mannanj

Does this beat self-stewarding my data, and placing relevant protections around my data instead.

Then the UI's, the "Apps", are just ephemeral instances over my live data whose permission I am consistently setting or reviewing.

I feel like that more accurately represents a "person" behind the data: when I am producing, creating and expressing in real life, I do not ask some intermediary 3rd-party for permission to access my voice and my output. I just produce and let whatever gets created be made there in the physical environment or in someone's head. Today's apps (edit: & cloudflare's direction here) feel more like "The moment I express or generate something, I lease it's output from someone else and ask for their permission to access my output".

Ah. I understand now. Thank you for clarifying.

And my bad too for assuming bad faith there and/or projecting onto you.

I don’t want to believe it’s true that you compromise privacy by registering a vehicle under your name, particularly in regards to flock. I admit you could be right, but I want to investigate this more. Do you think it’s possible there could be car insurance agencies that offer you privacy protection of some sort or that there’s another way to keep yourself private?

Some ideas I have: - get a cheaper vehicle and get it insurance coverage from the company or someone else - get yourself insurance for another car, and get the coverage for Liability ie to protect the other persons car if you hit someone else and don’t worry about your own car. For example; a $5k car pays for itself after 1-2 years of no significant claims and now you have what your insurance would have offered for your car anyway. (“The cost of privacy”.) - I am not convinced your insurance company would data sharing with flock or its subsidiaries if they only have your vin. What are your data sources for this?

Edit: as a legitimate need; perhaps the market will reveal itself large enough to surface an insurance company that offers privacy protection and refuses flock data sharing. However just because this could true that insurance companies would share with flock today, doesn’t mean it is.

So you called my advice bad. Then ignored my questions before retreating. You stated something as thought it were fact earlier (ownership) and then didn’t back it up.

How can you own something that is owned by another company?

Or said another way, do you have any sound basis to say you are on the hook to register property in New York (you linked to a New York statue) that you do not own. Or is it the LLC’s responsibility. Genuinely curious as every state is a bit different.

Is this where with in conjunction with Jevon's paradox, we are AI usage to exponentially skyrocket?

Same problem for me for sending emails, outreach, and other behaviors that signal human identity but it turns out to be an AI post. The area with grace for me is how much effort a human spent on composing the message - I wouldn't expect a message a human wrote >50% of and had an AI help grammar check, proof read and edit need an AI disclosure. But otherwise, if the identity is >50% have an AI disclose it.

This is how I'd like for human-on-behalf-of-human outreach to work too, i.e. if my human secretary sends a message under my identity and via my email client, I'd expect it to be under their name not mine.

This points out some long standing issues with lack of accountability and deception by humans through our time. Think: humans have been doing these things:

- human have other humans impersonate them and send messages on their behalf (i.e. via secretary, receptionist, email, a VA, via social media via a social media manager)

- friends or family answering your letters if your a celebrity

Those behaviors, deceptive and lies, are insults to you at the expense of the gain of the liar. We haven't held them to accountability or a standard of respect before AI, and so we are facing the same challenges we did before AI - we just have more humans doing the same thing with AI as the <insert old human role here>. Why have we been unable to hold them accountable to the deception before - lack if transparency, lack of power to hold accountability to the behavior?

Location: Alexandria, VA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Python, FastAPI, Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Cloudflare, agentic AI (Claude, Claude Code, MCP servers, agent harnesses, RAG)

Résumé/CV: https://mannan.is | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mannanjavid/

Email: hello@mannan.is

10+ years across fintech, healthcare, and national security, most recently Principal Engineer at Capital One (shipped features for 3M+ daily users, delivered a revenue-generating product in two months with a skeleton crew). This past year I've been founding Spirit & Hammer, consulting & shipping AI products end-to-end: built the agent harness for a security startup, released Sun Signal (https://sunsignal.app) for circadian timing, and SkillGuard (https://skillguard.sh) to protect agent skills and harness environments from malicious injection.

