Automating so many terrible chores with AI. Recently I automated pulling transactions from my banks (Canada, no open banking..) and putting them into Actual Budget. SimpleFIN or Plaid type services frequently break, make mistakes or require reauth every few hours for the banks here which makes them not so useful. Now I'm automating computing my taxes fully which gets pretty complicated because of international income, different assets etc. Its basically a data lake to process all kinds of financial data in various formats and compute stuff, moving lots of manual drudgery and complicated excel sheets into code.
Im still optimistic that Apple will do all this stuff on your device as opposed to in an opaque cloud somewhere you have 0 visibility into. Meta probably has 1000x this system in a data warehouse somewhere. If this info is not leaving the device that’s fine with me.
I was able to root my Samsung TV easily with Codex, disable updates and spyware, MITM everything with the eMudhra certs. The problem is no one really knows what these TVs do, they're all liars with 100 page privacy policies that will legally allow anything, and encrypted HTTPS communications that we can't even ordinarily monitor what they're sending. They can be updated at any time to start sending more or less data without your knowledge. So I feel the only realistic option is find a TV that can be rooted and do that. If you root a TV, you can fully disable network access and then use an Apple TV, or use the TV's software with MITM and deeper analysis with AI to disable snooping.
I have some kind of similar things using PocketTube (browser extension) to try to curate certain types of feeds on Youtube. These things are always limited because we can't query the actual platforms. I would kill for platforms like Youtube, X, Spotify to actually give us API access to their entire catalogs so we can define custom ways to surface/recommend content.
Just stop with this bullshit. Its clearly well written and also looks human. I don’t know what miscalibrated false-positive confirmation bias ridden seventh sense you believe you have to magically spot AI writing, but it doesn’t work.
Yeah, some criminal enterprise or state probably just made billions of dollars and will now use it against us for a long time. Crypto is practically designed for money laundering, particularly prediction markets.
Watch what comes out about Samsung TVs in Europe in the next few days.. the companies do mountains of illegal things because everything devices send/receive is encrypted now and they thought they'd never get caught. After a couple of firmware updates and CA certificate fixes for the eMudhra vulnerability, people will forget all about it and they will go back to doing it.
Every western country with a pension system is slowly getting crushed under the weight of an ever-growing share of pensioners relative to the working age population. People live to 85 now, supporting 20 years of pension and healthcare while they vote against property tax increases, building housing, retirement age increases or any cut at all to their benefits is going to wreck the finances of any country. They were using immigration to backstop the system but that's slowing down now and is anyways not a sustainable solution.
I feel most of us have been conditioned to prefer only the mildest and most inoffensive ways of protesting as valid and consider the rest impossible. In my view, governments today ignore protests because they don't actually threaten anything. A protest with teeth might be mass absenteeism from work, refusing to pay taxes, something that actually hurts.. although in this case it's probably a bit much, when the threat of real protest is completely gone you end up with authoritarian governments.
The petition to withdraw and amend the bill was presented to the House of Commons today [1]. People whining about how there's nothing they can do basically don't engage in democracy and thats how you end up in a US situation..
It's funny another massive vulnerability in LiteLLM is on top of HN now. They had another big vulnerability earlier too. If you look at the history of the project and the design decisions, I believe LiteLLM is slop made by bad programmers and I would stay far away.
I think someone explained that only browsers and maybe some applications check the CT logs in the first place. Most applications don't, so someone can impersonate any URL an application connects to and the attacker doesn't have to publish to a CT log.
It's not, there are levels of scumbaggery and Meta is one of the absolute worst. Rigging elections all over the world, privacy violations everywhere, actively scheming to get kids addicted to slop media, privacy destroying recording glasses, the list goes on.
I agree its so important to proxy and capture all the data. I've been very happy with bifrost as a proxy. It's a quality piece of software, unlike LiteLLM. You also get this one interface to access all your models, across all services, including self-hosted, STT models, everything. There are ways to use subscriptions with proxies too, but they are discouraged because of grey-hat uses..
I'm sympathetic to the mathematicians and don't like what AI is doing. Every other profession that relies on knowledge or thinking should be watching the mathematics community as a portent of the storm to come. OpenAI has extensively thought about and planned their disruption and chose mathematics to start with for a reason - small community, verifiable to some extent, can be used to improve model training, not seen positively by many average people etc. The AI companies are going to come for every field one by one.
