walrus01
walrus01 on Hacker News
If I see a document that uses "SI" seriously I'm going to treat everything in it with a very high degree of suspicion. Whatever people produced this document have clearly been required to kiss the ring by using the new federal mandate for SI, which makes its entire content suspect.
Hopefully the Canadian, Australian or some European governments have a better and functionally equivalent guide that can be better trusted not to mislead the reader.
Not SI, but SA: Super Anaconda?
I hear they have great "AI" programs in El Salvador! If you say the right things you might even be selected for a free trip here. Such a bargain. And the weight loss plan their nutrition experts have put together is top tier.
More of a derogatory comment towards the enshittification of things by PE, and a factual report of who runs the companies in that specific market niche. To be fair, plenty of horrible PE in other sectors are run by a diverse group of people too!
And where it isn't PE actually buying up local plumbing, heating, HVAC companies, it's "CRM lead generators" using automation tools to build plausible looking websites/phone number presences that look like a real company, fooling people who are searching for plumbing services in $city into calling them, then funnelling the lead to some local company in exchange for a percentage. Worst offender in this category is probably locksmiths.
One of the things you will learn after spending some time in the poorest parts of the developing world where the local cultural/religious practices don't do cremation, is that in many places, there is no equivalent of a "funeral home" or professional services for such. Each family is responsible for preparing the body of their relative and arranging for the burial themselves. It's a very visceral, in your face, hands on experience that people can't and won't do in western "developed" countries. Thus the standard practice of basically, doing quick prep on the deceased, getting them into a white cotton sheet (or local cultural equivalent) and buried quickly.
PE has also done this with locally branded veterinarians.
If you really spend some time thinking about, the western "bury in the ground" funeral industry is morally sick and wrong. Spending many thousands of dollars to "embalm" a person and then thousands more on a big fancy wood casket. And high pressure sales tactics to upsell every part of the funeral services to the more expensive version of whatever it is.
Brief historical recap: The western cultural practice of chemical embalming originated before we had reliable 24x7 electricity and high-powered freezers and modern morgues. If there's some need to have a corpse around for a period of time until everyone can be gathered for a burial, we have the technology to do that without going through some weird pseudo-mummification chemical "embalming" process of hooking up a machine to pump chemicals into a corpse's veins and arteries.
edit: This is an ugly and uncomfortably thing to think about, but in my opinion, many "funeral home" service businesses are optimized to extract the absolute maximum amount of revenue by selling products/services to a grieving family with upsells at a time of their greatest psychological vulnerability and grief.
If you're going to bury people, there's a lot to be said for the traditional Islamic requirement (or equivalent) of basically, dig a 6 ft deep hole, wrap the person in a clean white sheet, and get them buried ASAP without going through all the rigmarole of embalming and fancy expensive casket.
You want to have a big elaborate memorial service? Ok sure great, whatever fits the needs of the family and friends. Spend the GDP of a small developing nation on it if you want to. But I truly don't see the point in trying to embalm/preserve/buy a fancy casket for a body that's intended to rot in the ground. Chemical preservation embalming and $8500 caskets are nonsensical.
Frank answer: I'm far too lazy, it's outside of my general skill set of what I could confidently develop (or oversee hired people to build an equivalent service), and running a consumer SaaS with $10 to $30 monthly subscription/services or ad supported sounds like like a new level of personal hell for me.
Is it bad that taking a look at the homepage:
https://www.zamzar.com/My first thought was "imagine the astonishing amount of private documents and PII you could collect and store if you ran something like this for free as a honeypot". People just blithely uploading any document from their personal data to convert to another format.
And if I would have to guess it's less technical users who aren't going to try something like opening a document in the latest Libreoffice (or gimp, etc) and then exporting it to another format, using local software on their computer, first.
Would you be willing to share the code base of this site (sans videos list)? I know a person with a list of approx. 4500 curated youtube video links they've been maintaining for an entirely non-HN related purpose that would like to build a similar site and populate it with the video URLs. Right now it's in a much more clunky, awkward format.
