Hacker News Reader

AI companies really do socialize the costs and privatize the profits.

Sites like The Numbers have to take on the cost of surviving the AI onslaught and the AI companies return nothing back to them.

breveon Five tech giants are hiding $1.6T in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron

Linked from the article:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/tech-and-telecom-law/big-tech-...

breveon Who Is America's Homer?

Who would win in a fight between Stan Lee, Jim Henson, and Walt Disney?

Maybe Epic Rap Battles of History has the answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXBJIZ1NXFU

breveon Volkswagen planning to cut up to 100.000 jobs globally

BYD sells EV and hybrid vehicles. Tesla only sells EVs, and BYD sells more EVs than Tesla.

In 2025 BYD sold 4.6 million vehicles. Tesla sold 1.66 million. That particular war is already over. Tesla lost it.

Toyota has been the best selling automaker for the last 6 years straight. In 2025 Toyota had record sales with 11.3 million vehicles sold: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...

BYD was 6th: https://carnewschina.com/2026/02/26/three-chinese-automakers...

Tesla isn't in the top ten.

breveon Tesla FSD v14 Lite

In 2016 Tesla claimed to have solved the hardware problem for FSD. They lied:

https://electrek.co/2025/10/22/tesla-changes-all-cars-have-s...

Instead of "lite" versions of the software, what they should do is upgrade all cars to the latest hardware for free. Currently that's AI4.5, which soon will be made obsolete by AI5:

https://electrek.co/2026/01/26/tesla-quietly-starts-shipping...

breveon 'Once you have a machine think and write for you, you're cooked as a species'

To quote Agent Smith, "Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at it’s beauty, it’s genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBdYmStZJ4

breveon The case for physical media ownership

Disney has stopped physical media sales in some markets:

https://screenrant.com/disney-movies-dvd-physical-media-rele...

And it has outsourced its physical media business to Sony:

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/disney-sony-pysical-media...

breveon Peppa Pig studio wants to clone child actors' voices with AI indefinitely

Then it's not work worth having and maybe it's no longer product worth buying.

breveon Rich and famous families teach their kids Mandarin as China's influence grows

> Elon Musk tweets a lot but one recent post stuck out. "我的儿子正在学习普通话," he wrote.

Musk pledged his commitment to China's core socialist values. He also thinks Taiwan should submit to China:

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/elon-musk-signs-letter-p...

breveon New Study Shows That Tall Hoods Cause Deaths per Year

It was HN. I didn't notice it had removed "Hundreds of" from the title and I can no longer edit the title to fix it.

I find HN's automatic title editing annoying. It's wrong more often than it's right. I think it's a misfeature.

breveon Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

> build the most high-tech electric cars

Teslas aren't the most high-tech these days. They have fallen behind on the hardware side, particularly in charging and batteries. Here's a charging speed comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy46Ag0djjk

breveon CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

If an LLM is trained on GPL code then that code has become an intrinsic part of the model (because if it hasn't then what was the value of training on it). So shouldn't that model now also be licensed GPL?

And how do I know the LLM output is not reproducing substantial chunks of GPL'd code, making my code GPL?

breveon Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

And Opus: https://opus-codec.org/

breveon Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

> at least if C# counts as native

It can count as native. You can turn on Native AOT compilation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

breveon Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

> It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers

What's easiest for both users and developers is royalty-free video formats.

AV1 is solution to these video format licensing problems. Microsoft is part of the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/

Dolby has made direct threats to the royalty-free status of AV1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

So Microsoft and all the AOMedia members will need to defend AV1 if they want it to remain royalty-free.

breveon Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

> "I don't need tips, I just want Microsoft to change it,"

They won't change it unless you give them a reason.

Switch to macOS or Linux. That will give them a reason.

breveon Tesla presented misleading 'Full Self-Driving' safety data to European regulator

Lying is standard operating procedure for Tesla. It's simply how the business works.

breveon Codex for open source

What are AI companies doing to respect open source licenses and copyright?

I'm sure they train their models on open source software, so how do I know that LLM generated code doesn't reproduce substantial chunks of, for example, GPL licensed code? If indeed there are GPL violations, what are AI companies doing to police themselves?

I wonder if open source licenses will start to include "not to be used for LLM training" clauses.

breveon The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

> Who really uses WASM?

Everyone who uses Amazon Prime Video: https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-...

Everyone who uses Google Sheets: https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc

breveon The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

They're doing it already:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/making-webassembly-a-first...

breveon The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

> For instance the Mozilla DOM experiments seems to use a special JS variant with a 'use component' header

As per the article, that's temporary until Component Model 1.0 is implemented natively in the browser. In the meantime, jco can be used:

> The groundwork for browser implementations is being laid today: jco’s transpile command already converts any component into equivalent core Wasm and JavaScript glue, making components runnable in any browser without native support.

That's no longer needed once native support is there.

breveon The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

Direct DOM access from WASM is faster:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screens...

breveon Ukrainian drones target St Petersburg in attack Russia calls 'unprecedented'

There's a solution to this problem. Russia can get out of Ukraine and then the war will be over.

Easy to do, simple to achieve. No more Russians need to die.

breveon Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used.

But users also include users of the code. There's no value in self-flagellation via terrible code or pointlessly complicated frameworks.

breveon US banks rely on a 65-year-old programming language

So? If it works it works.

I guess banks don't want to invest in training their people.

breveon Tesla patents camera wiper for self-driving resulting in more doubts FSD owners

There's no need for any doubt. You don't have full self-driving. Tesla has never achieved full autonomy.

A decade ago Tesla claimed to have delivered all the hardware needed for full self-driving.

They were lying.

breveon Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

You've fallen into the trap.

breveon Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

Bryan Cantrill warns, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn. You stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s

breveon Dav2d

When you host videos with near 17 billion views you're going to want to stream those videos in as few bits as possible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w

That extra 25% becomes worth it.

Nothing will become obsolete. AV1 will stick around for a long time. And YouTube still does H.264 encodes to support old devices.

breveon Dav2d

Hardly niche. My laptop isn't new and it has hardware AV1 decoding and encoding. My 10 year old iPhone 7 can play 1080p AV1 video in software for over 200 minutes with VLC. The iPhone 7 was released in 2016, a year and a half before AV1. The dav1d decoder is mighty.

Netflix uses AV1: https://netflixtechblog.com/av1-now-powering-30-of-netflix-s...

YouTube uses AV1. It's tough to be more mainstream than that.

Right click on a YouTube video and select Stats for Nerds. If your system is capable of it, chances are it will be playing back in AV1.

Most of the YouTube videos I watch these days are AV1 encodes. Sometimes it's in VP9 and occasionally it's H.264.