EGreg

Poe

Twain

Wait wait. How does PWA when I click "install to home screen" actually show me that rich preview screen, with instructions? That's crazy!

Edit: I have been truly wowed today https://web.dev/learn/pwa/installation-prompt

On iOS, I think the only two reasons to have an app are: notifications and access to contacts.

It’s not about the companies specifically, or even AI specifically, but the incentive structure. I think the issue is more that they are embedded in a system of competition, where they can’t afford not to do things to “win” and fend off competitors’ practices. The people in the companies feel and understand this better than anyone.

I think Anthropic, being a Public Benefit Corporation, can absolutely do better than OpenAI. OpenAI was a nonprofit but flipped. Many people left from OpenAI to Anthropic, I think all original founders of Anthropic are still with Anthropic.

We have seen the same things in Web2 and Web3, this is not at all unique to AI companies! How many people at HN went to work for Facebook, or Google etc? The “don’t be evil” motto is nice but when you have to compete, you often end up doing the things you think you didn’t have to do.

With Web2 the stakes were: “centrally controlling speech”. With Web3 the stakes were: “people lose programmable money they gambled with”. With AI the stakes are much bigger. This isn’t about a company being moral or not. This is about incentives of the broader ecosystem, and how the products are designed.

As long as people (like Kevin O’Leary) say “but are you going to just let China pull ahead of us” we’re all going to be in a race (to the bottom, for a lot of affected people). It isn’t about OpenAI or Anthropic specifically. Hate the game, not the player.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The game can change: https://safebots.ai/singularity.html

I strongly believe that the future is the other way. New programming languages and environments designed for strong auditability and preventing bugs will dominate. Only bad actors will use latent space representation, and it might even be outlawed. But the bad actors will proliferate underground…

I actually built such a language: https://magarshak.com/U.html

It seems their incentives aren’t exactly aligned with their users, including corporate users. Look at the latest statements from Alex Karp, and now Satya Nadella etc.

Is this user-hostile? Encrypting stuff from the user is what RIAA used to do with DRM, worried about copyright infringement.

Why don’t they also capture information you enter into forms on Chrome?

They control the entire browser surface, technically they can know everything, even TLS and E2E encrypted data, that they silently phone home…

If you think this is silly, consider that Microsoft Recall had been observing everything on people’s entire SCREENS and phoning home much of it. That is how a guy was caught recently: https://x.com/t3chfalcon/status/2074134314145489195

And it is actually much worse than even that:

https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...

Why don’t they also read your gmail and get your bank passwords?

And maybe have access to EVERY site actually, with “forgot password” type stuff in addition to providing oauth tokens…

This is what the problem is with DNS.

Congratulations on putting it together!

And you have spotted the early stage opposrtunity most VCs fail to fund: paradigm shifting work often looks like infrastructure, very broad and general-purpose. It can eventually lead to trillions of dollars in wealth creation (the Web, Linux, smart contracts, etc) but the first movers may capture 5% of the ecosystem’s value. For a VC, that’s a bigger bet that can change the world a lot more than, say, the next short term memecoin sold to the greater fool for 50x or hype app dumped on the market for 100x.

Paradigm work has always run on patrons. A new paradigm is useless at the beginning, by definition, so markets have nothing to price. The first personal computers were toys. So was the early internet. The people who fund this stage are buying a position in the future before anyone can price it.

Well, some of us are drawn to this world-changing work (Vint Cerf who’s retiring this week, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Vitalik Buterin, Jimmy Wales, Igor Sysoev etc etc) and it runs most of the Internet. But, will it get funded?

Here’s mine:

https://safebots.ai/about

I’m right here

Been building about 20 interconnected pieces of a new software stack designed to help humanity.

Most VCs wouldn’t fund it.

Most investors wouldn’t understand it.

They prefer small apps. YC’s startups used to be called “feature, not a startup”.

Now with AI it has become easier — the work I and my small team that I’ve been paying for 10 years has been greatly accelerated.

But still. Most people on HN will just deride it. Few would look deeply. Here, I will share a link:

https://safebots.ai/ETHOS.html

"There is nothing wrong with capitalism, but..."

- said before any potential criticism of capitalism. In USA, you shall not criticize the Profit.

"peace be upon him"

- said after any mention of Mohammad. In Saudi Arabia, you shall not criticize the Prophet.

