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blfr

8,623 karma · joined January 7, 2014

genetyczny.belfer@gmail.com

meet.hn/city/52.2319581,21.0067249/Warsaw

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blfr··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
Can I easily run whois, curl, dig, grep, python, browser/playwright? Yes.

Was watching an agent with terminal access install its tools, configure them, then map my lab, find services, and guess stack just pure magic? Also yes.

Did it cost me $23 in tokens to set it up, test, and run? Probably. Using gemini 3.1 pro was not the spendthrift choice here.

Is putting some cost controls in place a good idea? Also, probably yes.

Can I therefore understand someone who wants to see things happen on their own with a beautiful prompt instead of doing them personally even when fully capable, maybe even more efficient? Of course.

blfr··on Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
Cameron's World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085542 - Aug 2015 (63 comments)
blfr··on I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet
The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.
blfr··on Life is too short for a slow terminal
How often do you launch a fresh terminal though? I start mine with a script to have favourite tabs ready at boot and then generally not much afterwards.
blfr··on The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
Yes, there was a whole idea about civilizing and pacifying the world through economic cooperation that would foster middle class in countries across the world that would then in turn make them democratize and become peaceful trade partners.

It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.

blfr··on The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
China is bad and there's a moral argument there. But the reason you want to be careful with sending IP to China is quite pragmatic: they're willing and able to use it while competing with you.

Is Alibaba interested in copying your TUI RSS reader though? Probably not.

blfr··on The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
I don't get the point. That Anthropic or OpenAI have more expensive products than Alibaba? So does Apple, AWS/GCP, and pretty much any other large western company vs its Chinese counterparts.
blfr··on Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow?
I banged out a simple FastAPI endpoint/tool (along with dockerization and deployment) and a media-heavy Astro website (along with Cloudflare Pages publishing) in Google's Antigravity2.

https://antigravity.google/product/antigravity-2

Not really a recommendation since I don't have a good benchmark of these tools but Antigravity's /grill-me feature where it asks you a bunch of questions like a system/business analyst and gives you an implementation plan for review (and can actually change it further) is pretty cool and it is certainly fit for what you intend.

Heard also good things about Zed and am testing it right now. So far I managed to... edit a json.

https://zed.dev/

blfr··on Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy
I would rather we be great at tech and sovereign as byproduct than try to copy Americans, poorly.

Trump's admin is trying to put breaks on new AI models. Meanwhile we will make procurement even heavier and slower with additional requirements and add more regulation for checkbox enforcement so massive inefficient enterprises can keep newcomers out.

That said it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with a docling container for large pdfs. Works like a charm. I highly recommend it.

blfr··on Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites
Can I (and how to) use it as a search engine for Open WebUI?
blfr··on Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity
Wait, wait, wait: browsers allow websites to store junk on my drive? They take up gigabytes of memory and still write to disk on top of this? Without even asking whether the site can use local storage?

Years and years back when laptops still had HDDs, I had a script to put the Firefox profile &c on a ramdisk and sync it on reboots so that it didn't spin up the drive constantly. I guess I should have kept doing it.

It's a sad day when Arch users are right (again) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM

blfr··on Last.fm is now independent
You can install your spotify and pull in all the data from Spotify.

https://github.com/Yooooomi/your_spotify

blfr··on Exit IP VPN servers mitigation rollout
Does this affect people using the socks proxy feature? I generally connect to the same Mullvad server over wireguard (not their client) and then use different servers for socks proxy as exits.

My clanker says no because socks proxies have all one IP per server but I don't know whether to trust it.

blfr··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
The subsidies deployed by the industry are so massive I don't even know if consumers need public assistance here. It's kinda like the gov was subsidizing web hosting or basic banking. The price for a regular consumer already barely hovers above zero.

Just look at this list of services included in Google's AI Pro subscription[1]. Google took everything it could think any consumer might need and bundled for $20/mo. There's even $10 GCP credit (that you can use for AI API calls).

[1] https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406?hl=en

blfr··on OpenAI Privacy Filter
This is very cool because it allows you to use any model. Obviously, it still lets the model and its operator see the entire context of the conversation.

I quite like Moxie's Confer[1] approach to just encrypt the whole thing in such a way that no one except the end-user sees the plaintext.

[1] https://confer.to/

blfr··on A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
Another one is hijcking ctrl+click (open in the new tab) into mere click (open here). I am shocked how many ecommerce sites do this.
blfr··on Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts
With a mass product we're all at the mercy of the bottom quantile or even vigintile. These are the people who need to hear about checking website, collecting basic information, etc.

Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.

Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.

There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.

blfr··on Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
Just as you get used to something crazy after two decades, have kids, and are about to unleash it on them, it gets fixed. Will there be no boomer pleasures left for us millennials?
blfr··on Good Bad ISPs
Relay nodes don't pose much risk and help mask/blend your own Tor traffic.
blfr··on More cows, more wives
most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans

Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here.

Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter gatherers are all that informative about our past. These are different people who live in marginal lands. Hunter gatherers of Europe would have had access to prime real estate and extremely food dense coastal areas, made long voyages at least occasionally. Quite simply, successful societies look different.

blfr··on We Will Not Be Divided
No one after Liz Truss fixed anything in Britain.
blfr··on Attention Media ≠ Social Networks
Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better.

The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.

The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.

blfr··on Over 80% of 16 to 24-year-olds would vote to rejoin the EU
Yeah, what I am saying is that these votes, regardless of their formal content, are usually an expression of general anti-immigrant sentiment.

Like voting for AfD. I doubt many people look at this organization and its leaders to conclude that "ah, here is the talent I would love to have running my country." They're merely the only available option against. Same with brexit.

blfr··on Over 80% of 16 to 24-year-olds would vote to rejoin the EU
This would be a good explanation but most of these immigrants, especially from outside the EU, are not net contributors.

vide https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...

from https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...

And I highly doubt other governments don't have similar calculations or aren't aware of them.

blfr··on Over 80% of 16 to 24-year-olds would vote to rejoin the EU
It is constantly shocking to me that no matter how many times and where in the west people vote against immigration (which is what most of these votes boil down to), they can never get it.

It's truly a crown in the gutter moment where you can be completely off-the-wall nuts (vide AfD) and, if you're just willing to campaign on anti-immigration, your ranks will instantly swell. Yet the establishment is somehow completely incapable or unwilling to capitalize/capture this.

blfr··on I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over
LinkedIn (like Teams) is a Microsoft product. And it shows.

However, they have a very generous free trial for sales/recruitment. You could probably activate it and get real support.

blfr··on How to stop being boring
In general "being a person who", that is projecting identity, is boring. This is why you need polarization as a crutch. Being someone who's into competitive puzzle-solving, pop punk, or birdwatching is exactly the focus group tested "say something about yourself" no one really needs.

Now, having gone to a pop punk concert and sharing some observation about the crowd or surprising opening act might be interesting. Noticing that a lot of induction puzzles are based on simple features like even/odd is less interesting but still might interest someone.

Reading the room itself is generally considered interesting. If you go for a minute or two about the induction puzzles and your colleague/date/whoever shows no interest, you can turn mid-sentence and imputing "so... no interest in induction puzzles, the last one you saw was in third grade and even then it wasn't your first choice." It's just good conversation.

It's like in writing. Show, don't tell.

blfr··on How AI destroys institutions
I am skeptical of hypotheses like this when the deterioration has begun before its supposed cause. This is how I look at social media or tinder being blamed for loneliness or low fertility. While they may have exacerbated the issues, trends have been unfavorable for decades if not centuries before.

Similarly, it seems to me like the rule of law (and the separation of powers), prestige press, and universities are social technologies that have been showing more and more vulnerabilities which are actively exploited in the wild with increasing frequency.

For example, it used to be that rulings like Wickard v. Filburn were rare. Nowadays, various parties, not just in the US, seem to be running all out assaults in their favoured direction through the court system.

blfr··on Dead Internet Theory
I agree with grandparent and think you have cause and effect backwards: people really do want to be outraged so Facebook and the like provide rage bait. Sometimes through algos tuning themselves to that need, sometimes deliberately.

But Facebook cannot "require" people do be angry. Facebook can barely even "require" people to log in, only those locked into Messenger ecosystem.

I don't use Facebook but I do use TikTok, and Twitter, and YouTube. It's very easy to filter rage bait out of your timeline. I get very little of it, mark it "uninterested"/mute/"don't recommend channel" and the timeline dutifully obeys. My timelines are full of popsci, golden retrievers, sketches, recordings of local trams (nevermind), and when AI makes an appearance it's the narrative kind[1] which I admit I like or old jokes recycled with AI.

The root of the problem is in us. Not on Facebook. Even if it exploits it. Surfers don't cause waves.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@gossip.goblin

blfr··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Sounds like Russian leadership should have known they're not a match for Americans. A costly misjudgement.
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