Hacker News Reader

clearleafon Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

I don't pay subs for things like photoshop. It doesn't matter if I can "afford" it. It could be one cent per year and still I just don't want stuff that's set up that way.

clearleafon Microslop Manifesto

What am I even supposed to think "gallons of slop" means? Funny that this is both fake and meaningless. OP if you're reading this, this garbage was the worst possible way you could have made the point.

clearleafon Setting up phones is a nightmare

Samsung phones are the most bloated pieces of shit I have ever seen. Mine came with an app just to view the msn.com web site and it couldn't be uninstalled. You have google and samsung in a tug of war over every single thing the phone does. I thought my home button was breaking because of how unresponsive it was, but it turned out it just waits for a sequence to trigger such and such unwanted AI assistant or whatever the hell. It's a crapshoot whether you accidentally launch google assistant or bixby or some other crap service you never even heard of. There are touchwiz sound effects that I hear in public and to this day it sends a chill down my spine because it brings me back to so much miserable time spent with that abomination of electronics.

clearleafon Setting up phones is a nightmare

Unless you live in a place where your phone needs to be a regional variant and there are no custom roms that support it.

clearleafon Dead Internet Theory

Yes registering fake views is fraud against ad networks. Ad networks love it though because they need those fake clicks to defraud advertisers in turn. Paying to have ads viewed by bots is just paying to have electricity and compute resources burned for no reason. Eventually the wrong person will find out about this and I think that's why Google's been acting like there's no tomorrow.

clearleafon Dead Internet Theory

It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be? We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try to get back into gemini protocol or something.

clearleafon Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

This is such an indictment of modern technology. No offense is meant to you for doing what works for you, but it is buck wild that this is the "fix" they've come up with. As somebody learning about this for the first time it sounds equivalent to a world where screenshotting became really hard so people started taking photos of their screen so they could screenshot the photo. How could such a fundamental aspect of using a computer become so ridiculous? It's like satire.

clearleafon Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?

I don't see the point of publishing any AI generated content. If I want AIs opinion on something I can ask it. If I want an AI image I can generate it. I've never found it helpful to have someone else's ai output lying around.

clearleafon Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

My brain first started doing this with online ads as well.

The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.

clearleafon Hachi: An Image Search Engine

For me it just doesn't work at all. I don't know why but every windows instance I've used since Win7 has not been able to find files even with the exact filename supplied. I don't disable the indexer. I can see it using CPU and disk resources but it just doesn't find anything relevant when I search. When I instead use Search Everything on Windows it works perfectly.

clearleafon Ask HN: What is the purpose of all these AI spam comments?

I think that due to how sophisticated anti-bot measures have gotten, bots now go through a "life cycle." An engagement bot spends the first phase of it's life building up an innocent and legitimate looking history. It does this by blending into the noise with innocuous and pointless comments that you'd never take a second glance at, and definitely not report or flag. Then when the account has aged and is in good enough standing, metamorphosis to the adult stage occurs, and the bot starts posting the kind of blatant spam that you'd think would be automatically ban filtered, but somehow isn't. These bot farmers are quite literally farming bots like vegetables and selling them when they've ripened.

I am very confident that this is the case in YouTube comments, where most people find they can not use violent words like "kill" or "genocide" when discussing war, but somehow there are bots posting uncensored racial slurs.

clearleafon Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

I stopped using apps like this because they were always getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have full access to extensions if you use firefox.

clearleafon Kagi Assistants

Maybe we should learn to pass reverse-turing tests and pretend to be LLMs so we can use this stuff lol.

clearleafon Kagi Assistants

Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

Hey Google, Pinterest results are probably messing with AI crawlers pretty badly. I bet it would really help the AI if that site was deranked :)

Also if this really is the case, I wonder what an AI using Marginalia for reference would be like.

clearleafon Ford can't find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade

A lot of these HR departments are in serious need of an investigation. If they've really determined for themselves that nobody is good enough for this job I guarantee there is some kind of discrimination or fraud going on.

clearleafon Peanut allergies have plummeted in children

Where I come from this was a widely held belief by the end of the 2000's: If you raise a child in an overly sterile environment and/or feed them a very limited diet, they are much more likely to develop a bad immune system and allergies. It was also believed that this idea came from science, but I guess not?

Here's an early preview for the next bombshell of this area. Breastfeeding is extremely beneficial. "Infant formula" should not be the main thing a baby is consuming.

