Hacker News Reader

peraon Radboud University selects Fairphone as standard smartphone for employees

I guess it was a Fairphone 2 from 2015? They are still selling screens, cases and camera modules but not the rest of the parts unfortunately:

https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?categ...

peraon First Lady Melania Trump Inspires America's Children to Be Curious, Use AI

Full title is too long for HN: "First Lady Melania Trump Inspires America’s Children to be Curious, Use AI to Achieve their Career Ambitions"

peraon Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

"Borrow" is an interesting choice of word, see for example this:

    /// The quirks mode of the document.
    #[inline]
    pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
        self.quirks_mode
    }

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

And then this:

    /// The quirks mode of the document.
    pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
        self.stylist.quirks_mode()
    }

https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...

It seems ChatGPT is still copying segments of code almost verbatim, although sometimes it does weird things, compare these for example:

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...

peraon Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

Just for context, this was the original claim by Cursor's CEO on Twitter:

> We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

> It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

> It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

https://xcancel.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552#m

peraon Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

Has anyone tried to rewrite some popular open source project with IA? I imagine modern LLMs can be very effective at license-washing/plagiarizing dependencies, it could be an interesting new benchmark too

peraon The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)

I think you are confusing The Dark Project, which is the first game of the Thief series from 1998, with some mod or maybe The Dark Mod? :)

peraon US attack on Venezuela raises fears of future Greenland takeover

CNN interviewed Stephen Miller last night:

Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509694

Here is a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tidejP41CBk

peraon Matlab Killed Home Perpetual License

The Home License for personal, non-commercial use, moved to an annual subscription model:

https://uk.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html?prodcode=HOM...

I am very sad because I was awaiting for my Learn & Development budget at work to renew to get a license to use the Antenna Toolbox :_(

peraon Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin

Thanks for mentioning this project, I have been looking for a good reverb plugin for Linux for a while now and this sounds great.

peraon US attack on Venezuela raises fears of future Greenland takeover

Here is a link for those like me who have not read Article 5 before, with additional comments:

https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/coll...

peraon Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

Given that Big Tech is training AI on copyrighted material downloaded from shadow library torrents it's safe to assume that they don't care about licenses at all.

Plus the US government is pro Big Tech and they will protect them at all cost.

peraon GitHub is returning Gateway Time-outs

It's intermittent for me now, some requests go through if I refresh enough times, but no incident according to the status page still...

peraon Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

I didn't mean it as VR being useless - I'm sure it can be useful for some applications or fun for gaming - my point was that you shouldn't fear getting left behind just for not having an Apple Vision Pro app or a land in the Metaverse :)

Another way to see this: Hammers can be useful, the Internet can be useful, but this doesn't mean that as a hammer manufacturer you should make your next hammer an IoT product ASAP or you will be left behind.

peraon Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

Many thing are "here to stay", should Mozilla also implement a "share with TikTok" functionality into their browser?

> or get left behind.

Last time I heard this phrase it was about VR, and before that it was NFTs. I wished the tech community wasn't so susceptible to FOMO sentiments.

peraon Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

Meanwhile MI6 offers an onion service for secure communications:

mi6govukbfxe5pzxqw3otzd2t4nhi7v6x4dljwba3jmsczozcolx2vqd.onion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYB129pGq0k

peraon US threatens EU digital services market access

https://xcancel.com/ustraderep/status/2000990028835508258

peraon Ask HN: Any experience using LLMs to license-wash FOSS projects?

Thanks for those links, I read a couple of the cited comments on those cases and still cannot find any mentions of restrictions for engineers who at some point in the past had access to the code.

Nordstrom Consulting v. M&S Technologies, which is possibly the most relevant case, describes a process for developing under a clean room environment and from what I understand it seems to focus on isolation of engineering teams and resources (except when required for interoperability). I did not find mentions of assessing the cohort of engineers for prior access to the copyrighted material but if I have missed that please let me know.

I also wanted to say that I am not asking this because I am thinking to start an unethical license laundering business, I am only trying to understand the meaning of making LLMs legally equivalent to human workers.

peraon Ask HN: Any experience using LLMs to license-wash FOSS projects?

Could you share a source for this definition? As far as I know it means no having access to the code only during the implementation of the new project

peraon Ask HN: Any experience using LLMs to license-wash FOSS projects?

In a sane world I would have agreed but in the US at least I am not certain this is still true: In Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge Alsup expressed his views that the work of an LLM is equivalent to the one of a person, see around page 12 where he argues that human recalling things from memory and AI inference are effectively the same from a legal perspective

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...

To me this makes the clean-room distinction very hard to assert, what am I missing?

peraon Tell HN: It's now impossible to disable all AI features in Firefox 145 (latest)

That's strange, which OS? I am on Arch and also on 145 and I get the "Ask an AI Chatbot" in the context menu. The settings used to work in the past so I am not sure what's going on.

I believe these are all the settings I have disabled for AI:

browser.ml.chat.enabled

browser.ml.chat.menu

browser.ml.chat.page

browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge

browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge

browser.ml.chat.shortcuts

browser.ml.chat.sidebar

browser.ml.enable

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

extensions.ml.enabled

sidebar.notification.badge.aichat

Am I missing anything?

peraon Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

It does feel wrong because in our society having access to more financial resources often translates to better representation in the courtroom. This is similar to how donating to organizations like the EFF can provide more justice to those who are not multibillion-dollar corporations.

peraon Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

There is a fundraising for that organised by their union (IWGB Game Workers):

https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-rockstar-worke...

peraon Gmail AI gets more intrusive

I really wished they would also let you disable those very annoying modal popups announcing yet-another-chatbot-integration twice a week: My company is already paying for your product, just let me do my work ffs...

peraon The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)

s/Doom/Deception/

peraon The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)

That's just like your opinion man, I see it through rose coloured glasses as a poem from more naive times back when some folks still had some hope... This was way before vulture capitalism fucked everything up you know, or at least that's how I remember it but I was like 10.

Not everyone was into this hopeful vision of cyberspace though, Masters of Doom comes to mind.

peraon Why companies will just keep nudging you to try AI

https://archive.is/rgJzT

peraon Japanese scientists unveil a quantum battery that defies energy loss

Preprint back from May:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03675

peraon OpenAI researcher announced GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened

Yeah no I didn't mean retail investors, OpenAI is not publicly traded, but yeah I do share your concern...

peraon OpenAI researcher announced GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened

Heh stockholders are not hallucinating: They know very well what they are doing.

peraon Pixnapping Attack

I am not familiar to this type of side-channel attacks but the article says they use GPU.zip which is exploitable through Chrome:

https://www.hertzbleed.com/gpu.zip/