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AndyMcConachie

2,874 karma · joined July 28, 2015

www.metafarce.com smutt@depht.com
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AndyMcConachie··on When did Google get so weird?
The problem is one of information provenance. A search engine shows you stuff that other people have written. It might be right or it might be wrong. But you get to judge that yourself, because you have an idea of where the information came from.

With AI summaries they take that away from you and claim the provenance for themselves. Google is now giving you the answer and they hide where that answer came from. Therefore, you cannot properly evaluate the provenance of the information presented. It still might be right or wrong, but you can no longer properly evaluate it based on source.

AndyMcConachie··on CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human – they prove you're American
Yes. Making meaning often requires context. The study of this is often referred to as pragmatics.
AndyMcConachie··on FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
> They already do that, in Europe. I assume that it works, as I don’t hear about this level of stuff, over there

As an EU citizen and resident I strongly recommend you not take EU privacy controls seriously. The GDPR functions well as a means of tax collection, but it really doesn't work all that well as something that actually protects people's privacy.

AndyMcConachie··on I'm becoming AI-blind
Having just a little background in traditional linguistic discourse analysis help understand why this is.

The best basic explanation I've found is this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA

The real answer is to take a class in discourse analysis and learn how to pick apart sentences. Once you start understanding how language works in the brain you can start to see better how LLMs fail.

AndyMcConachie··on The Amazon tax
Amazon regularly sends me spam emails.
AndyMcConachie··on The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding
As bad as this is, I don't see how it is fundamentally different to the ways in which research grants have been doled out before. Hasn't it always been somewhat political?

Granted, the methods used here are asinine. But I don't think USG research has ever been apolitical and there have always been special words that grant writers knew to use and not use. Part of being in research is getting grants and it has always been a silly game. This just seems to take the silly game to whole new levels.

AndyMcConachie··on Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
No. You're simply wrong.
AndyMcConachie··on Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
But how many times can you take a piece of Ikea furniture apart and put it back together again? I have friends who have moved apartments with the same Billy bookshelf 2-3 times and if they tried it one more time the thing would collapse.

Not to belabor the metaphor as heavily as my friend's Billy, but there's a maintenance corellary to be made here. Most Ikea furniture can be put together once, in one place, and left there for a long time. But once you want to change it in place it may just collapse.

AndyMcConachie··on How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
Embrace, extend, destroy. This has always been MS. They basically haven't changed since 1990.
AndyMcConachie··on TP-Link Kasa cameras leaked home GPS via unauthenticated UDP for 6 years
Why do people keep buying all this garbage and putting it in their homes?
AndyMcConachie··on DNSGlobe – Rust TUI to watch DNS propagate around the world
>> The myth of DNS “propagation” needs to die.

> What's the actual issue? Are you being frustrated by people laboring under the assumption that DNS records are being sent by carrier pidgeon or something?

The actual issue is that some people misunderstand how DNS works, and the notion that records propagate doesn't help people understand it better. It propagates a misunderstanding of DNS.

AndyMcConachie··on Google Hits 50% IPv6
I would expect online video games to be a more important driver.
AndyMcConachie··on Finding success in industry as a chip designer
China doesn't seem to really care about copyright or other forms of intellectual property. We'll see how long this stuff stays closed and opaque. Not that I believe Chinese chip manufacturers have some desire to open everything up. I just imagine that at some point they'll reach parity with the state of the art and will lack a desire to lock everything up behind trade secrets and contracts, at least initially.

Intellectual property favors the incumbents. If they're the upstart they may want everything to be open because their margins will be better anyway. If they're always going to be the cheapest why should they care about building an intellectual property moat?

But I'm just random dude on the Internet theorizing about the future ;)

AndyMcConachie··on Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier
I know people that work as contractors for the Dutch government. The government doesn't save money by hiring them through contractors. They cost more through contractors. But contracting allows private companies to act as gatekeepers and pocket some cash for essentially supplying full time employees. It's a form of corruption by well connected private contracting companies.
AndyMcConachie··on Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS
I love Strawberry Music Player. Works great and does everything I want.
AndyMcConachie··on Cisco workforce reductions
As someone who was impacted by Cisco's first ever round of layoffs, I can say with confidence that your statement was also true 25 years ago.
AndyMcConachie··on Why TUIs are back
One of my first jobs was working on Telephony User Interfaces (TUIs). Everytime I see the term TUI I can't help but think of that.

