AJ007

Very sad to hear. I was just listening to the latest episode of Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes' podcast last night, Rick Berman was the guest. They shared some stories about Patrick Stewart.

William Shatner was just on earlier this month, incredible he's still going strong at 95.

It is only a price drop if price * tokens used is less

Consider the messaging it took to attract AI researchers to OpenAI in the beginning, the exodus to Anthropic, and why Google, Meta, etc fail to recruit top researchers and the retain them. Reconcile all of this with the mammoth valuations of Anthropic and (previously non-profit) OpenAI and it all starts sounding a lot like "don't be evil." These guys never really believed any of this, did they? (not referring to the researchers)

What are we talking about here? I didn't read the full article but I looked at the synopsis at the top: "Striped patterns, flickering lights, bright glare, and crowded visual environments such as supermarkets"

With the exclusion of striped patterns, this just sounds like a typical over lit commercial environments, probably overhead fluorescent lights, maybe lights and screens running at different refresh rates. That has nothing to do with home decor of any era or culture.

Also I'm guessing the acoustics are consistently horrible in these environments too. Air quality probably sucks too.

The real question is when do you transition from building it with codex/CC to the harness itself.

RIP all of the open source European software initiatives.

Your world sure makes impersonation based cyber crime a lot simpler.

Little appreciated fact is news orgs have full time employees just dealing with licensing all day long, and they pay out millions of dollars when someone fucks up.

I wonder how long before it's common knowledge that a LLM has no segregation of a user's instructions and any other text it reads?

Not sure how your last point matters if 27b can run on consumer hardware, besides being hosted by any company which the user could certainly trust more than anthropic.

OpenAI & Anthropic are just lying to everyone right now because if they can't raise enough money they are dead. Intelligence is a commodity, the semiconductor supply chain is not.

"end-to-end message encryption is a sham as long as" -- I agree with that but would add even more caveats. If someone can't list those caveats off the top of their head they shouldn't be pretending they aren't able to communicate securely.

Just look at Salt Typhoon, every single person should be way more paranoid than they are, including government & agency officials. The attach surface and potential damage - financial and reputation - will only get worse with AI automation and impersonation, and that's for people who are doing nothing interesting and are law abiding citizens.

Every person and company I know who had an Adsense account was banned and not paid. Two of them were banned for terms violations which were things Google reps told them to do. Endless conspiracy theories on this, no idea.

Are you a lobbyist for Google, Apple, Meta, or the adtech industry? Because if you aren't, you are parroting their bullshit.

A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake. The universe of content is so large now, if you don't start with a fake audience you go nowhere. Slop rises to the top, because slopfarms can spend all their money on the farming rather than the content. It's even worse if you look at short form video because it's trivial to clone anything that went viral and alter the message, no real human or attractive 20 year old American required.

If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything.

The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.)

I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.

Discord & Roblox - no encryption, privacy, or anonymity on either of those platforms, by the way.

How does that even begin to make sense?

I want to protect my child from X type of content -- one of many jobs of a parent, but I will trust all content to self report to be child inappropriate? "Inappropriate" is entirely subjective and can not be defined as some sort universal bool -- and that's before you get to the point of actively malicious actors like Meta and Tiktok actively exploiting children for their content farms generation and ad impression factories.

If the user owns and controls their computers -- as they should -- then that subjective content filtering layer belongs there, in the owners control. If its a child's, then the parent owns the device, not the child.

Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.

One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.

I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.

This whole thing is silly, LLMs can automate reference validation.

If someone is a lawyer, accountant, doctor, teacher, surgeon, engineer etc, and is regurgitating answers that were pumped out with with GPT-5-extra-low or whatever mediocre throttled model they are using, they should just be fired and de-credentialed. Right now this is easy.

The real problem is ahead: 99.999% of future content that exists will be made using generative AI. For many people using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or some other non-sequential, engagement weighted feed, 50%+ of the content they consume today is fake. As that stuff spreads in to modern culture it's going to be an endless battle to keep it out of stuff that should not be publishing fake content (e.g. the New York Times or Wall Street Journal; excluding scientific journals who seem to abandoned validation and basic statistics a long time ago.)

Much of the future value and profit margins might just be in valid data?

Generative AI raises a lot of questions as to the value of copyright to society.

There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.

Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.

These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?

What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)

Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.

You'll be arrested for some weird law that doesn't make sense, but it's ok because a pool of 12 people off the street won't consider whatever random thing you did a real crime!

Every stage of human history was transitory, here comes the new one.

When I was a kid, they said don't meet strangers you talked to online. That was it. Sometimes it turned out poorly, but as it could anywhere. Perhaps on the internet it was less risky because the person you were talking to had no idea you were a kid or anything about you.

There were not apps that all of your friends in school used, and if you didn't use them you wouldn't be cool, but also the apps would push you or cause you to unwittingly share photos publicly while publishing your photos/videos globally to adults who for some reason use their app longer when they look at videos of kids.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how things work here, I don't use Facebook or Instagram. I've never even seen Tiktok. I've never used LinkedIn. But when I read these stories about what is going on with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta it sounds like they were doing a lot of things they shouldn't be doing in a commercial context, period. If you aren't 18 you should still be able to talk to your friends without being spied on, but you sure as hell shouldn't be getting connected to random people adult or otherwise from all over the world because it's increasing the usage time of those adults on some app.

