mctt

Hacker news Sans Ai https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai

This reminded me of a comment from CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou;

"It was my experience at the CIA where literally every Israeli prime minister since the 1980s would come to Washington, which they do all the time, and no matter who happened to be in the White House, they would say 'Please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran.' And every president would say 'We're not going to do that.' Until this president..." [39:15]

https://youtu.be/Dztm-FpDC0s?t=39m8s

Form the article; "The real safety net is that Bitwarden’s clients are Apache 2.0 licensed."

I bought a Pixel 7 from BackMarket to test out GrapheneOS. I have previous positive comments and conversations in my account history.

The article does not say anything about F-droid. However, there was discussion about this a few months ago; F-Droid and Google's developer registration decree https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794

F-Droid warns that Google's new "Developer Verification System" will require all Android app developers, even those outside the Play Store, to register personal data and pay a fee to Google to remain installable. The project argues this mandate threatens the existence of free and open-source ecosystems like F-Droid by ending anonymous development and stripping users of the right to choose their own software.

So that is one threat to what we have now. Right now you can install an APK that you trust and have been using for years.

What the article does say is that Samsung is removing several core options from the Android recovery menu, including the ability to sideload updates via ADB or SD cards and the "wipe cache partition" tool. While the reason for this change remains unconfirmed, it appears to be a permanent security policy shift tied to the One UI 8.5 update and the February 2026 security patch.

So why does this matter? Well some users like nocturn9x [0] have been able to take back control of their devices by installing: 1. An Unlocked Boot Loader. 2. An Unlocked OneUI/ROM 3. And then F-droid style installs are not problem.

Specifically, you can still install your trusted APK if you perform these steps, own a device where the hardware eFuses have not been blown and decline "Play Protect" nag screens and OneUI updates.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47205434

8. External storage works. This is the only mobile OS I've found that has stable support for an External SSD.

I bought a second hand Pixel 7 to test this and an exFat SanDisk Extreme Portable 2TB works with reads/writes perfectly.

Yes, and it is very easy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051 "Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token" And to save a debate, you can swap the phrase "liquor store" for "store" aka supermarket/grocery store.

https://www.pangram.com/history/f51a237d-df7c-46cb-8cf2-c5b7... It scores 100% human written.

I got that reference

I'll play along, so here is the counterpoint. The article remarks on end of an era during which he transformed a failing textile mill into a global conglomerate valued at over $1 trillion. So he never made anything? Wrong, textile mills make things.

Elsewhere in the comments someone links BuffettsAlpha.pdf This explains that they used a 1.6-to-1 leverage refers to the estimate of the average amount of borrowed capital Warren Buffett uses to magnify the returns. This level of leverage means that for every $1.00 of equity, Buffett manages approximately $1.60 in total assets. It explains why Berkshire experiences high volatility (roughly 25%) despite investing in relatively stable, low-risk businesses. A significant portion of this leverage—estimated at 36% of liabilities—comes from insurance float. This is essentially a "loan" that costs Berkshire an average of only 2.2% annually, which is more than 3 percentage points below the average T-bill rate.

So why does this matter? Unlike many investors who might face forced liquidations during market downturns, Buffett's unique access to stable, low-cost financing allows him to maintain this leverage even during significant drawdowns.

So yes, he chose the right "cronies" because during inevitable downturn the money was still there to be used to run these low risk stable business.

Do people idolise him? No need to debate that but power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Why did he continue to live a simple life while he has pledged that 99.5% of his wealth will go to philanthropic causes either during his lifetime or at the time of his death.

So I do think you "got that right", however you may have missed that he started with a factory that makes things, invested in a way that survived adversity, and then plans to deliver on the principle that his wealth belongs to society rather than to a "family empire."

I do wonder how you or I would handle running a business. To me that work does not sound easy.

Free trial then $20USD per year for ControlD. Is that what you use? If so, why do you use this over another service?

..."Indyke, an attorney who represented Epstein for decades, has not been criminally indicted by federal authorities. He was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate."...

From the Guardian UK https://archive.md/lO08a

Projectivy Launcher, for Nvidia Shield Home Screen. Before that I was building a rooted firmware and downgrading from that awful advert ridden update. I also tried Dispatch as a home screen replacement, but Projectivy wins.

Not a book, but a 'fact'book; https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/iran/

Religions

Muslim (official) 98.5%, Christian 0.7%, Baha'i 0.3%, agnostic 0.3%, other (includes Zoroastrian, Jewish, Hindu) 0.2% (2020 est.)

Compared to the United Kingdom; https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-king...

Religions

Christian (includes Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) 59.5%, Muslim 4.4%, Hindu 1.3%, other 2%, unspecified 7.2%, none 25.7% (2011 est.)

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

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

Pastor Niemöller

What happened to curl? The comment is referring to how the curl project is being overwhelmed by low-quality bug/vulnerability reports generated (or partially generated) by AI (“AI slop”), so much so that curl maintainers are now banning reporters who submit such reports and demanding disclosure, because these sloppy reports cost a lot of time and drain the team.

[generated by ChatGPT] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217858

Yes, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/505/use-only-as-directed

The episode shows how even small overdoses of acetaminophen can cause fatal liver damage, while decades of FDA delays and confusing drug labeling left millions of Americans at risk.

Can someone explain what is being said here in literal terms please. Can you also identify any dark humour or social commentary because I don't know enough to be sure.

"It is surmised that conditioning is enforced via several cogni- tive biases that trick a player into expecting euphoria (liking- pathway), when instead frustration is yielded – with condi- tioning being iterated to a point that the player is motivated to interact with the game on a foremost instinctual level. We posit that these stimulations of the wanting-pathway may lead to players interacting with the game not only with- out actually liking it, but also without knowing why they are interacting with the game. Indeed, this calls for drawing another parallel between drug addiction, and play behaviour in which liking may be barely exhibited (cf. [16, 38, 40])."

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/install.121/e22624/prei...

| /dev/null ?

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128234227/https://www.nytim...

https://whereto.stream/tv/235540

Here is a quote from Facebook/Meta's legal council to the Judge. In this document "Advertisers" refers to Snapchat, YouTube and Amazon.

"... the Wiretap Act provides that an interception is not unlawful if a party to the communication “has given prior consent to such interception.” 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d). Advertisers conspicuously fail to mention—and apparently do not contest—that Meta obtained participants’ prior consent to participate in the Facebook Research App, and with good reason: Participants affirmatively consented to “Facebook … collecting data about [their] Internet browsing activity and app usage” to enable Facebook to “understand how [they] browse the Internet, how [they] use the features in the apps [they’ve] installed, and how people interact with the content [they] send and receive."

So users consented?

"The GUILD does not take YOUR ORDERS" https://youtu.be/wRy18Euw6W4

Very funny. Thanks for the missing piece of the puzzle.

Found it; “I Could Rewrite Curl” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27220136 20 May 2021

What is this a reference to?

Good question, so I Googled some answers:

How common are RAM bit flips?

Research has shown that a computer with 4GB of memory has a 96% chance of having a random “bit flip” every three days. That's a crazy high chance of data corruption occurring on your computer.18 Mar 2021

https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/devils-advocate...

How often do ECC errors occur?

These can all not be corrected, but are extremely rare. A 1 Gigabit ECC DRAM contains 16 Million blocks of 64 bit datawords. Per each of these 64 bit words, one error is correctable. In other words: Statistically one out of 16 million hits might be a double-bit error.

https://www.intelligentmemory.com/support/faq/ecc-dram/how-o...

SNR Signal to Noise (ratio).

In this case the comparison would be; Citation to Citation needed (ratio).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed