HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

basilikum

2,035 karma · joined July 30, 2025

https://basilikum.monster
submissionscomments
basilikum··on Self-Hosting on the Dark Web
No
basilikum··on Self-Hosting on the Dark Web
You probably want to add the Onion-Location header to the clearnet site so Tor Browser can automatically inform the visitor about it: https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/oni...
basilikum··on Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election
You don't need to censor access to the platform itself. Just declare the group for what it is: a criminal cartel. Then just make it illegal to do business with criminal organizations: no Brazilian ads on Facebook anymore.
basilikum··on PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock
How do you ensure people upload the original video and do not tamper with it?
basilikum··on Two-tier encryption in the UK
Some laws that are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
basilikum··on Two-tier encryption in the UK
> Yes, I know, defaults.

You gave the answer yourself. If the person you are writing with has E2EE enabled for message backups then just exclude that chat from backups on your end or enable E2EE for that chat. That means if you take the restore route without having access to the keys that conversation will not be restored.

You could even let people overwrite that setting. Preventing screenshots or copying has nothing to with this. Apple is claiming that message are end to end encrypted when in reality their defaults are set so that they are not. That is a lie and al they would need to do to change that is to change those defaults.

basilikum··on Ask HN: Dead Internet
It shows comments and submissions that have been removed by either the system, mod action or flagging through the community. The former two get marked as simply [dead] and the latter as [dead] [flagged].
basilikum··on Don't Use AI to Write
Proofreading yes, automatic "corrections" no
basilikum··on Don't Be Nice
Why is your bar that they must be hurtful to everyone? What do you suggest to do when they direct the same behavior only a certain group in the space? You say that it does not have to be political and I agree, but what if it is? What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?
basilikum··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
As I explained in another comment the false negative rate is irrelevant in this context.
basilikum··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
The false negative rate would be interesting but is irrelevant in this context. I was replying to a comment claiming that most people take issue with the ethics of GenAI rather than the quality and that people have a high false positive rate. I raise myself and my experience with people I know as a counter example.

There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.

basilikum··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
I trust Pangram's stats to be a good baseline.
basilikum··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
I can say that my false positive rate is very low which is enough in this context.
basilikum··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.

But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657

I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.

I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.

basilikum··on How to Write with an LLM
You are moving the goalpost. OC is not talking about thoughts having to be unique. You can very much read someone else's thoughts, examine them critically and come to the conclusion of agreeing with them. You might then write a comment like OC putting these thoughts into your own words – maybe abridging them, placing different emphasize according to what you find most important or even adding new ideas – and quote or paraphrase something you found very fitting.

That is completely different from generating words that are not an expression of your thoughts or at the very best take some concise thoughts from the prompt and stretch them into a lengthy word soup.

Of course there are people who just parrot other people's thoughts without understanding them. That's closer to using an LLM. But you can often see how well someone understands something and how much reasoning of their own they put into it through their writing. And for the writer writing is a very good way to reflect on their own thoughts and to get them into order. Proper writing is thinking.

basilikum··on Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training
I'm asking sincerely, how do you get to the conclusion that it's those two?
basilikum··on The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
Yes, hold people accountable for their actions. Don't take away their freedom. We may prohibit individual actions that involve a general tool when they harm others. That is compatible with a free society. We may not prohibit fundamental tools¹ That is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. Especially when that tool forms the infrastructure for the flow of information and free speech.

[1] General purpose computing

basilikum··on The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
People accidentally hurt themselves with kitchen knives every day. They are also very often used for violent crimes.

Clearly we need to regulate the kitchen knife industry more. There should be a central authority that sells authorized kitchen knives with at max 6cm length and all other knives should only be available to certified chefs.

Once we have outlawed the longer knives and strong restrictions on ordinary kitchen tools become normal we should just outlaw knives altogether. You can still hurt yourself with a short knife. Only chefs should ever be allowed to own such a dangerous tool. Just buy or order readily prepared food. Why would you do this weird nerd thing called cooking anyway? Just choose from the official list of allowed foods.

The idea that we have to prevent people from being in control of their own computers — that's what a smartphone is — is deeply dystopian and authoritarian.

basilikum··on Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training
How did you dertmine it was those two companies? Also did you disallow them in robots.txt?
basilikum··on An update on Wayback Machine access
Mad props to the people at the Archive. You are the heros we need in a formerly open internet that is surrendering to evil big corps and closing down free access.

The Internet Archive is in a really bad spot being attacked from multiple sides at once. But — while service has not been consistent — they have maintained open access. I can still access anonymously from Tor without Cloudflare or some other centralized gatekeeper showing me the middle finger.

If you got some money to spare, consider donating to them. They need it.

basilikum··on Closing the IPv6 first-packet gap with GRAND
Interesting topic.

Started reading, the text is dreadfully lengthy, hard to stay concentrate on due to all the filler and mindlessly arranged words that obscure the actual content, notice AI tell signs.

Stop reading, paste into Pangram, mostly AI,

scroll down on the text, find this:

> Note: The author used AI tools to assist with drafting and language. The technical work, analysis and conclusions are the author’s own. For more information about our policy on AI-generated content, see our Contributing to RIPE Labs page.

Do better RIPE. I assumed RIPE had some standard. If you decide to not have any standards, at the very least put the AI disclaimer at the top so I don't waste my time on slop. It's disrespectful.

Does anyone have an article about NDP and GRAND that is not slop and worth sharing and reading?

basilikum··on GRP-Obliteration: Unaligning LLMs with a Single Unlabeled Prompt
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or the article, but as far as I understand it from a cursory reading this is not a jailbreak. They use this one prompt for fine tuning and use the model's response to the prompt as the sole underlying benchmark.

How would you do this with a closed weights model?

basilikum··on How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
We can't judge code quality without having the code.
basilikum··on How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
Perhaps it would be useful if both of you could provide examples of supposedly good and bad code – the latter being the result of a genuine effort to produce good code with state of the art models. Just asserting that LLM code is good or bad ends in a yes - no - yes - no back and forth circle immediately.
basilikum··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Because that's what's being discussed?
basilikum··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
How do you even know what "side" I'm on?
basilikum··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Twitter heavily censors speech on the platform itself by downranking things they do not like without any transparency.
basilikum··on Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith.

We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages.

Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.

basilikum··on Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
Most captchas are invisible as long as they like your IP and device. But they still do the fingerprinting in the background.
basilikum··on There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
Google may actively prefer AI slop over human quality content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
Page 1 of 13Next →