HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

bluehex

946 karma · joined January 24, 2011

submissionscomments
bluehex··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Didn't you consider that the comment you're replying to was for the benefit of other readers not necessarily the OP? I found it useful and yes I did read both.
bluehex··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
Most recently it was the configuration app for my keyboard firmware, and then video calling in FB messenger (that one might work in other browsers besides Chrome. I didn't dig too much).
bluehex··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
I never intentionally used any AI features in Chrome but first was made aware of the models when my disk was running out of space. I investigated with a disk usage tool and found I had multiple versions of the model in my Chrome directory taking up ~12gb. This was about half a year ago and maybe I was in a bad experiment or something but it's definitely not opt in or user visible. Less tech savvy people will have a really hard time understanding why their disk space is running low.
bluehex··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
I use Firefox as my main browser but occasionally run into Chrome requirements for certain web apps so end up begrudgingly installing it. I'm in the habit of going straight to the chrome flags page and turning off all this junk exactly because disk usage of chrome is ridiculous otherwise.
bluehex··on KiCad 10.0.0 Release
Congratulations and thank you to all the contributors! KiCad is an amazing piece of software.
bluehex··on California's Digital Age Assurance Act, and FOSS
"Designed by Apple in California, not for use in California" would be quite the statement.
bluehex··on California to require age verification for all OS including Linux
This post here has the most comments on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181208
bluehex··on uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts
I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.
bluehex··on Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit
Consciousness isn't a requirement for potentially dangerous behavior. When the science fiction the probabilistic models are trained on tend towards "AI uprising" and you give them the tools to do it, the probability machines will play out that scenario especially if they are prompted by their humans in that direction which some people will undoubtedly do for kicks.

If some people will give their bots crypto currency and the bots could buy hosting to "escape" or run scams to make more money or pool resources or any number of harmful things.

I'm not arguing any sort of agency here. I completely agree there is no consciousness nor do I believe there ever will be but that's not a precondition at all for an untethered probabilistic machine to be harmful.

bluehex··on Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit
They are running on individuals machines who can give them access to any number of "tools" which allow them to do things other than just writing words.
bluehex··on Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit
I keep seeing people dismiss this as an exaggerated danger because the bots are only pretending to be sentient and we're a long way off from AGI. The whole sentience debate is irrelevant. If people start giving these bots real resources, the fact that they are only "pretending" to be sentient doesn't prevent them from doing real damage as they act out their sci-fi AI uprising plots.
bluehex··on Common misunderstandings about large software companies
> The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.

I disagree with the argument that the US Tax Filing system meets the goal of:

> "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do."

It may do so for easy / common cases of W2 salaried employees but step a little outside of the norm (foreign sourced income, tax treaties etc.) and software gives up and shows you a PDF of relevant forms and requires you to become an expert in tax code and to keep your own multi year running calculation of carryovers and things to proceed. I'm glossing over all of the detail about how complex this really is but wouldn't expect the average, even very intelligent person to succeed in filing a correct return without a professional's help.

bluehex··on Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”
Such confusing naming they can't even keep it straight in the announcement.

"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app" in the introductory paragraph. Then there's a button "Buy Microsoft 365" The link below is as "Download Microsoft 365 apps for MacOS"

And the file you get is: Microsoft_365_and_Office_16~Installer.pkg

So is it the "Microsoft 365 Copilot app", or is it just "Microsoft 365" or multiple "Microsoft 365 apps"?

Above it says "formerly Office" and then the installer is named with "and Office". It's a jumble of inconsistency in just the first few lines on this landing page.

bluehex··on Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
How does lifetime elision affect performance? I thought the compiler just inferred lifetimes that you would have had to manually annotate. Naively, it seems to me that the performance should be identical.
bluehex··on Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust
I absolutely agree with you. I think this quote in the article gave me the impression that they are talking more about vibe coding it at scale rather than llm assisted engineering.

