Hacker News Reader

spdif899on TU Berlin Scientists Hack Tesla Autopilot and Discover Secret Elon-Mode

Elon mode was previously identified by a guy named greentheonly who has been known for his insight into Tesla software and hardware, often posting explanations of how their services work and peeling back the curtain on things like in-cabin camera computer vision etc.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/20/23767041/tesla-hacker-elo...

spdif899on Tesla Recalls 2M Cars to Fix Autopilot Safety Flaws

This article and discussion are specifically regarding base autopilot, not FSD.

spdif899on Learnings from fine-tuning LLM on my Telegram messages

Really interesting - as another person who's used telegram for several long-standing group chats, I imagine a tool to simplify this would be well-received.

I've wondered since fine-tuning started being a thing how long it'd be before somebody makes a utility where you can dump a giant chat export into it and an API key and then it fine tunes a Telegram bot that can imitate any of your friends - would be fun to play with and even create a group chat with multiple friend-bots talking to each other to see how long until it goes off the rails.

spdif899on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

Hey that's fair, I appreciate your directness and I think you did accurately break down my flawed perspective on this. I don't mean to belittle you.

spdif899on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

I'm the one you originally replied to, and yes that's roughly what I'm saying - maybe the individual engineers and designers that built features were trying their best not to be evil, but the company as a whole always had dark motives.

They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always drove people to use their versions of things with overly pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry than necessary.

They bought Android and turned it into a profit center, bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird algorithms.

Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always stretching every one of them to suck more private data, more telemetry, and more ad value.

Just because they invest in an open source programming thing (that gets people to use their platforms and ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.

spdif899on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

I can empathize with you and the linked writer feeling frustrated that public perception isn't able to match your privileged perspective as an insider... but in both cases I feel my eyes roll involuntarily here.

From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible.

The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted.

Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster child of capitalism

spdif899on Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

It's not the most ideal possible outcome, but overall the launch was a pretty huge success for SpaceX (and for space fans by extension).

The fact they made it so much further than the first launch, seemingly having corrected all the notable things that went wrong there, is very good news - the flight test process serves to root out unknowns and today's launch shows they've done so (and now found some more to work on for the next launch).

So to answer your question, I don't think it should really be interpreted as a negative, as the primary goals were met and the controlled nature of the launch seems promising for SpaceX getting cleared to keep trying.

spdif899on Ask HN: What work/office purchase transformed your life?

For me this is where Apple's walled garden shines - my work laptop is a MacBook and I own an iPad for personal use. The iPad can connect to the laptop and function as a (high quality albeit small) secondary display. And then I have an entertainment device the rest of the time instead of just a monitor taking up bag space.

spdif899on BP to purchase $100M in Tesla Superchargers

Yep, this is news because it's pretty much the first time Tesla has sold its superchargers to a third party at any sort of notable scale.

spdif899on Show HN: Fediverser Portal – Bring your subreddits to Lemmy

Very interesting. Will this cover all subreddits, or all above a certain size?

I've switched fully off of reddit in protest, and have turned to HN and Lemmy as imperfect replacements. The main remaining thing I've noticed reddit excels at is researching things like product recommendations.

Searching a keyword on BIFL, along with poking through various threads on whatever niche community might exist for the topic, has been one of the most reliable and useful ways to get a sense for what brands or models are best when considering a purchase.

So far Lemmy is not close to replacing this so it would be compelling if your project could change that.

spdif899on Researchers find a rare compound, plumbonacrite, in first layer of Mona Lisa

I've always heard that it is famous because it was stolen, and had lots of drama and global news cycles surrounding its eventual return and display. This is the first time I've heard of Sfumato let alone seen someone suggest a niche technique is the reason people are aware of the painting.

spdif899on Free IRS-run tax filing pilot to be available in 13 states

There's a perfectly legitimate reason - citizen's united allows corporations to bribe government officials into writing laws that benefit them.

If taxes worked simply and logically, the whole population wouldn't have to pay $100+ each year to Intuit and H&R Block, which would not please the shareholders.

https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

spdif899on The Average New EV Costs $14,000 Less Than It Did a Year Ago: KBB

Fingers crossed for a Maverick EV, it's the perfect size

spdif899on The Average New EV Costs $14,000 Less Than It Did a Year Ago: KBB

It is worth pointing out the potential confirmation bias of a salesperson given the lack of good EV options available, unless this sales guy is at a dealer with multiple EVs at different price points they are likely just not talking to people who are looking to buy an EV.

