I used to run YouTube with “ad targeting” turned off.
The ads were 100% scams. Lots of AI slop. Deepfakes of celebrities pitching all sorts of scams. Lots of nsfw products and even occasionally illegal things like drugs or guns. Also lots of ads in languages I do not speak.
I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.
On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.
Ah yes. “Non-existent security” is only a pesky detail that will surely be ironed out.
It’s not a critical flaw in the entirety of the LLM ecosystem that now the computers themselves can be tricked into doing things by asking in just the right way. Anything in the context might be a prompt injection attack, and there isn’t really any reliable solution to that but let’s hook everything up to it, and also give it the tools to do anything and everything.
There is still a long way to go to securing these. Apple is, I think wisely, staying out of this arena until it’s solved, or at least less of a complete mess.
Yes, there are some flaws. The first airplanes also had some flaws, and crashed more often than they didn't. That doesn't change how incredible it is, while it's improving.
Maybe, just maybe, this thing that was, until recently, just research papers, is not actually a finished product right now? Incredibly hot take, I know.
I think the airplane analogy is apt because commercial air travel basically capped out at "good enough" in terms of performance (just below Mach 1) a long time ago and focused on cost. Everyone assumes AI is going to keep getting better, but what if we're nearing the performance ceiling of LLMs and the rest is just cost optimization?
I just scrolled through my Libby history to check. I checked out 25 books in 2025. Several of them I didn't finish, so the number is closer to 15 completed books, but that's only though Libby. I also finished an entire fiction series that wasn't available on Libby, which was an additional 7 books.
Series is really what makes the number so high IMO. I read a lot of fanasy/sci-fi which is often a lot of trilogies. Reading just one trilogy puts you above the median. I have several friends that read only 3-4 books last year, but several that also read as much or more than me. Discussing the books amongst friends helps, as we recommend books to each other. Book-tok and other book-centric social-media circles are huge.
And it may seem like a lot but that was spread across an entire year. I often read a few chapters before bed each night, but it often depends on how hooked I am on the book, I make more time for it when I'm more hooked on a book, or on a deadline to return the book to the library.
Audiobooks helps carry the number higher as well. Its a lot easier to "read" a book when you can do it while doing other things. Although I prefer to sit down and dedicate time for e-books, I do listen to some audiobooks as well, and many of my friends exclusively read via audiobooks.
One big part of this is that gcode isnt really a 3d model
its a set of instructions on how to move the printhead around.
You don't download the gcode directly, because that varies by printer. You download a model, and then a slicing program turns that into a set of printer-specific gcode. Any subtle settings changes would change the hash of this gcode.
And the printer doesn't really know what the model is. It would have to reverse the gcode instructions back into a model somehow. The printer isn't really the place to detect and prevent this sort of thing imo. Especially with how cheap some 3d printers are getting, they often don't really have much compute power in them. They just move things around as instructed by the g-code. If the g-code is malformed it can even break the printer in some instances, or at least really screw up your print.
There are even scripts that modify the gcode to do weird things the printer really isn't designed for, like print something and then have the printer move in such a way to crash into and push the printed object off the plate, and then start over and print another print. The printer will just follow these instructions blindly.
Given that quite simple G-code, say a pair of nested circles with code for tool changes/accessory activation, can make two wildly different parts depending on which machine it is run on:
- a washer if run on a small machine in metric w/ flood coolant
- a lamp base if run on a larger router in Imperial w/ a tool changer
and that deriving what will be made by a given G-code file in 3D is a problem which the industry hasn't solved in decades, the solution of which would be worthy of a Turing Award _and_ a Fields Medal, I don't see this happening.
A further question, just attempting it will require collecting a set of 3D models for making firearms --- who will persuade every firearms manufacturer to submit said parts, where/how will they be stored, and how will they be secured so that they are not used/available as a resource for making firearms?
A more reasonable bit of legislation would be that persons legally barred from owning firearms are barred from owning 3D printers and CNC equipment unless there is a mechanism to submit parts to their parole officer for approval before manufacturing, since that's the only class of folks which the 2nd Amendment doesn't apply to, and a reasonable argument is:
1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == The Right to 3D Print and Bear Arms
Interestingly, theres an account in that thread claiming to be from Gyrovague, but its not the same one thats in this thread, which has been confirmed to be legit as it is mentioned by name in this latest Gyrovague article.
I wonder, is the newer gyrovague-com account because they lost the login for the old one? or was the old one a different person? Hopefully they can clarify, because if there's an account pretending to be them that makes this story even more confusingly weird.
You can just email hn@ycombinator.com to get help. They can reset your password if there's someway for them to verify that you were the owner of the account.
I didnt flag the article, but anecdotally, I was initially unable to load the article at all. It mentions how it ended up in an adblock list. The article makes it sound like this is a good thing, as it stops the DDOS, but it isn't preventing people from loading the page directly. That may be true for people using an adblocking extension, but my adblocking DNS seems to be blocking it based on that same list. I had to manually tweak my dns-based adblocker to allow the domain in order to read the article.
