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cbeach

1,004 karma · joined July 19, 2012

My projects:

    https://www.caption.me

    https://newsavista.com

    https://stackography.com
submissionscomments
cbeach··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
X.com makes it nearly impossible to run bot accounts, with its phone number per account requirement, and the astronomical fees for using its API.

Twitter, by comparison, was trivially easy to run bots on. I ran many automated Twitter accounts (for legit purposes). I had to shut them all down when Musk bought Twitter.

cbeach··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.
cbeach··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
There's no "catastrophising" here. This is simply an article that rationally explains why the latest EU regulation is well meaning but poorly implemented.

It just so happens that the same is true for a lot of EU technical regulation.

At what point are we allowed to say "the EU is failing to regulate its members effectively"?

Or are we not allowed to say that because it would create some kind of catastrophe where the EU Commission loses its power over the EU27 and Russia invades (or somesuch catastrophising...?)

cbeach··on Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
Ruby (language) on Rails (highly opinionated framework) is both a language and an architecture.
cbeach··on Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
After their infamous "Fail Whale" outages, Twitter replaced its Ruby on Rails / MySQL stack with modern (at the time) technologies: Scala (functional language running on the JVM) / Finagle (RPC) / Thrift (framework) / Kafka (message queues) and this made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users.

Ruby is single-threaded, slow with poor GC and memory leaks. As Twitter's Alex Payne said publicly in 2008: "there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind that Ruby itself is slow" and that scaling Rails meant "just throw more instances at it"

cbeach··on Qwen3.8-2.4T
Anyone thinking of buying 2x RTX Pro 6000 Blackwells - beware: unlike other cards e.g. RTX 5090, The RTX Pro 6000 cards cannot be NV-Linked, so you'll be going through the PCIe bus instead (7x higher sync cost)
cbeach··on Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
They deserve it.

I'm in the UK. The smartest developers I worked with in my ~20 year career were all Polish.

The hardest-working and most skilled tradespeople that worked on my houses were Polish.

cbeach··on The EU is making the Right to Repair the new standard in Europe
The EU is completely different to a parliamentary democracy.

Only the unelected European Commission is able to originate and repeal law.

The elected “Parliament” is only able to vote Directives through. And if Parliament vote against a Directive, the Commission pushes repeatedly until they get the result they want.

As former EU Commission President Jean Claude Juncker stated: “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker

cbeach··on Grok 4.5
This website tracks AI model political leanings:

https://trakkr.ai/bias

Grok differs from some of the other models (it's more libertarian, and more right wing), but all models have their biases - particularly ChatGPT, which sits to the economic left of 81% of US adults. See https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings

cbeach··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
In the EU that's the norm not the exception. A little taste of Europe for our American friends :-S
cbeach··on Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Just my idea. I'm working on a side project https://newsavista.com/invite/ASAD68923E that aggregates news and tracks news trends and changing sentiment on the major stories. With cheap cloud LLMs (and "free" local LLMs) it turns out to be a trivial feature to build.
cbeach··on Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
This is excellent.

A minor suggestion - I'd like to be able to render the current graph taller (full height of my browser window).

Also some sentiment analysis on the "people" graphs would be very insightful (particularly for the likes of Edward Snowdon, Julian Assange, Elon Musk and Sam Altman). Perhaps colour the area under the graph red-orange-green based on the sentiment?

cbeach··on Becoming a dad changes men's brains
The Guardian either wilfully or ignorantly publishes stats from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. Anyone who repeats these stats is an accessory to the terrorist regime in charge of Gaza.
cbeach··on Becoming a dad changes men's brains
It was Hamas’s war - started by a terrorist organisation butchering, abducting and raping young unarmed citizens.

The scale of the aftermath is what happens when an advanced democracy faces an existential threat from a terrorist-led neighbouring region, and must act to neutralise that threat for the safety of its citizens.

cbeach··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
General Electric was just fine when Thomas Edison died in 1931. And Apple was fine after the tragic early death of Steve Jobs.

Companies like this become bigger than their founders.

And I'm sure many on the Left would argue that Tesla and SpaceX would be healthier companies without Elon Musk.

Although I tend to differ on that, having owned $TSLA for a long time. Never bet against Elon!

cbeach··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
Just heard back from Google regarding my report of the ad that served malware to me:

> Dear Chris,

> We’re writing to let you know that we reviewed your report (ID 579240969280369002).

> Here's what we found

> We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies, which prohibit certain content and practices that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall online ecosystem.

I think the safest thing I can do right now is avoid using Google for searches and instead use Claude, which at least has functioning safeguards, and is less easily poisoned than Google Search.

cbeach··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
Firstly, Mike, thank you for all you've done with HomeBrew - an amazing product. None of my ire was directed at you or HomeBrew.

I am so frustrated at Google, not just for this incident, but for many reasons (like their inexplicable shutdown of my own Adsense account years ago, and their neglect of several products I'd built against or bought). When they act, they leave us with no recourse. I feel anxious being dependent on them, even for simple stuff like my email account.