Government spending is not an Elon problem. The biggest components are entitlements like social security, medicare and military spending like the war in Iran. Most of the firings and departures were by the heads of those agencies not DOGE. Elon has caused many problems but this isn’t one of them.
I play online games and i hate cheaters. Like they said, cheats are a huge industry now with talented people working hard on them. This is what it takes to stop them.
If you don’t want to play these games you don’t need to install any of this. But this is not unusable and none of this is impossible for distros. Most of this stuff is super common and the average linux user wouldn’t even notice.
Distros will just offer a “gaming-ready” image/mode that enables these restrictions and users can choose to use it or not.
The counter-argument he makes against people's concerns about attestation is laughable, all he says is that it hasn't happened yet.
Passkeys are not designed just for security, there are other corporate interests involved. It's impossible to share logins for example. He even mentioned this concern and didn't address it.
The device/app lockdowns are already real for TOTP - Microsoft and others insist on using their snowflake authenticator instead of using the standard protocol. So it's not unlikely that they will extend that kind of lock-in to all passkeys.
These guys are so dedicated to protecting us from ourselves that they won’t provide any mechanism to export passkeys and port them between devices because it might be used for phishing. It’s just fucking annoying and presumptuous. No im not going to fall for phishing, i need to have some escape hatch to get the data.
Attestation lock down is also ALREADY a real thing. Microsoft sites (and others) frequently require you to use their bespoke 2FA app instead of using the open TOTP protocol. They will do the same thing when it comes to deciding which devices and software are allowed to login, and everything outside the corporate slop safety bubble will be denied.
Access is a good thing too. I don’t want hardware attestation, i want to be able to access my bank from anywhere. Banks continually push their liability for security onto customers.
You can call a house a home or you can call it an investment, the boomer homeowners want both in an incredibly juicy deal that nothing else in the world gets.
If we are going say houses are not just investments, they are homes, then we can reduce the property taxes and let the government take the profits/losses in the home's value.
If we are saying houses are investments, then they should be subject to taxes and costs accrued in the upkeep of that investment which includes the infrastructure that property taxes pay for.
This conveniently ignores all the gains in property value which they can benefit from by refinancing, selling or renting. If they don’t want to pay property taxes on higher values, and don’t care about the value, then we have a simple solution:
Freeze the property taxes and let the government take the entire value gain in the house when its sold.
Wealth is easily converted to income. People can sell their properties and move to cheaper ones. If we’re gonna run our entire society on the whims of retirees who are taking up houses big enough to raise families, while also preventing all new construction, while also opposing paying their taxes, while also opposing moving to smaller houses, we are just fucked.
I think this is how society and politics works, there are a lot of people at different levels of understanding and different opinions all having parallel conversations. We don't need to have these conversations in serial order.
I can see the capital machine is sprinting at full force to create AI products for and replace labor in every industry, so the people who think it's hype now will soon see AI enter their workplace and understand its true capability. Even many reputed programmers said AI was overhyped say 6 months ago and one after another have changed their minds. I feel like there's also a large element of people saying its bad publicly BECAUSE they actually do understand its capabilities and fear being replaced, but they would rather say its bad to try to slow its adoption or as a kind of defense.
The understanding of AI's capabilities will diffuse naturally over time, although of course its worthwhile working on informing people there as well. Bill Gates recent interview with Ezra Klein was sort of on the same topic, where he says no one outside the industry understands its capabilities and that's why he's trying to use his platform to inform people about it.
As a matter of coalition building, all we have to do is agree that AI is being rolled out recklessly without any consideration for the consequences and apply pressure accordingly.
> Attempting to assert the primacy of meat-based thinking is not going to get very far
That's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. I know they're superior in many ways, that's why I'm worried about labor losing even more power. All I'm saying is the gains from AI have to be distributed society-wide instead of being captured by the same powers that control everything else and this is a political task that we need to participate in urgently.
Most of these idealistic pieces about AI seem to come from senior, established or wealthy people who aren't very exposed to the labor market. In that view, the question of AI and its transformation is almost philosophical like this piece.
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.