Hacker News Reader

wobfanon I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

And in your mind NOW always means "since GenAI is a thing"?

Most of the time, when people realize something, it happens NOW. Also, AI isn't even mentioned in the headline at all, and not even in the first part of the article. It's just used as one hint that it might be scam, then followed up with further evidence.

wobfanon I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

Where does the author claim or even remotely suggest that?

wobfanon I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

I love how, on the "I am retiring page", the image of the old woman even has artifacts of the Gemini logo on the bottom right - someone very probably manually tried to blur them with a tool that was not meant for blurring.

Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.

wobfanon Don't rent the cloud, own instead

To be fair, I think people are vastly over estimating the work they would have and the power they would need. Yes, if you have to massively scale up, then it'll take some work, but most of it is one-time work. You do it, and when it runs, you only have a fraction of work over the next months to maintain it. And with fraction, I mean below 5%. And keep in mind that >99% of startups who think of "yeah we need this and that cloud, because we need to scale" will never scale. Instead they are happily locking themselves into a cloud service. And if they actually scale at some point, this service will be massively more expensive.

wobfanon Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

The fact that so many people are discussing their terminal just confirms the fact that a terminal is incredibly basic.

wobfanon Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

The article is not about UNIX, what's good and bad, but what's better for understanding Linux. And replacing SysVInit with systemd is, objectively, bad for understand the core of Linux. And this is the core of LFS.

Discussing whether UNIX is good or bad seems narrow-minded, as there is no solution to that. It's like discussing whether iOS is better than Android. We can always isolate some specific parts and discuss that, but just slashing the whole concept doesn't help anyone and rarely yields any meaningful results.

wobfanon Kimi Released Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual SOTA-Agentic Model

> honestly I might start using Kimi K2.5 if its open source & just +/- Gemini Pro/Chatgpt/Claude because at that point I feel like the results are negligible and we are getting SOTA open source models again.

Me too!

> I like Gemini Pro's UI over Claude so much

This I don't understand. I mean, I don't see a lot of difference in both UIs. Quite the opposite, apart from some animations, round corners and color gradings, they seem to look very alike, no?

wobfanon Microsoft will give the FBI a Windows PC data encryption key if ordered

While you're right, they also went out of their way to prevent competent users from using local accounts and/or not upload their BitLocker keys.

I could understand if the default is an online account + automatic key upload, but only if you add an opt-out option to it. It might not even be visible by default, like, idk, hide it somewhere so that you can be sure that the median MS user won't see it and won't think about it. But just fully refusing to allow your users to decide against uploading the encryption key to your servers is evil, straight up.

wobfanon Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11

But Windows is made for the big masses. It's definitely a good thing that Microsoft forces Auto-Updates, because otherwise 95% of people would run around with devices that have gaping security holes. And 90% of these people are not being a firewall 100% of their time.

Side effect unfortunately is that they are shoving ad- and bloatware down your throat through these updates.

But that is, because Microsoft does not care about the end user at all. It's not the fault of auto-updates.

wobfanon Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

Also, they haven't cared about Windows 11 consumer sales for decades. It's not a coincidence that it's easier to crack Windows 11 than it was to crack Windows XP.

wobfanon Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

AFAIK Windows 11 IoT, which is intended for exactly these kinds of environments, can be activated via phone and LAN without internet.

Microsoft isn't abandoning these markets. They've been min-maxing consumer software enshittification for years now and doing an extremely good job, but they still have good options for enterprise.

wobfanon Backing up Spotify

https://netzpolitik.org/2025/die-cuii-gibt-auf-fuer-netzsper...

It's not voluntary anymore, it's required.

wobfanon Asahi Linux with Sway on the MacBook Air M2 (2024)

Is this actually such a big point? I feel like (subjectively) on Ubuntu everything gets updated just as fast, and even if not, there's a new full release every 6 months. Or is this actually rather slow in comparison to Feroda?

I've also only used Debian based stuff my whole life and even moving from apt to dnf or whatever it was causes too much friction for me haha, though it's not that bad obviously, if I really would see the positives.

wobfanon Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025

To be fair, the macOS Safari is not tied to the OS. Don't remember if it ever was, but it def isn't anymore then.

wobfanon iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

Last time I checked the European Union was a political construct and not a phone manufacturer.

wobfanon Self-hosting my photos with Immich

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Switching the ecosystem from something like Shopify to some other shop software requires a lot of manual work, and some of the stuff won't even be transferable 1:1.

Fixing some issue with your WordPress installation will require a person who can google and knows a little stuff about webservers, and maybe containers, and will usually go pretty fast, as WordPress is open source and runs almost half the internet, and almost every problem that will come up will have been solved in some StackOverflow thread or GitHub issue.

Usually though, if you run WordPress and you're not doing a lot of hacky stuff, you will not encounter problems. Vendors shutting you down, increasing their pricing, or shutting down vital features in their software, happens regularly though. And if it happens, shit hits the fan.

wobfanon Self-hosting my photos with Immich

> Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds.

Having seen a lot of companies and startups doinge exactly that, more of less everyone regrets it. Either you end up with such a lot of traffic through these vendors that you'll regret it financially, or you want to change some specific part of your page or your purchase process, which Shopify doesn't let you change, and you'll end up needing to switch or be sad, or, as I regularly have to (because we don't get the resources and time to switch): try to manipulate the site through some weird hacky Javascript snippets that manipulate the DOM after it loaded.

It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.

> Stop self hosting.

