jboggan

I once did an application of Benford's Law to USDT transactions between crypto exchanges, which seemed to indicate some exchanges had mostly "organic" transactions and a handful of exchanges seemed to have heavy transaction volume of seemingly-random but not really random amounts, indicating some level of wash trading on those exchanges.

To be fair, the reason the CA laws are much more expansive on all uses of data is because companies have tried a number of arrangements to get around the definition of "sale". This was Sephora's defense back in the first CCPA case, that their data sharing relationship in exchange for targeted marketing services was not "selling" data:

https://ccpa.world/enforcement/sephora-sale-of-pi

(I'm also in Utah)

I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.

That would be interesting but the space is so choked now.

I'm also already busy building Forgetmenaut and enabling data deletion at scale: forgetmenaut.com

You're probably on to something with the value of disagreement. I think it's one reason why chatting with current models doesn't create the same stimulation as rubber-ducking used to bring. The models are typically too quick to agree and amplify what you think rather than truly break it down and push back.

And thanks for saying it should have worked, I agree. My chagrin has increased over the years as I have realized the magnitude of my ill-timing.

In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly.

Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.

The CPPA went above the FTC and banned it outright, as well as forcing the two registered data brokers who bought the data to delete it.

Well, CT and VT passed their own version of the California DROP system last week and there are 5 other states in play for the current 2026 legislative sessions. I think it will be a slow patchwork for more states to take similar action, but it is coming.

I will note that many "data brokers" will just honor non-California residents' requests as if they were California residents and subject to the CCPA, simply because they would rather remove a potentially litigious consumer from their databases. Given the relatively low potential revenue for a single consumer's data it just doesn't make sense to hold on to information for the kind of person who currently goes out of their way to make that kind of request.

At the same time, many data brokers do go out of their way to deny as many privacy requests as possible. Given that the CPPA/CalPrivacy is starting audits very soon I don't see this as a winning strategy for them in the long run.

I built a half-baked CRM that has a lot of custom fields and visuals for statistics that are relevant to my potential customers. I'm selling primarily to registered data brokers, so being able to pull up their self-published compliance stats (gleaned from their own privacy pages or public filings) and contextualize them in terms of the rest of the industry ("your deletion request volume has been in the 95th percentile year over year") has been extremely helpful when starting conversations. I also gamified it a bit by giving myself targets for cold outreach and gathering hard numbers on my cadence for outbound calls and emails per lead.

I also built this site for educating potential customers and other privacy professionals about the increasing tempo of CCPA enforcement actions driving compliance: https://ccpa.world/enforcement

I could have probably coded this from scratch quicker considering that it took me two weeks to remove all of the hallucinated imaginary enforcement actions against real companies and also the citations to non-existent California law that the models kept injecting into my enforcement summaries.

California very quietly passed AB-1542 last week which includes precise location data, health data, SSNs, etc. I expect many states to follow suit.

Related, General Motors got hit with a $12.75M fine for reselling OnStar location data last month: https://ccpa.world/enforcement/gm-onstar-smart-driver

Previous discussion on this case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39709991

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42734260

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39793903

The real impact of this case is that it's the first time we've seen a serious data minimization case in the US. California's investigation showed that they will prosecute if legitimately collected data is repurposed and resold after the fact.

Yes of course, I was in a mountain lake looking for walleye yesterday!

My wife used to think that I had terrible sleep apnea because I'd repeatedly quit breathing for a minute or two at a time and then gasp for air, but it turned out I was just dreaming about freediving for lobsters.

Is this named after the 2011 split album with Grimes and d'Eon?

The fact that this is an AI generated comment makes this far funnier, despite being true.

I don't think it is killing SaaS. I have definitely had to extend my sales cycle when a potential customer vibe-coded a quick fix for a pain point that might have triggered a sale a few weeks earlier, but eventually the benefit delivered by someone else caring about the software as their entire mission really wins out over a feature here and there.

