HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rossy

1,480 karma · joined May 8, 2012

https://github.com/rossy
submissionscomments
rossy··on Tank Body Problem
I know sometimes obvious things miss us, but there's a 99% chance that a human author would have realised half-way through implementing movement that it broke the game.

Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.

rossy··on PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura
Can you give an example of a point in their rationale that they'll "come around" on, and why? I mentioned it because it looks solid to me.

I don't think they'll be forked to irrelevance. Even if I put aside my skepticism of the quality or longevity of AI-assisted projects, I don't think there's a bigger audience for a Nura that's less principled on the issues they mentioned.

rossy··on PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura
The policy you linked explains its reasoning pretty clearly. So you feel better about their decision, please re-read it with an open mind and a "why would a very ideologically-motivated copyleft free software project think this" attitude.
rossy··on Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel
> but models have become increasingly good at writing.

That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.

I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.

rossy··on Running Ubuntu on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet
Note that postmarketOS is proper Linux. It runs almost-perfectly (sans camera) out-of-the-box on most Duets, and has for a while. Once you enable developer mode in ChromeOS, the install process is just like a PC laptop. The article seems like more of a sidequest to (promote AI and) install Ubuntu specifically by getting uboot and a UEFI environment, but postmarketOS doesn't need that because it can boot from ChromeOS' bootloader. Installing postmarketOS on my Duets (homestar and wormdingler) was probably the best decision I've made with those devices, and they might be some of the best arm64 devices of that form factor to run Linux on.
rossy··on Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.
rossy··on How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
I think the burden of proof is on the new technology. It's been almost a year since the supposed death of manual coding, depending on how you count, but I haven't seen the efficiency benefits of AI trickle down to the programs I'm an end-user of. I _have_ seen the bugs, however (rsync 3.4.3 for example.)
rossy··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
No, he's right. Actually, let's have a bit of sobriety when discussing the achievements of the most heavily marketed technology of all time, as published by an organisation that stands to benefit financially from the public perception of that technology. The discussion of "what made this problem low hanging fruit" is much more interesting, imo, than just breathlessly joining the hype train.
rossy··on Show HN: Bodily Oddities
What enabled people to build cool side projects in the actual 90's and 00's and what stopped them from doing it in the period afterwards but before LLMs?
rossy··on Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished
It's actually pretty normal to be upset when an unjust law is enforced on you but doesn't seem to apply to someone else.
rossy··on Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished
Sometimes I imagine the world where each installment got, say, 14 years of copyright exclusivity before becoming part of a shared cultural mythos that anyone could contribute to. Imagine the boon for small artists to have access to such recognizable characters, but also the big-budget takes and spins on the setting that could come from literally anyone.

Instead we have a TV series that's more or less exactly the same as the old movies.

rossy··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
Tbf I was talking about first-party Google TV boxes (Google TV Streamer and Chromecast with Google TV.) Likely not perfect for privacy, but not pure evil like built-in smart TV firmware, they support sideloading without time limits, alternative app stores (Flicky/F-Droid) and they're friends/family/roommate/partner friendly with support for DRM-ed streaming apps, Chromecast and pairing with the official YouTube app.

I chose one over the Apple TV because I knew I wouldn't able to stand any limitations on sideloading. For a while I was running a custom build of Wholphin with patched libmpv/libplacebo to work around a bug before the fix was upstreamed. A device without the freedom to do that sort of thing would drive me nuts.

rossy··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
Obviously, as an advertising company, Google should have your utmost scrutiny. But as far as I know, their TV boxes don't ACR your content. If they were the only two options, sticking with your smart TV software instead of using a Google TV box would be a privacy mistake.
rossy··on QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
> I remember a socialistic coworker of mine—that was bragging about his -arr setup—talking about the end of the culture because authors aren't earning money.

To be fair, you can have it both ways. If you buy-and-pirate, and you buy 4 UHDs per year or 10 albums per year, you've put more money into the industry than the average streamer. Admittedly, buying-and-pirating isn't as commonly done for movies and TV as it is for music, but that can be explained by the increased DRM and lock-in.

rossy··on Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux
I don't see the issue. The thing I can't move past with generative AI is that it wouldn't exist without the labour of people who post things for free on the internet, but it's displacing those same people from their day jobs. Legal or not, I think having your own work used against your will to harm you is something to be justifiably angry about.

And many pro-AI communities sweep the issue under the rug, consider it invalid in some way, or just over-discussed and boring. They have to, because it's uncomfortable and it has no solution. There is no generative AI without scraped datasets. But the consequence of ignoring the issue is that you might be surprised when you encounter a large group who are still very (justifiably) angry about it. Bluesky has a large community of people who post art for free on the internet.

You can't expect them to be civil either, when so many countries are in a cost of living crisis. No one faces losing their home or health insurance and thinks "I'd better be polite to the people doing it," and a high profile developer posting publicly about implementing a long-asked-for feature with AI is exactly what the AI marketing machine needs. A lot of devs are wondering whether AI-generated code is good or slop, and it's the opinion of other respected devs that sways them.

Also, let's not forget that PDN isn't FOSS. Linux platform knowledge was scraped from FOSS Linux software, trained into AI, and is being used to port a closed source program to Linux where it will displace FOSS alternatives. And the dev expects a pat on the back from the community? Why?

rossy··on Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
Holding the threat of death over people isn't the way to a "high-trust society." Maybe you think it's the way to something similar, but you have to give up the word "trust" because it doesn't apply here. If the only reason I think a man isn't going to rob me is because I will shoot him if he does, I don't trust that man.

