pbasista

I would assume that they alienated their existing customers and put off their potential customers.

Why would it?

To the best of my knowledge, changing software does not cause damage to the TV that could result in warranty being voided.

If the new software burned pixels or did something like that, which I am unsure is even possible from software, then I believe that would cause the warranty to be voided as a result.

But the reason would be pixels being burnt by using the hardware wrongly (i.e. through a bad software). Not merely by installing the software.

I am unfamiliar with LG TV software but I would imagine that you can reinstall it after rooting and use custom software that you trust.

> I would accept vibecoded stuff at this point.

You might as well start you own project. Buy a $200 subscription from one of the major AI providers. And guide it towards your goal.

It is likely that within a week you will have something that suits your needs, is fast and reliable.

An example of a prompt that you might use to start:

> Please build a home TV frontend similar to Kodi or Apple TV. But nicer, faster, more modern and with cooler features. Use modern software engineering practices. Keep the code well-organized, performant and readable.

They are soldered in. Replacement itself can probably be done by a professional repair technician who is equipped with the right tools. But it is not a self-service job that anyone can do.

On top of that, the drives might be somehow paired to the motherboard. And I would imagine that pairing a new one with the existing motherboard may require some proprietary software that only Apple has.

These are only my assumptions though. People e.g. at Louis Rossmann's repair shop might know more.

Why not?

I can understand that they might be cautious about sharing their data with a Chinese company.

But them being the most successful companies means that they can just buy their own hardware. And run whatever models they can get their hands on in there.

Even if those models are Chinese. They (the companies running them on their own hardware) would be in full control then.

> very hard to move off of without convincing a lot of others

In my opinion, you do not need to convince anyone. Just leave. And face the consequences. If you think it is the right thing to do, do it. Do not wait for it to be convenient.

You will still be able to communicate with those people using plenty of other means. They have phones. They have e-mails. Some might even have open access social media accounts such as the Fediverse ones.

Similarly other people will still be able to contact you if they want.

I would be interested in knowing which devices were (or still are) vulnerable to these zero click exploits. And how those exploits (used to) work, specifically.

A very good point.

I assume that it is the current go-to way to operate for many spy agencies. Hire intermediaries. Who are then tasked to hire further intermediaries. Who then do the dirty work. Without a clue of where the actual order comes from.

Such a mode of operation has lower efficiency of course. But it can be done at scale. Which then offsets the losses caused by inefficiency.

I would not be surprised if there are multiple such attempts to spy on businesses all around the place occurring right now. And the person from the article is just one of the unlucky guys that got caught.

This mode of operation is likely also used, in my opinion, in the current hybrid war attacks by the Russian GRU, mainly in the Ukraine and in Europe at large.

You might make a distinction between looking at the door and walking through that door. But that is a flawed analogy to this particular issue. Because you cannot "look" at API. API has a single purpose. It can be used.

And if the entity operating it does not want public to use it, they need to make it non-public.

> if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site

I would say that you are not allowed to use their site as a logged in user (i.e. upvoting, downvoting, commenting, making posts).

It does not seem logical to me that Reddit could "ban" anyone from using their public frontends as anonymous users.

They could only do something like that, in my opinion, if access to all their content was gated behind a login.

There is no agreement you need to enter into in order to use public APIs.

That is the purpose of public APIs. Usage without prior agreements.

If the API providers want to restrict the usage of their APIs, they are free to make them non-public.

What are you talking about, specifically?

Using software with specific licenses? Or making modifications to it?

That is substantially different from reading the public APIs.

Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.

In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.

X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.

I do not understand how what you have suggested could be considered as an appropriate analogy.

No one implied that the author should offer their product for free. I merely suggested that they need to focus on other aspect of their product rather than the mechanical software parts because they can no longer be the differentiating factor. Precisely because they could easily be recreated or copied.

Of course.

I think that the differentiating factor must be something else than the software product feature. Because that can easily be copied or recreated.

It can be e.g. the customer support where customers will be listened to and will have their suggestions and requests implemented as features.

I would suggest that, instead of trying to complain about the people copying your products, which I think is practically impossible to avoid, and even from your own experience preventing it has led nowhere so far, you should focus on making sure that your version of the product is the best one. So that the people will naturally use it instead of those repackaged versions.

