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hapticmonkey

484 karma · joined July 19, 2020

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hapticmonkey··on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
If AI takes over the job market, they’ll have to. There won’t be enough humans with income to pay for things. The machines can crank out exponentially more code each day and maybe us silly humans can find something else to do with our time.
hapticmonkey··on LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'
Introducing the new BIC Ai SmartPen. Every word you write gets sent back to the BIC data center. Give one to every kid in school!
hapticmonkey··on iPhone Duo
As an iPhone Air owner here’s my honest take: Build quality, screen, and performance are all fantastic. No compromises there.

Compromises are battery, no additional camera lenses. Single speaker. Some niche USB limits.

Battery life is fine overall but on days of heavy use/travel it’s noticeable. Single camera lens is ok but I do miss the telephoto on occasion. Single speaker gets made fun of online, but for any serious listening you’re going to use headphones anyway.

Charge speed via USB is lower than the pros and you can’t do video-out over USB.

hapticmonkey··on iPhone Duo
They tried mini iPhones. They didn’t sell well. Unfortunately the market is just not there.
hapticmonkey··on On AI regulation and messaging
My take is that engineers were hypnotised by the technology (which is incredible) and they ignored the downstream social/political/economic factors until it became too obvious. Like moths to a flame.

We saw this play out with the social media era. Incredible technology but it’s now ossified into deteriorating closed platforms mostly filled with algorithmic, ragebait slop surrounded by ads. Fool me once.

hapticmonkey··on Why some people mow a lawn better than others
Reminds me of this Kurt Vonnegut quote:

> “(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

Sometimes efficiency is not the point.

hapticmonkey··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
This is the administration that got close to getting the Supreme Court overturning the pretty clear wording of the 14th amendment. Do you think they care about the 1st?
hapticmonkey··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
But if you just gave customers the video files, they’d get leaked. We can’t have 4K Dolby Vision + Atmos files just floating around for people to pirate!

Oh wait, despite all the DRM we have that anyway. What a huge waste of effort all this protection has been.

hapticmonkey··on Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
Just a reminder to anyone reading that accessibility features are not just for other people but they are for our future selves. Growing old, getting injured etc are things that will happen to us all.

Going to go and give my mum a call now!

hapticmonkey··on The iPhone's Last Stand?
They’ve been working towards this since the introduction of ARKit in iOS back in 2016. Maybe even earlier.

They’ve done a very good job at proving the required tech with stuff like putting LiDAR in iPhones which is key to the Vision Pro….which is their AR interaction model testing ground. They are taking a pretty measured approach.

I just don’t think the physical tech is ready for AR glasses that reach a level of polish that Apple would ship mass market. But all the other pieces are there.

hapticmonkey··on Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era
Maybe there’s potential here for certain accessibility scenarios for users who would benefit. But otherwise, leave the mouse cursor alone.
hapticmonkey··on EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids
Instagram and Facebook both have such features. They’re hidden, though. With Instagram you tap the logo in the top middle of the app and choose “Following”. With Facebook it’s hidden away under the “Feeds” section in the app.

I’d love for there to be an option to have them as default. It’s obvious ($$$) why they won’t do that unless forced to by regulators.

hapticmonkey··on GPT-5.5
The analogy would hold if there were 2 or 3 calculator companies and all your calculations had to be sent to them.

If local models get good enough, I think it’s a very different scenario than engineers all over the world relying on central entities which have their own motives.

hapticmonkey··on YouTube users get option to set their Shorts time limit to zero minutes
It’s so incredibly frustrating the effort required to keep the site/app from funnelling my kids into low effort slop.

I like to use it with my kids (under age of 6) to search and find interesting videos with them. The algorithm combined with the TV apps’s UX makes it such a frustrating experience.

There is so much potential there, but searching for things like space videos inevitably funnels me into AI generated slop and conspiracies. Searching for upcoming movie trailers funnels me into completely fake trailers. It’s clear the platform is an engagement engine first and a knowledge base second.

hapticmonkey··on Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware.

Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the hood and computed locally. Hence their chips. I don’t see what Apple have to gain by building a competitor to what OpenAI has to offer.

hapticmonkey··on Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead
Dolby TrueHD and DTS:X audio tracks (from Bluray) are played as lossless 7.1 PCM.

Only Dolby Atmos from WEB-DLs will play, and you need to use a supported player (like Infuse or VidHub).

