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randyrand

4,326 karma · joined April 16, 2013

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randyrand··on Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
Easier said than done.
randyrand··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
- "How many people died at Burning man"

- "How many people died due to Burning man"

- "How many people died going to Burning man".

IMO, distinct questions with distinct answers.

randyrand··on Tells of a Slop UI
1st major tell: the website was released in 2025 or later.

Pretty much all websites these days use AI to make them now.

randyrand··on What even is an OS now?
“Go enjoy my family photos for me.”

“Go play video games for me”

“Go create music for me”

Idk. Seems like there is still use for apps.

randyrand··on Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death
Pulling over on the side of the road is not typically considered unsafe. A gore serves that same purpose IMO.
randyrand··on Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death
An important detail, according to the driver he didn't force her out. The girl got out after he pulled over to argue about / inspect the vomit and assess the situation.

"Tran argued that he responded reasonably to a perceived sudden emergency caused by the passengers' prior excessive drinking, of which he said he was unaware, & that he could not anticipate that Normandin-Parker would leave his vehicle and wander into traffic."

randyrand··on Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death
The driver that actually killed them wasn't part of this arbitration. This is arbitrating the lead up.
randyrand··on Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death
ESH. Everyone sucks here. The person that hit them. The driver that dropped them off. The girls drinking to the point of stupor. Uber for not training drivers enough.
randyrand··on Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death
> The situation may have been avoided if Uber had this strict clause in its onboarding manual to never stop the car or drop the passenger at unsafe spot.

You think they don't?

randyrand··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
IMO it's primarily because it's a bad name. Names are important, as they reinforce your mental model.

Reduce means to take away.

But reduce isn't taking something away. It's combining multiple things into one -- squeezing multiple things together. Reduce is poor verb for that.

It should've been called squash. Just like squash-merge.

randyrand··on The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
For a critical bug fix, a week can be a very long time.
randyrand··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
“Bearing” is not how products are priced.

You need to think in terms of supply and demand.

The demand is there, but the supply is also going to skyrocket. Free open weights models will contribute to supply too.

There will be a new equilibrium that’s hard to predict.

randyrand··on The case against JPEG XL
JpegXL progressive decode is way better than AVIF:

- it's first image is way earlier: 2KB vs 8KB

- from 8KB to 100KB it's blurrier than AVIF, but it's more pleasing to look at and less blocky than AVIF. I highly prefer it.

- from 100KB until finished 288KB it's actually ~4x sharper than AVIF

Overall JpegXL gives the much nicer experience.

^ tested with pokebowl (https://jpegxl.info/resources/progressive-loading-demo.html)

randyrand··on Ask HN: How can I browse HN in dark mode?
iOS accessibility shortcut: 3 taps on sleep button inverts the colors of any website, if you set it up.
randyrand··on We must pace the frontier
How about this: stop connecting safety critical systems into the internet.

This is what we should’ve been doing a long time ago.

randyrand··on GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts
It matters, for now.

- I prompt better when I can understand the code, when necessary

- I can catch wrong assumptions it made more easily

- Good code helps the AI too, AFAICT

randyrand··on GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts
For anyone wondering, it's 2.4K lines of code. Very small, but yes AI is very impressive.
randyrand··on You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules
This scenario is not at all uncommon.

Brent Underwood has spent $30K+ trying to get water on his land: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atKOoMvLmTA&t=1s

If we are going to have a government promised right to water, we can't just ignore people that move to places where it's hard to find water.

randyrand··on You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules
It needs more qualifications IMO. "reasonable access" perhaps? I mean how would you handle someone who drives their car into the desert or climbs to the top of a mountain and demands water?
randyrand··on You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules
I'm not sure what a right to water really means.

A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.

randyrand··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
That’s not how things are valued. That’s moreso how the absence of something is valued.
randyrand··on “Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs
What comes after “the dog”?

Does it complete the sentence?

If not then it’s not a next token predictor. Or at least not a good one.

randyrand··on US gov sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material
This article is trash, but this ruling is just about the outputs of AI.

For use as training data you still need some right to it AFAICT.

randyrand··on Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux
Every device requires a random product key issued by apple and they’re not supposed to be reused.

No good way to get around that except buying an Apple device and taking its key.

randyrand··on Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate buyers
If all they do is raise the price, then the reason doesn’t really matter. Those people are willingly buying the product for that price.

If the money was earmarked for import taxes, like it often is for sales tax, then there could be ground to stand on and the customer owed a refund.

It’s a subtle difference but it makes all the difference. Are you buying the product? Or buying the product + specifically paying your import fees only.

randyrand··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
Their USPTO is still pending, so we'll see. But yes legally they have good grounds to continue DBA as Twitter.
randyrand··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
Well, I was confused. New Twitter got big coverage today [1] and then more Twitter related news on HN today too.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-laun...

randyrand··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
Is this referring to the new Twitter company that recently launched (https://twitter.now)?

If not, then this is just going to lead to confusion.

randyrand··on Everything I own, owned
For most products the LED is not a simple on/off indicator. It signals device state, user confirmations, ota updates, etc etc etc.

I’m at a loss for how you would signal all of that without a GPIO.

randyrand··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
I don't have kids and live in the city.
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