Hacker News Reader

rubyfanon Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

But what’s the crime? The thing got out of its poorly secured cage and caused what damage? Imagine instead of an agent it was a dog or a chimpanzee that got into the neighbor’s yard and the particular neighbor isn’t even pissed about it.

rubyfanon Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

But what do you honestly expect would happen? It’s “an accident” with no actual damages.

rubyfanon Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

Being a poorly equipped victim still isn’t a crime thankfully.

It may or may not be a crime and typically the damaged party is pressing the charges. One would argue there is no actual damage here.

rubyfanon Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.

rubyfanon It's getting harder to focus every day

The VAST thing speaks to me. I am capable of deep focus work but often am subject to constant interruption and multiple concurrent urgent demands. During a work week I get a lot done but often feel pulled in a lot of directions like I imagine ADHD might feel like.

During the weekends when I am not occupied with a task I often fall asleep. This happens on the first day or two of vacation also. After a few days my brain acclimates to the pace.

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

It’s theft because a lot of rich people have money on the line.

rubyfanon OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened

I can’t help but feel all warm and fuzzy with my head in the sand and getting a shout out in TFA for calling it marketing.

We don’t currently and probably won’t ever fully understand the conditions that precipitated these events. That and the timing of this event is going to make it look suspicious to a lot of people.

The truth of how it happened doesn’t matter. The attention around this will be used to create the kind of fear marketing that generates enterprise sales. Maybe more importantly it will also be used to aggrandize the national security and financial system threats to effect US government action in a way that benefits domestic closed frontier labs. This is an area already starting to get politically polarized, expect further developments here.

rubyfanon Advertise in ChatGPT

/ot Hamburger menu at the bottom right is pretty nice too. Haven’t seen it there before but seems like a very user friendly choice for its placement.

rubyfanon OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation

I would attribute it to profit motive instead of either stupidity or malice.

rubyfanon OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation

This is marketing+. They will look for policy action here to try to capture tax payer dollars.

rubyfanon Primate 0.40: Route pages, store enums, async schemas and events

I don’t understand what is the primary innovation over other frameworks. In passing it looks like Express 10 years ago but maybe with some modernization and flexibility to leverage components from various other frameworks.

rubyfanon Caffeine and Cardiovascular Disease: AHA Scientific Statement

Why can’t it be both?

rubyfanon REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500

I love the concept here. The site and preannounce feels a little gimmicky. It’s definitely of the time but kind of hard to commit to without more detail. Like $25 isn’t a lot of money to reserve a real truck but seems like a lot for a maybe we’ll bring a real product to market.

rubyfanon Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]

Translator services usually get paid because they offer an accreditation or certification that the humans doing the translation are trained and are not randos / computers. I could imagine these services becoming marginally more efficient but no dramatically improving profits.

rubyfanon Berkshire's $397B Bet Against an Overheated Market

I think the market is discounting some of the AI driven growth or maybe pricing in the likelihood of a correction. Look at some of the blow out earnings recently where the market shrugs it off. To your point, many non-AI companies are now driven by AI spend that seems unlikely to be durable.

I’m not a pro here but to me it would seem like an AI crash would hit certain companies really hard (SpaceX, Oracle, NVDA, etc), most other might take a small correction to reset AI driven gains, and potentially some deflation.

If the AI game ends then suddenly there is a return to free cash flow from hyperscalers, some goods and utilities cost less and a lot of investment dollars need a place to eventually go.

You could see a scenario where the overall market keeps chugging and the AI crash ends up being a rotation.

rubyfanon Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

Lots of people I work with seem to use Claude for things they should be learning or doing themselves. Stuff that really isn’t hard and if they took the time to learn themselves then they would be better at their job and more valuable.

Instead they are telling me that literally any other human could do their job and their only value is prompting a chat bot.

The thing is they aren’t even accelerating outcomes. Since they can’t be bothered to learn they pump out stuff that looks good but the detail that matters is trash and requires someone else to actually finish to an acceptable standard.

rubyfanon Show HN: Docx-CLI: agents read/edit Word docs using 1/2 the time and tokens

Sadly I have spent lots of time with ooxml and pdf and my experience suggests there really aren’t reliable means for dealing with seemingly simple changes.

rubyfanon Show HN: Docx-CLI: agents read/edit Word docs using 1/2 the time and tokens

I haven’t looked under the hood here but to make simple text replacement via command line is an LLM even required? A human driven command line tool to do basic substitution on batches of files reliably would be amazing.

rubyfanon GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

In these examples cost of the solution does not generally scale with the use of the solution in the same way we see token use. In the case of LLMs the cost of use scales very differently than seat licensing.

Many corporations have found they have a new cost center drawing tens of millions or more with little direct evidence of productivity gain. Corporations are probably best positioned to either switch providers, leverage router solutions or at worst use the fact that they could to drive prices down from the proprietary providers.

rubyfanon Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers

This could be a prompt for cards against humanity… Zuckerberg’s Increasingly Bizarre _____

rubyfanon Wicklow hotel cancels 'secretive' Peter Thiel group conference

This is likely more an invite list than a membership list. Not defending it. But it's more like being a high profile, influential or powerful person and being invited to an exclusive conference than it is being a member of SPECTRE.

rubyfanon Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

I’m not a historian but I think FCKEditor and TinyMCE predated contenteditable. These were solutions wrapping textarea back in the day if my memory serves me.

rubyfanon Virginia bans sale of precise geolocation data

I think the practice of tying the use of one product to coerce the loss of rights of your private data has some comparables (noted below).

The law seems to recognize that companies coercing someone to give up money using tie-ins may be illegal but is not yet recognizing data as a monetary equivalent. Because it’s not money it’s not regulated.

Isn’t it time that our data be treated as the exchange of value that it is? And the coercion should be something we are protected against?

1. abuse of monopoly power in tie-in sales.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

2. Freebie marketing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor-and-blades_model

3. RESPA

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/real-estate-settlement-...

rubyfanon Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

> They would have to refund everyone for every purchase in the long run.

That is the minimum they should do. At best they should offer the movie collections for free through competitors.

rubyfanon From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

Yes, Meta focusing on this type of research does set off alarm bells for me. I suspect this isn’t about some altruistic intention to help people with disabilities but something a little more surveillance oriented.

rubyfanon AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

Next time it’ll be different though

rubyfanon Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

I think you hit the nail on the head. In a winner take most society why would you expect the masses to embrace a technology that makes them losers?

rubyfanon Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

That’s why it’s so perplexing as a consumer when AI gets pushed so hard as if it’s a feature. Consumers don’t care what code your devs use, what cloud platform you deploy on, so why should they care about AI in your product? AI is not a feature; features are features tell me about those.

rubyfanon Arithmetic Without Numbers – How LLMs Do Math

Why does every exhibit made with AI look the same?

rubyfanon DoD Officially Drops 180 Faiths from Military's Recognized Religion List

This was true 20 years ago (not sure about now). As an atheist/agnostic in basic training I used to try different church services to get away from the barracks on Sundays. If you didn’t you were definitely assigned some cleaning detail instead of having down time. At the time it didn’t come across as discrimination and felt more like a way to keep control. At various times when control was lax bad stuff happened, e.g. fighting, sex, awol, etc. In a new light this does seem like it has a disparate impact.