jay-barronville (u/jay-barronville)

jay-barronville commented on Browser Fingerprint Detector fingerprint.goldenowl.ai/... · Posted by u/eustoria

elenchev · 6 months ago

yes but then you become a "suspicious user" and you have to fill 100 CPATCHAs every day

at this point browser fingerprinting is a feature, not a bug

To be frank, in my book, relative to inadvertently being fingerprinted and tracked wherever I go, I consider being consistently faced with “let’s confirm you’re not a robot” popups and pages to be a minor inconvenience.

jay-barronville commented on Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say washingtonpost.com/invest... · Posted by u/mdhb

Jimmc414 · 6 months ago

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

[0] https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

> Zuck: Just ask.

> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks.

> Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

The sad thing is, he was totally right. The Zuck gets none of my data.

jay-barronville commented on Browser Fingerprint Detector fingerprint.goldenowl.ai/... · Posted by u/eustoria

AbraKdabra · 6 months ago

So, what's the solution to all of this? Are there any settings I need to modify to Chrome to not allow certain info to be queried?

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

Use a different browser altogether. Chrome is never ideal for anyone who cares even a little bit about privacy. Use [Brave][0].

[0]: https://brave.com

jay-barronville commented on 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal tribuneindia.com/news/wor... · Posted by u/whatsupdog

bilbo0s · 6 months ago

I don’t know man?

You need moderation both ways.

Yes to the First.

But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.

Bonus points if the cops arrest him before he goes to school tomorrow.

Couching threats of violence in political language shouldn’t change anything in that regard.

(Well, it does these days. But it shouldn’t. That’s how you get kids gunned down at prayer.)

Anyway, bottom line is, adherence to the First doesn’t mean we abandon law enforcement, or military sense.

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

> But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.

I think that everyone (yes, literally everyone) would agree that direct incitements and threats of violence such as this would be fine to censor and deal with appropriately. As a free speech advocate, I know a lot of folks with free speech absolutist views yet I don’t know a single person who’d be against any of that.

The reality though is that, in practice, these extreme examples tend to be used to justify censorship only to end up making the rules vague and subjective enough that, sooner or later, folks start being censored for wrongthink.

Also, “moderation” is just a soft term for censorship.

jay-barronville commented on 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal tribuneindia.com/news/wor... · Posted by u/whatsupdog

SamoyedFurFluff · 6 months ago

I actually don’t know if I agree with the last part. A chunk of the Rwandan genocide was a radio station instigating and advocating for the mass slaughter of a people. Atrocities in Myanmar also were originally advocated for in Facebook. On more personal levels, domestic abuse is also psychological torture and the wearing down of a person with words and it should be in someone’s right to file a restraining order to stop being contacted by their abuser even if the abuser doesn’t perform physical violence.

That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

> That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.

While absolute free speech remains unattainable in practice due to inevitable societal boundaries, it should serve as an aspirational ideal toward which we continually strive, minimizing deviations rather than expanding them. Speech restrictions often and quickly devolve into subjectivity, fostering environments where only dominant ideologies prevail.

So, of course, by all means, restrict speech that harms children, incites violence, etc., but be very careful to not open that door too widely.

jay-barronville commented on 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal tribuneindia.com/news/wor... · Posted by u/whatsupdog

perihelions · 6 months ago

Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other.

This is all so disheartening.

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

Hard agree. I’m always trying to get my fellow young Americans to understand this and it seems to go right over their heads a lot of times. My parents lived through multiple oppressive dictatorships before emigrating to America. Once I understood everything that they and their families experienced (e.g., family members being kidnapped, disappeared, and eventually murdered simply due their political views), I gained a much deeper appreciation for our Constitution (in particular, our Bill of Rights).

Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).

No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.

jay-barronville commented on 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal tribuneindia.com/news/wor... · Posted by u/whatsupdog

ktallett · 6 months ago

These governments that block social media or control/monitor the internet to avoid critics of government or dissent, whether that be Nepal, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, Germany, China, Egypt, US, Russia, Israel, are always shocked when there is an uprising. Unsurprisingly when a government tries to control people this closely many will see the flaws in it and make a stand and rightly so whether that be digitally or in person. It's understandable why so many tech knowledgeable dissidents create or use apps that bypass ridiculous laws.

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

> These governments that block social media or control/monitor the internet to avoid critics of government or dissent, whether that be Nepal, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, Germany, China, Egypt, US, Russia, Israel, are always shocked when there is an uprising.

I beg to differ. I don’t think that any of these governments are shocked that the people eventually fight back. I think that they simply make the mistake of underestimating the power of the people (especially when united) and severely overestimating their ability to suppress the people and their dissent. That’s how tyranny works.

That said, freedom of speech is always worth fighting for! Once you lose your right to speak freely, it’s only a matter of time before you start to lose everything else.

jay-barronville commented on Show HN: C++ library for reading MacBook lid angle sensor data github.com/ufoym/mac-angl... · Posted by u/ufoym

balamatom · 6 months ago

Bold of you to assume the majority of developers can read code.

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

> Bold of you to assume the majority of developers can read code.

Haha. Bold indeed.

jay-barronville commented on Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver dmitrybrant.com/2025/09/0... · Posted by u/dmitrybrant

jxf · 6 months ago

Everything we do is a stochastic process. If you throw a dart 100 times at a target, it's not going to land at the same spot every time. There is a great deal of uncertainty and non-deterministic behavior in our everyday actions.

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

As much as it’s true that there’s stochasticity involved in just about everything that we do, I’m not sure that that’s equivalent to everything we do being a stochastic process. With your dart example, a very significant amount of the stochasticity involved in the determination of where the dart lands is external to the human thrower. An expert human thrower could easily make it appear deterministic.

jay-barronville commented on Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver dmitrybrant.com/2025/09/0... · Posted by u/dmitrybrant

elzbardico · 6 months ago

No. This is a fundamentally erroneous analogy. We don't generate code by a stochastic process.

jay-barronville · 6 months ago

I think that both of you are right to some extent.

It’s undeniable that humans exhibit stochastic traits, but we’re obviously not stochastic processes in the same sense as LLMs and the like. We have agency, error-correction, and learning mechanisms that make us far more reliable.

In practice, humans (especially experts) have an apparent determinism despite all of the randomness involved (both internally and externally) in many of our actions.