HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

montagg

911 karma · joined January 17, 2011

submissionscomments
montagg··on Trump wins presidency for second time
Yes. In my opinion, it's clearly been a wasted effort to try to convince the rest of the country those rights are important. They need to be defended where they can, and the states that defend them need to separate themselves more and more from their parent country. Secession is silly, at least today. If what you're saying comes to pass—and it could even without what I'm suggesting—then at that point secession is the only correct answer.

Either way, it doesn't make sense to spend effort where it's not making a difference.

EDIT: Another part of this idea that I struggle with, is that we shouldn't ask people who aren't accepted to stay in places where they aren't accepted. They deserve rights. They should go to places where they can get them, and we should get them out of the places that don't respect them. And doing that, which I think is the moral thing to do, leads to what you're describing.

montagg··on Trump wins presidency for second time
To be fair, it’s not half, and it’s shrinking.

Best bet is to find a way to build up states that can defend those rights and concentrate people there. In response to the evisceration of the federal government, set up equivalent agencies in those states that can do those jobs. The rest of America should be abandoned.

montagg··on Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages
> The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.

This was a key reason for Valorant's success. Anti-cheat is a necessary evil to make online games fair. I think if someone wants to suggest otherwise, they would need to demonstrate a superior solution. Companies truly do not want to be in the business of messing with your kernel, so if another solution exists—one that is actually superior in cheat detection and prevention—without a kernel extension, they'll do it.

I'll provide another example of why companies would rather not do it unless they have to. Kernel extensions usually require a system restart. Requiring a restart adds a huge drop off point to a conversion funnel and costs the game some amount of players who may have stuck around, and some players, like the ones here who are upset about it, won't even bother because they are outright opposed. Games would gobble up a solution that worked and didn't have that baggage.

montagg··on Working from home is powering productivity
Executive brain worms are real. They see each other do things, and they want to be like each other, so they feel safety in numbers, untethered to the data.

My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.

montagg··on Sony, Ubisoft scandals lead to California ban on deceptive digital goods sales
"Unlock."
montagg··on Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal court rules
I think the argument for using the line is, there is no reason in the moment not to try everything you can, no matter where you are, and you adjust based on the situation. If you’re in a place that doesn’t respect the rule of law ALL THE TIME, sure, don’t. Is the US(I will assume you’re US-based) that right now? I think your answer to that question == whether you feel the tactic is viable.

But you’re right, we shouldn’t be in this place as a nation, wondering if police are going to be ethical even most of the time.

montagg··on the US government has to start paying for things again
The number is, whatever number it is when USD stops being the world’s reserve currency, for reasons unrelated to national debt.
montagg··on The Untold Story of How US Spies Sabotaged Soviet Technology
It was stolen though. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...

> In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Russian KGB spies systematically stole NASA shuttle designs and smuggled them back to their motherland, as detailed in a 1997 NBC News investigation by journalist Robert Windrem. Later, as America tested its new cosmic vessel, Soviet aircraft and satellites flew reconnaissance missions to aide their own carbon copy.

This is settled history.

montagg··on Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns
I think the EU’s regulations are boneheaded, but I appreciate that there are multiple ways we’re seeing societies deal with the ambiguities of technology, and we can see how it plays out. Different strokes.
montagg··on Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns
Not a bad tradeoff imo. But it is a tradeoff.
montagg··on D-Day, as told by paratroopers
This is an important point. There was a US isolationist strain as strong as it is today. The Man in the High Castle alt history, or The Plot Against America, both involve FDR not being involved for WW2, and that's where the US stands today: at a similar decision point about how it decides to act.

The right path is never clear when you're in the valley of the moment.

montagg··on How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
I think the other comment is more accurate: this isn’t about polarization, it’s a potential threat to your safety.
montagg··on Stop Killing Games
As a person who works on a large online game, I appreciate what they are trying to do and I’m sympathetic to the pain of losing a game you love, in addition to the game preservation issues. However, games just aren’t the same as they were in the 90s. The service architecture is more complex, the ecosystem management is greater (ranked systems and matchmaking health for example), and games evolve in ways that are not backwards compatible.

I don’t want to say what they’re asking for is impossible, but I don’t think it’s realistic depending on competing goals. If you want to preserve a game, you have to decide what parts are important to preserve, because some aspects just won’t exist without centralized services, lots of other players, and experts managing those systems. If you just want to host a single match on your own server, and maybe the other aspects like meta-game systems or matchmaking don’t matter to you as much, you might be able to do it but you then don’t get the real game experience. Matchmaking in particular is a complex problem, and the reason some games have become successful is moving away from the lobby or self-hosted server model toward centralized matchmaking, which needs constant tending and large player populations to be successful.

I’m open to the idea that these are solvable, but I don’t believe requiring it by law is a good idea. It just makes the cost of multiplayer games higher and riskier for publishers, and they’re already very risk averse because of the massive content costs involved.

Should games be cheaper because you’re just leasing them? Maybe, but there are armies of professionals who want to make a living doing just this that are required to make this stuff look like someone pushed a “make game” button. At least that’s how it works today. Should those devs get a larger slice of the pie than publishers or execs or whatever? I mean, hell yeah, but it doesn’t stop the reality that games are just more complex and massively more expensive to make than in the past, and that’s just where the market is. A proposal for how games can be preserved or given back to consumers at end of life really needs a more detailed proposal than “make it the law,” because I just don’t think it’s realistic.

