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Springtime

2,552 karma · joined November 8, 2013

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Springtime··on A story of a Figma bug that wasn't a bug at all (2021)
It's interesting in retrospect that the keyboard of the first Macintosh was a very deliberate 60% layout, given how popular that size has become over the past 15 years among enthusiasts (albeit now augmented by fully customizable secondary layers so arrow keys/etc are still possible).
Springtime··on TV4 postpones show after AI agent erases edited material
> “It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material,”

That's odd, when I viewed the article the quote was them saying it wasn't 'some evil AI agent' but in the literal minutes since the quote has been replaced with one saying 'independent AI agent'. Wayback Machine confirms this. When I initially read it the quote could be plausibly interpreted as 'well it wasn't some evil AI agent that did this'.

Springtime··on Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta
If what someone has done makes me critique them rather than fully side with them then the goal of what they've produced has already failed. This is not a video I can share with anyone I know and expect their takeaway to be 'fuck Meta'.

People also use smartphones to take upskirt photos without any shutter sound (arguably much easier than this guy physically bending over) but if someone was protesting phone cameras then doing that to people in public for some video wouldn't be some gotcha 'dunk'. At best it'd merely be controversial.

For a high effort pushback of Meta Glasses see the lenticular They Live vandalism of Meta's bus stop ad[1]. It hits the same goal this video author was trying to make, is actually clever and doesn't leave itself open to critique. Didn't require video removal on platforms to get the attention of articles either.

[1] https://hyperallergic.com/guerrilla-london-bus-ads-mock-kyli...

Springtime··on Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta
Bending down to stare at a female employee's ass at waist level after he asked her to turn around isn't harassment[1]? Like, up until that point it was almost ribbing but that was quite the turn given it'd be the same issue whether he was wearing smart glasses or not.

Not to mention the sarcastic, insincere tone he adopts after being asked what he's doing, claiming he's "such a huge fan" of the Meta glasses. There is a way to draw attention to privacy and this is a poor way to go about it.

[1] Cambridge Dictionary: 'behavior that annoys or upsets someone'

Springtime··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
Whether or not this particular incident was OpenAI it seems the threshold for blame seems pretty low, judging by the 'An OpenAI agent swarm was responsible for this incident' section. The timeline is more compelling though.

Malware in the past has variously added red herrings to throw researchers off the scent or even deliberately try to masquerade as originating from elsewhere. In this case adding `oai` as a package author and having randomized Gmail addresses with that substring was apparently considered a strong signal.

It's not possible to verify the signals mentioned from the packages themselves since they're unavailable for download. They mention their analysis is entirely from publicly available RubyGems packages (which doesn't appear to be possible since May 13, just 1-2 days after the attack) but in a footnote say they talked with RubyGems (perhaps this was the source of the package data?). Maybe I'm missing something.

Springtime··on Don't be a meat proxy
Even Mythos can hallucinate[1] with a codebase to analyze. The argument I often see is that humans are fallible, too, but the issues we're seeing in this topic are about those who should know better—including in senior positions—heeding LLM responses/advice over human and concerningly not actually thinking about things at all. Ie: they're not being treated by many as just useful tools/tentative feedback but as authoritative answers/solutions.

There still needs to be critical thinking involved on the human side, even if there's a high rate of accuracy in certain dimensions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434824

Springtime··on AI companies are shredding rare books
It seems a key contention of theirs is the possibility that rare books are being destroyed this way, yet the things they cite don't seem to suggest this (based on their paraphrasing), they just throw the following at the end to make it seem like it's occurring to irreplaceable books:

> You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal.

Is there evidence of this? Since otherwise they could very well be describing what is only occurring to in-print or non-rare books. (This is a genuine question since their post doesn't shed any light on it.)

Springtime··on Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls
Is it the UI per se or the site that is requiring local storage? Since the examples don't load with cookies blocked, nor do any of the links/buttons work without it.

Ordinarily I wouldn't comment on this (eg: for the plethora of React-using sites that haven't tested without it yet work fine when manually bypassed) but in this case it's intended as a drop-in UI.

Springtime··on Firefox 153.0 Beta
> with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?

Macsurf is a browser project for Mac OS 9 leveraging LLMs[1] to do this. Tbh it makes sense for this given how time-consuming (absurd? Though the fact it exists tickles me) it'd be otherwise for essentially a single person to support the scope of web tech it does for such an incredibly niche userbase.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48339534

Springtime··on Qwen 3.8
I looked at the comments here but it doesn't appear to be an accurate characterization of the discourse. If anyone has links to such comments shaping the discourse from before the parent posted I'd be interested.

