Hacker News Reader

lepuson Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant

Being aware of what the basic strategy is with one of their most high profile products would have worked better.

lepuson AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

It's a very comparable game of cat and mouse to spam email filtering. People also tried to claim that spam was over because for a time companies like Google cared enough to invest a lot in preventing as much as possible from getting through. If you've noticed in recent years the motivation to keep up that level of filtering has greatly diminished.

Whether model poisoning becomes a bigger issue depends on the incentives for companies to keep fighting it. For now in comparison to attackers the incentives and resources needed to defend against model poisoning are huge so it's just temporary setbacks. Will that unevenness in their favor always be the case?

lepuson The AI valuation bubble is now getting silly

"This time is different"

lepuson Seattle, Tech Boomtown, Grapples with a Future of Fewer Tech Jobs

If you live in a tech growth region get your truck driver, construction, bar tender friends or neighbors to be truly honest with you about how they view "tech guys" and the impacts of massive tech growth on their cities and the impacts on their personal quality of life and you'll learn a lot about how people feel, especially if they're renters.

lepuson A modest proposal for destigmatizing America's favorite bad decisions

Their bitter sarcasm won't stop programs like this for alcoholics from finding degrees of success https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ylsw5e8d5g

lepuson Carlos Slim cancels his collaboration with Elon Musk's Starlink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_erasure

lepuson Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

Employees have and will continue to take Amazon to court over issues like this and go completely under the radar. The case would also highly likely be settled out of court to avoid this exact issue because they don't want it in the papers either. For an individual doing a (for Amazon) low stakes lawsuit you're highly sensationalizing the situation.

lepuson Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

Which record that most employers would check includes lawsuits against former employers?

lepuson Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

If you have a problem with too many furry posts I have bad news for you about Bluesky

lepuson Taiwan is heading toward an energy crunch?

One of those "purely political reasons" being the obvious and real risks involved with having nuclear power plants in an area known for large earthquakes which was made especially real in people's minds after Fukushima ( further down in the same page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Taiwan#Post-F... )

A lot of people go all in on increasing dietary fiber and then experience gut issues and think it must be the plants when they didn't work into it slowly enough. It's like going to the gym and and feeling sore all over all the time or even getting injured and then concluding that going to the gym is bad when no one told you that you should start easy. In my opinion there's harm in how people fail to communicate how to get started on plant based diets when they miss important issues like this that can permanently put people off from it.

lepuson The Promise of 5-MeO-DMT

Psychedelics aren't to be taken lightly and should never be first line treatment in my opinion. They can pull down your defense mechanisms, some of which can be very strong, and if you're not ready for it then it can definitely leave you worse off. That doesn't mean they don't have value in a carefully controlled set/setting and dose. Accepted treatments like ECT can absolutely also leave you worse off but in the right people the risk is worth the potential payoff for both.

lepuson Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

As a millennial I think voice calls sometimes are great. It obviously doesn't always work with big orgs like Facebook, but because so many people are now so afraid of or annoyed by just talking to a real person for a few minutes it's become a real power move to sometimes just go through the minor effort to make a call and expect some sort of immediacy to get things moving quickly. Email or text can be easily ignored and punted off (ex "whoops I didn't see it"), and increases the odds of miscommunication or having things be dragged out going back and forth.

lepuson Kubernetes v1.30: Uwubernetes

https://bsky.app/profile/kat.lol/post/3kqewdlatik27

>yes it's called uwubernetes, yes i did it to pander to terminally online furries and to make rich old white guys have to say uwu. yw

lepuson T-Mobile employees across the country receive cash offers to illegally swap SIMs

Things are pretty stable because Google Voice has barely changed in the past decade, but when things do go wrong there's no one around to look into it.

