- I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.
- The #1 thing I want from Firefox is for it to keep existing in the long term, as a hedge against Google's monopoly. Burning capital on hardware-intensive AI features to get FF from 1% market share to 2% market share would endanger that, no matter how useful the features might be.
- People like getting more money, but they don't die without it. You can get a job that pays just enough to pay your bills and work at it until you die. Companies can't do that under capitalism. They take on debt and require growth to pay back their investors, or they don't take on debt and get undercut by a competitor who does.
- The u-turn came long before that acronym existed, as I remember it. The Dems had been trying to build consensus for some kind of single payer plan for almost twenty years by that point, and practically the first thing Obama said after being elected was that as a show of good faith he would take single payer was off the table.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
- The issue isn't people going too fast, it's people turning left. 26 basically connects Portland on one end and Mt Hood recreation stuff on the other, and it used to be that there wasn't that much in between. Over the last few decades, a lot of development has gone up, meaning a lot more businesses and neighborhoods along both sides of 26, plus the highway has gotten a lot busier.
- The realistic path off looks like this, I think:
* I use Bluesky to chat as a Twitter replacement, which gets me into the Fediverse and gets me a PDS
* I use my PDS to store my payment details, giving me a (at first client-side) way to submit stored payment details that feels similar to storing it in the browser, but stores it in my "server"
* From there, it's a natural step to giving the retailer a token that can be used to pull payment details from my PDS; early adopter retailers are incentivized to do this because it frees them from the burden of storing and updating PII/PCI
* After some subset of users and retailers do this, users see the benefit of controlling their data as a viable alternative to some of the worst user-hostile patterns, e.g. the New York Times' "we don't have a cancel subscription page, you have to call an 800 number" nonsense.
* To the extent that storing PCI/PII in a PDS is as easy as storing it in the browser but with perceived additional benefits, user demand drives wider adoption
* Once it's technically feasible for sites to maintain their business model without storing any PII/PCI, it is much more realistic to write laws that proscribe it effectively for those users who choose that
- Sorry to have missed this, been traveling (naturally). You can see it yourself if you like, ineptech.com/flash. It is absolutely the bare minimum, but it worked fine for me.
- Last week I wanted to quiz myself on German vocab words, and after searching in vain for a simple "flashcard" site without subscriptions or bullshit I ended up just making one myself. Very barebones, a single index.htm file with a little css and js in the header. Threw it on to a silly novelty domain I own ( ineptech.com/flash ) and bang, a useful (to me) webapp from zero to done in maybe two hours. And I'm a terrible programmer! It does feel sort of powerful in the way this site describes.
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.
- This has nothing to do with search engines, it substitutes the argument from the search bar into the destination url. "wp XYZ" -> "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ"
- Another FF feature I love that I believe Chrome lacks: text replacement in bookmarks. Add a bookmark with url "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s" and keyword "wp" and typing "wp Potato" in the url bar will take you to the wikipedia entry on Potato.
I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use it over chrome for uBO alone.
- Very interesting, I hope you do. Anything new and weird is always fun to learn about the design, and I'm curious just how much of the text is LLM how much is hand-written. (Fair warning people will assume the worst if you are not explicit about that) The continuity is very good but I had assumed there must be some LLM involvement just due to the time it takes to load each page. Actually, now that I think of it, even if all/most of the text were from an LLM, I'm surprised it wouldn't be generated beforehand and loaded as static text. So what is being done when the spinner spins?
I also really enjoyed the Popov "biography", I'm a sucker for that kind of is-it-true-or-is-it-performance-art stuff online. Reminds me of the Velocity Gnome saga[0].
I'm not sure why your comments were being flagged but hopefully the HN algorithm knows you're not spam at this point.
0: Very sad to see this site is dead - https://web.archive.org/web/20250317181550/https://thefuture...
- Does the game "spoil" the movie? Like, is the movie's entire plot included or is it more of a prologue? And were you involved with the movie?