There's one top-level comment that's just an opinion of censorship of Qwen models (which might be argued to be politically adjacent if one assumes the censorship is referring to sensitive political subjects) but no specifics and there was a rebuttal reply anyway, while an unrelated top-level comment has a child reply believing China models are commoditizing AI to unseat US based models (could be argued a whiff of politics but also just competition) but it was still a positive impression.

Then I went to archive.org to check the earliest crawl of this page (prior to parent's post), but nothing different. So I enabled showdead in my settings to check dead-marked posts and there's one post near the bottom talking about how Chinese models are rarely ground-up foundational models, while another dead comment had an angle about it's a geopolitical strategy (neither of which had replies). Ironically some of the dead comments are praising Qwen.

Springtime··on Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history
What's weird is with Firefox for Android it's so difficult erasing a site from being remembered. Once visited, in my experience, even after deleting the history entry and last closed tabs item it still auto completes the domain in the addressbar (when it didn't before) and the only workaround is a full history wipe (since the Android version offers no granular timeframe like the desktop version).

So if accidentally clicking some link from some other app that auto opens the default browser it's a PITA to get FF for Android to forget about it.

Springtime··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
This[1] comment, mostly in terms of not knowing which parts are generated and which not when not disclosed, which puts an added burden on the reader to assess.

Like, if some non-controversial article makes a statement about something technical (where one's guard isn't already raised) but you've observed signs of LLM use (without any disclosure of to what degree) then instead of thinking it might be an interesting thing to follow-up on or remember one might be thinking instead 'is this something the author themselves understands and has reviewed for accuracy or slipped in by the LLM' and other such distractions (and legwork if wanting to try and fact-check such things on the spot).

It goes from having a perhaps pleasurable, educational read to questioning and being more skeptical/cynical about the material. HN's guidelines meanwhile encourage good faith engagement, which is challenging.

Edit: corrected permalink (had accidental extra digit).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888422

Springtime··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
> The current picture is that there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind.

It's not a purity test, it's as the author is communicating they don't care whether the reader has any signals of what is accurate vs inaccurate information, which puts the burden of investigating how much is accurate on the reader at every step when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role (outside of topics where there is some expectation of ulterior motives/biases and one would naturally engage more critically minded).

When people complain here it's more often than not when an article has no disclaimer about AI use or what has been human-reviewed, so the burden again falls on the reader who is now even more skeptical. That is more to ask of a reader than when it's coming from say a known expert and the reader is receptive to engage and learn.

That's the reason tired cliches and turns of phrase (overused by LLMs) have become a heuristic for whether to pay attention, because it's a sign that there's some unknown quantity of of the article that hasn't had human review and it's easier to put in the bucket of 'maybe worthwhile but would need a fully human analysis of this' or just outright rejection (as we've seen from comments).

Edit: I see a sibling comment has raised the same observation.

Springtime··on Librepods: AirPods liberated
I assumed, like Apple's Airtags (which use Bluetooth LE), that they used some proprietary pairing that's incompatible with non-Apple devices.
Springtime··on Librepods: AirPods liberated
I wasn't aware they operated as baseline Bluetooth headphones by default on other devices, so even having read the readme it wasn't obvious.
Springtime··on The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
Was about this part:

> Step out of the story and examine the acting. Robin Williams was given a script. Any other actor could have been handed that script, but ZERO other actors would have performed it like that. The script has all the words, but he brought the words to life. What's more, he did so by drawing on his own life.

The part I agree with in the article is that a Robin Williams performance is something unique that is an amalgamation of his lived experiences (whether or not related to specific scenarios he's portraying). All actors are drawing from things differently (even their own meta acting experiences). The part I was agreeing with you about is the article's premise being based on an analogy from a film is harder to sustain.

They're not wrong though that reading about some experience is different than experiencing it first-hand and the value that can bring, it's just how that ties in with LLMs while making an analogy about a script of fiction is obviously stretching it a bit in making a sharper takeaway.

Springtime··on The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
This angle is touched on in the article, as the words on a page script vs Robin's performance of it which is drawing from his unique human experience which would have been different from another actor (the lived experience throughline the article is making, not necessarily the experiences being described in the script, mind).

I do think though that article is a bit nebulous in parts, in the sense that articles and books we read are also just words on a page and its those mediums LLMs are similarly using, which is why I think they attempted to morph into a point later in the article about the acted performance.

I still get the gist the author is trying to convey though, in that through lived experiences we crystalize and hone in on the things that matter which allows us to have actual first-hand opinions rather than just second-hand ones from others. It's those first-hand experiences that are often most valuable to others and drowning them out in an avalanche of either stylistic or wholly generated slop makes them more difficult to find.

Springtime··on Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work
> Decide whether it's accurate, insightful, worth thinking about and researching further, etc. based on its substance

This is the part the original human poster is assumed to have screened as a first step, not the audience, particularly if the audience is unfamiliar with the subject (such as a guide, etc).

