r0m4n0

Facebook marketplace driving me crazy lately. A lot of people post photos of antiques and other furniture with obvious AI staging. It’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t. At least there I can just demand the normal photos. I know that isn’t the case with most rentals in NYC because it’s super competitive and already gated in ridiculous ways with brokers and real estate agents.

The HN crowd is not the usual demographic for call centers. Im willing to generalize a vast majority of callers can find the info they are looking for if they tried a little

A few thousands of years of skin bags dragging ourselves around a rock is practically nothing in the scope of the universe.

Or another take, life isn't all that special if we can make it this easily.

We have always theorized the start of life but this could actively show that life could have started on a rock floating in space given enough time. No sky daddy and no aliens necessary!

My name is Roman (father was Italian born in Rome and identifies as a Roman) and I always find it interesting that people try to speak something that sounds like Russian to me. Never thought about the fact they might think I’m Romanian and are speaking Romanian!

I say it’s a simple value proposition.

A few examples

Audio book narration. Human narrators are paid a seemingly ridiculous amount of money to literally read a book out loud. We have the tech to replace them, it’s actually pretty dang good, and it is substantially cheaper to do with computers. It’s pretty accurate too. In the audio book industry though, if you take your book seriously you have a real person read it. The best one you can find that you like. Readers enjoy hearing good narrators and the total value one narrator can bring is very high mostly because the value scales well.

Another real world example that doesn’t scale well, call centers. Customers want humans, but execs have tried to replace them with automation in every way possible. The margins of a business get squeezed because the value of the human touch doesn’t scale well in this case.

Translation falls a bit in the middle. I’m sure ChatGPT is good enough for some people. If you are a restaurant and need to understand what you are ordering at the local authentic Italian restaurant it’ll do the job. If you have a bad food allergy? Maybe not, you are willing to pay for accuracy because that’s what a human brings

So the answer to the question posed in the article, can’t you just upload it to ChatGPT? Maybe yea maybe no

I wonder if this will cannibalize their other more expensive product lines. I know some people and have recommended this to folks that would have purchased more expensive laptops otherwise. My grandpa never needed the macbook air he has continually repurchased over the years. I am planning on purchasing one of these for my oldest, would have opted for a more expensive macbook air as well otherwise. Others that thought the macbook air was too expensive may have purchased used or not at all so this does bring in some more money with that demographic. I have to imagine the margins are smaller if the product is cheaper. I guess time will tell.

The past 2 years in CA have been brutal for these invasive mosquitos. They bite all day and literally swarm around my house. It'll be 1pm on a hot day and they are all over.

I know this isn't attainable for most of the world but sharing in case someone else is similarly frustrated. I ended up spending $500 on a trap w/ co2 tank and it has been a life changer. I don't even see mosquitos anymore. Refilling the co2 is quite annoying and expensive ($20 every other week) and you have to clean out the 100s of bugs from the trap net but I can literally sit in my backyard all day again.

I wonder if a cheaper trap could be designed to give everyone little bubbles of safety.

Hey careful, I actually didn't say I do or have worked with React :)

I think you get me now but I'm just merely stating the stickiness and trendiness of these architecture decisions. Some other people mention this but just because a majority of the industry works on something doesn't mean it is the best.

I am a bit of the proof of this. I work on Angular at Google and have for a long time. It is kind of comical because I have worked on a few side projects outside of Google and I always use Angular, I know it too well.

I built a massive Angular webapp recently (2025) outside of Google and have had multiple people approach me about migrating it to React. They come at me like this is some old thing that needs to be refactored to unlock the modern times. It's just curious, there are large groups of people that don't really even understand what they are doing, they are just chasing words and hype. Mind you, there are reasons to pick one framework over the other still... but let's at least debate that instead of just the names of frameworks. React has won the framework adoption race so I can't argue much there.

I have never been able to pick the framework and libraries for my day job. I’m almost always working on something someone started years prior or bound to an organization that has strict choices. Personally I wouldn’t pick react :)

React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences

I'm not sure that's the lesson to learn from this outage. Hell Google resolved the problem in 7 minutes which is as good as you could hope for.

