Hacker News Reader

Also Vercel:

https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models/gemini-omni-1.2-flash

If you're using any sort of router middle-man new models are usually easy to try.

Yeah, this feels like one of those ‘explainers’ that feel like they are great to someone who already knows how the system works, but don’t actually work for newbies because they tacitly assume knowledge of the shape of the system that seems ‘obvious’ to someone steeped in it.

jrmgon Images 2.6

It looks like the images in there are 'based' on the "hot springs symbol" - a Japanese map symbol encoded into Unicode that seems to have become synonymous with "piping hot bread" in the West!

https://emojipedia.org/hot-springs

jrmgon My Favourite Laptop

What OS are you running on it?

jrmgon My Favourite Laptop

Despite all the sound and fury online, Golden Gate will also run just fine on the M1. They're barely less powerful than the current Neo - and usually have more RAM.

These laptops have a lot of life in them yet.

jrmgon AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture

Actually, yes! Books are great - although building code has changed a surprising amount in the last 10 or 15 years.

jrmgon AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture

I’m building a shed at the moment, and it’s become basically impossible to find reliable advice on tools or techniques by searching the web. It’s all just slop feeding back on itself now, unless you are lucky enough to find a forum post from before, say, 2023.

For example, try searching about what sort of nails you should be using to attach cedar lap siding.

On Google, you might find a few good results, but you’ll really need to scrutinize them to make sure they’re reliable. Most are slop on the ‘blogs’ of siding and roofing contractors.

On DDG, it’s even worse. Usually nailerguy.com ranks highly - it seems to be completely AI generated, complete with contradictions and impossible pictures. And, often, nailicy.com, a (seriously) nail salon in New Hampshire that I’m sure is confused about why all their web traffic isn’t translating into clients.

YouTube is about the only ‘reliable’ source for recent advice.

jrmgon America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments

That the process is sharply biased towards negativity is a cogent criticism.

Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.

It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.

With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability

This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?

jrmgon Everyone Has Email. Nobody Uses It Right

“All official things come through email — documents, confirmations, receipts, that thing you need to prove you actually paid for something three years ago.”

…although Amazon recently put an end to that…

jrmgon Everyone Has Email. Nobody Uses It Right

The headline is annoyingly clickbaitey, but the article actually contains pretty good advice.

jrmgon A tiny Pacific country rolls out universal basic income

What is “AI revenue” here?

jrmgon HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

This is also what we lost in the field of music, with the switch from radio to streaming.

With radio, you used to have to sometimes sit through music you didn’t like so much, with the upside that you often discovered things you didn’t know you liked.

jrmgon Enlightenment 0.28 Released with Many Improvements

In the article: “Enlightenment 0.28 continues to boast both X11 and Wayland support”

jrmgon Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees

It always astounds me that we’re using hard-coded device trees descriptions _in the kernel_ for ARM based computers. One for each board!

Every other desktop platform has had self-describing hardware with loadable drivers for 30 years now.

Why is it like this?

jrmgon Ten days later, Git on macOS still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates

It’s extremely common to see other Macs pop up in the ‘network’ panel in Finder in the independent coffee shops around me. I imagine they’re just signing up for a business plan and using the routers the ISP gives them with a custom SSID and password.

jrmgon Is my data used for model training?

I assumed that what they’re ’collecting’ there is at most stats on how much you like the product. Especially because, in my experience, if you say ‘good’ the next question is one that explicitly asks whether you permit Anthropic to analyze the session.

jrmgon I will no longer upload to NEW

You said that the basis for your opinion was “oh damn, I would not want to be at the receiving end of this”. I used to have that reaction all the time too. But I no longer, on the whole, do.

I thought this was the crux of your argument. What did I miss?

jrmgon I will no longer upload to NEW

I used to think this way too, and I believe myself to have high standards about this kind of thing.

But with the very latest models (like, Opus 5.5 class and up), I am now of the opinion that the output, in non-creative situations like code review and most software development, is fine. Great, even. Better than the reviews a lot of humans generate.

