HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

boastful_inaba

367 karma · joined September 26, 2018

Just a little bunny, scarred but wiser.

https://twitter.com/boastful_inaba https://www.moonflesh.com/ https://www.youneedfeeds.com/

submissionscomments
boastful_inaba··on Fair Access to Banking
The U.S. Internet Preservation Society writes about chokepoints in the financial processing system (inspired by recent events with games stores) and the several layers present that are not obvious to people outside the system.

UPIPS covers why payment networks are effectively immune from competition, and why creating a new competing payment network without restrictions will not provide benefits due to contract lock-in and other problems.

They also cover proposed legislation's benefits and weaknesses for addressing the problem.

boastful_inaba··on Japan's precision moon lander has hit its target, but appears to be upside-down
Well I now have context and explanation for the art I recently saw!

See this X thread: https://twitter.com/MADOguchimoto/status/1750415013343596786

The artist has anthropomorphized the lander - along with the "Sora Q" probe coming to document its misfortune.

boastful_inaba··on Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update
They've added in aim assist for the HL rerelease, at least. Annoyingly it's on by default, even in the PC version.
boastful_inaba··on Hard Lessons from Israel's High-Tech Border Failure
I wonder what the resistance of underground wiring is to rocket attacks. If the space in between is repeatedly getting hit by explosions, it seems likely the blasts would cut wiring at some point.
boastful_inaba··on Hard Lessons from Israel's High-Tech Border Failure
Interesting article that goes over the cascading systems and tech failure that Hamas exploited to conduct its recent attack.
boastful_inaba··on Pillows to help workers snooze at desk
You can use either a forwarding service where you order yourself to an address with a personal code, or a proxy buying service which does the ordering for you.

The big forwarding service would be Tenso: https://www.tenso.com/en

Proxy services include

Buyee - https://buyee.jp/ (though they don't like VPN access)

Noppin - https://noppin.com/

Japan Rabbit - https://japanrabbit.com/

amongst many others.

boastful_inaba··on NSA Backdoor Key from Lotus-Notes (1997)
CUDA only had its initial release in 2007 (compared to the mentioned crack in 2009), and I remember it being a fairly limited product at that point. GPUS were also much slower back then.
boastful_inaba··on I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)
The Jane Elliot story is quite a bit different from how it's usually remembered:

https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2009/10/i-sense-a-malign-presence...

boastful_inaba··on Ask vs. Guess Culture
I am reminded of the tweet from long-banned Twitter poster Hakan Rotmwrt:

"One of the strangest fixations of AFWL metaphysics is on a substance called 'trauma' that they believe is 'stored in the body' in small saclike organs where it constantly threatens to be 'triggered' and erupt out of its ducts. They assert life itself is about 'processing trauma'"

boastful_inaba··on Nintendo is trying to patent some broad Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
You can still hit a button to stop the loading from finishing, IIRC, and then just hang around on the combo practice screen as long as you like.
boastful_inaba··on Game tutorials should be easily skipped. Why is that so hard?
At least they patched out the effect where Curse stacked with each death to the debuff. Imagine playing the game with half health, then a quarter health, then an eighth health...
boastful_inaba··on Thunderbird 115 “Supernova”
Present in specialist clients like Eudora, perhaps, but I think for mass-market users that only touched webmail and Outlook the introduction of threading in Gmail must have seemed heavenly.
boastful_inaba··on Nvidia RTX Remix Runtime Open Source Available Now
It could work - but loading modded DLLs on CS is a great way to get VAC banned. It would be a very expensive tech demo!
boastful_inaba··on Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says
War Thunder's twitter account is even commenting on it now: https://twitter.com/WarThunder/status/1645727948949934082
boastful_inaba··on The risks of cleaning with bleach and other disinfectants
He's riffing on a study that was released just before that talk, in which blood was passed through a machine that shone UV light into it to kill infectious material. (Similar in spirit to dialysis in terms of blood going out of the body, being treated, then put back in.) Of course, that statement of "this new tech is interesting" got memetically mutated into "Trump wants people to inject bleach".
boastful_inaba··on Jailbreak Chat: A collection of ChatGPT jailbreaks
The funniest one I've seen is where someone messed with GPT enough to create a jailbreak themed around the idiotic ice fairy from the Touhou shooter series:

https://twitter.com/cirnosad/status/1623315923309559810

(Ice Fairy Army vs NATO is a very silly series of responses)

boastful_inaba··on Twitter starts limiting how many tweets you can post per day
Tweetdeck is also down if you're set to the non-preview interface, stuck in a loop of login and instant logouts. The Tweetdeck Preview works (and you can access this by clearing all cookies) but keeps hitting a rate limit. I hope the rumors of TweetDeck becoming a premium feature are not true - I could never hope to catch everything without use of all those columns at once.
boastful_inaba··on Leak of a cancelled 1996 “Duke Nukem Forever” side-scroller
You're in luck! An early engine test for the original Prey leaked just this last week. (So early, it's before the portals concept.)
boastful_inaba··on YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations
I second the BlockTube recommendation. It's great for spoiler avoidance too!

Put in keywords like:

  "ending explained"
  "top 10"
  "death scene"
  "betrayal scene"
  "all bosses"
  "all endings"
as well as series names that you don't want to be spoiled on, and suddenly your Youtube experience will be much better.
boastful_inaba··on Ask HN: Why Adobe still can’t figure out Flash on WASM?
I once spoke with an ex-Macromedia employee who told me that a full Flash-to-App tool had been developed for the launch of custom apps on iPhone ... and that Apple had internally committed to blocking any app developed in Flash, so the tool was never released.
boastful_inaba··on Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?
Metafilter is the only community that I've seen that had "agree with the hivemind" as an explicit rule! I don't know whether it still operates this way, but for a very long time it ran with a "read the room" rule, which meant that disagreeing with the others in a thread was a mute/banworthy offense. So of course a site monoculture would develop under those circumstances...
boastful_inaba··on Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service
In previous years, the admin noticed a repeated monthly pattern of DDOS attacks, and believed that it was due to the cycle of people getting welfare/disability and spending as much as they could each month on rent-a-DDOS services.
boastful_inaba··on Study: Chances of serious side effects from coronavirus vaccines
It's different depending on which vaccine technology was used.

Some vaccines used a lipid shell to get around the problems of raw MRNA being really fragile. However, it seems they made the protection too good, and MRNA that was supposed to just stay in the arm easily travelled further and got into the bloodstream. That means that MRNA was getting into cells all around the body and causing spike protein production everywhere, instead of just in the arm like designed.

This means that you got inflammation problems everywhere in the body, including in the heart (myocarditis/pericarditis), vascular systems ("brain fog", general unwellness), and reproductive systems (especially for women).

Inflammation in the injection site for a vaccine is pretty normal, inflammation elsewhere is terrible.

Initial optimistic assumptions of the MRNA being permanently consumed by the body relatively quickly also don't seem to be true - even the CDC recently edited a page on MRNA vaxxes to remove a statement that the MRNA is used up quickly. The very worst case scenario could be people who got vaxxed just have cells pumping out inflammatory spike protein at a low rate for years.

Other vaccines used a real virus vector that is modified version to express spike protein. This of course has the issue of a virus being not entirely controllable once it's in the body. Again, you'll have the problem of the virus (and thus the spike protein it expresses) ending up in strange places. However, the immune profile is slightly different, as the immune system will start to attack the vaccine vector as it progresses in the body.

Several vaccines were associated with strange, systemic blood clotting in some people - but I'm not sure if they ever found the mechanism of action.

Novavax uses a traditional protein+adjuvant mix seen in many previous vaxxes. There's no widespread report of nasty side effects with Novavax - but there's not that much usage of Novavax in the wild either.