  "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’"
bluehex··on Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust
Anyone who's done some vibe coding can imagine what a mess a vibe coded operating system is going to be with current day tools. LLM agent coding is good at making small prototype web apps and the like but trying to apply it to significantly complex legacy software is a nightmare.
bluehex··on Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
I just noticed last week that Chrome was putting multiple versions of some 4GB AI model [1] on my hard disk that I'd never asked for, so when I upgraded my laptop I took the opportunity to switch to Firefox, and now this.

My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started

bluehex··on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
I agree. One recent example is in the Zig community a popular tool for benchmarking is "poop" [1] (Performance Optimizer Observation Platform). It could have easily been "pop" (Performance Observation Platform) and been cute enough without being intentionally cringe. Every time I see Zig now I think about "poop".

[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/poop

bluehex··on RP2350 A4, RP2354, and a New Hacking Challenge
Kudos to Raspberry Pi for addressing the known issues with a new stepping in just a year! I feel like that's a pretty great turn around for errata that they could have pointed to the workarounds for and delayed this indefinitely with not much pushback.
bluehex··on IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites
Etymology of the word is irrelevant when it comes to current usage, and current usage and understanding is neatly summarized by Wikipedia in the first sentence of that same article where your quote about the etymology comes from.

"Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people."

bluehex··on IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites
> Iran and Hamas firing missiles and rockets into population centers is a war crime too. So is their embedding and use of civilians. The entire strategy of Israel's opponents in the middle east is to engage in war crimes. Where do we place Israel on that scale?

I feel like you're moving the target now. Those are your words above.

But yes, if your scale is that of the western world then harsh criticism of Israel's war crimes should be expected and welcome.

I don't mean to put words in your mouth, maybe you did mean something along those lines and I'm misinterpreting.

bluehex··on A Python-first data lakehouse
"Data lake", "data lakehouse"...

Who comes up with these weird names for patterns. What the heck is "lake" supposed to invoke.

bluehex··on Japan Post launches 'digital address' system
The "important notes" section on the Japanese page[1] says that you can disable / delete an address at any time and create a new one. If I used this I would rotate every so often and at a minimum for each move. I'm a bit concerned for people that don't understand the risks of updating these. Anyone that's ever seen this code being able to lookup the person's address across moves is scary. I don't feel like this convenience warrants the risk of having this feature, personally. It's already convenient enough to just limit the input required for updating third parties to an alphanumeric code without allowing updating the addresses.

[1]: https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/#importantnotes

bluehex··on Booting the RP2350 from UART
This is awesome. I've had similar ideas but wasn't able to do any prototyping yet as I only have Pico 2 boards that don't expose the CSn pin in the pinout.

Rather than UART booting every time I thought it might be nice to use UART Boot just as a way to deliver the firmware update to the sub chip - so the UART image you load would just be a program that accepts a larger image (over UART again) and would write to the flash for subsequent boots. I think that would get around the SRAM and boot time downsides the author mentioned. Is there a reason this might not work?

bluehex··on YouTube's New Hue
You don't have to worry about that because it very conveniently snaps to the click targets that you move it near. /s
bluehex··on The Bare Minimum Beats: Panasonic's RD-9844 Rhythm Machine
Some searching online in Japanese shows a production date for the RD-9844 as Showa 49 (1974).

It's interesting that they released this as Panasonic and not Technics which was already an established Panasonic brand for audio equipment since 1965.

bluehex··on The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
Once an Android app for the startup I was working on had a suspiciously large apk size. One of our engineers dug in and realized that our packaging script copied the .git directory in with the static files.

All it took to see the source was to cd into the unzipped apk directory and do a "git reset --hard ."

bluehex··on Tell HN: The “Y” logo in the top-left corner has been upgraded to SVG
I made my top bar the same as the page color, so that might make the logo basically invisible for me or others with a brighter color defined.
bluehex··on Starship Flight Test (Launch in 1 hour)
I've never loved a relevant xkcd so much.
bluehex··on The ‘Pity City’ CEO Is Sorry Now
What a classic non-apology that was.

> I feel terrible that my rallying cry seemed insensitive. What I’d hoped would energize the team to meet a challenge we’ve met many times before landed in a way that I did not intend and for that I am sorry.

In other words, I'm sorry that you all took it the wrong way.

Page 1 of 5Next →