I literally came across a guide online from a user who wasn't a spammer, who disclaimed they haven't even read the very guide they posted as an article on their website, as it was LLM generated. At least that user put up a disclaimer but why would I trust such a guide, given my and others' extremely inconsistent experience with the veracity of LLM output and as someone coming to the guide to learn (ie: not a domain expert)? Overwhelmingly other users don't put up such disclaimers so we don't even get to know whether they've vetted anything.

Trust is the key thing. To continually erode reader trust means you're putting the burden at every step on the reader. Sure, one should always apply critical thinking to even human output but there is an implicit, baseline assumption that with human output they're at least familiar with what they've output (whether they're lying or telling the truth or ignorant but honest). LLMs meanwhile handle ground truths in a flaky way, such as when they'll hallucinate quotes from even articles they claim to have read and cited. And the most common models users are using are the cheapest/free ones anyway, only compounding the accuracy issues.

Imagine you went to a library assuming authors, publishers and library staff have done some minimum due diligence only to find the library is being replaced rapidly with books that no one in the chain has read.

No one can be a domain expert in every single thing they encounter, which is why we place trust in others to varying degrees to fill in the gaps based on their experience and knowledge, even if you're a dyed in the wool skeptic. When increasingly what we encounter isn't being vetted as a basic first step then it's a waste of time and rude to the audience, which only decreases peoples' tolerance for bullshit and increases cynicism (which we could use less of).

Springtime··on Cooling in Space
There was also this[1] analysis in late 2025 from a former NASA engineer that looked at the impracticability.

[1] https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

Springtime··on Macsurf, "modern" web browser for macOS 9
The project didn't, only the HN submission title.
Springtime··on Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
MGSV had realistic graphics (one of the first games with PBR) and handled it well. One of the devs had a GDC talk about their lighting approach, too.

In the game light/shadow (in addition to what outfit you're wearing, surface you're on, if you've showered recently and other factors) has an effect on your camouflage index. Unlike prior Metal Gear Solid games this is never shown as a value on-screen but instead communicated by clues from enemy reactions and sound cues, where eg. their animation will change to show they've noticed something suspicious from a distance.

Springtime··on Xiaomi MiMo Token Plan is Now Globally Available
The point was that distilling based on others' models for training means they're not spending the same amount on R&D and/or training, giving them headroom in other ways (responding to the parent's point). It wasn't a comment reflecting on copyright/fair use.
Springtime··on Xiaomi MiMo-v2.5 price drops 99% – AI pricing war
There's evidence various third-party models (including Deepseek) used distilling in training, based on models from those leading services. So they have more flexibility with pricing.
Springtime··on Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers
> That makes me feel a little long in the horn

I see what you did there :)

Springtime··on CARA 2.0 – “I Built a Better Robot Dog”
I like the wide layout of the site but just on a readability front on a widescreen monitor after the opening more narrow paragraphs it changes to full width text layout and those could benefit from a `columns: 2` in CSS to split them since reading long width paragraphs is a bit difficult.
Springtime··on AI uses less water than the public thinks
While a couple months back an article[1] discussed how Google was keeping the water requirements a secret from locals who wanted transparency, claiming it was proprietary knowledge.

So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.

> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’

> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.

So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?

[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat...

[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...

Springtime··on The woes of sanitizing SVGs
It seems the reason they're inlined in the page at all is to measure things briefly like bounding boxes (not sure the full extent as it didn't cover that), before subsequent removal. I'm not familiar with Scratch and its use of user-submitted SVGs but I'd be curious to read more about what they're doing that required it be inlined specifically.

(This isn't a comment on the challenges in proper sanitization fwiw, as I've needed to do various of the same things myself)

Springtime··on We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
> Disabling JavaScript actually greatly increases your fingerprint as not many users turn it off, so that instantly puts you in a much smaller bucket that you need to be unique in.

I've heard a handful of people say this but are there examples of what I would imagine would have to be server-side fingerprinting and the granularity? Since most fingerprinting I'm aware of is client-side, running via JS. While I expect server-side checks to be limited to things like which resources haven't be loaded by a particular user and anything else normally available via server logs either way, which could limit the pool but I wonder how effective in terms of tracking uniqueness across sites.

Springtime··on Codex for almost everything
> It'll be like (lack of) privacy on the internet caused by the ad industrial complex, but much worse and much more invasive.

The concerning aspect is how others' content being scanned into systems don't have any knowledge or consent. Having private PII/files/code/emails/etc being read and/or accidentally shared by the agent online.

Springtime··on Pompeii's battle scars linked to an ancient 'machine gun'
Matches the name of episode 152[1] the Wikipedia article cites for the info. Seems the classification of seasons and even the season's episode order on Wikipedia differs from the one in the Youtube title.

[1] Text-based summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2010_season)#Epis...

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