HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

brigandish

3,977 karma · joined March 15, 2017

submissionscomments
brigandish··on Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back
As far as I recall, Apple does not do reproducible builds or show you the checksum of the built product, so how would one know that the software installed is the software they saw the source for?
brigandish··on Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back
Stop updating the OS. It gets a tad annoying that not all apps will continue to work, but that's what the web is for.
brigandish··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
> I don't think the grand social goal is to maximize economic growth. It's a stable healthy society.

The contentious part of that statement is what constitutes "healthy" and "stable". Look at Japan, stuck in a long deflationary period that looks like it will end very badly and is already going badly. They are very stable though.

That, for me, makes growth look much more tempting as a choice for what constitutes healthy.

brigandish··on Six-year-old breaks women's world Rubik's Cube record [video]
What kind of toxicity are females experiencing when entering Rubik’s cube competitions?

I think it’s more likely that people often don’t like being in a noticeable out group, and that females experience that more negatively than males, so they skip it.

No need to blame anyone, and it doesn’t deny the attempt to help females participate.

brigandish··on Six-year-old breaks women's world Rubik's Cube record [video]
Easy now, I’m sure there are plenty of people on this forum that can remember the 60s.
brigandish··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
Only if demand increases to the point where supply cannot meet demand in a short enough time frame. Capacity is a factor here.

You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.

Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?

brigandish··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
What would being prepared look like? A house in the woods with a store of food? Knowing how to pick door locks and set up a militia in the desert?
brigandish··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
I've seen several strangely dead comments today, perhaps the automated filter has been updated and has some gremlins?
brigandish··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
The competition is between:

- needing to look in several places

- looking in one place

Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).

brigandish··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
The reduction of competitors and no win for the investors is somehow a signal that entry to the market against an even stronger than before incumbent would be a good bet?
brigandish··on The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC
jjui is the killer feature for me

https://github.com/idursun/jjui

brigandish··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
> 2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable.

That is ahead for the majority of people.

brigandish··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
Quantum field theory? Quiet Firefox tremors? What is this QFT you speak of?
brigandish··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
By monopolies, yes. Know what an acquihire is? Heard of a buyout leading to a shut down?

That hinders development.

brigandish··on Grok 4.6
If it were literal then you'd be able to quote the exact part of the text that says that, but you can't because that is literally not in the page. Even Ellison, who surely would love to make that claim, is intelligent enough not to make that claim directly.

A more balanced view[1] of the proceedings is available via mainstream news:

> In the 38-page lawsuit, xAI — whose AI model chatbot and image generator Grok is available on the social media platform known as X, formerly Twitter, and elsewhere — said it does not contest the state’s interest in banning the distribution of AI-generated nude images of real people without their consent. But it said Minnesota’s law “extends far beyond that goal,” banning many constitutionally protected images and video and subjecting the company to a penalty of $500,000 per violation.

> The lawsuit argues there is no “safe harbor” provision for companies that make good-faith efforts to prevent such images from being created by users, and that it covers images that were consented to by the depicted person, or even created by that person.

> It also says the law’s definition of “intimate part” is overly broad, covering body parts that are routinely displayed in public.

Calm down.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-artificial-intelligence...

brigandish··on I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
Where was the tantrum? I think a citation should be provided, else concerns about straw man arguments might not be allayed.
brigandish··on I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
People are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.
brigandish··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
No UBI, thanks, let's just make them pay for the works they're relying on (as the rest of us would have to).
brigandish··on Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign
The facts are:

- people are being arrested, charged, and prosecuted, for opinions

- that number is greater than 1

- the number of people being arrested under speech laws, per year, is reportedly[0] over 12,000

- some substantial number of those are for opinions, some are not but we don't know how many either way [0] (and considering the government were attempting to delete the Courtdesk archive[1], I'd say that's by design)

- "convictions and sentencings for the relevant offences had decreased dramatically" [0]

This points to overzealous policing and vague laws.

The criticisms by Americans, who are surely aghast at this state of affairs given their founding principles, cannot be dismissed until better numbers are available, but while the number we do know is > 1, the criticisms are valid if not entirely sound (but may be entirely sound).

[0] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...

[1] https://www.legalcheek.com/2026/02/ministry-of-justice-order...

brigandish··on Chatto is now open source
> For perspective, I was educated in my high school in England, and in my Physics class no muslim scholars name ever mentioned in my many textbooks and in classes. The same goes to my chemistry and math classes. Guess how many times Newton was mentioned in my physics classes and textbooks? To be honest I lost my count because too many times.

Physics is the study of physics, not history, no muslim scholars are relevant to modern physics, whereas Newton is relevant to modern physics. That's either because he's closer in the chain or because his work remains relevant, but either way he gets a mention for being relevant. Not every European mathematician or physicist is mentioned either, for the same reason. Descartes never came up, nor did Brahmagupta, nor did Tesla… the list of greats would be too long to mention and just wouldn't be relevant. Complaining about people nigh on 400 years ago not writing citations properly is an insubstantial complaint, to say the least.

No one else needs to care about your religion but you.

brigandish··on Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign
> they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no.

It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.

From [1]:

> The Metropolitan Police has awarded Father Ted creator and Irish comedian Graham Linehan £25,000 and an unreserved apology after they arrested him last year as his plane touched down at Heathrow airport.

