gradientsrneat

Rossman made a good point recently that the physical vs digital argument is mostly a distraction and DRM is the real issue that needs to be focused on.

That said, there are specific legal benefits to physical media such as the principle of first sale, which digital goods do not have.

EFF has, on multiple occasions, specifically defended Kiwifarms, a site which unabashedly exists to turn people into hate-celebrities, with some members having kept "kill counts" of harrassed targets who committed suicide. The site is also known for spreading absurd false accusations, which has at least as much negative impact as AI revenge porn.

The EFF is not consistent in its principles. It has partisan bias. However, it can still be worth situationally supporting for certain causes.

I too do not understand the downvotes.

Unlike what Cory Doctorow implies, Facebook is not a Soviet Dictatorship. There is no Berlin wall. If you don't like it, you can just leave.

Misleading. Scanning is related to a setting called "Sensitive Content Warnings" and it's disabled by default on most devices.

Professional mathematicians and computer scientists use AI as well. Maybe that's not very reassuring from the standpoint of skills regression in modern adult work culture, but at least it demonstrates that skills and tool usage aren't mutually exclusive.

Some smartphones have a feature that detects if you're taking a picture of a menu/letter/etc and will automatically crop and unskew it for you.

Misogyny in government is a bellwether for authoritarianism. If a man doesn't respect women, you can bet they won't respect men or minorities either, although they may be less inclined to admit such in public.

According to the poster, this is happening in Facebook's HQ, i.e. in Menlo Park, California, United States.

Reminds me of a billboard I saw where Apple was touting the alleged privacy of the iPhone with a guy wearing clothes nearly the same color as his skin. I know iPhone isn't really private, and I'd rather not have a phone that isn't repairable, but I can appreciate the clever marketing in both cases.

That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far.

I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.

> Trump in December said he would withhold federal broadband funding from states whose laws to regulate AI are judged by his administration to be holding back American dominance in the technology.

Specifically, this is funding for BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment):

https://www.ntia.gov/funding-programs/high-speed-internet-pr...

Which among other things does "Deploying or upgrading internet infrastructure in unserved or underserved areas, or improving service to community anchor institutions".

From the executive order in December, withholding of funds could include residential internet repairs and bandwidth upgrades, assuming that falls under "non-deployment":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/12/fact-sheet-pr...

YMMV based on the role, but some healthcare roles are highly stressful plus you're exposed to all sorts of infectious diseases. A more charitable interpretation is that these new new role openings are in response to high turnover.

This is not the first time a Notepad++ release has supported human rights causes in China.

For example, here is "Notepad++ Stand with Hong Kong Edition":

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v789-stand-with-hong-kong...

And here's "Notepad++ v7.8.1 : Free Uyghur":

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/

In the latter (earlier) case, the Notepad++ issue tracker was bombarded by Chinese spam in response.

The Notepad++ releases have supported other causes too like "Je Suis Charlie", so special releases aren't confined to Chinese topics. Seems like they are concerned about free speech causes especially.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v674-je-suis-charlie-edit...

Food for thought: hundreds of thousands of Americans have top secret clearance. These deaths could be within statistical expectations for both countries.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyw9rpdl4po

RSS is truly in its own little universe.

I recently became aware of RSS stylesheets. Apparently there is a specification for that called XSLT which is distinct from CSS in both form and function. However, there are plans by Google/Mozilla to remove XSLT from their browser engines for security/maintainability reasons. Apparently RSS supports javascript though, so it's possible to manipulate the RSS DOM that way. One could imagine a javascript polyfill that interprets XSLT, although I'm not sure if there's some cross-site security issues that would make that impractical.

Related: Microsoft-owned GitHub recently switched to token-based billing:

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...

Claude tokens are priced by GitHub at a disproportionately premium price compared to Gemini and OpenAI. I wonder why?

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...

Surface laptops have always been overpriced, even before the RAM shortage.

Hard to say without more info but most at-home COVID tests have a very high false negative rate due to the virus mutating and generally how the test is designed.

FWIW it's feasible to make a "clone" of Notepad++ using the Scintilla library that Notepad++ is based on, but don't violate trademarks of course. That said, it's the details that make Notepad++ good.

Current Usgov says they won't enforce COPPA, so I don't buy the idea that they care about privacy. Having the product call out to a fickle third-party service that could shut down at any time is a problem that could distress both children and adults, and can be subject to invasive tracking. This proposed bill does not solve that problem.

Maybe if the LLM CEOs stopped spreading doomer narratives to sell their products, these people would chill out.

Sad that the Wikipedia page links to some specific commercial service rather than the actual programming language runtime (which appears to be AGPL-licensed).

I've opted in/not opted out to several class actions, and without saying the exact number, I'll say it was a lot more than that. Tech companies wouldn't be putting binding arbitration clauses/class action waivers/etc in their TOS if they weren't scared of being held accountable.

busybox does a similar trick where it executes a different program based on the program's name. But it uses symlinks for the different names, so it doesn't use significantly more space by doing this.

There was a comment in this thread criticizing Kiwi Farms, but it was quickly removed. I'm not here to repeat their eloquent criticism, only add my own thoughts.

> anonymous speech

Kiwi Farms users are not anonymous. They are, at best, pseudonymous. There is comment history associated with their online identities. Some use their real names, although the extent this can be verified is questionable and undoubtedly some are impersonators.

Overall, I don't buy the slippery slope arguments of RTN and EFF here.

Setting aside the obvious fact that it's morally wrong to harrass people, something tells me these harrassers never do the same to developers working on closed source software for companies, having the net effect of harming the FOSS movement overall.

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805

The archive.today domains have also poisoned DNS lookups from some privacy-preserving DNS providers, and in rare cases have been caught tampering the archive data. Make of that what you will.

As other commenters have alluded to, due to the timing, this is likely in response to the "Microslop" nickname catching on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047

Microsoft's PR team is in damage control mode right now.

Some commenters have pointed out that it's in response to the release of the Macbook Neo. I would argue that, if people were satisfied with the Windows OS, they wouldn't feel the need to jump ship. Ditto for Linux/SteamOS.

Other likely confounding factors:

The unnecessarily different hardware requirements of Windows 11, combined with Windows 10 Home reaching EOL in the United States, likely left some users feeling alienated.

The temporary-but-still-painful hardware cost crunch puts more pressure on software developers to improve their software on existing hardware rather than hoping their users will upgrade.

Could this technique be used to reverse-engineer end-of-life Nvidia GPUs to improve Noveau on them?

Nintendo's brand means nothing.