HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dormento

738 karma · joined December 4, 2014

A Flying Unicorn Angel of Light :) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8700561)
submissionscomments
dormento··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
Ah so that's why i cant use the chrome devtools color picker to pick colors off graphics editing software.

Makes me mad.

dormento··on Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
When the hype cycle for "technology x" is in full swing, everybody becomes a "x engineer", sometimes without even knowing. According to some of my previous employers, I've been an "engineer" in areas such as information security, development using specific languages and/or frameworks and the like. This was of course more performative than anything else - no reputable dev shop would be caught dead not having a couple blockchain engineers on call when the customer demands.

IMHO, it not only means nothing at all, it also could mean nothing in several different ways. For example, if you take "AI engineer" to mean "someone who uses AI as a tool in their daily job as a software developer", then I'm also a "chair engineer", "coffee engineer" and "keyboard engineer" as well, since I consider those essential to be able to design and code, even if they're not part of the deliverable. Or you could go the way of champagne - "engineer is anyone who is registered by this engineering council/association, and this is done by filling certain requirements in matters of education and/or professional status".

dormento··on Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software
That's some very embarassing american (I guess) defaultism.
dormento··on The Website Specification
You know, there are many places around here that serve coke with a slice of lemon. In some of them, it comes by default: if you don't specify, there will be a slice of lemon on your glass. You can ask to hold the lemon, and even then, sometimes it will be there. "No biggie, I can just remove the slice of lemon, but man does it get tiresome after a while".

This is how I feel with this agents crap.

dormento··on Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
Prob googled "how to bet with privileged info and not get caught".
dormento··on Ask HN: Is it just me or has Gemini enshittified in the last three weeks?
Massively so, yes. It feels snappier tho, and this makes the situation arguably worse - imagine they have this big dashboard showing that people are interacting more the AI, so they should keep on improving the speed even though the results themselves are terrible.

"I'm In This Photo, And I Don't Like It".

dormento··on We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
Oh crap, we gonna have to run adblock models wont we :///
dormento··on Do you enjoy reading any type of AI written text?
Sometimes i realize I'm reading AI bullshit while I'm already a few paragraphs deep (and then auto-close). I get this feeling that something is "off", don't know how to explain. This happens more often with topics like movies and gaming news. I guess it is just easier to fake that kind of text to a perceived sufficiently quality threshold. Maybe because most of the human-written text in the genera already looks LLM-ish (repetition, conjecture, listicles...)
dormento··on Google changes its search box
While I agree in principle, I think it was inevitable. People been gaming SEO for so long that even with judicious use of search operators, it was getting harder to find the things I wanted (probably drowned in a sea of spam in such a way as to fall outside of the optimized search index). It _looks like_ the AI overview does not have this problem (yet...).
dormento··on Gemini 3.5 Flash
Sonnet 3.7 tried its damnedest but it was just kinda "off".
dormento··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
(Brazilian here)

It works (passably) well here as well. However there's widespread lack of basic civic awareness which makes it harder for people to even know they could be settling such things on small claims court.

dormento··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
Am I mistaken or hasn't that been capped to 100% for a while?
dormento··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
False. There are mechanisms to undo PIX transactions. One such mechanism is the MED (official tool by the Central Bank). It can be used to help victims of scams, fraud and operating failures on the part of institutions so they can recover the cash).

https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/pix-seguranca

There's also the different insurance plans offered by mostly all banks and payment-adjacent businesses.

dormento··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
(Brazilian here).

> Do corner stores (small informal convenience stores) in Brasil usually accept PIX? I assume they all cash-only.

Pretty much every single one I've always been to. From the smallest one-person street corner popup shop to the biggest shopping mall boutique and outlets, virtually everyone accepts PIX payments. Its just better - its one of those "you gotta use it to understand" things.

Anecdotally: I've even gave some cash to homeless people on occasion using PIX. This may seem weird, but in Brazil, you must have a bank account to be able to subscribe to any sort of government benefits, and since its free, pretty much everyone has an account and therefore can receive PIX payments. Its also safer, since you're not carrying cash with you, and even if you're somehow forced to transfer, there are ways to monitor and reverse transactions (so called MED).

https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/pix-seguranca

Of course, there's been a few incidents over the years where some concerned citizens would not accept PIX payments because "the government will know what you're spending on" (in contrast to, say, credit card operators, where apparently the "right people" would know what you're spending on...).

There are some criticisms of the current system, which is fair, but most that I have heard are ideological in nature or some sort of foreign defaultism.

dormento··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> Like free speech, gun manufacturing and exporting to Ukraine.

"Free-speech' discussions aside, they're banning you from "manufacturing" and "exporting" TO Ukraine? This war is becoming very complicated.

dormento··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> Reason given by bank, broken internal policy, we cannot disclose which. Goodbye.

Wow this sucks. One thing I took from this comment (and the previous one), if you allow me to (badly) synthesize is: we might need less policy making and more policy enforcement.

dormento··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry.

