gausswho (u/gausswho)

gausswho commented on Rapid loss of Antarctic ice may be climate tipping point reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/yusufaytas

qcnguy · 16 hours ago

Meanwhile

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/20/slowdown...

Academics don't understand the climate and never did.

gausswho · 13 hours ago

If you read more than the headline you'd realize that this article does not support your boffins-know-nothing stance.

gausswho commented on We’re Not So Special: A new book challenges human exceptionalism democracyjournal.org/maga... · Posted by u/nobet

Treegarden · 5 days ago

I agree with you on several levels, what we call “exceptional” is entirely dependent on the metric we choose. Every species excels in its niche, and human exceptionalism is just our own preferred framing. It's fair to say it often functions like supremacism: a belief in our moral or functional superiority over other life forms.

That said, in a world of scarce resources and competition, tribalism and “team-thinking” are not bugs, but features, evolutionary tools for survival. From that lens, human supremacism isn’t a moral claim, but a pragmatic stance: of course we prioritize our own species. We are team human.

As for whether we're destroying the planet, it's a complex picture. I'd recommend False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, it pushes back against overly apocalyptic assumptions and argues that while climate change is real and serious, we're not necessarily headed for collapse. Doesn't excuse inaction, but does complicate the narrative.

gausswho · 5 days ago

Lomborg knows how to chase a limelight and put on a serious aspect, but his reasoning is plenty flawed. https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/a-closer-examin...

Ultimately, we are Team Earth. The scarce-mongering behind tribalist features does not bring pragmatism but rather sabotage.

gausswho commented on UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption theverge.com/news/761240/... · Posted by u/iamdamian

gausswho · 5 days ago

Smoke and mirrors. The UK government got what they want with Apple disabling ADP. Until that's turned on, all iCloud backups are available to them.

That Apple can even claim it encrypts your data is such a bald-faced lie when Advanced Data Protection defaults to off.

gausswho commented on The forgotten meaning of "jerk" languagehat.com/the-forgo... · Posted by u/aspenmayer

tunesmith · 5 days ago

Too bad it's misogynistic. I'm not sure you already knew that. If I were rude enough to call you a name, I wonder what term I could use that would work either way!

gausswho · 5 days ago

You could try scumbag, but you might not want to know what it originally meant.

gausswho commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar

nativeit · 6 days ago

I setup a self-hosted FreshRSS + extensions for this very purpose. With a little effort, I can even pull in social media feeds and YouTube subscriptions. Now I have a very plain (but highly functional) UI with a chronological list of the sources I wish to follow. No recommendations, no algorithms, no infinite anything. For discovery, I can now go elsewhere and look for new content with intention, even if facilitated by algorithms. But I've successfully divorced that from the act of consumption.

I can tell you, it feels better. I have experienced what I consider to be a material improvement in consumption habits, and overall mental health.

gausswho · 5 days ago

This does sound divine. Please give us some more details.

gausswho commented on Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/robtherobber

gausswho · 5 days ago

The remarkable state of affairs here is that this has nothing to do with blocking ads. These sites can serve ads the same way they serve all their imagery. They don't do that because it's more profitable to turn your device into a tracking and serving mechanism. By the same argument they could claim the right to mine crypto across all their visitors' devices.

gausswho commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar

calmbonsai · 6 days ago

Unfortunately, we're well past that era. Certain tech is so "good", we need to actively fight it and, sadly, the only solution is more tech.

Not related, see also media and nutrition.

gausswho · 6 days ago

I don't agree. More tech will always have snickets we can bypass our best self-imposed gaols.

The mitigations that work well for me are purely encouraging endogenous dopamine production. Hiking (or anything outdoors). Sleep improvement through regular rituals (no phone in bed). And, indeed, nutrition. Basically, the old adage of eat well, sleep well, get some exercise. That's how you get your groove back.

gausswho commented on AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers axios.com/2025/08/18/ai-j... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

PhantomHour · 6 days ago

Consider the kinds of jobs that are popular with outsourcing right now.

Jobs like customer/tech support aren't uniquely suited to outsourcing. (Quite the opposite; People rightfully complain about outsourced support being awful. Training outsourced workers on the fine details of your products/services & your own organisation, nevermind empowering them to do things is much harder)

They're jobs that companies can neglect. Terrible customer support will hurt your business, but it's not business-critical in the way that outsourced development breaking your ability to put out new features and fixes is.

AI is a perfect substitute for terrible outsourced support. LLMs aren't capable of handling genuinely complex problems that need to be handled with precision, nor can they be empowered to make configuration changes. (Consider: Prompt-injection leading to SIM hijacking and other such messes.)

But the LLM can tell meemaw to reset her dang router. If that's all you consider support to be (which is almost certainly the case if you outsource it), then you stand nothing to lose from using AI.

gausswho · 6 days ago

Also consider the mental health crisis among outsourced content moderation staff that have to appraise all kinds of depravity on a daily basis. This got some heavy reporting a year or two ago, in particular from Facebook. These folks for all their suffering are probably being culled right now.

You could anticipate a shift to using AI tools to achieve whatever content moderation goals these large networks have, with humans only handling the uncertain cases.

Still brain damage, but less. A good thing?

gausswho commented on SuperSight: A graphical enhancement mod for Brøderbund's "Stunts" marnetto.net/2025/02/20/b... · Posted by u/alberto-m

thristian · 8 days ago

Brøderbund was the publisher of "Stunts", but not the developer. The developer was Distinctive Software Inc. who had previously developed the hit games Test Drive and Test Drive II: The Duel for Accolade. For whatever reason, Accolade developed Test Drive III in-house, and DSI developed Stunts on their own.

After Stunts, DSI got bought by Electronic Arts. They were briefly "Pioneer Productions" (or at least, people from DSI were part of that group within EA) and made the original Need For Speed, but eventually became just a part of EA Canada.

gausswho · 6 days ago

What a legacy. Launched only golden geese, of which two were run over by the parent company.

gausswho commented on Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator technoblogy.com/show?2AON... · Posted by u/chrisjj

Xmd5a · 7 days ago

The distinctive element here is the hardware. Briar allows you to sync via local wifi and bluetooth (i.e. the range is tiny) but since it's a mesh network your message will be relayed eventually.

This device though doesn't seem to support mesh connectivity because it doesn't have this short range limitation in the first place. It uses a LoRa chip with a range of a few kilometers. The bandwidth is tiny though, for reasons that are both technological and legal. In particular your are asked to respect a duty cycle of 1% (or even 0.1%, depending on the exact frequency you're using). That's 36seconds every hour. On top of that add some cities offer LoRaWAN gateways (between LoRa devices and the internet) and the limits are even more drastic like 10 messages per day, 51 bits being the maximum payload length.

LoRa was designed for async metering of IoT devices basically. This application is pushing it to its limits I guess.

I'm not an expert, I have a couple LoRa chips but never used them, however here are some back of the napkin calculations:

Assuming a spread factor of 12 (very long rage, very low bandwith) and a 1% duty cycle, you can send about 40 messages per hour if they are short like "yo what's up". 50 chars -> 20 messages/hour. 100 chars -> 10 messages/hour.

gausswho · 6 days ago

Does the duty cycle mean it's only sending a receiving for those 36 seconds of every hour? The hermit in me is enthused by communicating with this restriction.