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jancsika

10,727 karma · joined September 18, 2016

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jancsika··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
> This is going to be tough to enact, anywhere in the USA, even New York.

You followed the link to the poll in the article, right? I haven't seen poll numbers that high on any poll in my lifetime. It shows people of all political affiliations know what junk fees are, and they are all hungry to have them banned.

Keep in mind that Mamdani's first "press conference" was nearly[1] all questions from influencers. I'm sure they are hungry to publicly record themselves encountering a junk fee should this rule pass, starting with the fitness influencer.

1: I counted one journalist ask a question. For free fake internet points, name that journalist. (Hint: it was a three-part question, and it wasn't a soft ball.)

jancsika··on New Literalism Comes for Museums
The author is confusing literalism with superficiality, and I don't understand why.

For example, Hans Haacke had a piece which was literally documenting the provenance of a museum's Manet painting to reveal a connection between the donor and the Nazis. That's literal, but I hope most here would think it's not at all superficial.

jancsika··on Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
Where are you finding the lien on that property? I don't see it listed at all.

Edit: I'm asking how you came up with the $200k+ figure

jancsika··on Small Penis Rule
I wonder if the Catch Me if You Can guy counts. He apparently lied about a lot of his adventures as a scam artist, making him more of a fabulist.

However, if anyone taken in by his stories were to complain publicly (say, a book publisher or something), they'd be admitting not only to being a rube, but a rube to a liar who had already claimed publicly to be a scam artist. Even worse, that scam would be real and count as a success, restoring the scam artist's tarnished reputation from fabulist back to bona fide scam artist.

jancsika··on Web-based cryptography is always snake oil
> An evil Debian maintainer would have to make a change that was well enough disguised as something else to evade scrutiny.

The xz utils hack got slurped up into sid before it was discovered by a researcher's performance regression in ssh. IIRC the hacked test file didn't even need to be added to the upstream source tree because Debian was blithely downloading release tarballs from Github. No evil Debian maintainer needed.

It's funny that when speculating about Debian's security you forget an actual state-level attack that got code into sid, but when speculating about Signal's insecurity in another thread you're quite happy to imagine potential state-level attacks.

jancsika··on Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming
I don't get the drama here.

Either Odin is mentioned in at least a handful of what Wikipedia considers secondary sources, or it isn't. Just skimming Rust's entry I immediately see stuff like MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch.

There must be (tens of?) thousands of potential secondary sources that could count toward Odin's notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. Is Odin mentioned in any of those?

jancsika··on Bring back crappy forums
> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion

On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.

E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.

Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.

After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...

Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?

jancsika··on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.

Dear Previous Paragraph,

Couldn't many small published reviews which don't show a noticeable or measurable positive effect on their own build up over time to rebuild trust?

Sincerely, Your Reader

jancsika··on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 
OP is saying Trump has demanded loyalty as a condition of serving in his administration. As HHS Secretary, RFK caved on Roundup, something he famously won a case against as a lawyer[1]. That even lost RFK support from some of his MAHA fans.

1: https://apnews.com/article/maha-glyphosate-rfk-kennedy-trump...

jancsika··on Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops
Curious that you include REI. It's a retail coop model, not a worker-owned coop.

Apropos: the way they ended the REI Adventures program is behavior consistent with a normal big-box chain. That is, announce the end simultaneously to their customers and REI's partner adventure companies, provide refunds to customers, but don't forward the relevant same customer info to the partners for rebooking because that's REI's proprietary data.

If that's also behavior consistent with a worker-owned coop, I have to ask: what is the social benefit of worker-owned over a normal corporate structure? And if it's not, why point the user to REI for a pair of hiking shorts?

jancsika··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
> I recently heard that a trip to Popeye's for a family of 3 recently cost $68 in Florida.

Just checked online.

8pc family meal of spicy white meat with large mash potatoes and gravy, one sweet tea, one purple lemonade, one chilled premium mango lemonade

=

$41.05

@ 1501 NW 20th St, Miami, FL 33142

Bring-your-own-liquids = $30.38

Either ordering at the counter is criminally expensive, or you were listening to someone who wanted to spend $68 at Popeye's in Florida so they could complain about spending $68 at Popeye's in Florida.

jancsika··on The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level
> There's an extreme selection bias there.

Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this:

Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness.

digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?

jancsika··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
You can choose a) a calm, level-headed passenger who knows they aren't a pilot, or b) a calm, level-headed passenger who almost has their pilots license but has a medical condition that prevents them from admitting when they lack certain knowledge.

Who do you choose to be coached by an expert on the ground?

jancsika··on OpenRA
I want a VCS that works this way:

1. download current version of Linux

2. an MS-DOS/Minix dualboot VM starts with Linus beating Prince of Persia

3. fast-forward all the way through the history of Linux to him merging the relevant patchset

jancsika··on FDA advisors unanimously vote to approve Moderna's mRNA after agency drama
> faster time to manufacture.

In other words: improved responsiveness when loading a flu season.

jancsika··on Never Give Them Your Face
Now I'm curious-- if I do an image capture of my face on an Atari 2600, can AI recreate a recognizable image of my face from that data?

