Hacker News Reader

ryeightson Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates

This is misleading. In order to read traffic you would need to swap out the end-entity TLS certs being used. Phones and browsers (at a minimum) enforce certificate transparency, so connections would fail.

ryeightson SynthID Detector

Actually… (tw: bitter lesson)

https://www.vals.ai/blogs/ai-detection-benchmark

ryeightson Device detection and occupancy monitoring for Airbnb hosts

We have to err on the side of humanity. Wear and tear and some bending of rules is part of the human condition and should be considered the cost of doing business in the STR space. I believe increasing neurosis, anxiety, and social dysfunction can be explained by increasing systemization, surveillance and rigidity in the world.

ryeightson Device detection and occupancy monitoring for Airbnb hosts

This is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong in modern technological society. Most Airbnbs have occupancy rules that bar any daytime visitors if read strictly. This has been normalized under the understanding that the policy isn’t strictly enforceable, but exists as a backstop for situations where extra visitors cause damage/nuisances.

So if you want to have a (perhaps spontaneous) guest over or a small polite gathering, as long as you don't cause a disturbance, it's no harm no foul. This is beneficial to the social fabric and doesn't bring any detriment to the host or neighbors. Yet, thanks to the marvels of technology, we can now detect and deter these aberrances that would have otherwise gone unnoticed!

ryeightson Dots: Always-on agents

Meat proxy at work, meat proxy in your personal time. The utopian visions of AI futures strike me as alternative forms of hell. Humanity accomplishes everything and it means nothing, actions have no real consequence, the bumpy friction and individuality of life smoothed to a plane of perfect optimization.

ryeightson What would a serious AI product look like?

As soon as we stop posting lazy LLM reductionism that has been clearly falsified by events

ryeightson Pacing the Frontier is not the actual goal for AI labs

Zitronian dreck. It’s possible to be concerned with multiple aspects of a technology at once

ryeightson Pacing the Frontier is not the actual goal for AI labs

International control of nuclear arms faced similarly tall odds. So why is it impossible for AI?

ryeightson What would a serious AI product look like?

All of the world’s brightest mathematicians have clearly been slacking on the job—turns out solving a Millennium problem doesn’t require any thought at all!

ryeightson Yes, Claude can do nine loops

i.e., we're entering RSI and LLMs will help to build their more capable successors under a new paradigm? Fair point, but most people saying #2 surely mean to say LLM development has been a dead end and hasn't gotten us substantially closer to AGI

ryeightson Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos

Books, writing, comments, etc on cocktails are certainly in the training set. The model doesn’t need a sensation of taste in order to understand what humans enjoy. RLVR specifically on cocktails is not needed as the general intelligence of the models increases

ryeightson Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos

Emergent capabilities, bitter lesson, increasing general intelligence, etc

ryeightson Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5

But an LLM provider could very easily add a "Jev mode" to any existing model, right? LLMs already produce a probability distribution over arbitrary classes. Just tell e.g. 5.6 Luna “here is the user's question, you must respond ONLY with the words 'foo', 'bar', or 'baz',” run a single forward pass of the model, and report the normalized probabilities of 'foo' 'bar' and 'baz' tokens before the first output.

With such an approach you could even retain full reasoning capability

ryeightson We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

The Chinese models talk Claudlish too

ryeightson Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?

Proper time asymptotically approaches zero here right?

ryeightson No country for mediocre mathematicians

Don’t confuse loving AI with recognizing its capabilities. Know thine enemy

ryeightson The turbulent AI era is here

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://ai-2040.com

Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?

Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.

ryeightson Black hole singularity is a surface not a point

I believe this is a misunderstanding based on inadequate coordinate systems, and that an astronaut would fall through the event horizon, die, and reach the singularity in finite time.

See https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82678/does-someo...

ryeightson Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

This may be true now but isn’t the trend clear? GPT-2 couldn’t write a coherent function. Now we have the SWE oracle that can autonomously navigate your codebase, write code at a superhuman level, and give the correct answer to most engineering questions.

If anything I feel I am understating the capability of current models here. What is stopping the next generation of models from closing the feedback loop further?

ryeightson Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

Outside of the most niche domains like frontier AI development, are there software engineering questions that Sol 5.6/Fable 5 can't answer better than the median software engineer if explicitly asked? It strikes me that models already have superhuman software architecture capabilities, they are simply underelicited.

Furthermore the AI companies are spending gobs of money and compute to address this—harness development, orchestration/agent coordination, computer use are all designed to lower the skill level required to get the best results out of a given model.

Soon the models themselves will be more persistent, more observant, and more skilled than any of us at driving models to obtain the "right" solution in a given SWE context.

ryeightson AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain

Your brain is a stochastic generator. Have you read 4chan?

ryeightson License plate reader searches should require a warrant

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/us/flock-cameras-can-trac...

“In recent years, as artificial intelligence has advanced, Flock has added the ability to search for cars based on their make, type, color, or unique details, such as bumper stickers or visible damage.” So TOTP license plates is not enough.

ryeightson Taste Is All That's Left

Right, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading all the comments taking this article seriously.

I think AI has broken HN. The readership is so head-in-the-sand about AI that they wouldn't recognize 2000 words of Claudeslop if it genuinely slapped them in the face

ryeightson Taste Is All That's Left

He's lying.

ryeightson Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

Ed Zitron has predicted 16 of the last 0 AI bubble bursts...

But more seriously, this has to do with DeepMind falling way behind the frontier in intelligence and cost per task. There's basically no reason to use a Gemini model today.

ryeightson Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

You’ll note that Mr. Zitron’s analysis is based on unfounded assertions (API prices are the ‘real costs’ of tokens, and model providers are margin negative on subscriptions) and outdated figures (OpenAI negative profit in 2025, ignoring at least Anthropic’s recent turn to profitability.)

Just more wishful thinking from our favorite AI skeptic

ryeightson AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

Of course. Everyone should have an ASI assistant that will happily tutor them, step-by-step, through synthesizing mass killing agents from household chemicals.

Then the good guys can just ask their ASI how to construct a hermetically sealed bubble to live out the rest of their lives in!

ryeightson "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

OP already answered why this time is different. Previous technology has never reduced the scarcity of general intelligence, which has been the exclusive domain of humans.

ryeightson Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails

Superintelligent AI is more dangerous than a bioweapon. How, then, is this guardrail not addressing the most pertinent safety concern of all?

ryeightson Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says

This reads like satire from a Slate commentary piece on Citizens United. I suppose we’re just waiting around until the majority of corporations in the US are formed and operated by AI agents. And then…