AJ007

It is only a matter of time before ID verification means the camera is always on watching the face of the person looking at the screen.

There is a good parallel here with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace added an ad network & was hammered by spammers around the same time Facebook was opening up user registration to everyone. Facebook had no ads. Myspace was dead.

This time Linux has very good game support to the point where some games have a higher FPS on Linux. It will be so expensive for Microsoft to attempt to turn this ship around, and it will likely still fail.

This is happening at the same time AI agents have gotten really good, so users will just use local AI agents to configure and troubleshoot the rough stuff about Linux. And then they will customize it so much they will never be able to go back to Windows.

Ubuntu is just fine for 99% of non tech users. Windows has so many anti-patterns, tricks, and OneDrive rugpulls now that Ubuntu is actually much safer and simpler for non-techies to use (I can also make the case it beats iOS in that department too.)

The YT transcripts are linked to on the YT page itself. If they remove that, it is trivial to use a local STT model to transcribe the video. If they make it impossible to download a video, you could just have a microphone record all of the sound, and so on. Once you have the transcription of anything, summarizing is trivial. I have a local script that does this and I use it all of the time. Also produce diagrams for YT summaries. Hours saved, per day.

One thing that's consistent with AI negative/doesn't work/is slop posts: they don't tell you want models they are using.

There was also a brief moment where digital art wasn't cheating as long as you didn't use layers and the clipboard.

This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.

"Your band was formed after 2023, we will ignore you even if you aren't AI"

By the end of 2026 the AI/no-AI thing is debate is going to be dead because there will be no way to know the difference. This is almost true right now, it just is going to take the general public a while to catch up.

One distinction which could be made: I would like to see bands that are humans because I want to physically attend and enjoy concerts. If the "artist" has never played a concert I don't want to listen to them. Which expands a whole new grey area..

Mastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive.

There is probably nothing that is safe for a toddler to have displayed on a screen 6 inches from their face for an hour+ a day, either for their physical or mental development. Adults suffer as well, but at least by their own agency.

Also to point out, if a 10 year old walks in to the street and is hit by a car, their parent gets charged now (in some US jurisdictions.) The idea that the adult is not responsible for the child does not correspond with US law. Maybe it's different in Europe.

A secondary issue is tech companies on-boarding children to having public social media profiles (and their parents posting the child's entire lives on their own) -- which is completely asinine and appalling. That bridge was breached years ago and somehow no one complained loud enough. Certainly a mistake.

Just had to look this one up. PG&E's first bankruptcy was April 6, 2001. Based on the stock price decline prior to that, it looks like their shareholders thought everything was ok in November of 2000 and the stock was $27 (it bottomed out at $8.97 in April of 2001.) As of today, the stock is worth $15.97.

If we go back 30 years to 1995 -- and you invested $10,000 in PG&E and $10,000 in the S&P500, and reinvested the dividends -- today the PG&E investment would be worth $11,708. The S&P investment would be worth $201,420.

To put it in simpler terms, the PG&E investors look like gullible fools.

PG&E emerged from their most recent bankruptcy with more debt than they entered with! This was largely because of the wildfire liabilities - $30 billion. In more direct terms, the lucky Californians are paying the unlucky Californians, and it was financed by bonds which used PG&E's existing assets as collateral (which for some reason weren't already collateralized.)

The best case for Californians overall would have been PG&E's debt and equity to go as close to 0 as possible, and all that extra debt have been used to actually upgrade the aging electricity infrastructure. Instead you are paying interest on past fire damage claims.

In 2018 PG&E had about $18b of long term debt, they now have just under $59b. Their outstanding shares also quadrupled. The bankruptcy didn't wipe out the equity, but investors got f'd hard if they thought they were acting conservatively. Would you accept a 1.25%ish dividend with the prospects of the stock going to 0 higher than it doubling in the next 10 years?

For all of the whiners about how utility investors shouldn't make any money, and possibly earn below their cost of capital, -- I spent some time looking at the utility industry over the last few years (including PG&E.) These are basically money pits which more money goes in than comes out over decades.

The other layer here is if the billions of dollars being borrowed are to build new infrastructure results in billions more in future liabilities to maintain everything. The first layer looked so bad I didn't go any further.

The petty dividend payouts utilities make just keep the equity investors from examining what they really own. Higher equity valuations let utilities borrow money cheaper than they really should be able to.

Functionally the whole thing looks like a ponzi scheme that perhaps could only happen with the 40 year run of ever shrinking interest rates. If the bond bull market is over then this utility ponzi scheme is going to blow too.

Bottom line, if investors were paying attention, your utility bills would be a lot higher. If utilities ever have a big problem getting Wall Street to keep funding their debt ponzi, they will be.

The alternative is the state owns the utility. Given how ugly the math is for utilities right now, I doubt it would be cheaper.

