News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pbiggar

Re:Fair Use Benefits Everyone on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:57PM (#50311730)
Whatever fair use is supposed to have been, generating never-before-seen amounts of revenue by hoovering up every word ever written is not it.
i think you're being sarcastic but for others reading this without context:

- Israel has used "Hamas" as a get-out-of-jail-free card with people in the West - Hamas are not in the West Bank (which is physical separated from Gaza, where Hamas operated)

Reminder Sergey Brin was in the Epstein files.
Re:Orkut.com on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:07PM (#50008546)
You might try UpScrolled. 6M users, designed to resist Big Tech's control of our lives.

https://upscrolled.com

Israel too [1] - these things are highly influencible.

[1] https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatb...

That one had a UN mandate.
The problem is that the US used its soft power for evil, not for good. WW2 was the last war where the US were the good guys.

With the US' war of aggression on Iran, it just doesnt care what it loses in its quest to support Israel.

This will further push the EU towards sovereignty, not just on a tech front but through the financial sector. Similar to their sanctions of the Iranian airlines - these are attacks on civilian and human rights infrastructure that other countries actually find value and alignment with.

Probably (hopefully) we'll look back on this as the start of the end of US soft influence.

You misunderstand me. I'm saying that the developers can make these optimizations with LLMs, at the source level, and thus they don't need to be added to compilers.

Like just open Claude Code and ask it to find optimizations. That's the right place for this kind of optimization.

When I think of how a "compiler" could make these optimizations, I think the right place is an optimizing LLM (so, just a regular coding agent that you prompted to find optimizations like this one), making the changes in source at the request of the developer. That provides the dev with adequate input on whether they would like to opt-in to an unsafe optimization like this one. The compiler can continue to do deterministically-safe optimizations.
Similarly, Meta is paying violent illegal israeli settlers, who commit attrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank in order to steal their land. Same mechanism.

https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/posts/meta-does...

This has already happened. It appears that Israel has poisoned the Common Crawl.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatb...

Re:IRGC Claims It Destroyed Amazon's Bahrain Data Center on Saturday July 25, 2026 @05:28AM (#49046025)
America had a violent revolution. So did practically every other country. Are violent revolutions de facto bad?
We evaluated Bitchat and determined it would be a really useful tool for Gaza - Israel controls all internet access to Palestine and would frequently cut off internet access to Gazans. We tried building our own but when Bitchat came out we focused on that instead.

https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...

Relevant section:

Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]

Fwiw, there is tons of evidence of these company's complicity with Israel's occupation (it's probably a much longer list if we want to look at those that enable the US' wars).

Most recently the UN report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-...

> The AWS strikes did not emerge from an improvised targeting decision. On March 31, 2026, the IRGC formally declared eighteen US technology companies “legitimate military targets” — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla, Boeing, General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm.

Given these companies are selling the AI and cloud tech that's used by US and Israel in their invasions, wars, genocides, etc, it's no surprised that they would be deemed dual use.

Re:Stripe, Advent offer to buy PayPal for more than $53B on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @03:44PM (#48926108)
Paypal have historically been anti-Palestine [1] but recently have calmed themselves (though not yet undone their discriminatory practices).

Then Stripe have historically been pro-Palestine but recently Collison has taken part in Israeli propaganda [2].

Can't wait for these two evil companies to team up.

[1] https://paypal.7amleh.org/ [2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/cal...

Microsoft's human rights stain will take decades to wear off (just like Meta, Google, and Amazon).
I'm sad to see Intercom/Fin's CEO, Eoghan McCabe, did not face repercussions after credible allegations about sexually harassing his employees came out in The Information in 2019 [1]. Some quotes:

> When the woman said she, too, wanted to go home, Mr. McCabe told her that he wanted her to remain, the people said. After the other two employees had left, Mr. McCabe made a lewd remark to the saleswoman and said that he would like to sleep with her, the people said. She declined and eventually left his home, they said. > Later, the saleswoman said Mr. McCabe’s actions had frightened her, according to one of the people who spoke to her about the incident, who declined to be named.