It’s a tvOS limitation.

hapticmonkey··on Cursor 3
As these products mature people are going to see more of this stuff. These are the contours of the market. The technology is incredible but it’s still subservient to the economics of building products.

It’s the “why can’t Facebook just show me a chronological feed of people I follow”. Because it’s not in their interests to do so.

hapticmonkey··on Show HN: Dull – Instagram Without Reels, YouTube Without Shorts (iOS)
I uninstalled the app and use a bookmark to https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following

It’s an ad-free chronological feed of posts only from accounts I follow.

hapticmonkey··on The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
I don’t think this is limited to coding. We’ll eventually see it across all products and services. It’s just a matter of how much customers are willing to accept.
hapticmonkey··on ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms
Rooftop solar is incredibly popular here in Australia. I think it’s something like 33% of houses have it. We also have a great climate for it.

I have solar on my house and am seeing around 50% self sufficiency overall. Of course with this much saturation, the rate you get paid for feeding back to the grid is quickly dropping to zero. So self use is the game now.

The problem is now shifting to home batteries and storage. Because peak power household use times are in the evening when the sun is not shining.

hapticmonkey··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
They had Unreal Tournament 4 in development around 2018 but it never gained much traction in the pre-alpha phase. Once Fortnite blew up they seemed to just focus on that and their app store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3botRkqnwk

hapticmonkey··on Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
I’m a UX designer not a coder, but this is so bizarre to me because shouldn’t every project be doing something novel? Otherwise why does it exist? If this industry is so full of people independently writing the same stuff that AI can replicate it…then it was a vast misallocation of resources to begin with.
hapticmonkey··on Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma
Depends what you use Kodi for. If it’s for accessing media files on a network drive, Infuse is the “gold standard” media player for the AppleTV.

It’s not free, though. But it’s far more stable and nicer to use than Kodi ever was in my experience. I ran Kodi for my home theatre for years but switched to AppleTV+Infuse and never looked back.

For free (and open source!) options you can use the Swiftfin tvOS app and a Jellyfin media server.

hapticmonkey··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
> I fail to see what value these glasses bring that a smartphone with a camera can't do already ?

Stop thinking like an end user and think like a Meta shareholder.

Meta don't own smartphone hardware or operating systems. Apple and Android locked that market up. But if they can create a new market and own that, then imagine all the data they can harvest!

hapticmonkey··on Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw
Did people learn nothing from the rise, stall, and now fall of social networks?

Yes, AI can do some incredible things. But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies. Running at a loss. A reality check is coming.

It’s not a technology problem. It’s an economic problem. People are too busy looking at the tech to notice.

hapticmonkey··on Attention Media ≠ Social Networks
Annoyingly I can not get it to work on mobile (iOS Safari). Loading the url cause the page to refresh and take me to the main page.
hapticmonkey··on A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
Then Google can copy it with a series of a dozen product launches and closures over the next decade.

Google BT Chat. Android B Chat. Google Relay.

And Microsoft can get on board, too. With Microsoft Teams Decentralised For School and Work.

hapticmonkey··on 2025: The Year in LLMs
It’s not the technology I’m dismissive about. It’s the economics.

25 years ago I was optimistic about the internet, web sites, video streaming, online social systems. All of that. Look at what we have now. It was a fun ride until it all ended up “enshitified”. And it will happen to LLMs, too. Fool me once.

Some developer tools might survive in a useful state on subscriptions. But soon enough the whole A.I. economy will centralise into 2 or 3 major players extracting more and more revenue over time until everyone is sick of them. In fact, this process seems to be happening at a pretty high speed.

Once the users are captured, they’ll orient the ad-spend market around themselves. And then they’ll start taking advantage of the advertisers.

I really hope it doesn’t turn out this way. But it’s hard to be optimistic.

hapticmonkey··on Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones
It’s the third stage in the process. First the platform is good to users. Then it’s bad to users but good to business customers. Third, and finally, it’s bad to both users and business customers. Now it’s only the shareholders that are winning.
hapticmonkey··on TurboDiffusion: 100–200× Acceleration for Video Diffusion Models
> We further urge the machine learning community to act proactively by establishing robust design guidelines, collaborating with public health experts, and supporting targeted policy measures to ensure responsible and ethical deployment

We’ve seen this play out before, when social media first came to prominence. I’m too old and cynical to believe anything will happen. But I really don’t know what to do about it at a person level. Even if I refuse to engage in this content, and am able to identify it, and keep my family away from it…it feels like a critical mass of people in my community/city/country are going to be engaging with it. It feels hopeless.

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