On the other hand, if the US is going 100% EV (AI datacenters or not), then there trillions of federal dollars are inbound and maybe utilities will be ok. One thing is for certain, the utilities, their investors (debt & equity) their customers, and the US states don't have the money to pay for all that has to be built.

The TV thing isn't a new story, this was public. Everyone should have known about it and no one cared. (I could inset a boilerplate rant about Snowden here)

Those datacenters are not being built so that you can talk to ChatGPT all day, they are being built to generate and optimize ads. People who were not previously very suggestible are going to be. People who are suggestible will have their agency sold off to the highest bidder.

Avoid owning a TV? Your friends will. Maybe you can not have a FB/IG/WhatsApp account, only use cash, not have a mobile phone, but Meta (or Google, or Apple) can still detect your face in the background of photos/videos and know where you shop, travel and when.

The average VPN user is knowledge-less. At best their internet usage data is being sold to third party analytics companies. At worst third parties are routing their own bots through their local connection.

Deep dive this is not, and it certainly wasn't worthy of being upvoted on hn..

The real story is we are training millions/billions of people to send what is basically biometric data to sources which they should never trust. You think stolen credit cards are bad?

The long term consequence are so dumb and obvious that all I can say is "good luck."

The problem is the reverse of what is being argued here. The stakes are high because of how much money these companies are making off of DLCs/in-app purchases. The game operator thus has an incentive to ensure that high value customers can't be banned by third parties. Instead of just being banned, the player is suspended 24 hours or something, and then they come back.

Interesting thing I noticed trying to play old versions of Call of Duty a year or two ago -- the oldest ones which supported hosted servers, there are still players, but once they switched to matchmaking either no one is playing or its so tiny you never get connected.

I don't know what's wrong with XMPP other than the network effect collapsed when the GMail chat thing was killed, while the mobile client options were poor for a very long time.

Matrix has the appearance of being a drop in replacement for Slack or Discord, but the design decisions seem so compromised that the only explanation is they did manage to establish a (somewhat weak) network effect? It certainly is not a good look for an open source project to be running on Slack or Discord (free/cheap plans rugpulled or to be soon.) Then that leaves IRC, which has a network effect collapsing at a much slower pace.

I never got far enough to try hosting a matrix server, but reading the linked post -- Matrix definitely is not GDPR compliant. The combination of whatever end form of ChatControl the EU gets along with possibly hundreds of other laws across the world and individual US states makes me think the days of a public facing non-profit or small startup running a project like this are over. (Or maybe the future of open source is funding lawyers while the development is all done for pennies by AI?)

They have the same jurisdiction problem as Signal. So does Delta Chat, Matrix which were mentioned in another response here.

From a practical side, if the client and server are open source then the project is survivable even if the supporting organization is wiped out. For now users don't demand it nor do they understand it. At minimum, the clients must be open source and buildable, all encryption must happen on the user's device and there should be some control over the end server connections. It is also critical that there are near foolproof workarounds for tunneling the traffic in severely locked down countries like China. This is one of the big problems with requiring a phone number, for example. If users in China can't use a communications tool then it's bullshit.

Some projects like Delta Chat are criticized for one reason while the critics take at face value unverifiable claims from other projects. Delta Chat checks a lot of boxes along with user control and deployment of servers.

SimpleX is a good concept but I'm not sure how it can scale -- which is a detail that shouldn't be ignored. How Signal expects to continue with no visible revenue source is another good question.

XMPP should not be written off either. If I had to bet on a protocol having users a decade from now, that's the one. AI coding agents are going to rapidly iterate on improving the front end stuff. With all of the privacy busting age verification coming from the US, I'd be willing to bet the replacement for Discord will be something XMPP based.

On one side the EU funded open source projects to try to break away from the US tech giants, while passing laws to kneecap their own tiny open source alternatives (Cyber Resilience Act etc.) If the US & the EU wants to exist in the next century they need to be going the opposite direction. It was bad enough that western tech companies built China's great firewall and assisted authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

Most end users don't understand that keeping communications secure is not a given, it is really expensive and difficult. Adding wacky, difficult, very expensive or impossible to follow requirements is the fingerprint of EU bureaucracy and not just unwelcome but very dangerous.

For the EU Elon haters -- with the growth of Starlink, Elon Musk or whoever controls SpaceX is going to have a deep view of global internet communications in the years ahead. That will include an ability to block, filter, and allow things either they or those who control Starlink choose. Any regulation which weakens or cripples the security of internet communications is ceding power to that entity, whoever it may be.

Seeing the height and angle, I would question how comfortable that keyboard is.

The whole project looks like a special edition collectors item, not something anyone would use.

Kind of reminds me of the junk forensic fire science. "Slop Detective" might have been nice in 2022, now its slop itself. Maybe this is an old link? If someone just published this in the last 90 days, they are an idiot.

There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the art world (not news) but real artists are now actively accused of using AI and getting kicked off reddit or whatever. That tells me there is going to be 0 market for 100% human created art, not the other way around.

