Willish42

I've been using Fable on and off since the promotion started and have been fairly impressed with it, so I consider this great news!

At the same time, I sense a lot of negativity (especially on HN) in comparison to Codex from OpenAI (who IIUC is bleeding money to keep this going, though maybe Anthropic is too) which didn't do as many promotional and nerf-ing shenanigans.

As somebody who doesn't want to constantly switch tools, is Codex really that much better, or is this sour grapes from folks who want to stay on the subsidized access plans and are mad at Anthropic's pricing model?

I remember the hype around the first OnePlus phone, with the invite system. It was the first time I'd had a device loaded with Cyanogenmod that ran relatively stable without any issues. Eventually the capactive touch home button on my OP2 gave out on me but I was a pretty happy user of the OnePlus One, 2, and 3T. I especially liked the removable backplates that had wood options that were pretty neat and felt nice to hold

I suppose Nothing is carrying that torch forward but it's still disappointing to see. Even though most of it was extensions of Oppo tech and ideas into a US/Europe-friendly market position, it still felt like they were innovating and keeping Android ecosystem healthy and interesting beyond simple slab phones.

I was considering looking into a OnePlus phone as my next device for Lineage or Graphene OS, but I guess I'm glad I waited...

I'm thankful I tested Fable via my subscription before the cutoff. To me, it seemed like at least part of the improvements were in how it broke up work for a "one-shot" style prompt, but I was very impressed at how quickly and effectively it produced better results than Opus 4.8 at a handful of real-world use cases I threw at it from my own work.

Another interesting finding which I've heard others corroborate is that even though the per-token cost was higher, it seemed to orchestrate the work efficiently and burn through fewer tokens, roughly evening out to approximately the same per-prompt token usage as Opus.

Computers feel like a pretty good analogy for how AI will affect the workforce.

I suspect productivity will massively increase, the complexity and cognitive load of our work will similarly multiply, and yet we'll still being doing the now-more-complex work in some capacity for a similar number of hours.

I've been thinking for some time that it wouldn't be too hard to create a third-party browser extension to crowdsource detection of channels that use primarily AI-generated content (for example, the AI slop music channels that put out multiple hour+ long genre or cover "playlists") and hide them from suggestions or home feeds.

My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.

Like a lot of things in tech and pop science, "AI psychosis" had a narrow(-er) definition [1] (psychotic-like symptoms, i.e. believing the AI is in love with you, or being fueled by the AI into some strong delusions or belief in a "mission" so important your faith in it becomes quasi-religious/"destiny"), which aligned loosely with actual psychiatric symptoms.

The much broader version of people getting a bit too full of themselves or trusting an LLM's sycophantic nature as validation that they are right or uniquely smart with their ideas seems to be the version I'm seeing more of in tech news sites and places like HN

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250...

I loved my TI-84+ SE and wish I still had it (had all sorts of custom programs on it but it got lost or stolen before I finished high school).

That said, I find it really hard to believe that they can't provide better specs and feature set for the cost. User-available memory of 3.5MB is incredibly low, especially with Python support. These could be really cool handheld computers if TI put more effort into their devices that already have a massive install base.

Currently, most of their popularity in my experience is "lock in" effect from teachers who are familiar with TI calculators and lab / curriculum materials that are specifically built around teaching through TI calculators. At this rate they're charging a lot and resting on their near monopoly status in education, which I'm sure is very profitable for TI.

There used to be a great app called WabbitEmu that emulated these devices on Android. I think they got a cease and desist but it was pretty neat to have back in the day

The cost of these devices isn't the computation, and if anything more connectivity would probably make these more expensive and harder to use (many "smart" devices in classrooms have networking issues and if even one of them can't connect, it hurts the ability to run a lesson). I think standalone computation abilities are pretty important, and connectivity can be a downside for preventing cheating in standardized exams etc.

I wish the audio quality of youtube videos matched other streaming services. Bandwidth-wise it's pretty minimal, but the audio quality isn't quite as good as competitors like Spotify (and the longer they take to upgrade audio bitrate, the longer the problem persists and uploaded content has lower audio fidelity)

By this logic, the Nazis were the good guys in WWII, and Israel would be the good guys if they'd just turn off all their pesky air defenses.

