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bjornstar

Re:Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model on Friday April 25, 2025 @11:05AM (#43794320)
List 5 famous goblins with proper names, for each provide a quote either from them or about them.

Half the time they say Jareth from Labyrinth, The Great Goblin from The Hobbit, or the Green Goblin from Spiderman. Sometimes they answer Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter.

They also confabulate goblins out of thin air and create made up quotes. When pressed for links to support their answers they admit they made them up.

I'm happy when they include goblins from Magic the Gathering, World of Warcraft, or Warhammer. Occasionally you'll get a good answer like Blix from Legend, but more often than not if it's a goblin you don't recognize, they made it up.

Recently I had an experience where the chatbot gave completely wrong subway instructions over and over again. It confidently told me that it was accurate and it was my "trusty companion". It had no idea what was wrong with the answers and kept prompting me to give it the correct answers.

This was in contrast to when I asked it who had access to my chat logs and would only tell me to read the privacy policy. When I asked it to for specifics in the privacy policy it refuses to give wrong answers:

"When it comes to company policies, especially related to privacy and data handling, it's crucial to provide accurate information because these topics are very sensitive and important. I want to ensure you have the most reliable information, and the best way to do that is to refer you directly to the official privacy statement."

It's clear what the priority is for these chatbots: get the public to train them and protect the corporations that run them.

Re:Google Hiring Chrome Extensions Developer Relations Engineer on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @07:43PM (#32919251)
Text of the tweet

> We're hiring @ChromiumDev! The Chrome Extensions Developer Relations Engineer will work directly with developers, helping them adopt Manifest V3 and build extensions using web/browser API’s.

Re:Show HN: Socket – Secure your JavaScript supply chain on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @02:22AM (#30524719)
It looks like having an MIT license gives you a score of 70. It seems wrong that the most commonly used license on the platform is poor and it makes it hard to trust your scoring on anything else.
This used to be true, but in 2008 direct flights between China & Taiwan were established and today it's easy to holiday in Taiwan from China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Links

@dang can you fix the typo in the title? Assymetric => Asymmetric
create-react-app made their own security problems by bringing in the entire world, npm audit just makes that clear.

npm itself having vulnerabilities is a more serious problem and it's not clear that they're taking it seriously.

Re:International Mail Service Suspensions on Saturday October 02, 2021 @03:54AM (#28726856)
My assumption is legibility, should be a nice cost savings when you don't have to read handwriting.
Re:International Mail Service Suspensions on Saturday October 02, 2021 @02:53AM (#28726565)
I was going to comment about this as well. We've been unable to ship packages from Japan to the US for the past 20 months. I heard that as of yesterday we are now able to ship again, but all custom forms & address labels must be printed rather than hand-written.
Re:‎Amplosion: Redirect AMP Links on the App Store on Monday September 27, 2021 @11:47PM (#28679115)
There's already the Redirect AMP to HTML extension, I use it for both Firefox & Chrome

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-ht...

While it doesn't modify the behavior of any sites, Intercept Redirect automatically skips most redirect services. It's a dead simple implementation that attempts to require the bare minimum permissions to do the job.

https://intercept-redirect.bjornstar.com

From the MIT license:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

It clearly requires attribution.

Re:Manifest V2 Support Timeline on Saturday September 25, 2021 @08:04AM (#28652465)
I've already switched to Firefox on Android and expect to stop using Chrome the moment they stop accepting updates to manifest v2 extensions.
Re:Npm Audit: broken by design? on Thursday July 08, 2021 @06:15AM (#27770133)
It's like claiming that the weeds are not dangerous in your garden not that the guidebook got them wrong.
Re:Npm Audit: broken by design? on Thursday July 08, 2021 @12:51AM (#27768580)
It's really disappointing to hear an important member of the javascript community not maintaining their library and then blaming npm when people rightfully complain about it.

This is like getting mad at the guidebook for showing which plants are weeds when your neighbors complain that your unmaintained garden is full of weeds.

If Dan says "npm audit is a stain on the entire npm ecosystem", maybe it's safe to say that Create React App is a stain on the entire react ecosystem. The best time to maintain it was every single month of its existence because that's how you maintain software.

Facebook has abandoned Create React App. Dan stated that he intentionally does not maintain the project. Rather than complain about npm audit, they should give Create React App over to the community who actually use it instead of keeping it shambling along as a zombie with their name on it.

And if Facebook doesn't want to give it up, the best thing we can do as a community is to move on to any of the other great tools available that are actually maintained.

Re:Npm Audit: broken by design? on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @09:12PM (#27767514)
It was added to the standard library: padStart
He just posted another demo where you kick your feet to accelerate a la The Flintstones -- https://twitter.com/GoingHandsfree/status/140136648492059033...

Pretty fun to watch!

There's a nice demo of using handsfree.js to drive a car in a racing game -- https://twitter.com/GoingHandsfree/status/140032233301379891...
Thanks for trying it out and leaving a review. It's available for most browsers at https://intercept-redirect.bjornstar.com
I wrote Intercept Redirect to skip these redirect services. It doesn't change the URLs that appear on sites but intercepts the requests and instantly redirects them to the intended URL. It also requests the are minimum of permissions and collects no data.
As counter anecdata, I've reported a concrete coatings company claiming to be inside of a post office. I've reported it several times over the course of several months and nothing has happened. See for yourself: https://goo.gl/maps/LvAZXpSJgURoUqYk8

And with the blackhole that is Google support, what's the point in feeding the beast? We're all better off using Open Street Map and not rewarding Google for their poor behavior.

Re:Transparent privacy practices for Chrome Extensions on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @05:32PM (#25143433)
Some choice quotes:

"Google does not sell user data and extension developers may not do this either."

"Prohibiting the use or transfer of user data for creditworthiness or any form of lending qualification and to data brokers or other information resellers."

"The item listing page will also display whether the developer has certified that their extension complies with this new policy."

Calling it certified is a bit misleading since Google is the one auditing, and they are not certifying anything.

Not looking forward to having my extensions updates being arbitrarily prevented from updating and not getting any clear answers from Google about what the actual problems are.

Re:OBS Studio 26.0 on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @03:38AM (#24636466)
Don't call me Shirley
Re:Chrome Web Store payments deprecation on Monday September 21, 2020 @09:00PM (#24549882)
Are they still going to call it a "Store" when you can't buy anything on it?

I always thought it was weird that my free extensions were distributed by a store. Expect Google to launch a new service with the same functionality and then deprecate the Chrome Web Store.

I put in my favorite poorly conceived product name: chocolate stool

It warned me that it contained the words 'ho' and 'chola'. Not really the result I expected.

The server is in the process of being overwhelmed.

Here's the best tweet it generated for me: “Sex with very handsome and beautiful people is the best.”

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