Tesla you do online, and many people are shopping specifically for an EV, not going to a random dealer and considering it as an option alongside ICE vehicles.

spdif899on Atlassian Acquires Loom

Screenstudio is incredible and a one time purchase

spdif899on Zen 5's Leaked Slides

I dunno, I haven't seen much evidence that 3nm is as big a leap as hoped/claimed, the A17 pro is certainly impressive but in most cases it is not more efficient for its power gains.

spdif899on Vivaldi on iOS

"It's not chrome" is a pretty compelling feature for many. If you ignore Brave's insistence on following shitty web3 trends, it's an open source chromium fork that matches Chrome in performance and reliability while supporting the blocking of ads and trackers, and importantly ripping out all the ways Google sucks up all your usage data in Chrome.

spdif899on Satya Nadella Says Copilot Will Be as Significant as the PC

Many companies in the web space operate almost entirely via MacBook

spdif899on IRS consultant charged with disclosing tax return info to news organizations

I get the sentiment but under the current system of government it does seem quite unlikely such a law would be passed. IMO if we think something should be legal (i.e. if you think presidents' taxes should be public information) then it's ok to support vigilantism that acts towards that end, as a reasonable alternative to years or decades of lobbying.

spdif899on Airbnb Is Different Now

Airbnbs/dedicated vacation rentals are still better when you want an actual house, for example to vacation somewhere with a private yard, or to have a full kitchen to cook meals, or separate bedrooms for kids.

Airbnb is no longer consistently the best source of these, but there is definitely still big value outside what hotels can offer.

spdif899on Airbnb Is Different Now

The point of the 11-star experience is not to actually target an impossibly perfect and amazing experience every time.

The idea is to acknowledge that 5 stars is what we tend to rate something that goes perfectly well without complaints, and as a product design exercise it fails to be a good target.

So Chesky's idea is to figure out what would make something so absurdly good that someone would rate it more than twice the usual "no complaints" rating - and then work backwards and figure out what is in between the 5 and 11 star experiences. You're never trying to reach 11 by design, but maybe you can target 7 or 9 as an aspirational goal, and thinking through this as a design exercise can help you identify user motivations more effectively.

spdif899on Social media platform X could go behind paywall

I am eager to see this happen, due to how useless the site has become to a non-user. People still share tweet links around saying "this thread has x..." when you can only see the singular directly linked tweet with no context or replies.

And you can no longer search for anything without a login, making it really irritating when twitter continues to be used as a primary source of info or updates for a company.

spdif899on Stable Audio: Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusion

https://youtu.be/o-kJ4_CuWzA

This video from MKBHD's studio channel dives into this topic

spdif899on Labeling Beef ‘Low Carbon’ Could Open Premium Market for Wyoming Ranchers

Quite the claim without a source - you're implying that almost the entirety of American healthcare costs are due to people eating vegetables, chicken, pork, fish?

spdif899on Kagi Small Web

Unless I've missed something, they aren't doing that - the mention of a three year time frame is that you must have made a post on the blog within the last 3 years, this excluding old and dormant blogs

spdif899on Geo Guesser identifies the location and seat number from an aerial shot

He has a few videos of him vs AI (that is specifically trained to play geoguessr) and it's quite impressive already just at that game-focused scale.

spdif899on Hacking the LG Monitor's EDID

I too use betterdisplay on macOS after something in an OS update made my laptop decide that my second monitor can only support 30Hz instead of 144.

spdif899on Loose lips save sunken ships

It's quite telling how much the article makes it clear that these fishing practices are absolutely devastating the marine habitats that their perpetrators profit from, but oh no nobody wants to do anything about that because that would be hard. Instead let's try to preserve some "culture" for some reason (but not actually try because that would also be hard).

spdif899on Camera crushes Lidar, claims startup

Person you're replying to is talking about time budget offered by your computer, not monetary budget. Regardless everything is about optimization - the "best" option will almost always be so costly that no consumer will be able to afford it.

spdif899on Asteroid crater 520km in diameter buried in southeast Australia, scientists say

What specifically does Google measure? Entire load time, or just first contentful paint?