> During the meeting, Schuur said she told Mr. McCabe that his behavior was inappropriate. The Intercom CEO cried during the meeting and said that he hadn’t realized there was a power imbalance between himself and the young woman, Schuur said. > “I felt like I was just a guy at a party and she was just a girl,” Mr. McCabe said, according to Schuur. > Two former Intercom employees present for the harassment training seminar said Mr. McCabe didn’t attend.

> At an Intercom party around 2014, Schuur said she witnessed Mr. McCabe slap the saleswoman’s buttocks. At a different event around that time, another former employee said she saw the Intercom CEO place his hand on the same woman’s thigh. Four former Intercom employees, including Schuur, also said the woman told them of the advances, which she said were unwanted.

> A key figure in the company’s culture was Mr. McCabe, described by employees as both brilliant and temperamental, with a tendency to cross boundaries with junior female employees.

> Mr. McCabe, through an Intercom spokesperson, declined to be interviewed for this story, but said in a statement: "In the early years of the company I demonstrated some poor judgment. I apologized at the time [...]"

> But early employees said he also showed flashes of temper and vindictiveness. He was known for occasionally writing scathing messages to employees in group messages, according to a former employee who saw them. On at least one occasion he told another person leaving Intercom that he intended to tarnish their reputation in the tech industry, that person said.

I previously tweeted about this and McCabe threatened to sue me.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/harassment-allegatio...

cached content: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zsAytvQRuEwc0ftY3OtlXwvj...

Thanks for catching that, should have done a better job vetting that. The rest of my post is still true.
I find it pretty ironic and pathetic that Eric Ries is talking about a darkness in the industry when he's part of that darkness. Here's Ries in 2024 writing a propaganda piece for Israel on his blog:

https://medium.com/eric-ries-stewed/sympathy-for-the-devil-i...

I spoke to Ries in 2024 (he's a former investor of mine) about the genocide, and he used every pro-Israel trope ("oh, it's so complicated") to dissuade me from speaking about it.

If you publicly are shilling for a state that has for 76 years committed massacres against Palestinians, you don't get to be the voice of "why good companies go bad".

Facebook is also paying far right israelis, whose content incites violence against Palestinians.

> a new report titled “Monetizing Occupation: Meta’s Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians.” The report reveals how Meta allows Israeli far-right pages, settler-affiliated accounts, and extremist media outlets to generate revenue through its platforms, despite publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

https://7amleh.org/post/meta-monetizes-settlements-and-viole...

Every Big Tech company employs hundreds of "former" Israeli spies - Google just brought on another 900 via their acquisition of Wiz (to add to their existing 6000).
Defensive missions? Was the UK under attack?
We work on helping people move to Signal from WhatsApp. It'll be easier once they have a Communities feature, as WhatsApp is very far ahead there.

The main advice we got is that although you need to migrate individuals, the main focus should be on migrating channels. If you have a family group chat, that's the target. Tell people about how Meta spies on them, etc, and then support everyone in the channel to individually set up Signal if necessary.

Re:Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:47AM (#48292798)
Definitely. Not to mention that their major investor, Sequoia, has been war profiteering and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire has been publicly islamophobic and a huge supporter of the genocide and occupation in Palestine.
Re:2009 Aftonbladet Israel Controversy on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:11AM (#48291618)
> Before eventually admitting to the theft of organs, the Israeli government initially denied the allegations and called them antisemitic.

This is basically the MO for anything. Call out a genocide - you're antisemitic! Call out the endless crimes against humanity committed by Israel? Antisemitic.

Re:The User Is Visibly Frustrated on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @04:22AM (#48276749)
The best advice I saw on this was to think of the LLM as simply a tool, and if you get bad results, it's because you -- the user of the tool -- are using it wrong.

After that, I'm less angry at the AI, and turn more towards a constructive "ok, this machine is stuck, how can I unstick" it approach. Calms the frustration a lot too.

Re:Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops? on Monday May 18, 2026 @07:34AM (#48178202)
They mention Vibecoded compiler, here is one: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/full-optimizing-compiler-with-ai.... I continue to work on it in some limited spare time, but it continues well. I'm currently working on building an orchestrator to continue building it, as babysitting the AI still takes a lot of time. Need to figure out how to put the strategic direction into that though.

Older »