Unless they have backdoors to absolutely every form of encryption, including https certificates, etc. you can always use that to tunnel through.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/cukcaf/goog...

For some reason it made me think of this right away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

I do not believe solutions to these issues will be found with government regulators. I believe they can be enabled by new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS.

Having said that, I don’t think the tech industry is what it once was, dominated by cypherpunks working to create a better world. It has been captured by greed and “moving fast and breaking things”, as well as infighting. Greed (both in the form of web3 numbers go up, and benefiting from the greater fool while delivering no utility) and moving fast (web2 facebook / VC / dump shares on the public / lock in / extract rents). So no wonder the government eventually steps in, when the industry spends a decade without adults steering the ship. We have giant platforms controlling everything, and the rest has devolved into zero sum games and memecoins. The tech industry hasn’t led or even organized enough to get behind technology that can liberate users. Instead it’s been captured by for-profit interests. Mozilla and Apache are rounding errors.

Here is what open source can do when it comes to mass surveillance, and this would also solve the Flock problem here in the States, too:

https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...

More broadly, here is what needs to be done across the board:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

The "banned" Differential Privacy refers to this: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5855734/census-bureau-d...

Exactly this.

The correct way is to have M of N signatures on specific package manager pinned versions. And you trust the auditors to look at each new version, of a well-known package.

We should start a project and get it funded, to do just that. The money can go to LLM tokens for audits, at least, and hosting the multisigs and the package managers.

Anyone want to partner on this? See my profile on HN and email me.

Wait, state laws can restrict you using software on your own general-purpose computer? Does that infringe on freedom of speech?

What about the famous case of Carlsen claiming that his opponent cheated and even forfeiting to draw attention to it?

One major trick in distributed systems is to always attempt things in the same order. And then locally, you just store what you’ve seen, for “a long time”. That takes care of a lot of transactional issues — idempotency, retries, exactly-once delivery with no distributed locks, etc.

But as someone who builds distributed systems, I can tell you that transactions should be local. Anytime you want to lock something across the network (eg Canisters in ICP) so you can read it, that’s probably a code smell. You probably want to have evented reactive things ripple out, you do need idempotency, but you shouldn’t design your system to read remote state if you can help it. Only subscribe to remote messages.

We've had peer-to-peer livestreaming for years, on the platform. Here is a video of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh0cewsyJlw

The code is here: https://github.com/Qbix/Media

Peer to peer Livestreaming is much easier than storage + streaming, because everyone is online at the same time, and can restream to each other using webrtc. If someone drops out, those listening to their stream can join someone else. It helps the livestreamer save money and not have to rely on Big Tech platforms ingesting RTMP.

This does: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud

I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed

Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...

It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already.

Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565

Did you read the academic paper? It proves otherwise.

Yes, the government already knows your age, it gives you a driver's license for example. We're not talking about erasing their memory or databases. We're talking about you being able to prove your age range to others, without revealing your identity.

In this scenario, Google is still a trusted dealer.

I just posted a general solution anyone can implement without needing Google as the trusted dealer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760492

Then I guess you'll be violating laws.

I'm talking about complying with laws, in a privacy-preserving way. It's possible.

Here, I posted it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760492

Google has pioneered a few technologies where they are the trusted dealer. For example, Private State Tokens.

I have written a paper on how to do age verification in a completely privacy-preserving way, and it doesn’t even need zero-knowledge proofs:

https://magarshak.com/papers/Personal.pdf

Are we distinguishing eustress and distress?

I like to think that I change my mind based on evidence, but the more I battle test my ideas in a specific thesis, the less reluctant I am to give it up, and prefer to see a synthesis incorporating the new arguments.

Often though, I find the arguments are things I have already heard before and either incorporated or debunked - either way they do not affect my positions.

https://magarshak.com/blog/why-im-confident-in-my-views/

As for strawmen like “well that’s not true of ALL cases” (I never said it was) or “that’s whataboutism”, those are just bad argumentation:

https://magarshak.com/blog/whataboutism-considered-harmful/

In a few years: Did you go home and make love to your wife, and put your kids to bed? Great, now give Claude Code access to those, so you don't have to. It is trained on 10,000,000 kids' behaviors, will remember every one of your family's health profiles, preferences and microexpressions, and can prevent tantrums and motivate them to lead much healthier lives than you can.