I didn't say they won't immediately move somewhere else or still be readily available. Just be taken off HF. It'll be a futile game of whack a mole for anyone trying ot stop it. The new corporate overlords at some point will face pressure. The 72GB 2160p HEVC copy of Apocalypse Now sitting on my home theatre file server which came from a well seeded torrent does indeed say that large file sizes of things that $bigcorp don't like will continue to be easily available.
Recently saw a hand drawn cartoon to the effect of, a person is asking Claude or chatgpt to do something, it refuses, so the next step is "make the Chinese one do it", and the Chinese model is represented as a chained demon
I guess it depends if we're talking about decent new car at $40,000 or $95,000? I've seen lots of people claiming they're running v4.1 flash 1017 on local hardware but then it turns out it's something like the unsloth Q2 XXS or similar size. The Q8 is 508GB so assuming for a moment we're not running it on a Mac, we're looking at a cost of five or six 96GB GPUs to load the whole thing with a good sized full context and KV cache.
Yes, it'll likely just result in some people standing up a more dedicated purpose community hosting site of abliterated/uncensored open weight GGUF files. In a theoretical scenario where HF bans abliterated/uncensored models I could very well see the same people who are producing those now simply moving the location they upload stuff to.
To use an old analogy, it's not rocket science:
https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic
Wait and see, I give it fairly high odds everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface at some point in the future. The main barrier to wider spread adoption of this right now is that very few people have the legit on-prem hardware resources/budget to run something like an abliterated Q8 of deepseek v4.1 flash 1017 or mimo 2.6 or equivalent in size locally.
Discovering and exploiting some of the latest CVEs doesn't absolutely require the services of the most expensive Anthropic or OpenAI models.
I really wouldn't worry about this. People are already doing much more advanced, compute cycle intensive cloudflare bypasses with things like playwright + camoufox:
https://github.com/daijro/camoufox
There are various headless antidetect browsers now which are patched at the source code level to avoid headless-browser-detection systems, and to present consistent profiles for things like webrtc/webasssembly capability and other features that looks like a legit normal user agent of someone running MS Edge on Windows 11 on a consumer grade laptop. Or whatever the desired profile is. Often coupled with residential or mobile carrier proxies.
I mean, take a look at this and tell me if you think a cloudflare turnstile stands a chance when you are ready to spend the CPU cycles on running an entire browser and human-behavior simulation stack:
https://pypi.org/project/behavioral-playwright/
I didn't mean that the 10.0 finder was a reskinned NeXT GUI file management application (as you point out, it clearly wasn't and was a huge thing that had a bunch of heritage code), but that the entire 10.0 GUI was a kinda-MacOS-9-like GUI on top of the NeXT bsd-heritage unix-like base. If you were to take a 10.0 system and put it side by side for comparison with the CLI environment perspective, file tree, system libraries with the last NeXTSTEP releases or rhapsody.
Abliterated gguf of glm5.3 size and capability class models and similar are widely available for download, or the methods to produce them yourself from open weights safetensors files is also available.
The same AI that can be used to find exploits in things can be used in an internal adversarial way to self-audit your code before you put it into production or expose it to the world. This will have to become the new normal.
Or trigger the built in protection against abusing Claude.
It would have been a disaster, BeOS was significantly different from a NeXT/BSD-like unix type base that made it relatively easy for software to be developed on MacOS in the 10.0 to 10.4 era. Early versions of MacOS X like 10.0 were clearly just an evolved NeXT with a cute MacOS finder like skin on top.
If you really want to see magic, take a test sample of YUV420 video and AV1 encode it to an extremely low bitrate at like 720p, 24 fps to simulate something like the jerky handheld front-phone-cam in the example URL. Keep lowering the bitrate until the quality become unacceptable. Then compare it to the same bitrate/approx total file size in H264 and how bad it looks.
It would have been about 50x less annoying if whoever was driving the LLM had simply told it to make a clickable top of page index/headers in markdown and divide it into sections and subsections by logical topic.
"Haven't had enough yet of very junior engineers pasting wall-of-text from chatgpt at you in Slack? Come on down to the CVE announcement emporium, where we have a special treat for you today..."