> take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it

I would assume that this might be one of the reasons why people are modifying and repackaging your product. I would suggest to remove that incentive. So that the people will have no reason to repackage your product because it has annoying features. And so that they could use it directly and be happy about it.

> They refuse it because ...

It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.

From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.

From the article:

> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.

I do not understand how that is even possible.

If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.

I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.

I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.

This figure is about the water consumption only. The estimate about the electricity consumption, in that same article, is much higher than that.

The main problem is, in my opinion, that those are just estimates. If we are supposed to accommodate the current and potential future needs, we need real data. Not estimates.

Tangential:

I have recently noticed that e.g. ChatGPT, when used from a web browser, periodically sends unfinished prompts to their servers, namely to the `conversation/prepare` endpoint, without waiting for the user to actually send it.

This partial prompt data might potentially be used to "pre-warm" some kind of cache.

But it may also be used to track the user's writing cadence, error correction style and evolution of their stub ideas as they are being formulated into a prompt. I would assume that such data could also be sold to the advertisers.

> then deploy right to production

And when things go south, you blame AI?

I would be very curious to see how you explain it to your customers.

Is it going to sound similar to this?

> You see, our well-meaning AI-generated code has caused all your data to be permanently deleted. In case you are confused as to who to blame, we would like to clarify that we did not write, nor review the code. So we cannot possibly bear any responsibility for its mistakes. The responsibility lies with the LLMs, not us. We have already fired the LLM which did the coding and the review. And we are already using their main competitors. Hopefully that settles your concern with the quality of our service and we are looking to have you on board of our next products.

Yes. It appears that there was another person, perhaps with another pair of such glasses, who was filming the interactions from a 3rd person's perspective.

Arguing about whether to call this kind of behavior a harassment or "a bit" of a harassment is in my opinion all besides the point.

This video mainly shows a person approaching other people in public and recording them with these glasses. Which is one of the typical scenarios in which such a glasses are probably going to be used. And that video shows that even the Meta employees themselves generally do not seem to like it very much.

That is the point.

I think you are not missing anything. I have not checked the code itself originally, I am sorry for that. But you are right that there seem to be no actual code for the harness itself. Just the code for (some) mods, plugins and scripts.

I just read the first line in the README file which says:

> Claude Code is an agentic coding tool ...

and I immediately assumed that this is what this repository hosts.

It claims that it includes plugins but that does not mean it does not include anything else. It also never explicitly claims, as far as I can tell, that it does not hold the source code of Claude Code, the harness, itself.

It is all extremely misleading, in my opinion. Which might be on purpose, unfortunately.

I understand the motivation for such a concern. But Claude Code in particular has its source code available on GitHub [0].

So I am unsure if it is fitting to call it a "closed source" harness.

[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

Edit: The linked repository does not contain source code for Claude Code, the harness, itself. It only contains the source code for (some) scripts, mods and plugins.

> I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads.

That would make a great title for a write-up of your experience.

There is no "panic". It is more a realization that it is becoming difficult to notice recording devices.

I assume the most problematic scenarios are private. Private meetings. Private conversations. Private encounters of every kind in general. Environment in which ordinary people used to have good enough confidence that, unless they see a phone or a camera, they are not being recorded. It no longer is that simple.

Confirming, at least to some extent, that there is no recording going on may now require confronting the other person. And asking them to remove their glasses or hand them over for inspection might be considered rude.

As a result, I think that it might make people more suspicious and less trusting, especially when meeting new people for the first time.

> are you going to tell me “well you made it public access, they have a right to it same as everyone”?

Yes. You can of course always close it to the public if the public usage bothers you. Or require those using it to agree to your terms and conditions where you restrict the speed, the weight, the time of the day, etc. Anything you want.

But if you choose to make it public with no restrictions, you have to be prepared to face the consequences.

> Public availability doesn't give you a license to use it however you want.

Of course. You listed complex examples from the real world. A park where walking is allowed but damaging the plants is not, for instance. There it makes sense to distinguish various activities that can be done in there and treat them separately.

But a website offers not much activities that you can do with it. You can read it. And that is about it.