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Facebook asked for my face. Just to create an account. So I sent this.

Facebook asked for my face. Just to create an account. So I sent this. Facebook Asked for My Face Just to Create an Account. So I Sent This. It feels a bit surreal, right? You want to create a simple account, and suddenly Facebook is asking you for a video or photo of your face. I mean, who thought face scans would become part of the login ritual? I remember trying to set up an Instagram account a few years back, and within an hour, they blocked me and demanded video confirmation. No Instagram for me—at least not then. We’re living in an era where your biometric identity is becoming the key to digital doors. From a security standpoint, it’s tempting: it’s harder to fake a face than swipe a password. But on the flip side, there's the question of privacy and where all these face data go. Facebook, with its track record, doesn’t exactly inspire bursting confidence. What’s striking is how different communities approach this. On Hacker News, there’s a technical focus on authentic...

Google's AI is doxxing my real phone number

Google's AI is doxxing my real phone number Google’s AI Is Doxxing My Real Phone Number: What You Need to Know Imagine being bombarded with phone calls from strangers who somehow got your personal number from Google’s AI—sounds like a nightmare, right? That’s exactly what one user reported after Google's generative AI models, like Gemini, started hallucinating their private phone number as a placeholder in generated content. Instead of a fake number or generic placeholder, the AI spits out their real digits, leading to constant harassment by people expecting legal advice, design help, or locksmith services. This is more than just an annoying glitch; it’s a glaring privacy failure. The affected user tried to get Google’s attention through official channels, even filing a Legal Removal/Privacy Request over a month ago, but received silence. It’s frustratingly common to hit dead ends with automated support systems when dealing with big tech. In response, community advice lean...

Is this a new official emoji? It shows up as an X in a box on TikTok🫪🫪

Is this a new official emoji? It shows up as an X in a box on TikTok🫪🫪 Is This a New Official Emoji? Understanding the X in a Box on TikTok If you’ve been scrolling TikTok and noticed an unexpected "X" inside a box popping up where an emoji should be, you’re not alone—and no, it’s not some freshly minted official emoji. This little graphic usually means your device or the app can’t render the emoji properly. TikTok, like many platforms, regularly updates to support new emoji sets, but not every phone or OS keeps pace. So when you see that mysterious box with an X, it’s basically a placeholder indicating a missing or unsupported emoji character. Interestingly, on Reddit, users posted about new emojis such as 🫪 (biting lip) and others recently added, sparking confusion because some see the actual symbols, but others just get the box-X symbol. This discrepancy often boils down to whether your smartphone or browser has the latest Unicode support. It’s similar to when I got...

How do JavaScript closures work?

How do JavaScript closures work? Introduction to JavaScript Closures JavaScript closures can feel like a magic trick at first—functions mysteriously holding onto variables from places they shouldn’t logically “see” anymore. But once you unwrap how they actually work, it’s a neat, powerful concept rather than black magic. At their core, a closure is simply a function bundled together with its surrounding state (the lexical environment). Every time you declare a function in JavaScript, it keeps a hidden reference to the scope where it was created. This means the function can access variables from its outer scope, even if that outer function has already finished executing. Take this simple example: function greet(name) { const greeting = "Hello"; return function() { console.log(`${greeting}, ${name}!`); }; } const greeter = greet("Alice"); greeter(); // "Hello, Alice!" Here, the inner function keeps a “memory” of greeting and name . Eve...

Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game Introduction: The Importance of Pause Functionality in Modern Games Pausing a game might seem like a straightforward feature—you press a button, and everything halts. But any seasoned game developer will tell you it’s anything but simple. The true challenge lies in what "pause" actually *means* for a given game, and that varies wildly. Back in the early days, like with NES games, pausing sometimes just meant freezing the tilemap and skipping sprite updates, which often caused odd visual glitches, like disappearing characters. Sometimes this was intentional, like in Tetris, where you want a clean break. But often, it was just a side effect of how the game loop was structured. Modern engines like Godot try to give developers more nuanced control over what happens during a pause, using tools like process modes to decide which elements keep running and which stop. Still, there's no one-size-fits-all solut...

Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7 Comprehensive Comparison of Anonymous Request-Tokens in Opus 4.6 vs Opus 4.7 Diving into the nuances between Opus 4.6 and 4.7, it’s clear that understanding their anonymous request-token dynamics goes beyond just raw capabilities. One key takeaway from the community is the importance of considering total cost rather than token count alone. While 4.7 churns out fewer output tokens, which immediately suggests cost savings, the catch is in how input tokens and reasoning play into overall expenses. For example, reasoning costs in 4.7 are almost halved compared to 4.6, which benefits reasoning-heavy tasks. However, if your workload leans toward simple prompts requiring less inference, 4.7 can actually end up costing more—at least according to some user observations. What struck me most is the mixed user sentiment around value. One dev noted hitting their 5-hour token limit in just 2 hours with Opus 4.7. They tried batching,...