> Last year, Graham Linehan — who now lives in Arizona, United States of America — was arrested by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow airport in one of the most shocking incidents we have seen in years.

> What was Graham's supposed crime? Three gender-critical posts on X. This is despite the fact that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act 2010 and were reaffirmed by last year's landmark Supreme Court ruling, which settled that "sex" is defined by biology, not gender identity.

Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word. It also seems that it is far more than one, too:

> General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, said: "I'm beginning to lose count of the number of cases we've fought in which the police have arrested someone for a tweet, decided to take no further action and then had to pay them substantial compensation for wrongful arrest.

[1] https://freespeechunion.org/news/met-police-apologises-and-p...

brigandish··on Chatto is now open source
Again, in the link you provided, in the very first paragraph, it mentions several great names who are said to have given frequent credit to muslim scholars. Are you saying that is false? If so, you have the ability to edit that Wikipedia article, and you should.

Don't forget the legacy section, where there is a long list of people and organisations giving him enormous credit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham#Legacy

brigandish··on Grok 4.5
Is Signal morally bankrupt for resisting the UK government's onboard scanning for CSAM?
brigandish··on Chatto is now open source
Firstly, there is a difference between a telescope and the prior advances that led to a telescope being invented. The telescope was not invented by a muslim scholar, hence that being why no one gives credit to one of them for that.

Secondly, to this claim:

> That's why there's little to no credit given to Muslim scholars (Arabic, Persian, Moorish Spain, etc) by the western scholars, by conveniently dismissing the Muslim golden era as "Dark Ages" but at the same time stealing the knowledge (idea, equations design, tools, etc) for most of the prior inventions by the Muslim scholars, for example the telescope.

From the link you provided, in the very first paragraph:

> The works of Alhazen were frequently cited during the Scientific Revolution by Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, and Christiaan Huygens.

No credit or frequent credit - which is it?

brigandish··on The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
> the capital was raised for AI requires that it produce as many reverse centaurs as possible, because the only way to recoup the farcical sums associated with AI production is to fire millions of workers and replace them

I'm not sure that this is the only way, just the way that selfish, sloppy, or impatient actors within business often work. If more wealth is created, more efficiencies found, more problems fixed, new jobs created, these would also bring the returns desired.

brigandish··on The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
> You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.

I'm going to guess that means "the blogs you know, you primarily found from Google searches"?

Most of the substacks I follow are because I encountered the author's thoughts on X or forums like this one. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I'm also not sure why you're generalising, seemingly quite hastily.

brigandish··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
Your assumptions are the opposite of those for an English common law country, which is why those with that background are particularly aghast.

> Operating a motor vehicle requires a license, and you have to present it.

You do not have to present it in all cases, and not to actually use the vehicle.

> Drinking and other activities and purchases require showing ID to prove your age.

Not in all cases. Purchasing alcohol in the UK may require ID (but again, not in all cases) but drinking is legal above 5 years old in areas that are not solely for the purpose of selling alcohol (crazy, but true).

That list will go on.

> Since the government currently has all of our ID data

No, it does not - for example, a passport is different to a birth certificate and they contain different amounts of identity information, and my government does not need to know other identity info regarding my work.

> mathematically secure algorithms have been invented to prove personal information without revealing it, I'd say we have reached the point where digital identification can be implemented without infringing on people's privacy any more than a clerk checking your ID.

This is too strong a statement. Having strong algorithms does not equate with the level of security you claim to exist. Implementation of the whole process is just as important.

Regardless, we have plenty of good reasons to fear any government having this information. The Japanese government, for example, has its civil service set up in a way to prevent the kind of abuses we saw in WW2. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dutch have done the same, for what should be obvious reasons.

brigandish··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
> I am not making an argument based on tradition.

I know, and neither am I. Perhaps you misread my comment.

> I couldn't care less that the web has not been government-gated for the past X years

That is clear.

> because through this logic you should adhere to any dumb tradition or custom humans have ever had

Not only is that statement a non-sequitur, since neither of us is making an argument based on tradition, it's also entirely irrelevant.

> I am concerned with the present and the future of the web's impact on the world, which of course requires government intervention like any other big phenomenon or technology in the history of humanity.

An assertion that is a) going beyond the subject, thus creating a straw man, and b) when applied to that actual subject, completely undermined by my comment.

My actual comment, not the one you appear to have decided to respond to that I haven't written, wouldn't write, and thus doesn't exist.

> Not only is your assumption false, since in its first years the web was only accessible to academics so the gating was implicit

The subject is *explicit* age gating. Nothing implicit, and nothing that isn't age gating is relevant.

> Do you know what's behind the cables that carry your bytes? The ICANN? The IANA? I hope you never do, if you dislike government involvement this much

Firstly, that is snark, but fair's fair I suppose. The irony.

Secondly and much more importantly, I dislike age gating via large-scale government coercion, the subject of this discussion.

Could you respond to that? Specifically, age gating via large-scale government coercion.

brigandish··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
Someone else in the thread asked, as others have, but most pithily

> How about not needing to do age verification?

Which I agree with. However, I think that ship is sailing. Those who care about this had better find a provider that they trust and support providers they trust, because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and without the good there'll be no way to rollback to the perfect at all.

brigandish··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
The web has not had age gating via large-scale government coercion since its inception. To claim that it's absurd to think we can do without it is to detach from that reality, and is itself absurd.

The irony.

Page 1 of 34Next →