Hacker News Reader

fhubon LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

“LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."

The definition of “process” is really important and is missing. LG could process all transcripts on their servers too and stay within a very wonky definition of “process” on the TV that excludes transcription and transmission.

fhubon Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

I had one feature in RN and the rest properly native. The day I realized agents were good, I ported that RN to native. Monkey-off-back moment.

fhubon More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

I think for OpenAI to win back some hearts and minds here we should have the option to retrospectively turn off "Help improve our AI models". i.e. Any new model trained would exclude all those user's sessions. This could be technically hard but I'm sure an intelligent AI model could work out how to do it :-)

ChatGPT agrees with this too.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa31959-b0e8-83ec-bee6-851ed18d45...

fhubon Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

She turned herself in (After the police went to her home and she wasn't there)

fhubon iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max

Package size has very low correlation to launch time. The binary and assets are separate. Additionally some slow app launches are simply waiting for a network request or chain before the view controller renders.

fhubon I resigned from Anthropic today

We need to be building silos to save humanity. Maybe 50 of them should do it.

fhubon Disconnect your LG television from the internet, now

1. Onboarding tells you to

2. Convenience

3. Cheaper than buying an Apple TV et al

fhubon AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

You’d hope these AI incident responders have very constrained production tools to fix things. You’d hope the humans remain familiar with those tools and they are incredibly well documented.

fhubon VC isn't VC anymore

I was living in SF Bay Area when a16z started. They had good marketing and a good reputation. Their analyst posts were insightful and well received here. My perception of a16z has changed drastically. I’m ashamed just how badly that marketing worked on me in the early years.

fhubon FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

IMHO If statutes require it to be kept, then it should get written to storage that can’t be read without being there in person. Have the police actual show up to look at it. Make it really slow to look at too. Cryptographically slow.

fhubon “I just chose words carefully”

Two definitions that I had to look up.

* Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column.

* Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.

fhubon A week of using Codex more than Claude

I just use both. One is doing review work the other is doing planning and coding. I pick which one does which arbitrarily. I have zero proof that the end result is better either way around. But I tend to have the reviewer on "high" and the coder on "medium" for whichever model my instinct thinks is best for the task. I think it is really hard to "prove" which one is better at this point as so much is dependent on AGENT.md/CLAUD.md, prior documentation/plans the code etc. If someone tells me one is better than the other I take it with a grain of salt. When dumb things happen I simply blame both of them - they are team afterall.

fhubon There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

1-5ms response time is clearly hard for most real world endpoints.

fhubon There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

> So Uber’s approach to modularity may have seemed extreme at the time, but it could become the new normal.

I doubt it. This seems to conflate code modularity with service modularity. Moving complexity from the codebase into operations is counterintuitive to at least the way I use LLMs.

fhubon Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction, because AI

I appreciated it fwiw. Also the “fasten your seat belts” ending.

fhubon I don't enjoy the Internet any more

At least with youtube you can turn off your watch history and a whole bunch of other things. Then proactively curate playlists. Cudos for Youtube for making it really easy to opt out of "the algorithm"

fhubon Stripe Clinches over $7B Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter

I don’t think it “being bad” is the motivation. It’s about saving money and pooling cheaper resources.

fhubon Is it all just vapourware?

> Is it all just vapourware?

No. Anyone making this claim is being disingenuous.

fhubon Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers

Article is light on details but the premise is something I’ve seen playing out for series A and B companies. Head-counts that were growing as some pretty stable function of revenue growth having a sharp trend change starting about 6-9 months ago.

fhubon Hackers Stalked Me by Hijacking a Smartwatch for Kids

https://archive.is/xNU3i

fhubon Almost no skill required to cook a steak

I couldn't resist looking up if there was an AI grill that would cook the perfect steak.

https://uncrate.com/seergrills-perfecta-ai-grill/

fhubon Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

We programmers had it good for a long time. Paid well, exercised the brain, creators.

I always thought that when I retired I’d do woodworking. But perhaps I’ll also code - to remember what it was like when I was young.

fhubon Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

Google investing in Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat is a good result for Google. Means they are less likely to go to the competition and easier to bring them back into the fold if they do something next level.

fhubon Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

"Abduction" being the way the article used it as in "explanatory reasoning in justifying hypotheses". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/

fhubon Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

> I, as the human, still have to do the thinking as Claude still 'can't jump'

I still have to do quite a bit of thinking but the amount of of thinking I do per task is trending down. I agree LLMs are not good at abduction but very few humans are either and very few jobs/tasks require it. I can't talk for researchers jobs though. But perhaps fewer researchers would be desired by these labs (not none).

fhubon How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

I think discovery via streaming services also contributes to bland sludge. Decisions are made based on a name, category, maybe an actor and a single "cover" art image.

fhubon OpenAl, Anthropic ask U.S. government to consider slowing down Al

https://archive.is/l54x8

"The letter warned that companies could be close to automating the work of AI research, a development that it said could lead the technology to careen out of control."

fhubon Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

Regulatory capture? One of the two companies that stands to benefit most has a founder who, together with his wife, donated $25 million to MAGA Inc, a pro-Trump super PAC, and another $25 million to Leading the Future, whose stated mission is to advocate for policies “friendly to the artificial intelligence industry.” Open-weight models aren’t necessarily aligned with the commercial interests of the industry’s largest incumbents.

fhubon Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

More broadly, this is one of the things I dislike about the US political system. When executives or major shareholders can legally make very large political donations while their companies are lobbying on issues that directly affect their businesses, it creates an unavoidable perception problem.

fhubon Advertise in ChatGPT

I've been thinking along these lines for a while.

It isn't just about building an alternate cheaply, it is about convincing people to switch. I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying, just that building the thing is just the beginning of a long journey.