It does work reliably enough though. A huge portion of games on Linux do so via pretending to be windows via wine/proton. It’s what allows the Steam deck to exist as a product at all.
And Linux on those handheld devices out-performs windows to such a degree that Microsoft has noticed and is trying to make windows perform better on those devices, basically making a gaming mode / handheld mode for their Xbox Ally.
It's not nearly enough to matter to Microsoft. An absolute tiny percentage of desktop computers/laptops run Linux.
This is actually a good thing if you're hoping WINE avoids a legal fight with Microsoft. It doesn't matter who's right, Microsoft has deep enough pockets to drag anyone through expensive litigation.
I'm an active Linux user and I play tons of games via Proton. But this isn't something I'd suggest to normal people. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit keeping Linux working.
They also served as a foundation for much of my career growth. But I understand it's not for everyone.
I don't think it matters very much. It's not a matter of "if" but of "when": one is consistently getting worse, and the other is measurably getting better and more compatible with the former. Unless of a drastic paradigm change, Linux will see more and more users. Trump dismantling of the global system of trade might also add another nail to this coffin (the recent talk by Cory Doctorow at CCC gives a good picture of how and why).
I'm always open to being wrong. At a minimum European governments should switch to a Linux distro based in Europe like Open Suse.
I don't believe this is going to be enough of a dramatic shift where Microsoft would see it worth while to try and shutdown WINE.
This is a good thing though, if Microsoft really wanted to they could sue WINE. Even if WINE isn't doing anything wrong, Microsoft could easily make things really difficult.
We saw this with Nintendo and the Switch emulators.
Maybe I came across as a bit harsh, I run multiple Linux computers, I just can't see this being a realistic concern for Microsoft
> I just can't see this being a realistic concern for Microsoft
I think Microsoft strategy for Windows shifted a long time ago, from being their most precious engineering product, to a necessary component for their sales teams to bundle B2B services. The focus went from "pleasing users and enabling things" to "seeking rent in the gregarious corporate world by building a captive monopoly". I suppose that makes perfect shareholder-sense, but that leaves the door open to a competition that actually wants to make operating systems, in the traditional way.
Now that this model is being threatened, with a real geopolitical incentive to leave captivity and to reconsider past practices (like OEM installs), I think it'd be silly for Microsoft not to immediately course-correct. And that means doing something much more significant than suing Wine: without trade agreements, the US has no jurisdiction and no IP that's worth a dime outside of its borders. That means doing something that, for once, would put them so much ahead of the competition that choosing Microsoft would be a no-brainer. I don't believe Microsoft has it in itself to execute such a thing.
Microsoft has subsidiaries all over the world. They'd still have standing to sue, even if say Germany and France ignored American IP laws( which they definitely won't).
Plus it's not out of the question for them to personally sue WINE contributors. It's not about winning, a simple DMCA takedown notice to any entity hosting WINE code would probably be enough to stop the project.
I want a future of competition between different OSes. I use Linux everyday, but I don't think a market share of 3.86% is sweating anyone at Microsoft.
I could see Lenovo, which is ultimately a Chinese company, making more aggressive steps to offer Linux. But outside of certain ThinkPads you can't even buy a laptop with Linux pre installed.
In my dream world you'd have to buy Windows separately with any hardware. I guess Best Buy could still offer Windows installation as a service though.
DMCA takedown has no legal basis outside the US. And it's funny you bring that up: the only reason why this has any relevance at all is because of the established norm for countries to sacrifice some of their sovereignty in exchange for being allowed to trade with the US. Now, with the US breaking trade norms and agreements, those countries can (and eventually will) stop complying, because they have nothing to gain (and everything to lose) promoting hostile foreign competition.
I agree the DMCA has too much power, but I think your getting ahead of what's realistic.
Maybe in 20 years some EU court will declare US IP to be up for grabs, but that's not now. Microsoft is deeply embedded so many different businesses and government IT departments.
The removal of several features from windows 10 is infuriating.
Why can’t the taskbar be moved to the side? Why can’t the taskbar be made smaller? Why can I pick the smaller icons, but the taskbar remains the same size, with massive margins and blank space?
At least they finally added back the “don’t combine taskbar icons” but it’s still lacking basic functionality that was previously there.
The KDE plasma UI feels like all the best parts of windows 10 to me. The default taskbar+clock+system tray+start menu UI feels exactly like windows 10 to me. But you can also customize it very easily. The settings menu feels a bit more like MacOS than windows’ control panel though.
Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.
Yup, Plasma has also gotten really good. It started to get really good with 5 and has polished like crazy with 6. It's defaults are now pretty close to perfect out of the box for me as a long time windows user.
I'd say it's close to the windows 7 or 10 experience. But without any of the clutter that has crept in.
The recommendation for the average inexperienced user trying out Linux for the first time should be Kubuntu. Full stop. Saying this as an Arch and Gentoo user.
I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.
On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.
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