For people who don't know this version of TUI, it's the ole, "Press 1 for X, Press 2 for Y" kind of interfaces that you use over a phone. Think voicemail text-to-speech and automated speech recognition.

AndyMcConachie··on Do_not_track
The reason the DNT header failed is because there is no way to enforce it. The browser can set the flag, but there's no way to ensure it's actually respected. There are no protocol police.
AndyMcConachie··on A report on burnout in open source software communities (2025) [pdf]
What pisses me off the most is that there are companies making billions of dollars off the labor of others and many of them don't even acknowledge it.
AndyMcConachie··on The Last Quiet Thing
We're getting beeped at constantly by the various devices we surround ourselves with. I can't help but comapre it to changing a baby's diapers everytime it needs our attention. So I've started referring to all of these annoyances as 'digital diaper changing'.
AndyMcConachie··on German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function
You're screwed. This has been the way for a while now. You cannot exist in society without a smart phone and it's only going to get worse.
AndyMcConachie··on Migrating to the EU
I also use mailbox.org and use my own domain for email. Not sure what issue the author ran into.
AndyMcConachie··on Nobody finishes reading my books
Shorter chapters allow me to have more frequent natural break points. I often have limited time to read, or the time I have is broken up into shorter chunks. So books with shorter chapters are easier to stop and then pick back up.
AndyMcConachie··on Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS
You have a point, but two counters to this:

1) You don't need to capture a large part of the market to make a profit. The market for smartphones is large enough that even capturing a small percentage of it can be profitable.

2) Privacy is increasingly becoming a differentiator and I predict privacy will be increasingly important as a differentiator. Just because no company has successfully managed to market privacy benefits doesn't mean there is no market for it. There's a lot of marketing potential in terms of privacy that companies like NordVPN, Incogni, and DeleteMe have figured out. People are clearly willing to pay for privacy.

AndyMcConachie··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are

I don't think you understand how capitalism and corporations work, friend. Even if Anthropic is a public benefit corporation it still exists in the USA and will be placed under extensive pressure to generate a profit and grow. Corporations are designed to be amoral and history has shown that regardless of their specific legal formulation they all eventually revert to amoral growth driven behavior.

This is structural and has nothing to do with individuals.

AndyMcConachie··on Never buy a .online domain
https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint
AndyMcConachie··on Cuba's regime is in dire straits
American empire is a death cult.
AndyMcConachie··on Show HN: Browse Internet Infrastructure
Great site. If you don't mind I have feature requests, but feel free to ignore them because OSS is OSS and you shouldn't feel obligated.

1) Include a link to dnsviz.net to check on the DNSSEC status of domains. They've already done all the work and it would be a nice integration.

2) Something that I wish more DNS operators understood is the concept of shared fate between authoritative name servers. Shared fate can come in the form of same AS, same upstream, same parent domain, etc. Operators might think they have redundancy when in fact all their servers are located in the same AS, for example. If there is any way you can highlight this or show this it would be useful.

3) I didn't try looking up a phishing domain, but displaying whether a domain exists on popular block lists would be awesome.

I love your attempt at understanding all the TXT RRs that have spread across the DNS in the last 10 years. What a mess.

You're right in that this is a rabbit hole. You could spend the rest of your life building this and never actually completing it, be careful!

AndyMcConachie··on When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
The real trick, and the reason I don't build my own NAS, is standby power usage. How much wattage will a self built Linux box draw when it's not being used? It's not easy to figure out, and it's not easy to build a NAS optimized for this.

Whereas Synology or other NAS manufacturers can tell me these numbers exactly and people have reviewed the hardware and tested it.

AndyMcConachie··on EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification
I gave you an upvote because you're correct. EU leadership has no ability to think strategically.
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