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Comment by chromacity | Hacker News Reader

I will actually concur with one of the less upvoted comments here: the most fascinating thing about this article is the website. I've seen that pattern on HN a couple of times in the past couple of months.

It's an incredibly specific vanity domain called passiveradar.com. Who would want that unless they're a radar manufacturer or an expert in the field? In both cases, they would put their name on it, but there's no attribution whatsoever.

The site contains two short articles, mostly illustrated with photos lifted from elsewhere. For example, the schematic of how the radar works in the earlier article comes from:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-schematic-diagram-show...

The article is also illustrated with what appear to be two vibecoded SVG animations that don't look quite right.

So, what's going on here? I suspect it's an attempt to farm domains for resale, or for LLM spam operations down the line?

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It’s reminiscent of what are known as “unbranded pharmaceutical websites,” which focus on educating patients about conditions and symptoms without promoting a specific brand-name drug, which means the regulatory bar is far lower and you don’t need to include any safety info etc.

An example would be a website creating awareness around a disease for which there is (or was at the time) only one or two treatments for, like ED, crohns, a specific type of cancer, etc. in fine print at the bottom will say “Pfizer” or “j&j” but no drugs are mentioned, just a call to “ask your doctor about possible treatments.”

(Not so) funny enough - I just did the same thing for https://gunsight.com complete with Claude generated interactive simulations for ballistics. We are actually building radars, and are likely going to use the domain in the future, but with zero effort I transformed an otherwise parked domain into something with a minimal amount of utility. So I do recognize the pattern.

I understand why you're doing it, but as a person who has to wade through dozens of these "minimal amount of utility" sites on almost every search, you're not making things better for the rest of us (or for the people who do hands-on ballistic testing that the LLM is just repeating without attribution).

wading through sites is still a thing? web search is still a thing? ok

Web search is a thing that is increasingly filled with AI slop that drowns out actual content. "wading through sites" for me means "wading through sites returned in search results".

From the second article:

  There are two options for purchasing pre-made kits that use Blah2:  
  Retina.fm: An open-source project [...] (Full disclosure: I run this project)

It's by this guy: https://github.com/jehanazad

They make/sell Blah2: https://github.com/offworldlabs/blah2-arm

They could use passiveradar.com to advertise their product I guess, but they don't have to. I see no shenanigans here. I'm glad to be better informed about passive radar.

Half-broken visualizations look suspiciously like ones I get from LLMs, so who knows, maybe it's some LLM setting up their first blog?

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