To me it discredits science a lot more when things like this are treated as arcane or brand new knowledge. It's good when we can lock in reasoned beliefs as definite fact, instead of just reasoning which is often incomplete or flat out wrong. But when it's right and people act like this about it, it just makes it look like "scientists" know less about the world than my grandma, and that my grandma would make better calls on national health policy than the people currently in charge. Obviously that's not the case but I wouldn't be unjustified in thinking that during times like this.

clearleafon Lace: A New Kind of Cellular Automata Where Links Matter

If we had a grid of cells where each cell was a number from 0-8, representing the number of neighbours, would that be equivalent to what these "links" are? I'm still finding it hard to understand.

clearleafon All the sad young terminally online men

Nobody on earth has ever taken this idea too far? Even if I hadn't seen it myself this would be hard to believe. I've seen people go for the throat just because of opinions on Sailor Moon's color correction. And I mean fully treating them like a monster. The world is an awfully big place to make claims such as the one in this comment. It's one thing to say it doesn't matter or that it's not as bad as this or that, but this is the exact kind of gaslighting that's really messing with people's brains and sending them into underground avenues to discuss how they've been abused and what should be done about it. If we could just stop being so weird about this it would be a lot better. Why is it so hard to say that sexism is bad no matter who it happens to?

clearleafon You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here

There's a phenomenon of fraudulent "security researchers" which has sprung out of the AI world. I became aware of it when someone on discord posted a video covering an "ACE exploit" against users of a particular AI coding assistant. The exploit was this: 1. You accidentally grab a malicious config file for the assistant 2. For some reason, you would pipe this entire file into curl and then into bash 3. This results in downloading and running a script that sets up malware.

It didn't make sense at any point but I was gripped by a need to know the intention such a worthless video. It made sense when the host started shilling his online course about how to be a "security researcher" like him. Not only that, paying members get premium first access to the latest "disclosures" that professional engineers are afraid to admit exist. It's likely that the creator of this bug report is building up their own repertoire of exploits that have been ignored. Or perhaps they're trying to put their course knowledge to use.

clearleafon Gemini (2023)

I discovered Gemini years ago and was completely enchanted by the whole concept. There are two main buzz kills though.

1. The TLS requirement really undercuts the idea of using Gemini for whatever you want. I know how to set up certificates and run DNS but it's too much infrastructure. I've seen the rationale and don't find it realistic.

2. The barriers to entry are so high that only hardcore tech enthusiasts survive the journey. I don't dislike the people on there but they ran out of stuff to teach me pretty quickly.

Due to these two things I find Gemini very self contradictory in it's goals. Is it serious or just for fun? Is it meant for everybody or for a small covenant of nerds?

In the end I was unable to find any value in Gemini, however I'm still very interested in the gmi format and gempub ebooks. It's my opinion that unlike web pages, ebooks actually DO need to be rescued in the style of Gemini. The creator of gempub gives a very good rationale of what problems ebooks have and why gmi is much more condusive to a comfortable and consistent reading experience than html and css.

https://codeberg.org/oppenlab/gempub

From what I can tell I'm the only person on earth who gives a rat's ass about this (even more than the dev possibly) so I would really appreciate people checking this out.

clearleafon Dumb Pipe

The incredible technology you're describing was possible on the Nintendo DS without wires and no need for a LAN either. It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years but certain people don't want that problem to ever be solved without cloud services involved.

This dumb pipe thing is certainly interesting but it will run into the same problem as the myriad other solutions that already exist. If you're trying to give a 50MB file to a Windows user they have no way to receive it via any method a Linux user would have to send it unless the Windows user has gone out of their way to install something most people have never heard of.

clearleafon Android 16 is here

I wonder what method they've employed to make SD cards even more useless this time around.

clearleafon Gemini in Chrome

Recipe sites always have a print button which gives you just the recipe. If I end up on one of those sites I instantly hit Ctrl+F "print" to get it.

clearleafon Half-Life 2 RTX

The way nvidia plasters their name all over this project isn't right. I was led to believe an nvidia team was being paid to make this. But they have practically no relation outside of the underlying tech. They're so unclear about the role of rtx remix that I wouldn't be surprised i some people think RTX automatically "upscales" models somehow. Something about it is a step beyond how an engine dev would treat a game made in their engine.

clearleafon What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

That's just chromium with a weird cryptocurrency racket on top.

clearleafon Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever? (2021)

Are these the world's most crispy fries?

clearleafon Building a Medieval Castle from Scratch

https://i.imgur.com/dGXUE2o.jpeg

clearleafon Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

Large microsd cards are very cheap these days. Using all this cloud stuff seems like a waste of multiple resources. And if you ever don't have a good connection then it's worthless. I've given stuff like this a try and only found it worth it on internal networks.

clearleafon Google, the search engine that's forgotten how to search

If you work in the SEO industry, how can you be confused by this? The majority of your "industry" only produces spam which targets search engines. Google was already getting cooked long before ChatGPT ever went live. This is one situation where AI disruption could be a good thing because if Google continues to be ruined maybe you'll get real jobs in the meantime.

clearleafon Anime is eating the world

This has to be an AI generated article. It doesn't take 1/10th this much gobbledygook to announce you'll try injecting AI into anime and pray that money comes out somehow. Crap on crap on crap.