Honestly, if you’re at all open minded about this, get a $20 Claude Pro subscription for a month (they are easy to cancel) and ask Claude Code with Opus 5.5 to review your codebase or a PR or two. I was very (pleasantly? unpleasantly?) surprised.

I have complex emotions about this (‘sad’ on balance I think - although it’s definitely not all simply in that direction), but I can’t deny it to myself.

I still bristle at reading articles and even documentation that’s not just ‘reference’ documentation written by it - and even that can get a bit weird and circuitous. But for review and coding? It’s great.

jrmgon New iPad mini

It’s definitely not true even now. Even a moderately fast finger drag will lag noticeably - usually by at least a frame in even very carefully tuned situations. It’s just physics. If you aren’t noticing it, you’re just used to it.

Try rapidly dragging up and down to scroll a web page.

For some people, it’s motion sickness inducing of it gets too laggy

jrmgon New iPad mini

I know you’re being sarcastic with that first line, but touch latency is even more noticeable than mouse latency.

Does the page look and feel glued to your finger as you scroll?

jrmgon F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS

People regularly blow through all their Claude Pro tokens every week. It’s relatively easy to do.

jrmgon Root shell on Samsung TV

I don't think I'm the one being overly credulous here.

None of the assertions you made are backed by this 'research' which as far as I can see only shows that the TV is capable of detecting dog barks and baby cries.

You're just presuming that because the TV is capable of sensing these things (which Samsung advertises - links at end) this data is being collected and sent to Samsung - and then sold on.

So, some questions:

Is information about every time your baby cries or dog barks even valuable enough that this is plausible?

Is there any evidence that this is actually being sent over a network - for purposes other than the features they advertise?

Is there evidence that these are even being monitored if the dog bark or baby cry feature is not turned on?

Shouldn't the burden of showing things like this be on the people making the sensational accusations?

I could come up with more, but I think that these are enough. I'd love (well, hate, because I don't want it to be true) to see some actual proof of any of this.

https://www.samsung.com/us/smartthings/experience-smartthing... https://www.samsung.com/ie/smartthings/care-for-your-pet/

jrmgon The U.S. Power Grid

What I thought this would be:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/five_minutes

(Not a comment on the quality of the submission - it's also fascinating).

jrmgon Root shell on Samsung TV

I don't get why people think it would be worth all this effort for Samsung to nefariously work out not only if you have a dog and/or a baby, but exactly when they make noise. Like, sure, that would be a gross invasion of privacy if they were doing it - but what's the business reason for putting all this effort into it?

I can almost see the "they're using it for advertising" or "they're selling information about whether you have a dog or a baby, of course!", but notifying every time they make noise?

There's obviously more to this story than these sensational knee-jerk reactions assume. They're just so non-curious for a supposed 'investigation'.

jrmgon FreeDNS

I agree with you - but this project also offers pay-for services.

https://freedns.afraid.org/pricing/

[Edit: actually, I think I misread your comment! I guess this is extra context for the people arguing that expecting some sort of contingency planning is unfair].

jrmgon FreeDNS

An answer to "what happens if the administrator of this dies?" doesn't require feel-good words to answer clearly.

jrmgon Run full iOS 16.5 firmware on Android Devices

This is just the ‘full self driving’ sense of ‘running the full firmware’.

jrmgon Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans

output that aims for median responses by design

And also has been trained or system-prompted out of any *actual controversial opinions. They’ve all got to have been set, up at many levels, to not insult the people using them, right?

jrmgon Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans

The norm (I think?) where I am is lock it if you’re out, and at night.

If and when you open it during the day, leave it unlocked (and perhaps open if it’s a nice day) until one of those two things happen.

jrmgon Run full iOS 16.5 firmware on Android Devices

It has an, uh, interesting funding model: “$HACKIOS ON BNB CHAIN The project has its own community token, live on flap.sh. Each trade carries a 1% fee that supports the team and funds development.”