News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

thrdbndndn

Just for your information, if you care about the reachability of your project: this site, like all ChatGPT sites, is blocked in countries that are banned by ChatGPT (e.g., Hong Kong). And because it uses a custom domain, it cannot be automatically proxied as I have set up for ChatGPT domains, which is slightly annoying.
Re:I Returned My iPhone Duo on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:45AM (#50301683)
Having both would be even better.

My current Android phone (Pixel 7) has both Face Unlock and an on-screen fingerprint scanner. My previous phone (a OnePlus) had Face Unlock along with a rear-mounted fingerprint reader, which was even better.

Unlocking a phone has never felt as effortless on my iPhones; after all these years, it continues to be a nuisance. Face ID is fine, but you have to hold the phone right in front of your face (and its angle sensitivity is far less forgiving than on my Android phones, where it recognizes you even at an angle--unlike the iPhone, where you practically have to hold it parallel to your face).

Plus, there are countless situations where you cannot or do not want to pick up your phone from a table just to align it with your face. In those cases, I am forced to type in my passcode, whereas an on-screen fingerprint scanner would be a billion times more convenient.

I am mostly baffled that such a "solved," trivial problem in the Android ecosystem continues to be a topic or a matter of "choice" on iPhones.

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually the same way. I use AI almost every day to build all sorts of pet projects now, and the results are often surprisingly good. From a productivity standpoint, AI is absolutely a game changer.

It's just that I no longer really consider myself a programming hobbyist, because what I'm doing now doesn't really feel like programming anymore. I'm mostly just talking to an AI.

It's kind of like if I were into crocheting. A big part of the fun is the repetitive process of actually making something by hand. If I suddenly had a magic machine that could produce whatever I wanted in seconds, I'd obviously be a lot more productive, but I wouldn't really call myself a crocheter anymore.

I can relate to this. I used to code as a hobby (never professionally), but since AI came along, I've pretty much lost interest in writing code by hand. Obviously just one data point, but I can easily imagine something similar happening in fields like math.
Re:Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE) on Sunday September 06, 2026 @09:07PM (#49592639)
Chinese does the same thing, using prefixes like 西 (western), 番 (foreign), and 洋 (foreign) for introduced items.

For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant".

Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) for bulb onion etc.

Re:Gemini 3.8 Flash on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @11:50PM (#49545721)
When can we use it in Gemini (web)?

It still uses 3.6 Flash for example.

Re:The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:38AM (#49533516)
I don't think there are.

Even when you have the MS Office suite installed, it doesn't really provide a good interface for LLMs or automation, so AI tools don't really use it.

Re:Leak of Internal Valve Data on Monday August 31, 2026 @05:31AM (#49507658)
10 years of all games' content is only 13TB? They are 'ancient' games, but I still find the number too small.
Re:Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card on Thursday August 27, 2026 @11:38PM (#49474076)
Apple Wallet version is enough for 99% case. You do need the suica app for things like purchasing green car ticket etc.
Re:Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio on Saturday August 01, 2026 @01:29AM (#49131313)
But op said their RTL-8157, which is also RealTek, is good?
Re:Xiaomi-Robotics-1 on Monday July 20, 2026 @03:57AM (#48975548)
Better analogy would be that even though the coffee machine is still worse, we choose it because it's more convenient (at least I think that's the case).
Re:Grok Build is open source on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @09:53PM (#48929520)
I love this kind of stuff (ASCII art, if you will), but it just breaks down too easily as soon as Unicode characters (mainly CJK, as I'm Chinese) and fonts are involved.

For example, on your website, any chart or plot involving horizontal arrows breaks down because the assigned font-family (`ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, Menlo, Consolas, monospace`, which ends up as Consolas on my machine) has no such glyph. Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width (or is not fixed-width at all) as other characters: https://i.imgur.com/d2DPGHE.png

I never really use AI via API that much, so I'm surprised reading 'merely' 6000 emails will cost $500?!
Re:Mullvad to China: Block This. We Dare You on Monday June 22, 2026 @05:53AM (#48628033)
Chinese people have been developing similar obfuscation protocols and playing a cat-and-mouse game for years, and most of them are "open source" (in quotes because lots of them have to be somewhat hidden because the Chinese gov threatens the devs).

Props to Mullvad, but it's not like they're unique in this regard.

This happens more often than you would think.

During COVID, lots of live shows (concerts, etc.) in Japan moved to streaming (and most of them stuck, so thanks to that, lots of large concerts today have real-time streaming, which is great for foreign fans).

