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paulvnickerson

196 karma · joined July 29, 2021

Paul Nickerson Gainesville, FL pvnick [at] gmail [dot] com
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paulvnickerson··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
Duh... If you don't want want to get reported to the police, don't upload illegal things to the internet.
paulvnickerson··on US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS
They didn't have to go with NixOS...
paulvnickerson··on SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading
I think people around here just dislike Elon Musk for his politics and are rooting for his stuff to fail at every turn.
paulvnickerson··on Fox to buy Roku
Thats interesting - I didn't know foxes watched TV.
paulvnickerson··on Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
Very cool, thank you.
paulvnickerson··on Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
What types of vulnerabilities was it finding? Cross site scripting, privilege escalation, etc? Mostly memory corruption or any Javascript logic bugs?
paulvnickerson··on Qwen3-Max-Thinking
I don't have any trust in these Chinese models to write code either: "CrowdStrike Research: Security Flaws in DeepSeek-Generated Code Linked to Political Triggers " [https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-researche...]
paulvnickerson··on Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology
we in America would love to see Europe break free of its suicidal regulatory straitjacket and do enough innovation and building to carry its own weight
paulvnickerson··on CI-Hush
well that's kinda fun. thanks for sharing
paulvnickerson··on Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts
Enemies of this administration have no idea how to pick their battles.
paulvnickerson··on Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface
drop enough pennies here and there and it adds up
paulvnickerson··on Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface
why is the federal government using tax dollars to develop fonts?
paulvnickerson··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree

That's just not true... When a mother nurses her child and then looks into their eyes and smiles, it takes the utmost in cynical nihilism to claim that is harmful.

paulvnickerson··on Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]
Don't tell that to Paul Graham.
paulvnickerson··on Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]
Here's why Bari Weiss delayed the story:

Hi all,

I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.

Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.

- At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.

- The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.

- Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?

- We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.

My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.

I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.

Yours,

Bari

paulvnickerson··on EFF launches Age Verification Hub
What they should do instead is invest in technology that can do age verification while protecting privacy. This is obviously a required piece of technology. It is not acceptable for children to grow up on the Internet and easily access pornography by simply going to a website. Imagine letting your children loose in a city where they can wander in and out of peep shows without friction.
paulvnickerson··on Ozempic does not slow Alzheimer's, study finds
neither do most things in life
paulvnickerson··on Sanders: Government should break up OpenAI
Bernie Sanders is a professional useless person. He was once kicked out of a commune for failing to pull his own weight.
paulvnickerson··on Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology
Maybe if Wikipedia sourced more peer reviewed publications and less Vox, I would be more satisfied. Thrilled to see Grokipedia as a competitor that could perhaps pressure Wikipedia to improve its editorial policies.
paulvnickerson··on NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference
They should take a cue from sqlite and just adopt the Rule of St Benedict.
paulvnickerson··on Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
Most likely this is due to political bias of the group that was surveyed [1]. Liberals in general dislike X because of the owner. It's the same reason that the average Hacker News reader favors Bluesky over X.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01382-3

paulvnickerson··on Amazon fined $2.5B for using deceptive methods to sign up consumers for Prime
Why not make it a trillion!
paulvnickerson··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
It's not a gun problem that we have in this country. Iryna Zarutska was murdered with a pocket knife. What we have is a spiritual sickness, which cannot be legislated...

The only thing I can think of that the government can do is to clamp down hard on violence, including speech which advocates for violence (e.g. glorifying Luigi Mangione, calling everyone a Nazi/fascist, etc.). Freedom of speech ends where it actually turns into violence.

paulvnickerson··on Kenvue stock drops on report RFK Jr will link autism to Tylenol during pregnancy
> The autism stuff is plainly false and disproved.

If you consider the relevant research you might think differently: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/using-acetaminophen-during-pre...

paulvnickerson··on Kenvue stock drops on report RFK Jr will link autism to Tylenol during pregnancy
Here's the relevant study from earlier this year: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/using-acetaminophen-during-pre...

It's a meta-analysis that considered a bunch of individual studies, their effect size, and their quality. It claims that Tylenol use has increased alongside a 20-fold increase in autism rates, suggesting causation, and recommends immediate efforts to reduce Tylenol use during pregnancy.

One objection that I've seen is that the lead author, Dr. Baccarelli, has a conflict of interest because he was an expert witness in a lawsuit about acetaminophen and neurodevelopmental disorders. If you think about it though, someone knowledgeable enough to write this paper is exactly the kind of person you'd want to serve as an expert witness.

paulvnickerson··on FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'
I just hope the NSA is better at this than they are.
paulvnickerson··on Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock
That's probably true lol. More specifically socialism.
paulvnickerson··on Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock
You guys would love it if Obama or Biden had done it.
paulvnickerson··on XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites
They should switch, then. This notion that we can't peal away browser spec complexity because it will break some websites is the same reason ActiveX continued to wreck havoc long after it should have. I found multiple security vulnerabilities in XSLT back in my pen-testing days, and even if it didn't increase the threat surface, browser spec needs to be simplified anyway.
paulvnickerson··on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"
I support the html and browser spec being greatly simplified in general. Makes it easier to develop competing browsers.
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