I think protocols are the way to go and will be what dominate in the post-AI era. Fuck the ads, the constantly changing UIs, the bait and switch, and now just add photo verification to the list. No thanks.

Thinking about this a little more -> "nature of LLMs and intelligence"

Bloated apps are a material disadvantage. If I'm in a competitive industry that slow down alone can mean failure. The only thing Claude Code has going for it now is the loss making $200 month subsidy. Is there any conceivable GUI overlay that Anthropic or OpenAI can add to make their software better than the current terminal apps? Sure, for certain edge cases, but then why isn't the user building those themselves? 24 months ago we could have said that's too hard, but that isn't the case in 2026.

Microsoft added all of this stuff in to Windows, and it's a 5 alarm fire. Stuff that used to be usable is a mess and really slow. Running linux with Claude Code, Codex, or Pi is clearly superior to having a Windows device with neither (if it wasn't possible to run these in Windows; just a hypothetical.)

From the business/enterprise perspective - there is no single most important thing, but having an environment that is reliable and predictable is high up there. Monday morning, an the Anthropic API endpoint is down, uh oh! In the longer term, businesses will really want to control both the model and the software that interfaces with it.

If the end game is just the same as talking to the Star Trek computer, and competitors are narrowing gaps rather than widening them (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI releases models minutes from each other now, Chinese frontier models getting closer in capability not further), then it is really hard to see how either company achieves a vertical lock down.

We could actually move down the stack, and then the real problem for OpenAI and Anthropic is nVidia. 2030, the data center expansion is bust, nVidia starts selling all of these cards to consumers directly and has a huge financial incentive to make sure the performant local models exist. Everyone in the semiconductor supply chain below nvidia only cares about keeping sales going, so it stops with them.

Maybe nvidia is the real winner?

Also is it just me or does it now feel like hn comments are just talking to a future LLM?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft certainly desire path dependence but the very nature of LLMs and intelligence itself might make that hard unless they can develop models which truly are differentiated (and better) from the rest. The Chinese open source models catching up make me suspect that won't happen. The models will just be a commodity. There is a countdown clock for when we can get Opus 4.6+ level models and its measured in months.

The reason these LLM tools being good is they can "just do stuff." Anthropic bans third party subscription auth? I'll just have my other tool use Claude Code in tmux. If third party agents can be banned from doing stuff (some advanced always on spyware or whatever), then a large chunk of the promise of AI is dead.

Amp just announced today they are dumping IDE integration. Models seem to run better on bare-bones software like Pi, and you can add or remove stuff on the fly because the whole things open source. The software writes itself. Is Microsoft just trying to cram a whole new paradigm in to an old package? Kind of like a computer printer. It will be a big business, but it isn't the future.

At scale, the end provider ultimately has to serve the inference -- they need the hardware, data centers & the electricity to power those data centers. Someone like Microsoft can also provide a SLA and price such appropriately. I'll avoid a $200/month customer acquisition cost rant, but one user, running a bunch of sub agents, can spend a ton of money. If you don't own a business or funding source, the way state of the art LLMs are being used today is totally uneconomical (easy $200+ an hour at API prices.)

36+ months out, if they overbuild the data centers and the revenue doesn't come in like OpenAI & Anthropic are forecasting, there will be a glut of hardware. If that's the case I'd expect local model usage will scale up too and it will get more difficult for enterprise providers.

(Nothing is certain but some things have become a bit more obvious than they were 6 months ago.)

The British press has strict libel laws, and stories that the American press publishes are absolutely not legal in Britain, yet the British state doesn't threaten the New York Times or Washington Post with reparations (unless I'm missing something.)

If this is the end goal, then they should do the same thing China does. Make back doors mandatory on all devices and ban any sensitive foreign platforms at the network level. If anyone is using VPNs, Tor, or whatever the UK police can flag those individuals and investigate what they are doing. At minimum, they can get ad revenue for Google, X, Meta, etc close to $0 in the UK which will dis-incentivize those platforms from having users there.

There is also a future here where the UK will not be able to monitor or see what their users are doing. SpaceX is already breaking foreign sovereignty with Starlink usage in Iran. If the UK or the rest of EU fails to really crack down at the scale China did, they may completely lose control of what is distributed within their borders. A combination of satellites and mesh networks could be much harder to monitor than the current telecom infrastructure.

The current approach is going to get the UK pressured at the nation state level by the US. In that case the UK isn't answering to some foreign tech company but whatever party is in power in the US at the time.

I'm curious about the Slack thing. I wonder if there could be third parties doing something (browser plugins, third party keyboards for Android, edit: someone using a TV as a computer monitor.)

One thing is for certain, if ad targeting is not being done in ways it shouldn't be, there isn't anything technically preventing it.

Maybe the whole thing was intentional, right at the footer of viva "Cloud services by Microsoft Azure" ; #1 I've never heard of viva before #2 I've never seen an azure logo at the footer of a website.

Extensions are trivial unless they have to run external software or services. Download the extension, extract the source, audit it with a good thinking model and either strip out all third party URLs/addresses or have the agent clone the functionality you want.

They need to have an always-on camera looking at the person using the device. No camera, no discord.

It is only a matter of time before ID verification means the camera is always on watching the face of the person looking at the screen.