Aside from that, there's also the issue that in targeting a variant of the rapidly-mutating spike protein, you set people up to be victim to the long-known "original antigenic sin" effect.

Immune system works off a principle of first impression - it targets a response to whatever it sees first. This also applies to infections that are somewhat close but not the same as what is 'memorised' by the immune system already. So an infection by a COVID variant when the person has been exposed to a vaccine for the originals will produce an immune response for the modified original protein, not the real infection that is currently happening. (The vaccines target a modified original spike protein, and not the S-shape protein as well, so the distance is even greater.) Since the spike protein keeps shifting so fast in the wild, hitting the OAS effect is really likely over time.

Some people think the S-protein in the middle of COVID should have been targeted by the vaccines, not the spikes, as it's more stable. It's hard to know if that would have been more effective.

boastful_inaba··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
In several places there's a differentiation between a "primary boycott" and a "secondary boycott".

Primary boycott: I buy from you now, but you did something bad and now I don't like you and refuse to purchase your goods/services anymore. I'm going to campaign for my friends to not buy from you either.

Secondary boycott: I don't buy from you directly, but I don't like who you work with or sell to, don't associate with them. If you don't stop my friends and I will hurt you

In some jurisdictions, secondary boycotts are illegal, usually as a measure to prevent unions applying muscle to people tangentially related to a core business.

I'm not sure of the legal status of these things in the mess of jurisdictions involved in this controversy, though.

boastful_inaba··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
The basic data point for claims for near/byuu faking it are:

* He's done a disappearing act with an identity before! That's the reason for the near/byuu name split. People eventually figured out the two names were the same though.

* He never appeared on the international US citizens death list that is regularly published.

* There's been no independent confirmation of his death otherwise

* The thread documenting him was long-inactive at the time he messaged the admin, so there wasn't anything that could have been called 'harassment' at the time.

That doesn't mean the death is impossible.

The US government bureaucracy could have failed, and the vanishing by suicide of a guy who had kept his name/face secret for quite some time is not hard to imagine either. Maybe the guy who told the dramatic story of byuu's last phone call on Twitter was telling the truth!

Judge based on evidence, such as it is. KF has enormous threads full of archived backing for everyone's statements, if you really want to kill an evening reading the back story.

boastful_inaba··on Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
I have to wonder - are there any USB sticks available that have a read-only toggle like floppies used to have?
boastful_inaba··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
It should be noted for the record that Kiwi Farms has had a longstanding 'no touch' rule, usually displayed prominently at the top of every page. (It appears to be currently replaced by the admin notifications whilst the site deals with the current state of events.)

Much like the old site Portal of Evil, another best-of-the-worst aggregator from the early internet, making on-site trolling/harassment plans is a great way to get your account banned very quickly ... or becoming a thread topic yourself.

boastful_inaba··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
Josh Moon (Null), the owner and administrator of Kiwi Farms, responds to their removal from CloudFlare.

Their core claim is that the post which got attention (a shooting/bomb threat) was made by a sleeper account that had only ever posted a single time before the controversy started. Null also says the post was removed just after half an hour from its creation, having been reported seven times by other community members.

EDIT - RE: The submission title. I quoted the title exactly as per HN submission rules - but I guess the system changed the capitalisation and removed the punctuation present in the title?

boastful_inaba··on Twitter Is Unsuspending Accounts
A fairly active account from years ago tied into some areas of ... leftist-sceptical online gaming culture.

Either a Japanese housewife who likes videogames, or a Brazilian man claiming to be a Japanese housewife, depending on who you ask.

They were banned (assumed at the time to be as part of the regular general reaping of non-leftist accounts), and the fact that they've resurrected seems to be indicating a policy change at Twitter.

boastful_inaba··on Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul
Maybe just follow their Twitter account (https://twitter.com/desolation_mod) or Youtube account (https://www.youtube.com/embersparkgames) ?
Page 1 of 2Next →