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phantomathkg

2,248 karma · joined September 2, 2016

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phantomathkg··on Visa and Mastercard near deal with merchants that would change rewards landscape
QR Code base system is slow, have security risk and will not work without smartphone.

Proliferation of hundred of QR Code based payments system is not a good thing, you need one that works across all countries.

Outside Visa and Mastercard, we have Amex, Diner, JCB, even China has UnionPay, but unfortunately they are not as popular as a contender of the duopoly.

phantomathkg··on AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
I thought the argument point is letting it die is OK, but letting wrongfully translated text, becoming the source of AI to chuck out wrongfully translated text is not OK.
phantomathkg··on Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
As ex-Smart TV app developer, I would stay with Sony's Android TV. Reason being

- Samsung Tizen is sluggish. - LG webOS is fiddly and don't feel it gets enough attention and care from LG. - Other brand is just slow. - On hackability, Android is far easier to handle than any other brand.

Mind you Sony has a few line and some run Android, some run something else.

phantomathkg··on The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)
Why not? Code is liability. Less code to maintain also enhance engineer's ability to reason the code and implement better website.
phantomathkg··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
If using LLM can shorten the time reporter needs to rewrite the whole article again in the language the reporter is fluent but take effort to write, why not?

This will give the reporter more time to work on more articles, and we as a foreigner to Korea, getting more authentic Korean news that is reviewed by Korean and not be Google Translate.

phantomathkg··on Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
Vega is FireTV new OS. LG TV run webOS, which is totally different.
phantomathkg··on UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards
As an adult, you probably need to authenticate yourself in the following situation.

opening a bank account, getting a credit card, getting a mortgage or a loan, buying a flight ticket, signing up for internet service, signing for mobile services, buying a concert ticket and the list goes on.

What's common here is the service provider need to know you are actually the person say it is you and not someone else.

Back in the old days where we apply the service in person, you can take your driving license or passport to authenticate yourself, but with myriad of services now moving online, we need a centralised system that mimic the physical ID.

phantomathkg··on Thoughts on Cloudflare
Maybe it is me, but I wouldn't take whatever advice provided by someone who is only known by pseudonym.
phantomathkg··on The Amazon Kindle War Against Piracy
I googled, and it seems Kobo can? But I don't own a Kobo to test it.

https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019527954-Downloa...

phantomathkg··on Why our website looks like an operating system
This works, until you want to print the page (dead tree format or PDF format) and breaks everything.
phantomathkg··on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
Some people think dealing with the following are fun.

Handling massive amount of video ingestion from content creator; Transcoding to various format that is optimal for various devices, Live streaming with Live to VOD, Geo restriction, Live Commenting, Ad insertion and penalise adblocker, Recommendation engine.

There are many features and challenges that are unique to OTT streaming applications and running at YouTube scales makes it even more challanging, or fun to some, to handle.

phantomathkg··on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
Anything can disappear in this modern era. Thankfully YouTube is not DRM protected yet and you can do something about it. Any media company can take any video offline and your access to it will be gone. Same for ebooks, not only those tied to your account, but I was thinking, what if Overdrive/Libby terminate the access to particular library.
phantomathkg··on Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win.

For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]

Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.

So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611

phantomathkg··on Toronto’s network of pedestrian tunnels
Hong Kong has a similar system in the CBD area, but instead of going underground. They built foot bridges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Elevated_Walkway

phantomathkg··on Taiwan Submarine Cable Map Showing Current Outage
Sorry, should have said "Current Cable Outage" instead.
phantomathkg··on Taiwan Submarine Cable Map Showing Current Outage
It is not a burst but a consistent sabotage action happening in the background [1]. To make the matter worse, those vessels that commit the crime will be merchant ship flying flags of convenience. [2]

[1] https://globaltaiwan.org/2025/03/countering-chinas-subsea-ca.... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy3zy9jvd4o

phantomathkg··on Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
Simply looking at check out you can see that customer obsession is false. Littering with tiny text and checkbox trying to trick you to subscribe to Amazon Prime.

Not to mention they can randomly ban account for no reason given.

phantomathkg··on When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
Side note: some people may not be able access it outside of specific area.
phantomathkg··on Yamanot.es: A music box of train station melodies from the JR Yamanote Line
What interesting is, the implementation is completely simple multi pages HTML5/CSS/Vanilla JavaScript. No framework. And it just, works.
phantomathkg··on From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent
Why not recycle it? I thought Apple in general can trade in old device?
phantomathkg··on Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on August 20, 2025
It won't get you from where you are to China though.
phantomathkg··on Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file
At first I thought it is tiddlywiki but it is not.
phantomathkg··on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C
Because APT will use any devices to infiltrate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSaix1C-UMI

phantomathkg··on Rethinking DOM from first principles
But we have more than one OS in the world, how would you think your one framework approach is going to fit in all platform?

We have seen all these framework claimed to be cross platforms and none of them are not able to make it to the top framework being used.

Web is the only "platforms" with some kind of success by abstract everything away so most of the browser display roughly the same things to all users on all OS.

phantomathkg··on Rethinking DOM from first principles
> There should be a singlular framework for creating desktop apps.

Why?

phantomathkg··on Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Effects of Novel Swear Words
So this is like a more rigorously version of Mythbusters' No Pain, No Gain test then.
phantomathkg··on YouTube No Translation
i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:

If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.

No, there are tourist from country Z, long term resident who prefer language A and people from country X want to learn language B.

- If your browser Accept-Language say X,Y, then you must want all the content to be served in X.

No, I want my search result to be predominantly in X, but when I search for things about Y, show me language Y, and when I search for this band from country Z, please show me in language X.

As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.

I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose and say, interface language, english, content language, follow origin.

phantomathkg··on CF-Shield – An open source tool to protect any website with Cloudflare
How does it differ from existing Cloudflare DDoS protection on free tier? https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/ddos/
phantomathkg··on Privacy implications of browsers’ (mis)implementations of Widevine EME (2023)
So they can monetize the consumption of video/audio.
phantomathkg··on Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content
are you and GP are saying that all social media platform should perform policing to the point that everything outlaw in every countries should be banned?
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