I have a Mannan MCP server: https://mcp.mannanteam.workers.dev

Looking for senior/staff product or AI engineering roles. Full-time, part-time or contract.

what happens when you mix world wars, potential food and water shortages, and a rising unrest with the local governments? (edit: and a massive inequality in resource distribution). (edit 2: and a drop in jobs).

Any historical precedent for this all occurring together with technological hype/fast growth?

Meta recently added a filter as a requirement for posts on Facebook. if it was ai generated, you are required to check off a box for that on your posts.

I've been asking for that for some time.

Am I hearing this right:

- people will use AI bad

- because people will use AI bad, stop building it

So what's your argument or point here?

I am arguing that a Montana registration, with registration under an LLC and not you, with insurance even where the vehicle's vin is tied to your name, as a driver of the vehicle (not owner), is still more privacy protection and better for you in reference to Flock privacy-invading-cameras than an in-state registration where it's directly registered under you.

Seems your whole post may fall under my original "Straw Man" camp that I was referring to. edit: And the whole "bad actors lie" comment feels to me like a bad faith, Ad hominem style statement that attacks credibility rather than substance.

You are mistaking ownership and falsifying who owns the vehicle. Do you understand how ownership is defined, legally? How can you simultaneously own a vehicle, and the LLC too?

If the LLC owns the vehicle, you do not.

Sure. Insurance isn't asking for your vehicle registration though, and is not even getting your license plate. You are not being tracked by flock cameras and your license plate linked to your identity through your insurance registration.

You are though, through your state registration at the DMV.

Unless, of course, you have Montana registrations.

The LLC’s ownership and Montana registration are not inherently tax evasion.

The appropriate party can pay California or New York use tax arising from the vehicle’s in-state use. Whether Montana registration may legally remain or California requires a registration from you for a vehicle you do not own is a separate question. Generally, the LLC registers it. Since this vehicle has had its use tax already paid, the tax evasion argument won't apply.

The LLC’s ownership and Montana registration are not inherently tax evasion.

The appropriate party can pay California or New York use tax arising from the vehicle’s in-state use. Whether Montana registration may legally remain or California requires a registration from you for a vehicle you do not own is a separate question. Generally, the LLC registers it. Since this vehicle has had its use tax already paid, the tax evasion argument won't apply.

Now is vehicle registration evasion a real thing or something you made up to conflate your fear mongering with legality?

dropping here, again:

- Montana vehicle registrations give you privacy

- are not tax evasion, those straw mans and ad hominems are to scare you into giving away your privacy protections

- you can pay use tax still (consult a professional, I'm no attorney)

That will speak louder to your representatives who are voting in these cameras which violate your privacy.

BTW officials in California, Texas have a history of selling your persona info tied to your vehicle registrations to 3rd policies and have been fined before. Trust them to have changed? Hah.

I remember the old hacker news though having more "we built xyz" posts and less any "War, news, flee from death" type of things and even AI dystopian-themed things (regardless of AI not being out then, we had more focus on building products).

edit: maybe politics isn't what I really want out of hacker news. I think what I mean is I want less non-building related posts.

What's the necessary thing here that people need to "learn" to prevent the hypothetical AI damage scenario you are talking about?

I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that.

Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do.

I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of using AI to do so. People in religious study or having other pursuits, surviving at a time when this book came out, at least some of them, could very likely be thinking the same. It feels disingenuous to emphasize the motivation as "knowing things without having to learn them"

Wondering when did political discourse become so prevalent in hacker news? I have now become accustomed to it being normal, but I remember the hacker news of 10 years was not like this.

Why has this become so normal? I miss the days where this was focused on technology and, well, hacking.

Can we stop engaging this political commentary please.

I think they already are.

If I was in a power position, I could theoretically channel this water into my own private reservoirs and locations like private land, bunkers, etc to weather a disruption, and blame Iran and it would be really hard to validate.