If you are selling SaaS consider that a vibe-coding customer is validating your feature roadmap with their own time and sweat. It's actually a very positive signal because it demonstrates how badly that product is needed. If they could vibe code a "good enough" version of something to get themselves unstuck for a week, you should be able to iterate on those features and build something even better in short order, except deployed securely and professionally.

Everyone's going to talk about how cool their custom vibe-coded CRM is until they get stuck in a failed migration.

My friend Dave Taylor (programmer on Doom / Doom 2 / Quake / Abuse) was famous for marathon gaming sessions when he was at id. He told me it almost killed him after a session because he was driving and saw what he thought was a Quake rocket ammo box and he instinctively swerved the car at speed to "pick it up", but it was in fact a concrete pylon securing a guardrail by a drop-off. He narrowly swerved back into the road.

On a lighter note, I played far too much GTA: Vice City on PS2 in college, to the point that when driving in real life I forgot to check my side and back mirrors at stop signs, and instead realized I was squeezing my middle fingers on the steering wheel instead of turning my head to look.

I lament my 13 mini coming to the end of its lifespan. Good design.

I am very curious if California's consumer rights to data deletion and correction are going to apply to the LLM model providers.

Fantastic read and a really interesting company I did not know about until just now.

I would love to see how it handles Castlevania II.

If you are a California resident you can request a deletion via the state's new DROP platform which is launching next year. That will send the deletion request to every registered data broker in the state who will then have 45 days to comply. Part of that compliance is sending deletion notifications to everyone downstream that they have shared or sold your data to in the past. The penalty for not responding to a DROP request is going to be $200 a day, per request.

Starting in 2028 CA registered data brokers will have to undergo audits to ensure that they have been complying with deletion requests to the fullest extent of the law. Now, maybe only 20% of actual data brokers are registered in California like they are supposed to be, but it's a start.

Shameless plug: I'm building a platform to help the data brokers actually delete the data they are supposed to, provide full auditing and accounting for that process, and automate privacy request handling: forgetmenaut.com

One of my favorite interviews (Mixrank) was where the CTO/founder and I picked a random problem on Project Euler and we both coded on it in parallel. I was in the driver's seat as far as design and general approach was concerned but we were each coding an independent solution. We weren't even using the same languages.

Once we both had the correct answer, we started optimizing to try and eclipse each others' runtime. This was actually a fantastic test to display deeper knowledge beyond just regurgitating a solution, showing benefits and drawbacks of different languages and patterns, and seeing how we could work while agreeing or disagreeing on a technical subject.

I was really too junior for the role they wanted and I didn't get the job, but it was a fantastic experience.

We are not approaching the Singularity but an Asymptote

I can absolutely relate since I'm doing the same right now. I had a good meeting with another founder last week, and the thing I was most excited about wasn't the potential integration between our platforms but just that he was willing to invite me to a group call of other early founders to get support and ideas. This is emotionally more difficult than any previous building phase I've had.

Just like the Purple Hearts made for the invasion of Japan

https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/75-years-later-pu...

I got a CAC scan for $75 just to catch anything crazy and I found out that I don't have a right coronary artery and also that I have 2 superior vena cava. My calcium score was 0 though so that's awesome.

One close friend died of a heart attack at 42 and another found a 95% blockage after his CAC scan came back north of 900 at age 40. I'd get it if it's available, the ability to catch certain catastrophic conditions is invaluable.

My 4-year-old daughter asks to watch his Red Bull Stratos jump almost every night before bed. She's obsessed with space because of him and says "Felix is my favorite astronaut." May he continue to inspire.

Sure, if you can design a server farm with no copper wiring in it

A conibear #330 isn't going to even dent that. I'd need a #3300 and farm jack to set it.

This is the crux of the piece to me:

"We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software—and the idea of squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, or building something lean and wild and precise, will sound like folklore."

This somewhat lines up with my concerns about libraries and patterns before 2023 getting frozen in stone once we pass over the event horizon where most new code to train on is generated by LLMs. We aren't innovating, we are going to forever reinforce the screwed up dependency stack and terrible kludges of the last 30 years of development. Javascript is going to live forever.