Can you elaborate on this? I thought that the Nazis were pretty obviously the "bad guys" due to committing genocide and mass casualties (combatant and civilian) while trying to expand their borders.

It doesn't make any sense to try to judge morality based on casualty ratios.

Really, even the ratio of civilian casualties, or ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties? Those seem pretty relevant to morality in my book, but I might be misunderstanding.

The trust component is so critical here. When I get halfway through reading a design doc and hit a part that's obviously slop, it really hurts my confidence in the project and in any faith in the developer having done their due diligence.

Certain communications, especially technical writing, are "expensive" both in terms of the effort of the author(s), and in terms of the person-hours of people reading them to gain understanding. Like mission-critical code, they should be written and reviewed with care, and at the very least heavily edited from an automated LLM output to be unrecognizable as such.

I personally don't use LLMs at all in my designs and I remain skeptical of the value proposition for those who do.

This was not opportunistic. It was precision. The malicious dependency was staged 18 hours in advance.

Another obvious ChatGPT-ism. The fact that people are using AI to write these security posts doesn't surprise me, but the fact they use it to write a verbose article with spicy little snippets that LLMs seem to prefer does make it really hard to appreciate anything other than the simple facts in the article.

Yet another case in point for "do your own writing" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573519)

I think this is a political and economic problem rather than a technological one.

I cannot think of a more important skill than surgery to continue training humans to do and to be wary of AI robotics replacing. Sure, some surgeries could likely be automated, but the entire point of specialist surgeons is to make choices and act in a timely manner in ambiguous situations with extremely high stakes.

What happens when the robot messes up? What happens when the internet is down, or the hospital is operating under abnormal circumstances? How do you teach, train, and collaborate with human medical workers and caregivers in a world where surgeons have been replaced by robots?

Most of the excess costs for healthcare and surgery aren't the humans doing the work. I think there's a lot of other areas we can optimize first, chief among those in healthcare being the cost structure around private businesses and insurers bloating the bill with administrative costs. There's a reason every other developed nation has a single-payer healthcare system and better outcomes, and I don't think an AI breakthrough is the only plausible solution to improving costs in the US. In fact, under the current system, an AI breakthrough in medicine would likely hurt the workforce more than it would improve costs.

This is an angle for people who default to AI-edited written speech that I've tried to be more empathetic to. I think it depends on your audience, but in professional writing that isn't published publicly (i.e. communication with your colleagues, design docs, etc.), or even the "rough draft" form of something that will be published, I think starting with your own words comes across as way more authentic.

I've seen enough GPT-generated slop that I find its style of writing very off-putting, and find it hurts the perceived competence or effort of the author when applied in the wrong context. I'm not sure if direct translation tools serve a better purpose here, but along with the other commenters, I personally find imperfect speech that was actually written "by hand" by the author easier and more straightforward to communicate with despite the imperfections. Also, non-ESL speakers make plenty of mistakes with grammar, spelling, etc. that humans are used to associating with "style" as authentic speech.

It can also become a crutch for language learners of any age / regardless of their primary language, that inhibits learning or finding one's own "style" of speech

I've been meaning to get off Gmail, and Proton Mail does seem like my favorite of the alternatives from a quick glance, but I'm also concerned about privacy focused services like Proton getting blocked or compromised in the US... This was a pretty good read

Also,

I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.

OK, I can intuit why most of those are bad, but can somebody give me a good-faith interpretation on what's bad about Apple?

I'd assume it's the working conditions and material extraction processes in China, parts of Africa, and elsewhere, but isn't that true of every piece of consumer technology? The only better companies for consumer hardware that come to mind are Framework and Google for recycling parts and raw materials, but the whole point of the article is about de-googling and Framework's products are relatively niche and at a much lower price and performance / market category.

I think many used to feel that Google was the standout ethical player in big tech, much like we currently view Anthropic in the AI space. I also hope Anthropic does a better job, but seeing how quickly Google folded on their ethics after having strong commitments to using AI for weapons and surveillance [1], I do not have a lot of hope, particularly with the current geopolitical situation the US is in. Corporations tend to support authoritarian regimes during weak economies, because authoritarianism can be really great for profits in the short term [2].