They are sufficiently big that they no longer care about the little guy anymore. They are only interested in swallowing up all the World's data and cashing in on Workspace.

cbeach··on Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks
This demonstration is the clearest I've seen so far, showing the gulf between Opus and Fable for app creation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzJCly4YgDQ

The Age of Empires clone (and the difference in graphics quality/creativity between Opus and Fable) is at the end of the video and I was blown away.

Notice how this guy prompts the models. Very detailed, with technical requirements and steering. He's going for a one-shot build and he nailed it.

cbeach··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
I reported the ad to Google immediately, and when I checked back an hour later the search results were clear. But I suspect it's only a matter of time before another one slips through the net.

I think what happens is a legitimate business with a history of legit Google advertising gets compromised by malware, and then their Google adverts are flipped.

cbeach··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
Slightly tangential, but I went to set up Homebrew today on a new Mac. Stupidly clicked the top link in Google (which was sponsored but not obviously so). Took me to a spoof Homebrew page. I ran the script. Typed in my Mac password like a fool when prompted, and nothing happened. Then I realised what an idiot I’d been.

Claude found evidence of an exfiltration malware on my laptop and I inmediately wiped the device and started again. Revoked all my keys, rotated all my passwords. And now I pray the damage is contained.

I can’t believe that Google would have let this slip through. I probably wasn't the only one that got caught out.

cbeach··on The Chinese EV standard winning globally is banned in the U.S.
The whole premise of this article is troubling. I don’t want there to be a single standard for vertically-integrated EV design.

I want BYD to compete with Tesla, each having distinct stacks. I want Ford to differ from GM.

The pace of EV innovation since the 2010s came from companies like Tesla breaking the mold and doing things differently from legacy auto, sometimes with stubbornness and audacity that caused the media to shame them, and claim they’d be bankrupt within weeks.

IMO we need that sense of urgency and existentialism injected back into the industry. We need EVs to be exciting if people are to be inspired to make the switch. With one or two exceptions (eg charging standards), the last thing we need is the imposition of supranational standards, regulations and homogenisation that brings innovation to a grinding halt and leaves all carmakers with a lowest-common-denominator generic solution

cbeach··on Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers
As soon as data starts being exfiltrated to Google (or any Big Tech firm), be sure that governments will demand their copy of the stream too.

The non-disclosure clauses in mass surveillance legislation will ensure the process is opaque to users.

You’ll only find out about it when your door is smashed down and all your devices are seized, because Chrome’s crappy 4GB AI model misinterpreted an innocent photo of your kid in a paddling pool.

cbeach··on Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold
> Never expected to see the Critical Drinker mentioned on HN. I find myself agreeing with the majority of points he brings up in his videos, but I suspect the majority on HN would disagree with him.

Sadly you're right. At times like this I wish Silicon Valley was in Texas or Florida rather than one of the most leftwing / collectivist states in America.

cbeach··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
The software, OS and chips are completely irrelevant to the discussion about the physical design of batteries.

As for ergonomic differences, I see sliding phones, folding phones, big phones, small phones, minimal phones, phones covered in buttons.

cbeach··on Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold
I think Hollywood has been churning out derivative content for a while, and catering for "modern audiences" (as opposed to the silent majority) too much.

One or two exceptions - Project Hail Mary, for example.

But the decline of Marvel, Star Trek and Star Wars franchises has been stark.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker has some great commentary on the problem.

Also, a number of other factors:

    * massive TVs are cheap now
    * people behave disrespectfully in cinemas
    * cinema tickets are now unaffordable for the low end of the market
    * the experience hasn't modernised and become luxy enough to retain the high end of the market
    * streaming services have high budgets now
cbeach··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027

    * Samsung Electronics
    * Apple
    * Xiaomi
    * Oppo (includes OnePlus)
    * Vivo
    * Huawei
    * Honor
    * Motorola Mobility
    * realme
    * Google
    * Sony
    * Nokia
    * Asus
    * Nothing
    * HTC
    * ZTE
    * Fairphone
    * LG Electronics
But yeah, "no competition left," okay..
cbeach··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
This should be for the market to decide, not EU bureaucrats.

If I want a thicker, clunkier, less waterproof phone with a user-replaceable battery, I can already buy a Fairphone or a Samsung Galaxy XCover6 Pro, or whatever.

The reason people buy iPhones and flagship Samsung phones is they want the benefits that come from a design that doesn't have to make sacrifices to accomodate a user-replaceable battery.

cbeach··on Microsoft suspends dev accounts for high-profile open source projects
Alongside talk from the UK Labour government about intervening on VPNs, I'm getting uneasy vibes about this move, especially since Microsoft is one of the most government-friendly corporations in the big tech arena.

The surveillance state is growing more sinister every day (especially in the UK), but the efforts are somewhat thwarted by the existence of VPNs.

Once they find a way to undermine VPNs, the UK govt will have literal CCP-level control over our access to information and communication.

cbeach··on EFF is leaving X
It would be illegal to post such rhetoric, and I can't name a single social network CEO who's been investigated and found guilty of posting such rhetoric. Perhaps I missed a court case somewhere?
cbeach··on EFF is leaving X
You could literally be describing any modern day social network with those slurs.
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