I mean if I was in a power position I would have also disrupted those in positions who would be validating me, made journalism much harder and have algorithms with LLM-enhanced astroturf accounts running to label any questioning of the official narrative as conspiratorial or tin-foil hat.

I would probably be on sites like this downvoting people who said things like this. Yes. That's how I would do it. edit: Oh I might even consider channeling that water to my data center friends!

I often buy content to support the creators, then download it on torrent sites because the UI and experience is better. I can use whatever player I want, modify the screen size more and have no branding bloat (Amazon Prime! Youtube! Netflix! etc) and have a better, more focused, and even off-line friendly experience.

It gets deleted, I move on with life.

But man the experiences in branded players really sucks, and I wish it were better.

I think making noise is cheaper than reducing it.

And I think this is also a problem at the habit/behavior level for people. Most people don't want to know how to set proper boundaries with people and technology and articulate what they want. Once you do that at least you can articulate what you want to come in at you or not.

Without that you get stuck with a weird one-size-fits-all policy which definitely doesn't fit for me at least.

I'm actually not referring to any treatments at all. There's no evidence to suggest that anything I said exists, or works, and it causes vaccine hesitancy so I think that I may be killing people and taking lives by even talking about it.

This is a real likeness of a reply I received during COVID when I shared my vaccinated parents used treatments like Ivermectin to manage COVID.

I can tell you, maybe look into frequency therapies & managing what frequencies are around you, look at inflammation reduction activities, and try cleansing like diets. I remember hearing also, with no evidence to support this conclusion of course, as I am not making any claim to remedy or cure any disease nor am I an FDA licensed practitioner, that classes of probiotics and bacteria and connected substances work great too. Edit: there's no evidence to suggest that 10 years of personal obsession and experience reversing my own diabetes (said to be incurable) and working with cutting edge scientists, doctors and researchers makes me qualified to make any sort of claim about this. I am not really certain what qualifies as evidence though, maybe you can help me understand who decides that.

Well yes it exists, however it's too high friction IMO for me to use - and I'm already a software guy. And I mean the data at the application level too - it wouldn't be practical for me to have to keep removing apps and data since they don't integrate with this at an OS level and with your proposal we would have to manually sync/remove data from S3.

Or I suppose we would program something to make this. Just saying, doesn't exist today it seems but would be valuable for us.

If you can tolerate an older phone by 2 or 3 generations, a cost-benefit analysis reveals its cheaper still to go used and buy that class on a Facebook marketplace like platform and then repeat that (selling or even keeping your old phone) when you're ready to upgrade again.

This is what I personally do. I haven't upgraded my iPhone 12 yet and when I do, I'll likely go like an iPhone at base settings thats 2-3 generations older than present then.

If only these phones could have a feature where you can enter a mode to encrypt segments of data with different encryption keys, all able to be unlocked still by one single master encryption key that you could also enter at any time.

Then when in travel, and about to pass a border, you enter that selective mode. You can enter a different password as the proxy to unlock the phone in this bare minimal data mode. The agents can access it, etc but wont have all the data. That data shouldn't even be visible in the OS, and if they try to copy the hard drive they will get encrypted data in the other blocks.

You still legally comply with orders and unlock the phone but the other partitions don't unlock/decrypt unless you specifically unlock them.

I'd heard in another article around this, that in this particular situation they had said it was a routine border search. Not even something criminal, just routine procedure. Then that under neath all that they did in fact suspect something criminal and were using the standard stop as a pretext for criminal investigation is the constitutional violation.

I wonder: Could your data be more secure if you didn't give its custody to a company like Google? i.e. is there actually a sound basis that an alternative like taking control of your data and securing it yourself, would be more secure that the "banks exist to protect you" type of fear-mongered custodian idea against the self-ownership of things?

There's non-vaccine treatments and holistic therapies that work great for HIV too. Though if you talk about this you get labeled woo or an enemy to science. If people could make more money off those alternatives though I think it would be more acceptable to discuss.