Out of 10+ platforms, more than half have vulnerabilities that allow you to access the content freely (sometimes including the rehearsals, because they are also streamed internally), and on a handful, you can access the admin panel and, as the author said, stream whatever you want.

Most of them have been patched over the years (some are just the byproduct of them changing the backend/SaaS provider, though), but there remain some major providers where you can get content for free.

Re:The Last Surviving Japanese Porsche 912 Police Car on Monday June 15, 2026 @04:16AM (#48538149)
The article said Kanagawa so not Tokyo. Well, close enough.
This has to be trolling, right?

I find it hard to believe that anyone, no matter how dense, could come to this conclusion after this whole saga.

Re:Upcoming breaking changes for NPM v12 on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @09:14PM (#48469993)
How do you allow scripts for tools installed globally?
Re:I don't want my search engine to think for me on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @12:29AM (#48379908)
Sometimes it's not very clear what I really want when typing.

Also, Google Search's AI answer doesn't prevent the actual search results from still showing below; so if I later realize I need those (search results) instead, they're already there.

Also, I use browsers all the time, so typing things into the location bar is quicker than deliberately opening the Gemini app/website or whatever.

I value one fewer click/action a lot when such an action will be performed hundreds of times a day.

Re:1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @12:25AM (#48379886)
Very good write up but I lost it a little at the end. Could someone clarify for me?

The author said:

You cannot just use the shortcut trick to install the evil extension directly because of new publisher trust system;

You can bypass this by using local workspace extensions which has no publisher screening, but CSP blocks it;

The solution seems to be that installing a local workspace extension which binds a shortcut of 'install extension without checking publisher'.

So I assume it means:

1. you need two extensions, 1st one is local and only for the keybinding, and 2nd one is the 'real' evil one and it doesn't need to (actually can't, because of CSP) be local anymore?

2. the CSP only prevents the JS in local extension but nothing about its package.json (or the ability to add shortcuts), right?

Re:I don't want my search engine to think for me on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @09:32PM (#48378675)
I don't want either, if I'm indeed "searching." But I find that often times I am indeed just looking for a quick answer, and Gemini/Google's "new" search does it fine.

It's one of the few AI features, despite still being shoved in my face, that I actually find useful.

With that said, the worst thing is how search results have degraded significantly since the AI years, even before they added the actual "AI mode."

Google now (and quite a few search features on other services, e.g., Twitter) often returns results that have ZERO relationship to the search keywords I gave -- like an entirely different person when searching for a person's name, which I think should never happen and did not happen when search was still based on a "rigid" algorithm of indexed content. So, I can only assume it's because they have some AI thingy along the process.

I lost my 10 years old account this way after being flagged about 2-3 times due to travel.

My account really isn't that important but still makes my blood boil at the time.

In the video, some debris seemed to fly away from the explosion in a wavy path (top left). I thought things only moved like that in video games. What causes that kind of movement?
Re:Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @11:42AM (#48109930)
Good article, but I'd like to ask about two small technical details (I've used Bambu before, but I'm not very familiar with the 3D printing ecosystem).

1. OrcaSlicer: so it's a fork of Bambu's official client, Bambu Studio - but it apparently still goes through Bambu's servers for printing? How exactly does that work? Does it also "impersonate" the User-Agent, and Bambu was okay with that?

2. OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?

Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing on Monday April 27, 2026 @12:26PM (#47923677)
I keep seeing people mention OpenRouter.

Does it effectively bypass regional restrictions for you, so you can use something like the Claude API from unsupported regions such as Hong Kong, or does it still enforce the official providers' geo-restrictions?

Re:Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port on Monday April 27, 2026 @03:59AM (#47918894)
Well TBF, the original Notepad++ isn't too good in this regard either.

Whenever I opened a N++ window in a remote desktop session and leave it open, and then use the same computer in-person, the whole UI of that window becomes a blurry mess and the boundary of the window is off (as in, if you maximize the window, moving the cursor to the top-right will actually not land on X.), which I assume it because of changing resolution/scaling between remote and in-person use.

I failed to find the "86%" figure. The total energy mix shows "66% renewable".
Re:Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @11:55PM (#47609818)
I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions.

The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else?

And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release.

At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.

Re:Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @10:59PM (#47526183)
I always thought "opt-in" (not "opt in") meant something you have to actively choose to enable; otherwise, it stays off. So calling something "opt-in by default" sounds like a misnomer to me.

But English is not my first language so please correct me if I'm wrong.

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