The resulting action should be you have proper disaster recovery, failover, etc.

Not sure I would trust these folks if this is the conclusion they are coming to from this experience. Any cloud provider can/will do this to you.

Used to drive me insane living in NYC. Funny that Google Maps even highlights both Gold street in Brooklyn and the Gold street in the financial district if you do a search and zoom out. I wonder if that’s intentional or not.

I'm not sure what I believe is right but one thing I can think of is there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias. The same goes for companies that work with the military/defense which I think the parent article lays out as well.

If you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to do, we may actually end up (or already have ended up) with all of the talented people and cutting edge businesses chasing money here and only second tier folks working with and for the government.

I think a great example of this is with NASA. They are doing a big hiring blitz (someone posted about it recently here). They have a ton of openings but I have to imagine that the talented folks that work in the field are chasing the money that is paid by private companies right now. I personally believe NASA is an important thing that needs to exist and we need to figure out a way to make it happen. Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government? Maybe even more so if you working for the armed forces because you lose a lot of people based upon the sheer fact that your life is more at risk.

It would definitely be worth some research. I don't think free market concepts align well with working in the armed forces and there could be some arguments that we need to tip the scales to make it work better. For some things like the usual government services that aren't vital for our existence, I think we can all accept the longer wait at the DMV or the two decades to get a Real ID implemented. I don't think we can accept not defending our own country from an adversarial invasion so we need to make that importance reflected somewhere.

Yea I'd argue even less. You can get a used android phone w/ shipping for $15 on ebay. A new android phone for $30!

That's the price of one meal at a restaurant...

To be fair, Google does it too. I just had the product I work on renamed to Gemini Enterprise. Sure we use Gemini but it’s confusing because it’s not really an “enterprise” version of Gemini. It’s just a way to name drop what it uses under the hood. This was our third rename in 4 years so probably will change again soon

I can't quite relate. Over the past few years I have been using facebook more and more. I use it almost solely for Marketplace and Groups. You can buy literally anything on marketplace for a fraction of the price new. You can sell things on marketplace for more than you bought it for from the store. It's actually quite amazing.

Groups are also really great. I have a lot of hobbies and you can join local groups where people trade stuff or just chat about things related to the topic. I have met some really cool people in real life from facebook groups. Into overlanding in your region? There is a group for that. Into rare Trichocereus or trading rare fig cuttings? There are groups for those. It feels much more personal than reddit because it's connected to a profile that actually has real information/photos associated with it.

Occasionally I end up scrolling videos on fb which appear to just be extensions of reels on Instagram. Doesn't appear to be any different, literally crossover comments even. OP is probably seeing the chum because facebook is going off of nothing.

Anyway, facebook is not cooked :)

I’m not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas.

I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in

This year the family favorite everyone was fighting to play including the adults was the new litebrite touch https://amzn.to/3MROaJs

Really satisfying to click the buttons and see the super bright lights as a young kid. The games like mirror were easy yet technical which had us all competing for high scores. Definitely well thought out

Everyone appreciated it didn’t involve cleanup of any little plastic pieces like the original litebright

No clue but don’t some states require that you prove your age to view content? That would force you to share private information that could be leaked like this which is even more worrisome.

Yea I do think you make a lot of valid points about the tradeoffs of the advances. I think anything we do to progress humanity technologically will have negative outcomes on everything else. I think as humans make things better for ourselves it will almost always rely on destroying something in nature in return. The capitalistic world we live in will almost always drive that to the extreme quickly.

As for the other points, are the LLMs wrong sometimes, yes. But so are humans so it's not really a novel thing to point out. The question is, are they more correct than humans? I have seen they can be more accurate, less biased, etc... and we are driving toward higher accuracy and other ways to make them right.

And the fix later attitude is not great toward everything and I was referring to the accuracy issues that people often point out as why AI is hype. The things you mention are side effects and those should be controlled because the cat is out of the bag. You can spend your time yelling at the clouds or try to do something to make it better. I assure you, capitalism is a tough enemy. This is no different than another type of combustable engine that was created that has negative consequences on the environment in different ways.