Edit: the true "test" will really be can Anthropic maintain their AI lead _while_ holding to ethical restrictions on its usage. If Google and OpenAI can surpass them or stay closely behind without the same ethical restrictions, the outcome for humanity will still be very bad. Employees at these places can also vote with their feet and it does seem like a lot of folks want to work at Anthropic over the alternatives.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-responsible-ai-principles... [2] https://classroom.ricksteves.com/videos/fascism-and-the-econ...

I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

I know this is somewhat a joke site, but I think admitting this really proves Apple's dominance and doesn't really help in making your case. So long as the walled garden / "platform" approach still works, enshittification will continue

I feel like this anecdote represents the differing incentives / philosophies of each group rather well.

I've noticed ChatGPT is rather high in its praise regardless of how valuable the input is, Gemini is less placating but still largely influenced by the perspective of the prompter, and Claude feels the most "honest" but humans are rather easy poor at judging this sort of thing.

Does anyone know if "sycophancy" has documented benchmarks the models are compared against? Maybe it's subjective and hard to measure, but given the issues with GPT 4o, this seems like a good thing to measure model to model to compare individual companies' changes as well as compare across companies.

cmd /c "whoami&&tasklist&&systeminfo&&netstat -ano" > a.txt

Naive question, but isn't this relatively safe information to expose for this level of attack? I guess the idea is to find systems vulnerable to 0-day exploits and similar based on this info? Still, that seems like a lot of effort just to get this data.

This resonated a lot with me. I am also addicted to being useful and find that off days where my output and usefulness isn't where I'd like it to be really tank my self esteem.

I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)

Apparently one of the other linked posts shows how you can also gain RCE

Yep, here it is: https://kibty.town/blog/mintlify/

Also linked in his guide (which I missed) and [here in a separate HN post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317546). I think this other author's post is a lot more detailed and arguably more useful to folks reading on HN.

Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation.

I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!"

TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.

There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.

I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.

I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too

I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.

Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.

Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.

For all of the naysayers in the comments, I think the author has hit on a palpable societal trend, at least in the US.

My leading theory is that the pandemic supercharged a lot of folks' individualist tendencies and/or nihilism, and we're seeing the decline in real time. To claim that the author is simply missing the incentives, bureaucracy, or other structural mechanisms behind enshittification, is missing the point, and they even allude to these towards the bottom of TFA!

Poking holes in the examples is similarly missing the point, but I know we love correcting people on the internet. Cunningham's law and all that...

Thanks for throwing in references like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis even though this was a silly response to the science fiction implications.

I found it an interesting read and hadn't heard the term before, but it's exactly the kind of nerdy serendipity I come to this site for!

Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit

Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.

Notepad++ was a life saver in my early days of needing to open and edit large files without having the tech literacy or familiarity required to use an actual IDE. I was a Windows "tinkerer" for a long time before learning programming and getting into engineering, and I suspect I'm not the only one on HN who got started that way. It's probably the first editor I used with line numbers, tabs / multiple view panes in one window, and customization options.

I can't say I use it as often these days, but it's still installed on my PC at home and it's a reliable tool that I think back on fondly. Without it, I might not have "leveled up" to more advanced tools later on.

For anybody who's wondering, Nintendo doesn't _actually_ own Pokemon (a common misconception), but has a major stake in "The Pokemon Company", which does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Subsidiaries

As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?

Should be interesting regardless to see what happens

That's a pretty grim outlook, but I honestly can't poke a "hole" in its logic.

Well stated, somebody's clearly done their reading on Marxist theory :)

I've been struggling recently with limitations on "managing upward" I've seen thus far in my career -- eventually incentives become aligned such that no "good" manager that represents their employees well to leadership and says "no" when necessary has stuck around very long. I suspect it's largely systemic but I appreciate the way you've highlighted why.

The only cases I've seen where incentives align in favor of the rank and file employee tend to be ambitious projects as "growth" opportunities -- but of course this tends to be more often than not in the form of "experience" rather than necessarily higher "pay". Good managers still try to proactively find opportunities and make sure the team keeps growing. Eventually you "fix" the pay part by switching jobs, but I do wish we had a better system where I could just be "loyal", grow expertise in a relevant area, and be fairly compensated without having to worry about basic things like healthcare.