I don't think that's how its supposed to work. So IF you're correct and a French entity of any kind is found breaking current Czech laws, THEN this must be reported and action must be taken against it, no matter the law, no discussions here.

> Only because France, Germany, UK and similar countries are against guns and against self-defense, where your only option is to lay on the ground and let the attacker kill you.

This is a big reduction to the absurd, and unnecessarily inflammatory. I'm no dang, but I would ask you to please refrain from such things, in the name of civil discourse. It could have been dishonestly framed in a number of other ways, for example, "Poland as a country is pro-violence and pro-crime, since they are arguably fond of shooting people". I know this must not be as simple, as "laying on the ground and letting the attacker kill you" does not look like a sound defense strategy. However, gun collecting and sports are not, to me, good reasons for owning firearms. To each their own.

> Luckily we can still use guns for self-defense, we can conceal carry by default and we will fight EU laws till our death for this.

> (pepper sprays, knives and even katana, whatever)

Wow, go Brussels I guess. Hope they can eventually implement the "idiotic laws" that make people unable to kill each other with katanas.

dormento··on Show HN: Gaussian Splat of a Strawberry
Thank you for your service!

This is one of the most endearing things about open source IMHO, the way people can find novel uses for it.

dormento··on Native all the way, until you need text
Congrats on shipping, OP!

> 8ms is an entire frame at 120Hz, that’s an eternity

While I agree in principle, do mind that this in on a mobile device. It may seem slow indeed, but I think this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the performance of current Electron-based software lowered the bar a little bit, therefore it feels faster. If you spend your day using web-based stuff instead of native, it may certainly feel so.

dormento··on WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency
I couldn't agree with you more.

On this:

> What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure.

Its weird when you think about it in this way, but there's no evolutionary pressure for human beings to either become tame and servile and trusting of authority ("for their own good") or independent tinfoil-clad "freethinkers". We substituted evolutionary pressure that used to come from the environment and hardships of life for media consumption in a way that matchmaking/pair-bonding is done (for example) by what news channel you chose to follow. The search for "actual Truth" (with a big T, as in factual perception of reality) is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage. It can be an ecological hindrance. IMHO, this is downright unsettling.

At the same time, I understand how this type of mystical thinking can come from distrust in authority figures and organizations. For example, I know the approximate distance from the Earth to the moon, except I cannot ever really verify it, therefore I must source this information from third parties, such as Wikipedia. Thing is, I'm comfortable with the fact that the best answer I can give to some questions is "I don't know", but I'm pretty sure that there's no global conspiracy to hide from me the fact that the moon is actually a big piece of cheese.

dormento··on The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
> keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy

in other words, its _still_ legal.

dormento··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
Cue the clueless CEOs of zig shops (I don't know many, but still):

"Rust is faster and safer! Port it! If you don't do it, I'll do it myself, because AI can do everything a programmer can, including the stuff you don't want to do. Ship it!"

dormento··on Remove .zig Files from Bun
> My hot take is Anthropic is going to have a really rough year as they’re going to start to feel the weight of all their vibe coding and products.

sed -e 's/Anthropic/everyone/g' and I agree.

"move things and break fast" all around.

dormento··on The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.
dormento··on What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?
I loathe the blasted copyright washing machine as much as the next intellectually honest person, but:

> AI can't create anything original.

Can we? I mean, don't we base our output on experience and reprocess references + memories of things past to create what we deem as "new"?

dormento··on Notepad++ Mac Port Renamed Nextpad++ After Trademark Row
IMHO the '++' still looks so... dishonest? Maybe that's not the right word. I mean, it would be fitting if it were a modern version of something called "Nextpad" (which it isn't).
dormento··on Our keyboards are tracking us
These are the kinds of comments i keep coming back to hn for.

Thanks for this piece of history.

dormento··on Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?
The meta has certainly shifted.

At $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, they prided themselves on having the best support operators, with deep technical prowess of their specific knowledge domain. Their L1 were better than some other business' L3s infrastructure specialists. This lasted for more than a decade, right until a merger with another business that also had their own human support department and certain "strategic opportunities" were identified. At first, some operations were consolidated, and some people were fired. Once the corporate machine saw the numbers, they just kept going. Nowadays, its almost full AI.

dormento··on Ask HN: What happens when eventually all E2E mess. apps removed from app stores?
At first "but its no big deal, you can still sideload".

As sideloading gets worse, "but you can still use web versions of platforms you trust".

As those get outlawed in the name of "anti-terrorism" or "protecting kids", "but only criminals use those. You gotta trust your country, we'll use this information responsibly and there will be full oversight".

(I am shorting tinfoil stocks rn.)

(btw, "sideloading" still bugs me, i feel like it should just be called "installing software".)

dormento··on Ask HN: Is Spam getting worse or is Gmail getting worse?
Unfortunately, this is one of those questions that can be jokingly answered with an inclusive "or". The two things can be true at the same time.

(Just like their web search, which I'm pretty sure had to die so they could prop up their AI offerings).

← PreviousPage 5 of 16Next →