evertedsphere (u/evertedsphere)

evertedsphere commented on Firefox expands fingerprint protections blog.mozilla.org/en/firef... · Posted by u/ptrhvns

There has to be a happy middle between "no protection" and "complete uniqueness"

The web without ad blocking is revolting. Browsers building in these features makes them more popular.

Aside: Fuck the Washington Post. They have a line in their privacy policy that acknowledges the existence of "Do Not Track" flags in browsers. Their acknowledgement: since there is no industry standard for responding to it, they ignore it.

evertedsphere · 3 months ago

wow lmao

> Do Not Track. Some web browsers may transmit a “do-not-track” signal. Because there currently is no industry standard concerning how to treat such signals, the Services currently do not take action in response to do not track signals. We respond to legally recognized browser-based opt out signals such as the Global Privacy Control signal for California residents.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/privacy-policy/

evertedsphere commented on The write last, read first rule tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/vismit2000

MichaelGlass · 3 months ago

from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

evertedsphere · 3 months ago

As a general rule when it comes to this pattern of replying to "this is AI generated" with that link: the people that write these posts often read HN and attach a certain amount of importance to the opinions presented here, and it's important that people express their opinions about trends in how the majority of technical writing submitted to this website is either generated or presented, before they become well and truly entrenched as being problems "too common to be interesting".

There's a difference between criticisms of the content or the reader's ability to view it and complaints about "tangential annoyances" surrounding it.

evertedsphere commented on Erlang Meets Idris: Cure Programming Language cure-lang.org/... · Posted by u/delitrem

PaulRobinson · 3 months ago

Emojis at the end of a statement online are a generational thing, not an AI thing.

Replying to an email inline rather than at the top marks you out as of a certain generation. Using text emojis rather than finding the graphical emoji does too.

Everyone needs to relax about AI generation anyway (did you learn something useful or not? If you did, does it matter if it was AI generated as a site?), but saying "this is what people under 30 frequently do, so it must be fake", is just this weird vibe spreading everywhere I don't get at all.

evertedsphere · 3 months ago

emoji at the end of a statement are not the same thing as emoji adorning or replacing every heading

evertedsphere commented on You can't cURL a Border drobinin.com/posts/you-ca... · Posted by u/valzevul

FearNotDaniel · 3 months ago

> buy a sausage roll at Greggs

If that's the first thing he thinks of while transiting through a UK airport, he deserves a citizenship, no questions.

evertedsphere · 3 months ago

claude is nothing if not sensitive to cultural differences

evertedsphere commented on The Internet runs on free and open source software and so does the DNS icann.org/en/blogs/detail... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

evertedsphere · 3 months ago

Perhaps it doesn't even matter anymore, but I'm not yet past the point where it's disheartening every time I click on a link and it's clear that it came out of an LLM. Hopefully this doesn't extend to the actual report.

evertedsphere commented on Board: New game console recognizes physical pieces, with an open SDK board.fun/... · Posted by u/nicoles

evertedsphere · 3 months ago

This reminds me a lot of…something Dynamicland.

evertedsphere commented on Why do some radio towers blink? jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/warrenm

floatrock · 4 months ago

Yeah, I've seen it with windfarms. Always wondered why do they need to blink at the same time. The scale of the blink is pretty jarring at night (but also awe-some, in the same way any big enough infrastructure project inspires a kind of awe).

Wind farms have a certain amount of nimbyism because they "spoil the natural landscape." (So do regular farms -- nothing natural about grain silos or row crops, but that's a side topic...) Anyways, having that many towers blink in unison across that big a landscape is a weird effect when you first see it. I think there's an argument that if they blinked independently it would feel more natural in a way.

But since the blinking is all FAA requirements, I assume it's to help identify all the individual towers from the air. I suppose if they were all blinking independently, it would be a predator-trying-to-focus-on-a-single-zebra-in-the-herd problem, except in this case the predator is a pilot trying not to crash into a turbine.

Sure would emit more subtle 'part of the landscape' vibes though.

(Which I guess is exactly what you don't want when you're flying above them. Sigh.)

evertedsphere · 4 months ago

> Always wondered why do they need to blink at the same time.

presumably this makes it more striking, and thus easier to notice and avoid

evertedsphere commented on Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division bbc.com/news/articles/c1m... · Posted by u/mosura

evertedsphere · 4 months ago

Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by this unfortunate corporate-involved job loss incident at this time.

evertedsphere commented on Why JPEG XL ignoring bit depth is genius (and why AVIF can't pull it off) fractionalxperience.com/u... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

nicoburns · 4 months ago

What makes you think it is AI generated? Perhaps it's just the Dunning-Kruger effect in an area I'm not especially knowledgable in, but this article strikes me as having more technical depth and narrative cohesion than AI is generally capable of.

evertedsphere · 4 months ago

Formatting and headers aside, there are lots of local rhetorical flourishes and patterns that are fairly distinctive and appear at a far higher rate in AI writing than in most writing that isn't low-quality listicle copy artificially trying to hold your attention long enough that you'll accidentally click on one of the three auto-playing videos when you move your pointer to dismiss the newsletter pop-up.

Here's something you know. It's actually neither adjective 1 nor adjective 2—in fact, completely mundane realization! Let that sink in—restatement of realization. Restatement. Of. Realization. The Key Advantages: five-element bulleted list with pithy bolded headings followed by exactly zero new information. Newline. As a surprise, mild, ultimately pointless counterpoint designed to artificially strengthen the argument! But here's the paradox—okay, I can't do this anymore. You get the picture.

    Inside JPEG XL’s lossy encoder, all image data becomes floating-point numbers between 0.0 and 1.0. Not integers. Not 8-bit values from 0-255. Just fractions of full intensity.

Everything after the first "Not" is superfluous and fairly distinctively so.

    No switching between 8-bit mode and 10-bit mode.
    No worrying whether  quantization tables are optimized for the right bit precision.
    No cascading encoding decisions based on integer sample depth.
    The codec doesn’t care about your display’s technical specs. It just needs to know: "what brightness level does white represent?" Everything scales from there.

Same general pattern.

    JPEG XL not worrying about bit depth isn’t an oversight *or* simplification. It’s liberation from decades of accumulated cruft where we confused digital precision with perceptual quality.

It's hard to describe the pattern here in words, but the whole thing is sort of a single stimulus for me. At the very least, notice again the repetition of the thing being argued against, giving it different names and attributes for no good semantic reason, followed by another pithy restatement of the thesis.

    By ignoring bit depth, JPEG XL’s float-based encoding embraces a profound truth: pixels aren’t just numbers; they’re perceptions.

This kind of upbeat, pithy, quotable punchline really is something frontier LLMs love to generate, as is the particular form of the statement. You can also see the latter in forms like "The conflict is no longer political—it's existential."

    Why This Matters

I know I said I wouldn't comment on little tics and formatting and other such smoking guns, but if I never have to see this godforsaken sequence of characters again…

evertedsphere commented on Why JPEG XL ignoring bit depth is genius (and why AVIF can't pull it off) fractionalxperience.com/u... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

diffuse_l · 4 months ago

I think the article could be better and get the point across with half the length and without the second half of it being full of ai generated list of advantages, or using that space to give some more technical information

evertedsphere · 4 months ago

the article could be better if it weren't entirely "ai generated"