HN user

yoaviram

1,014 karma

Human Rights Activist, Author, Philosopher.

Founder of ConsciousDigital.org, a nonprofit organization creating people-centered digital initiatives promoting and advancing digital human rights.

Check out YourDigitalRights.org, a free and open-source service that helps people regain control of their online privacy by automating the process of sending data deletion requests to organizations and then providing guidance on how to ensure that requests are resolved favorably.

I am currently working on a book that explores the science and philosophy of Time Travel, from Einstein’s relativity to quantum mechanics and multiverse theories. It shows how these ideas transform time travel from playful fiction into a lens for understanding the very nature of time itself. Check out timetravelbook.com.

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news.ycombinator.com 3mo ago

Ask HN: Is Anthropic Enshittifying Claude Code?

yoaviram
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consciousdigital.org 6mo ago

ChatGPT Health is a marketplace, guess who is the product?

yoaviram
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consciousdigital.org 9mo ago

We do not support opt-out forms

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consciousdigital.org 1y ago

Privacy at the Border: A Technical Guide to Securing Your Data and Devices

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consciousdigital.org 1y ago

23andMe customers? This may be your last chance to protect your data

yoaviram
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www.abc.net.au 1y ago

Julian Assange speaks for the first time since his release from prison

yoaviram
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consciousdigital.org 2y ago

Texas, Oregon citizens gain new data rights: get companies to delete their PII

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consciousdigital.org 2y ago

How deceptive design is used to compromise your privacy and how to fight back

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consciousdigital.org 2y ago

Utah residents can now submit data protection requests

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news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: Is Geothermal Electricity Green?

yoaviram
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consciousdigital.org 3y ago

Location Data = Personally Identifiable Information

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consciousdigital.org 3y ago

The NSA’s Large Language Models

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consciousdigital.org 3y ago

What do intelligence agencies use LLMs for? A thought experiment

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consciousdigital.org 3y ago

The NSA's ChatGPT

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billionairebonebureau.com 3y ago

Billionaire Bone Bureau

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nonstructured.com 4y ago

In Defense of Web3

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www.youtube.com 4y ago

We Asked 600 Data Brokers to Delete Our Personal Data [video]

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timeforme.today 6y ago

Show HN: Find inspiring wellbeing sessions taking place online

yoaviram
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yourdigitalrights.org 6y ago

Get companies to erase your personal data – automated CCPA deletion requests

yoaviram
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opt-out.eu 7y ago

Show HN: Get organisations to erase your personal data (automated GDPR requests)

yoaviram
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www.youtube.com 8y ago

Artificial Intelligence in Recent Art Practice [video]

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spinoff.com 8y ago

Technology restores body's insulin generation capability in diabetic patients

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www.energizedwork.com 9y ago

From services to digital products – why and how we are changing

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thoughtexperiments.net 9y ago

The Many Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Thought Experiment

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thoughtexperiments.net 9y ago

People who divide like an amoeba thought experiment

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thoughtexperiments.net 9y ago

Could Alexander the Great Have Defeated the British at the Battle of Waterloo?

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www.reddit.com 9y ago

Quantum Suicide Quantum Immortality and the Doomsday Device

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thoughtexperiments.net 9y ago

Quantum Suicide and Quantum Immortality

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www.energizedwork.com 11y ago

Continuous Delivery in a Hostile Environment [video]

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www.itv.com 13y ago

Sun apologises to alien lifeforms over Scientology

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Their cookies consent is not clickable on Firefox. What a s*t show. Every single privacy-related promise from OpenAI is theatre.

I believe this is inaccurate. Vercel env vars are all encrypted at rest (on their side). The 'sensitive' checkbox means you can't retrieve the value once it's set, which would have saved your ass in this case. Also, annoying to read an article like this without a single link to source material.

I've been using GSD extensively over the past 3 months. I previously used speckit, which I found lacking. GSD consistently gets me 95% of the way there on complex tasks. That's amazing. The last 5% is mostly "manual" testing. We've used GSD to build and launch a SaaS product including an agent-first CMS (whiteboar.it).

It's hard to say why GSD worked so much better for us than other similar frameworks, because the underlying models also improved considerably during the same period. What is clear is that it's a huge productivity boost over vanilla Claude Code.

Yesterday I wrote a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. It is much closer to proper engineering.

Like an engineer overseeing the construction of a bridge, the job is not to lay bricks. It is to ensure the structure does not collapse.

The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything.

https://nonstructured.com/zen-of-ai-coding/

I just finished writing a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. It is much closer to proper engineering.

Like an engineer overseeing the construction of a bridge, the job is not to lay bricks. It is to ensure the structure does not collapse.

The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything.

https://nonstructured.com/zen-of-ai-coding/

ChatGPT Health 7 months ago

This thread reads like an advertisement for ChatGPT Health.

I came to share a blog post I just posted titled: "ChatGPT Health is a Marketplace, Guess Who is the Product?"

OpenAI is building ChatGPT Health as a healthcare marketplace where providers and insurers can reach users with detailed health profiles, powered by a partner whose primary clients are insurance companies. Despite the privacy reassurances, your health data sits outside HIPAA protection, in the hands of a company facing massive financial pressure to monetize everything it can.

https://consciousdigital.org/chatgpt-health-is-a-marketplace...

Sharing my experience with SpecKit in case anyone finds it useful.

I've been using Speckit for the last two weeks with Claude Code, on two different projects. Both are new code bases. It's just me coding on these projects, so I don't mind experimenting.

The first one was just speckit doing its thing. It took about 10 days to complete all the tasks and call the job done. When it finished, there was still a huge gap. Most tests were failing, and the build was not successful. I had to spend an equally long, excruciating time guiding it on how to fix the tests. This was a terrible experience, and my confidence in the code is low because Claude kept rewriting and patching it with many fixes to one thing, breaking another.

For the second project, I wanted to iterate in smaller chunks. So after SpecKit finished its planning, I added a few slash commands of my own. 1) generate a backlog.md file based on tasks.md so that I don't mess with SpecKit internals. 2) plan-sprint to generate a sprint file with a sprint goal and selected tasks with more detail. 3) implement-sprint broadly based on the implement command.

This setup failed as the implement-sprint command did not follow the process despite several revisions. After implementing some tasks, it would forget to create or run tests, or even implement a task.

I then modified the setup and created a subagent to handle task-specific coding. This is easy, as all the context is stored in SpecKit files. The implement-sprint functions as an orchestrator. This is much more manageable because I get to review each sprint rather than the whole project. There are still many cases where it declares the sprint as done even though tests still fail. But it's much easier to fix, and my level of trust in the code is significantly higher.

My hypothesis now is that Claude is bed at TDD. It almost always has to go back and fix the tests, not the implementation. My next experiment is going to be to create the tests after the implementation. This is not ideal, but at this point, I'd rather gain velocity, since it would be faster for me to code it myself.

Essentially what this article is asking for, in most cases, is a better UI/UX for one of the foundation models.

It seems to me that the ongoing “vibe coding” debate on HN, about whether AI coding agents are helpful or harmful, often overlooks one key point: the better you are as a coder, the less useful these agents tend to be.

Years ago, I was an amazing C++ dev. Later, I became a solid Python dev. These days, I run a small nonprofit in the digital rights space, where our stack is mostly JavaScript. I don’t code much anymore, and honestly, I’m mediocre at it now. For us, AI coding agents have been a revelation. We are a small team lacking resources and agent let us move much faster, especially when it comes to cleaning up technical debt or handling simple, repetitive tasks.

That said, the main lesson I learned about vibe coding, or using AI for research and any other significant task, is that you must understand the domain better than the AI. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Trust and privacy are at the core of our products. We give you tools to control your data—including easy opt-outs and permanent removal of deleted ChatGPT chats (opens in a new window) and API content from OpenAI’s systems within 30 days.

No you don't. You charge extra for privacy and list it as a feature on your enterprise plan. Not event paying pro customer get "privacy". Also, you refuse to delete personal data included in your models and training data following numerous data protection requests.

Same pattern for me. About a year ago migraines escalated to a few times a week. Debilitating. I started searching for a solution and discovered this book [1]. It basically recommends a low carb or even a keto diet. After three weeks migrants reduced to once every three to four months, and mostly because I'm cheating on the diet. Life changing.

If you live in one of the states that has strong privacy regulations send Meta a data deletion request. Or if you are curious about the data they have on you, send them an access request to get a copy of your data, and then a deletion request.

In some cases Meta ignores these requests. If that happens to you then complain to the state regulator. Both sending requests and complaining is easy as sending an email / filling in a form.

Not only are these not thought experiments by most definitions, this is also not really an article by most definitions. It's as if the author had a few interesting yet unrelated thoughts, scribbled them down and covered up for the lack of depth with fancy illustrations and transitions.

What a brilliant example of self-righteous post-rationalization. Maybe we all need to recalibrate our moral compasses. Yes, ethics is nuanced, but not in the case of Palantir, who directly enables the abuse of human rights on a massive scale. They are not in the grey, they are pitch black - arms dealers selling to the highest bidder[1][2]. Same as NSO but with better PR.

The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way.

1. https://archive.ph/LwvMA 2. https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/