Edit: by "data" I mean only the screencapture of the Atari 2600 output at some point in time.

jancsika··on Memory Safe Inline Assembly
> My agent loops tried even harder

What happens if you ask to find the strings that will erroneously return True from validateSafeInlineAsm for disallowed asm? :)

jancsika··on The brain was not designed for this much bad news
One man's spite against this type of self-satisfied, evidence-free opinion is what got the 27th Amendment passed.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...

jancsika··on Perlisisms (1982)
> 2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.

A good way to enforce this is to encrypt the data at the beginning of the process.

Then any function that returns structured data is clearly foolish and can be marked for removal.

jancsika··on Measles surge in Utah sparks fears US could undo decades of progress
> Quite interesting to see.

No, the article is a shitshow.

Ben Dowse is an MD, not a pediatric nurse.

The family ended up accepting the antibody treatment before leaving the hospital. The Daily Mail article bizarrely implies that they never accepted the treatment.

Both journalistic mistakes are clear from reading the beginning of the Wired article linked in the error-laden Daily Mail article.

Did you notice these errors?

jancsika··on Every Frame Perfect
If you can't even guarantee internally consistent state then good luck communicating your "convincing and aesthetically pleasing effapt update && apt upgradeects" successfully.
jancsika··on Who's the smartest corvid?
> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?

No.

E.g., a bunch of chimps who come upon food will probably become aggressive, whereas a bunch of bonobos will probably get frisky with each other.

They are closely related primates, and their level of intelligence is at least comparable. So it's quite unlikely that the chimps higher level of social aggression is a hard dependency of their level of intelligence.

jancsika··on The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
> the quality and quantity of published work will increase.

I know the argument from the late 1700s that having copyright wouldn't necessarily lead to higher quality works of literature, music, etc.

But I've never heard the argument that getting rid of copyright would actually lead to higher quality published works. What's the evidence or even reasoning for that claim here in 2026?

Edit: added here in 2026 because, on reflection, I'm not asking about historical arguments; though they may be interesting, I'm curious about what's relevant in the time of social media and LLMs.

jancsika··on The Cypherpunk Library
> as long as that power can be revoked at any time

I understand the idea that "justice delayed is justice denied." But within reasonable governance time-frames for a municipality/region, why would revocation latency be a litmus test for the type of governance model?

This just sounds like an implementation detail masquerading as a philosophical ideal.

jancsika··on The Cypherpunk Library
> The way they would self-regulate (self-organize) is into tribes/gangs.

I assume you mean "gang" in the sense of, "Hey honey, a non-rivalrous gang converted this luxury hotel into a mutual aid hospital, let's go get that rash looked at."

If not, your assertion is at odds with what Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia.

I'm not even a fan of anarchism, but I am a fan of reading about these things.

jancsika··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
Apparently Petri was driving when he figured out a new fingering for a Chopin Etude he'd use at a concert later that evening[1]. The passenger survived to tell that story, so I think this is more about your correct risk-assessment than physical limitations of the brain. :)

1: Just to unzip: "I don't like this fingering; let me imagine playing with this other fingering; yep, that will feel more comfortable and stronger; I'm now confident enough in the change that I'll do it that way in public, for one of the most difficult piano pieces, without ever having practiced it physically..."

jancsika··on Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
> Now try this experiment with the JavaScript ecosystem.

Wow, JavaScript ecosystem is bad!

> Now try this experiment with [scrubbed] JavaScript [scrubbed].

Wow, JavaScript is great!

jancsika··on The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true
> The fourth seems logical, but I'm sure what the impact is, if any.

Why you would say that you're not sure what the impact would be of accidentally training an image model on "child sexual abuse material?" That's the sole example given in the article.

jancsika··on When su replaced login for becoming another Unix login
Hijacking this post for my own selfish curiosity:

Since Linux has these built-in ttys, why wasn't login done like this:

1. put a bare-bones x11 instance on the "login" tty with the necessary graphical/DE crap for login prompt

2. if the user enters the correct credentials in the graphical crap, switch the user to another tty and spawn a new x11 instance there for their graphical user environment/DE

That way you could use the "login" tty for the login prompt, accessibility apps, screensaver, win-at-space-invaders-to-login, etc. Then if stuff crashes at any point during the login attempt it just falls back to an empty tty rather than a user session or whatever.

jancsika··on What I've learned about the trombone
> This system ensures that every key and every note sounds equally good, but it sacrifices the purity of just intonation.

Bach wrote two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier over 300 years ago that explain musically why that sacrifice is worth it:

* Book I: pick a prelude/fugue in any key and it will sound ok on a keyboard that you tuned ahead of time

* Book II: modulate anywhere you want[1] in the middle of a piece and it will sound ok

That same system works all the way through high-Romantic Wagnerian operas and atonal pieces of the 20th century. Use equal temperament and let the singer/violinist/horn player "sweeten" a third by ear where applicable.

Edit: well, anywhere Bach wanted. Hee hee.

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