Worst mantra of the century. Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging. This is only a good idea for a prototype, and only as long as you'll not gonna run the prototype indefinitely but will eventually replace it. And maybe for one-person-companies who just want to get going and don't have resources for this.

wobfanon Self-hosting my photos with Immich

I fail to get the problems with self hosting Immich. I mean, obviously you gotta have a server ready, and at least some knowledge about self hosting and docker. But apart from that, installing Immich was like a breeze. It was actually not more than pasting some lines into a docker-compose, and running it.

Have been using it for about 1.5 years, and I have not a single problem, which is quite incredible for a software that basically has all features that Google Photos has.

wobfanon Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought (2024) [pdf]

I have never not thought in words. How does it work? Like, how can I for example think about plans or something if not in words?

I do meditate here and now, but sooner or later the constant stream of words will 100% set in again, usually during or immediately after meditation. And these words for example tell me or discuss whether I should go shower, go to gym, do dishes, or whatever. And in the end I'll decide based on that discussion and do it. It's weird how defined I am by this inner voice.

wobfanon Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought (2024) [pdf]

I have no clue, have not read the PDF, and am naive and dumb on this topic. But my naive thought recently was how important language must be for our thought, or even be our thoughts, based on how well LLMs work. Needless to say I'm no expert on either topic. But my naive impression was, given that LLMs work on nothing more than words and predictors, the evidence that they almost feel like a real human makes me think that our thoughts are heavily influenced or even purely based on language and massively defined by it.

wobfanon The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy

Did you read the comment your replied to?

wobfanon AI adoption in US adds ~900k tons of CO₂ annually, study finds

Because it's wrong. AI doesn't save any CO2 or hours.

> AI helps in productivity in many places so it is definitely a fair point.

The productivity per hours might be higher, but the CO2 per hours is also higher, per definition. This isn't about productivity though, OP talked about CO2 emissions, and they can only rise, per capitalism's definition. If any company owner says "Okay we're doing a workday's work in an hour now, so now we'll just leave the office after one hour", then yes, we may save CO2. But this is not what's happening.

The hours still go by as fast as before, but instead of only having working humans, we have additional data centers that pollute the air.

In comparison to effectiveness, AI may (or may not, I saw studies that suggested otherwise) may reduce the CO2/LoC cost, but saying "AI saves CO2" is just entirely wrong and a misconception. It adds a massive amount of CO2. The rich people running the companies only earn money a little more faster than before.

> I run searches that otherwise would take 15 min in google. The energy to power the monitor for that much time itself is higher than one prompt that solved my search query.

But the time didn't go away. You consumed more energy in a smaller timeframe, but the rest of the 15 mins that you "saved" didn't go away. You probably did something else in there. So it just added CO2.

wobfanon Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

I mean they need the resources to switch from native, to UWP, to web, and then start over again in 2 years. How do you think should they manage to fix such a unnecessary thing like search in the meantime?

But fear not! As we learnt from Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, in early 2026, 100% of the code will be created by GenAI. Finally we can have native apps with working core-functionality. Can't wait for it!

wobfanon Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

> That's not really WhatsApp's fault though.

I mean, you could argue that you're at fault when you're choosing a platform that literally eats your RAM. They're not at fault that the platform is shit. But they could have chosen another platform. Or, even better, just use the existing, most of the time perfectly working app, and optimize it.

They had no resources to build the new features for every single platform that they offer native clients for? I could not imagine any other app for which this would be more hypocritical. Give me the iOS WhatsApp IPA from 2016, or even earlier, and the Windows Chromium Wrapper from 2018, and I will tell you neither me nor probably 98% percent of users will notice any difference in feature, let alone design.

wobfanon AI adoption in US adds ~900k tons of CO₂ annually, study finds

I am not yet aware of an AI that is able to straight up remove hours out of a timeline. Time goes by pretty fast recently though, maybe AI is the reason?

wobfanon Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

> Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies

The problem with this is, that in the age of put-as-much-data-as-we-have-in-some-us-megacorp-managed-cloud this does not mean anything anymore. I may sound paranoid but it's just the truth. There is an abundance of general evidence for this, but even more, there is evidence that Flock data has been shared with parties in the US government who weren't "allowed" to access them.

Your sentence makes it sound like they have a document somewhere in their office that has not shared with anyone else. But that's wrong. They have a document on servers ran by a shady company (prob. AWS, Azure, Google), managed by another even shadier company (Flock). The police department has no idea who can see it, and who can't.

I can only speak for myself, but I do not have a problem with enforcement of immigration laws at all. What I do have a problem with is how it is enforced [1,2] and how the general surveillance is handled, especially by Flock [3,4] and the US Government [5], but, to be honest, in the whole US.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/21/you-feel-like-your-lif...

[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-power-abuse-cas...

[3] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-pushback

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/22/warrantle...

[5] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/mass-surveillance-trump-era

wobfanon Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

I mean NT is still way more advanced and modern than Linux will ever be, per definition. NT implements a lot of modern security architectures right into the kernel, while Linux inherently just lacks a lot of them.

But apart from NT I can't think of a lot more solid products that came out of Microsoft.

wobfanon Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

Affirmation bias leads to people usually using stuff that prove their point, so probably the commenter would not have changed his position from one study - which is fine. This is how a discussion works. But your comment leads to a dangerous path of just disregarding people defending their positions with studies, and make it seem like these studies don't hold any value beyond elaborating what the people are saying, which isn't true.

Studies, if done correctly, hold massive scientific value and (at least a bit) of "the truth". Especially in the current climate we should never go down the path of disregarding studies.