to be doing so.
Re:Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware threatens most servers on plan...
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @05:39PM (#50266227)
This one seems weird. PXE-boot is such a fragile process in and off itself this doesn't strike me as end-of-the-world. If an attacker has enough presence on your network to send a targeted ICMP packet, they almost certainly could also fool around with your PXE-booting servers some other way.
Re:The American Divide on Empathy
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @02:25PM (#50263581)
a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54%) believe empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.
This sounds like they're working up to imposing their religion on the entire population.
Re:Is "Who's on First?" Funny?
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @02:19PM (#50263478)
Betteridge's law of headlines should have given Cowen pause here.
Re:The Web Can't Afford a JavaScript Runtime Monoculture
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @02:14PM (#50263414)
Maybe it can't afford one but it wants one very, very badly. There was IE 6 circa 2003, just shy of a lockout monopoly. Thankfully, Microsoft mistakenly stopped work on it, letting Firefox and Chrome in. We're repeating the same mistake with Chrome. I doubt Google will drop the ball like Microsoft did. Ad incentives weren't as great in 2005 as they are now.