All of the above is about explicitly multiplayer games. Single player games that have little to no multiplayer involvement at the core of the gameplay is an entirely different situation. There could still be complexities there, but you can get closer to the real game experience without centralized services.

montagg··on Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right
It varies. I’m totally fine with it if it’s clear the person can hear and interact with me, and the people I interact with a lot do it to varying degrees, and no one’s offended.
montagg··on Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account
One of the worst gaming user experiences on Windows is how every publisher wants their own store. And depending on where you get a game, it may or may not have certain features. And if you get into modding, sometimes one version of the game just won't work with some mods.

I understand everyone feels good about increased competition with Apple—and hopefully it turns out well for users—but iOS is hurtling toward the same situation that exists on Windows, and I think the iOS experience is worse for it. It's definitely worse with the browser nag. So I don't call this a total win. It's a theoretical win, but I foresee it being about as much of a win as cookie banners are, when it comes to the actual, practical, day-to-day experience people have using this technology.

montagg··on Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose
I don't understand. How do you see disabling a feature that few people use leading to riling people up so the EU reverse itself?
montagg··on Apple's bad faith 27% tax on web purchases
It's legally settled, so, from a US law perspective, it's clearly not ant-competitive, and the US will need new legislation if that's not good enough.

I figure you probably see this very clearly, but the problem is that a lot of people don't see it that way, and the law doesn't. Clarifying what is anti-competitive in your view, and crucially what other economic and competition trade-offs you're willing to make to realize that rule, is what will really move the conversation forward.

montagg··on Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom
You’re describing priorities, not impossibilities.
montagg··on Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security
Vultures picking what away at parts of a corpse they can.

You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early 1900s, that created a backlash that corrected it and led to more prosperity? Dunno. We’ll see, if the vultures leave anything behind.

montagg··on Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security
When we see Uncle Enzo’s chain launch, we know we’ll finally get the Metaverse we deserve.
montagg··on Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance
You’ve described all of late stage capitalism + democracy, for things you agree with and things you don’t.

This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy.

montagg··on Semantic Zoom
It’s worse than that. It forces the user to decide what’s most important from an interface design perspective at each moment while also doing the task. The fluidity is cool, and it helps maintain an understanding of hierarchy and context, but at some point the “system” needs to decide what’s important, or you’re just outsourcing design to your user.

I agree with the overall idea that users should have a lot of control over what they see and how, but just presenting this idea as the only good one (as implied by contrarian or heresy or whatever) is not the way to go. This could work for specialized creative workflows, and there may be a version of this that you could use for a window system, but I think as shown it would need to be targeted at very engaged and specialized users who can put in the work.

Is there a version of this idea that could work for general computing for a typical user? Maybe! But it would make a lot of decisions for the user at the end of the day; it would just need to feel like it didn’t.

montagg··on Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions
But those executives need to pay for their yachts today, so the extraction strategy makes sense. It won’t be as valuable tomorrow as it is today, so they’re shorting it.

The earth as well as the value of their own companies.

montagg··on Miyazaki’s Magical Food: An ode to anime’s best cooking scenes
Lots don’t even have a villain, really. They are really great for children, to help them see that not every story needs a villain to be compelling.

My daughter is 21 months old and has seemingly memorized Totoro—if she hears the soundtrack, she’ll start talking about what’s happening in that scene. If she hears the track where Mei grabs the soot sprite, she’ll yell out, “I caught one!”

Miyazaki movies are truly timeless. They’ll still be loved in the 2080s.

montagg··on SpaceX punched a hole in the ionosphere
I don’t have references for this, but my understanding is that you have more to worry about space debris that is higher/faster than lower/slower. The atmospheric drag is such that any out of control craft at [some threshold] or under will deorbit themselves fairly quickly, and the debris will burn up entirely. I believe that threshold is around 450-500km, but it’s also probably not a literal height, more of a gradient of risk. Higher/faster, they will be up there for longer (years? decades?) and it’s harder to predict where any broken pieces will go over time.
montagg··on Former intel officer says 'non-human biologics’ found at alleged UFO crash sites
If they aren’t bringing evidence, it’s a waste of people’s time. Taking a big risk that is most likely a very bad decision shouldn’t provide any credibility at all. Do that when you can show evidence, and then you have credibility.
montagg··on Former intel officer says 'non-human biologics’ found at alleged UFO crash sites
Trump would have done so. It would have been impossible for him to keep a secret. His need to stroke his own ego wouldn’t allow it.

When Trump ended his term without once mentioning aliens, that’s when I was certain all of this was hogwash.

Are there maybe very advanced aircraft out there we should be aware of? Certainly. But it’s definitely not aliens without hard af evidence.

montagg··on Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?
Well, maybe in another 65 million years, whatever's around will just use us and the rest of this era's biomass as crude oil in the next cycle.
montagg··on Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
Projecting mine, just replace “engineers” with “designers” and “designers” with “product managers.”
montagg··on Apple Vision Pro may have VR Apple TV+ content at launch
It just works likes theater instead of like a movie. Or video games.
← PreviousPage 3 of 7Next →