It's a neat idea with beautiful execution and I hope it gets more attention in other places than it got here. I'm not even sure what genre it is. It's not a game in the sense of requiring the player to solve anything, more of a novel in which the reader chooses a perspective and shapes the narrative but (AFAICT) cannot really direct the plot. Was the author of the game's text the same writer as the movie's plot and dialogue?
edit to add, also, was this built with an existing interactive fiction engine or was the site custom coded?
- As interactive fiction this is very well executed. I'm some part of the way through the story from one character's perspective so I don't know how far it goes, but is this a (for lack of a better word) novelization of the entire plot of the movie? And did you make it?
- Unless I'm missing something, what I'm describing satisfies both of these (unless one or both parties are malicious).
- I'm not suggesting that people actually authenticate to Pornhub using Login.gov's oauth, they would continue to auth (or not) as they do now. Login.gov can issue a token saying, in essence, "A user authenticated to me, and that user over 21, but I'm not going to identify them, I'll just give you a random GUID so this token will be unique".
edit to add more details, since I'm thinking it through: the token would need to include the issue date and be signed obviously, and would be ephemeral. Properly implemented, it could be done entirely in the browser (Firefox would have a "age verification provider" pull-down) in way that's transparent to the user and both private and secure. And since you have to be 18 to get a credit card, essentially any service you pay for with a credit card in your own name ought to be able to attest your age, even if it hasn't done KYC or scanned a government ID.
- Would it not be reasonable and safe and private to implement age verification through login.gov? An Oauth implementation that knows your identity and age can produce a verifiable token that attests your age but not identity. The only way your identity would leak would be if both the porn site and the oauth retain the tokens (which they would both claim not to do else no one would use this), and the attacker gets access to both.
I know it's unlikely to happen because of America's (misguided IMO) extreme distaste for digital government ID, but it seems like the current solution (people uploading pictures of their driver's license to porn websites) is worse in every possible way.
- What's the seductive-but-wrong part of EA? As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the opposition to it boils down to "Maybe you shouldn't donate money to pet shelters when people are dying of preventable diseases" vs "But donating money to pet shelters feels better!"
- The article presumably omits mention of Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" because it also does a raft of other controversial[0] and broadly unpopular[1] things that are much more impactful than, and completely unrelated to, the subject of the essay.
0: kick 7M people off Medicaid, hire 10K new ICE officers, tax university endowments, subsidize fossil fuels, etc https://apnews.com/article/big-beautiful-bill-trump-tax-cuts...
1: "Voters 53 - 27 percent oppose the legislation, with 20 percent not offering an opinion" https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3924
> The federal government responded to the 2008 crisis by limiting the ability of traditional banks to take on big, risky loans. Since then, however, private-equity firms, which aren’t subject to the same regulatory scrutiny as banks, have gotten more heavily into the lending business. As of early this year, these firms had lent about $450 billion in so-called private credit to the tech sector, including financing several of the deals discussed above. And, according to one estimate, they will lend it another $800 billion over the next two years. “If the AI bubble goes bust, they are the ones that will be left holding the bag,” Arun told me.
> A private-credit bust is almost certainly preferable to a banking bust. Unlike banks, private-equity firms don’t have ordinary depositors. In theory, if their loans fail, the groups that will be hurt the most are institutional investors, such as pension funds, university endowments, and hedge funds, limiting the damage to the broader economy. The problem is that nobody knows for certain that this is the case. Private credit is functionally a black box. Unlike banks, these entities don’t have to disclose who they are getting their money from, how much they’re lending, how much capital they’re holding, and how their loans are performing. This makes it impossible for regulators to know what risks exist in the system or how tied they are to the real economy.
> Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.
A lot of people lost money when YHOO tanked in 2000, but the money they lost generally hadn't been lent to them by a bank, which is why 2000 was a tech crash and not a finance crash. I generally think of private equity as a rich guy gambling with a wealthy guy's money, but to the extent that the last ten years of growth have made private equity seem safe enough for banks and pensions to invest in, a correction caused by AI companies failing seems a lot scarier.