I'm not disagreeing with you... mostly just saying: the hype is warranted

I'm mostly saying the hype is real on a lot of things today. Is it working perfectly for everything? Definitely not, but I'm of the opinion giving it another 10 years and it just might be. I'm amongst the many working to make it better and all I see is a million possibilities of what can be done that we have only worked through a few of the issues. Did it change EVERYTHING over night? No, it was a big breakthrough, the rest is still catching up.

I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread.

I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for.

I need to write about some absolutely life changing scenarios, including: got me thousands of dollars after it drafted a legal letter quoting laws I knew nothing about, saved me countless hours troubleshooting an RV electrical problem, found bugs in code that I wrote that were missed by everyone around me, my wife was impressed with my seemingly custom week long meal plan that fit her short term no soy/dairy allergy diet, helped me solve an issue with my house that a trained professional completely missed the mark on, completely designed and wrote code for a halloween robot decoration I had been trying to build for years, saves my wife hundreds of hours as an audio book narrator summarize characters for her audio books so she doesn't have to read the entire book before she narrates the voices.

I'm worried about some of the problems LLMs will create for humanity in the future but those are problems we can solve in the future too. Today it's quite amazing to have these tools at our disposal and as we add them in smart ways to systems that exist today, things will only get better.

Call me glass half full... but maybe it's because I don't live in Seattle

I like this a lot better because you don’t have to visualize the way a number looks to remember the association, you say the word in your mind and just mentally say the number that rhymes. Seems faster to get the hang of

Yea so as someone who lives on a busy road with daily visibility into how many people flaunt the law I basically did this to force the city to make changes to the street. There really isn’t much you can do to the folks who break the law and drive away but high def video of daily shenanigans is great ammo for other types of solutions that force drivers into making better decisions.

I work for a big tech company that was already hiring a ton in Canada, I have to imagine this is going to add massive amounts of fuel to the flames. Are they just going to accept that offshoring is the next best alternative? And by offshoring, I mean, immigrants moving to Canada and working for American companies because their work visas are better

Yea and if you look at all of the job openings they have right now, they are mostly in the “applied AI” space which is a very different thing from what they have been doing altogether. This is mostly generic enterprise development which is how they will try to become profitable

I think it’s more like Open AI has the name to throw around and a lot of credibility but not products that are profitable. They are burning cash and need to show a curve that they can reach profitability. Getting 15 people with 15 ideas they can throw their weight behind is worth a lot

No, I donate a lot of money on top of the time I volunteer for free. Someone has to spend maybe an hour every few months to deposit a single check for $50.

You got me on the rejection part because there are some benefits the members get (being able to attend social events, newsletters, etc) but if your donation is a net negative on an organization, I just don’t think they should donate at all. They don’t know it’s a net negative though and maybe would donate with an electronic payment but possibly don’t know? I think it’s mostly old people doing things the way they are used to

But TBH I’m not sure if much of this matters other than the ratio. Time is money and if there aren’t enough people utilizing something, it’s just not worth it to continue. If it’s a government org that’s possibly the only thing that needs to accept all forms of payment

I think this writer focuses on the buyer side but on the merchant side, there are similar tradeoffs. People (employees, robbers etc) steal cash and it adds work to close out registers at the end of your day. Having no cash in your store solves those problems.

I run a non profit with membership dues and I have tried to just boot the 3% of our membership that pay w/ check or cash annually (I haven’t convinced the rest of the board so we haven’t done it yet). It takes so much extra time to follow it in real life, receive checks in the mail, and effort to deposit in the bank. It’s just not worth the time

I personally would not like chrome, or some of these other things to exist on its own. Google operates some of these things mostly like a charity. Obviously there are serious incentives to have control but imagine what Chrome would be doing without Google… you think your privacy is at stake now? Some private equity companies were drooling over the idea of buying chrome a few weeks ago