A society which only has low crime because everyone is able to use lethal force to defend themselves and their property isn't one I would call higher "trust" than one that maintains the same crime levels without that threat.

rossy··on A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
> Honesty section:

This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.

rossy··on GCC steering committee announces AI policy
I read the comment as "allowing wealth to access the skill of the people who created the contents of the training set." I don't think anything prior has allowed such direct access to the skill of other people while denying them access to wealth. At least the creators of stock photos and templates get paid.
rossy··on When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
Let's Encrypt can issue wildcard certs too
rossy··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
> It’s a targeted advertising machine that is extremely effective on kids and teenagers. It preys on them so, so efficiently. It’s a technical work of art. A young mind is extremely susceptible to the algorithms on those platforms. Much more than adults are, and adults are already really susceptible.

Sure, but the Australian government's definition of an age-restricted social media platform doesn't mention advertising or algorithms at all. Technically, their definition also covers algorithm-free social media like Mastodon, which I'd argue isn't nearly as harmful.

The framing of social media as something that's inherently bad no matter how you do it is a framing that helps social media giants like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook to continue to "do it" in a way that harms people. I'm sure they love the idea that the ills of social media can be solved by banning their least profitable users while doing nothing to regulate what they do with the others. They're probably thrilled that their healthier algorithm-free competitors haven't even entered the conversation. They want to be the tobacco companies of the future, because making addictive things for adults is incredibly profitable.

rossy··on People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows
> They are mostly on the wrong side in the war on general-purpose computing.

All modern Chromebooks can be put into developer mode without opening the case, which gives you root access.

rossy··on GCC 16 considering changing default to C++20
> (though this isn't the case for Anubis) the cliche inappropriately dressed inappropriately young anime characters dawned as mascots in an ever increasing number of projects

I think the fact that people bring up things that the Anubis mascot isn't when talking about Anubis is more telling of their own harmful (and potentially racist) biases against Japanese-styled media than it is about the idea of having anime-styled mascots for free software projects.

rossy··on Steam Machine
To be fair there are a lot of games on Steam that don't have DRM, which means you can just drag them out of the steamapps folder to a computer that doesn't have Steam and they work fine. The decision to add DRM comes from the developer/publisher, not Valve.
rossy··on Steam Machine
Did you forget about Vulkan? Valve and AMD are Khronos members and active contributors to the Vulkan spec. Games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Civ VII use Vulkan on Deck. There's a complete graphics ecosystem with full participation from the games industry that doesn't have Microsoft as the gatekeeper.
rossy··on Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
The more I think about it, the harder it is to recommend anything else for the average Windows gamer/prosumer but first-time Linux user.

- Rolling release, so you don't have to do a major upgrade twice a year - which would otherwise be much more often than Windows.

- Latest kernel and graphics drivers, so it works with newly released hardware with the best performance.

- Steam, NVIDIA drivers, H.264/H.265 codecs, Gamescope, GameMode, MangoHud, etc. all in the default repos - a huge boon for new Linux users compared to having them in an external repo like RPM Fusion or having to install them manually, which can otherwise cause confusing dependency problems over the life of the installation.

- Nothing unusual about it that would be confusing or cause compatibility problems. It's just a normal mutable binary distro with a normal package manager, upstream packages, glibc and systemd.

The biggest issue is the lack of an official graphical installer, but while the install process is intimidating, it's not very difficult for people who are patient, can follow detailed instructions, and have a vague idea of what a partition and a bootloader is.

rossy··on Open Social
I don't think being able to migrate your account addresses the rugpull concern. The rugpull scenario is that one day, in five years or so, bsky.app drops all AT Protocol support and transforms into a Twitter-like centralized social media website. The problem isn't that the account will stop "existing" but that Bluesky users will stop seeing it. The average non-techie Bluesky user who doesn't know about the AT Protocol won't even notice the change, except that, from their perspective, a tiny percentage of nerdy users have stopped posting. For you, "migrating" your account away is effectively just deleting it from the now-centralized Bluesky and willfully decreasing your audience by 100-fold or more.

The problem is a social not a technical one. It doesn't matter how good AT Protocol is at account migration. The vast majority of AT Protocol users think of themselves as Bluesky users and don't even know what the AT Protocol is. If the official Bluesky clients move away from the AT Protocol, the majority of users are moving with Bluesky.

For all the UX concerns people have with Mastodon/ActivityPub, at least they make it obvious that different users are hosted on different instances, and no one instance has more to gain than it does to lose by defederating.

rossy··on Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU
It worked on my device. The page you linked looks very outdated and doesn't have my device's board or any device made in the past 5 years. The lists of unsupported devices also look pretty reasonable - old kernels, CPUs that don't support virtualisation and 32-bit ARM. Since modern ChromeOS uses the same virtualisation to run Android apps, I doubt there's a modern device where it doesn't work.
rossy··on Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU
Sorry, but "CLI stuff" is not "as far as it goes" with desktop Linux apps on ChromeOS. ChromeOS provides Wayland and PulseAudio servers to the apps as well so GUI and audio works too. It even synchronises file associations and installs a ChromeOS-like GTK theme into the container. The Linux GUI apps I had installed back when I used it felt completely native.
rossy··on Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU
I got a ChromeOS device a few years ago and it was great. I think they get an underserved bad reputation from being the locked-down devices you're forced to use in schools, but a personal ChromeOS device is a capable computer that can run any Android app or desktop Linux app.

Though having said that, in the past year I've replaced ChromeOS with desktop Linux (postmarketOS) and I love it even more now. 4GB of RAM was a bit slim for running everything in micro-VMs for "security," which is what ChromeOS does. I've had no trouble with battery life or Android emulation (Waydroid) since switching.

rossy··on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater
If the creator of this app doesn't know their stuff, they're putting other people at risk.
Page 1 of 13Next →