Cursed Knowledge • Hacker News Board

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#161

Post by laggyluke » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 6:06 AM UTC

motorest wrote: post #117

pushedx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason that an LLM couldn't (or isn't) being trained on commit messages. No difference between a git index and any other binary data (like video).

> There's no reason that an LLM couldn't (or isn't) being trained on commit messages. You are arguing that it could. Hypotheticals. But getting back to reality, today no coding assistant supports building system prompts from commit history. This means it doesn't. This is a statement of fact, not an hypothetical. If you post context in commit messages, it is not used. If you dump a markdown file in the repo, it is use…

This is hair-splitting, because it's technically not a part of _system prompt_, but Claude Code can and does run `git log` even without being explicitly instructed to do so, today.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#162

Post by account42 » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:56 AM UTC

joshdavham wrote: post #36

This is awesome! Does anyone else wanna share some of the cursed knowledge they've picked up? For me, MacOS file names are cursed: 1. Filenames in MacOS are case-INsensitive, meaning file.txt and FILE.txt are equivalent 2. Filenames in MacOS, when saved in NFC, may be converted to NFD

> 1. Filenames in MacOS are case-INsensitive, meaning file.txt and FILE.txt are equivalent

It's much more cursed than that: filenames may or may not be case-sensitive depending on the filesystem.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#163

Post by account42 » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 9:02 AM UTC

tonyhart7 wrote: post #59

ok but this one is not cursed tho ( https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/11268 ) its valid privacy and security on how mobile OS handle permission

It is cursed because now the photo management app needs to ask for the permission to constantly track you instead of only getting location of a limited set of past points where you specifically chose to take a photo. Besides giving malicious photo app developers an excuse for these permissions, it also contributes to permission fatigue by training to give random applications wide permissions.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#164

Post by account42 » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 9:06 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #12

"Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them." Uh... good?

It is cursed because now the photo management app needs to ask for the permission to constantly track you instead of only getting location of a limited set of past points where you specifically chose to take a photo. Besides giving malicious photo app developers an excuse for these permissions, it also contributes to permission fatigue by training to give random applications wide permissions.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#165

Post by rschristian » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:33 PM UTC

karel-3d wrote: post #72

sunaookami wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's some deep rabbit hole. This guy gets paid per XY npm downloads and games the system through this. Awful.

There is apparently a tool, that you can upload your package.json and it will show you how much dependencies are controlled by ljharb https://voldephobia.rschristian.dev/

Ha, was wondering why I started getting a few more stars all of a sudden.

For extra context: I created the tool ~9 months prior to the meltdown as one could vaguely mention an individual trolling over NPM deps and absolutely everyone in the ecosystem with a bit of experience would know who was being referred to, aka, "You Know Who". And, if you dared mention him by name, he'd eventually show up reciting his download counts in endless "appeal to authority"-style arguments, trying to brow-beat people into accepting that he knows more or whatever, ergo, "He Who Must Not Be Named" (at least, if you didn't want him being annoying in your mentions).

There's a number of "-phobia" apps in the ecosystem and given the negative impact he has on dependency trees, it felt fitting to offer a similar, somewhat satirical, app to detect how much of your dependency tree he controlled.