My first thought was this is the whole thing about managers at Google trying to get employees under other managers fired and their own reports promoted -- but it feels too similar to how fucked up all the account and billing stuff is at Microsoft. This is what happens when you try to "fix" something by layering on more complexity and exceptions.

From past experience, the advertising side of the business was very clear with accounts and billing. GCP was a whole other story. The entire thing was poorly designed, very confusing, a total mess. You really needed some justification to be using it over almost everything else (like some Google service which had to go through GCP.) It's kind of like an anti-sales team where you buy one thing because you have to and know you never want to touch anything from the brand ever again.

The "decentralization" of Matrix is true in some respects, and false in others. Which would be ok, but if all of the complex architecture and issues are in the support of being decentralized, then this seems like an early planning failure.

My suspicion is the real problem that exists now originated from the bifurcation of desktop and mobile. Mobile broke the true p2p decentralization which was easy on desktop, and the split between Android and iOS makes it worse. Users expect an experience on iOS and Android which has parity with desktop. And the entire thing has to be as good as Discord.

I've taken a hard look at all of the truly open source alternative messaging options, and almost nothing handles multi-platform very well. Even when you expand it to commercial options, for a very long time, all of the Slack clones had mediocre mobile apps -- which basically was a death sentence if you weren't Microsoft. This is true today, but I expect it will change in 2026 and onward with the rapid increase in software development driven by AI agents.

Perplexity had a big advantage over the competition when model hallucination was bad. That gap has narrowed enough for now.

Perplexity beats Google, ChatGPT, and Claude if you want an answer with citations and want it fast. Claude deep research is more thorough, but that's going to be a wait. ChatGPT web search is slower, uses few citations, and looks like more of the answer is coming from the model than the results. It's also possible that the quality and speed of Perplexity would vanish with scale and the only reason they look so good right now is because they have so many fewer users.

The mid to long term problems I see are:

#1 Google could cut them off from Youtube and a big chunk of their value is gone without recourse.

#2 over time the open web is going to shrivel and switch to paid or even die as ad revenue drops and bot traffic increases (already at this point probably, just countermeasures haven't been fully adopted.)

#3 goes with the previous point, more content is going to be AI generated and not fact checked which will dramatically drop the value of the output. This of course is a problem for all LLMs. Google may be the one who has a big advantage here given their advanced AI research and that they already have an index of the pre-LLM internet.

Maybe I'm going too far from the tipping point of "this is easy" when it actually isn't, but the ability to clone an open source project now, modify some part of it, and then compile it locally seems like the future. This is almost trivial to do now.

Why not do the same for the web?

Without going off on a rant about all of the user hostile bullshit that's being shoved down our throats right now, I think one inevitable outcome of AI is that users are going to need to have defensive local AI agents protecting them and fact checking data. This is the trojan horse for the big tech companies that rely on ad revenue and dark patterns to manipulate their users: if they provide the AI agents, they will be obviously inferior and not super-intelligent, just like when Google's early public image-gen model was making image of ethnically and gender diverse nazi soldiers, etc.

"one call per claim" I wonder how long it takes for it to be common knowledge how important this is. Starting to think never. Great idea by the way, I should try this.

Also easy to forget how much negative sentiment, on the opposite political side, there was prior to the vaccine being approved. The NYT had an article on how it would take 10 years for the vaccine to be developed and approved! Operation Warp Speed was a project from the first Trump administration. One could rationally blame Trump for the vaccine skepticism. It's arguable it never would have been rush approved if it had been someone else in the White House!

I wish I had cataloged all of the stuff I read and listened to in 2020. There are things where the references are basically impossible to find. All of it mainstream news sources. There was concern expressed in 2020 that the covid vaccine could trigger resistance to other existing vaccines, and that's exactly what happened.

Also worth name dropping one of the most interesting books I've ever read: _The Pox of Liberty: How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection_. Apparently so obscure that Amazon tries to auto correct the search.

The night before this story was published I was pondering what percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or some kind of funny billing stuff going on.

What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.

The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.

Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.

Did not read the book, but have been following OpenAI since the beginning. The whole thing comes across as a bait and switch with parallels to Google's "Don't be evil." At minimum he isn't a person whom comes across as trustworthy - but very few tech leaders (or politicians, etc.) do.

This situation is arguably better than an alternative where Google or another big tech monopoly had also monopolized LLMs (which seems like the most likely winner otherwise, however they may have also never voluntarily ventured in to publicly releasing LLM tools because of the copyright issues and risk of cannibalizing their existing ad business.) Feels like this story isn't finished and writing a book is premature.

The AI researchers who joined and worked for less money than they would have been paid by a big tech company because they thought it was the right thing to do.

It wouldn't be the first honeypot phone, haha.

What bothers me is that when phones are stolen, they end up in other countries. Maybe you are a nobody, but if it is trivial to extract the information on a phone then there is more than an identity theft issue. Generative AI makes all of this shit way worse than it was even a year ago.