There was a time many years ago when Google Voice would intermittently fail to ring or even forward calls to another number when I tried that, and then give no indication that a call was ever made to your number that you missed (I verified it by asking when people I knew called me and said I never got back to them), which is pretty bad when you're expecting to receive important calls sometimes. This went on for months. I received bare minimum support which didn't even come close to helping the issue even though my issue was voted to the top of the support boards because many other people were having the same issue at the time. I'm glad you personally haven't had an issue but you should be prepared to have one at some point and get essentially no help.

lepuson SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

There are other concerns that need to be addressed where a hack wouldn't help:

>The transportation body says the train control system was built to last for just 20 to 25 years, meaning it surpassed its expected lifetime in 2023. In 2020, the Muni Reliability Working Group, said to be composed of local and national transit experts, recommended replacing the transit control system within five to seven years. [...] "We have to maintain programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the '90s in order to keep running our current system, so we have a technical debt that stretches back many decades," Tumlin told San Francisco's KQED in February 2023.

lepuson Surge Pricing Is Coming to More Menus Near You

If they called it something along the lines of an off hours discount that's what the optics would be. Clearly the fact that people are talking about this in a generally negative way shows that they aren't seeing it as getting a bargain.

lepuson Surge Pricing Is Coming to More Menus Near You

The optics to the average person are "I'm getting ripped off right after prices already went up way too much with inflation". What you're talking about is the reality.

lepuson What is trauma? The author of "The Body Keeps the Score" explains [video]

For now it's the term people have adopted to describe a wide range of negative impactful experiences. Usually there's something deeper and older going on in someone when a seemingly minor event causes feelings of "trauma", but sometimes the extreme results of opening that can of worms in someone can be nearly as devastating. The human experience is messy and ultimately hard to keep confined in rigid definitions, but we keep trying.

lepuson You are what you love

My blue collar friends aren't passionate about their jobs at all - it's long hours, physically unhealthy, and bad conditions/pay. But at least what they do is real and meaningful without having to craft a weird narrative for themselves about how passionate their life is making better buttons and faster queries.

lepuson You are what you love

Their only reference point is other tech workers. Maybe they should get out of their social bubble and make some blue collar friends to figure this out.

lepuson How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

That works sometimes, but you could still get screwed if that out of pocket care is wildly expensive. A friend of mine needed a drug that costs about $85k total but was the only effective treatment at the time, and Kaiser doctors told him they wouldn't prescribe it until his condition started giving him organ failure(!), so he had to switch insurance to get it and luckily the timing worked out.

lepuson FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines

My sleep apnea was already extremely mild to the point where a sleep doctor told me I could just sleep on my side and not experience it, but I appreciate the concern.

lepuson FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines

That's great! I didn't want to give the impression that I had the one and only solution to everyone, so what matters is whatever works for you.

lepuson FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines

Watching the way they handled this recall so poorly got me to do whatever it took to reduce my snoring and mild sleep apnea down to almost nothing (mouth/throat/tongue exercises did the most followed by head positioning). The stories of people who relied on their CPAP caught up in it were heartbreaking and nerve wracking.

Edit: I used a combination of the Snore Gym app and Vik Veer's videos on Youtube. After a couple months my snoring became barely audible, but it doesn't always work for everyone. I was tilting my head down at night which blocked off my throat somewhat, so I lifted my head up higher with a bigger pillow.

lepuson California Bill Wants to Mandate Electronic 'Speed Limiters' in Cars

You can just "temporarily" disable the system every time you start the car like auto start-stop and still be in full compliance as it's currently written. Even for people who want this mandated this bill is atrociously written.

lepuson The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

If business leaders actually cared about "inequality" they would slash their own compensation down closer to the people who work for them.

lepuson Amazon allegedly resells damaged books

It's implied that he gets paid 0 times for either the return or the resold book. There's more discussion on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/joabaldwin.com/post/3khrp64a5pw22

lepuson Amazon allegedly resells damaged books

> Of note: if a customer orders a copy from Amazon, and a damaged, returned book is shipped to them instead, no new KDP printing orders kick in. This means I don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed.

lepuson Shoplifting and frustrated customers plague self-checkout

If the stores you're buying from have most of their produce in packaging then you're buying at best average quality produce in the first place.