Hacker News Reader

preach.

baconbrandon Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

This is just such a weird comment to make. Like just so weird. We have minority death squads and concentration camps. Steven Miller wants to "get rid" of 60 million people. His friend Curtis Yarvin advocates turning poor people into a slurry. If the argument is that this administration is not particularly good at carrying out their absolutely maximally evil intent, that's one thing. What you have put out here is nonsense and reflects a grievous lack of moral character.

baconbrandon Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

Building the panopticon does not reduce crime.

baconbrandon Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number

I am confused why you want to debate and make excuses for an agency that sent an innocent man to torture prison for all the months it took for the courts to get him back. Honestly. The complete inhumanity of some people.

baconbrandon Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number

I think you are a bad person who wants to sit around and talk about this as if it’s some sort of abstract philosophy and not a situation where actual human beings’ lives and health and bodies are being ruined by thugs paid for by my tax dollars. You are a bad person.

baconbrandon Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number

I listed asylum seekers and visa holders in detention but they are definitely grabbing citizens too. Usually they do not hold them for very long.

This happened at the Target I shop at:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...

Two teenagers just doing their jobs, dogpiled by roughly four adult men, beaten up and released hours later. One of them was just dropped off at the Walmart down the street, the other they released at the federal building they’re working out of.

baconbrandon Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number

https://youtu.be/e4X0hI40a8A

Just a handful of examples from last year. As a resident of Minneapolis I can assure you it is much, much worse than these few examples.

Are you not familiar with Liam Conejo Ramos? Or Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Just two other high profile cases, but this is far more prevalent than any reporting has outlined. Three of Liam’s classmates were also “mistakenly” shipped to Texas and returned. At least one of his classmates, a documented asylum seeker like the rest, is still in Dilley.

baconbrandon ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data

From everything we are seeing, the tools are not actually that capable. Their main function is not their stated function of spying/knowing a lot about people. Their main function is to dehumanize people.

When you use a computer to tell you who to target, it makes it easy for your brain to never consider that person as a human being at all. They are a target. An object.

Their stated capabilities are lies, marketing, and a smokescreen for their true purpose.

This is Lavender v2, and I’m sure others could name additional predecessors. Systems rife with errors but the validity isn’t the point; the system is.

baconbrandon I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

In English the word is “connotation.”

baconbrandon Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

Or you could just… not use LLMs

baconbrandon Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

I had a coworker who kept up a blog about random purchases she’d made, where she would earn some money via affiliate links. I thought it was horrendously boring and weird, and the money made was basically pocket change, but she seemed to enjoy it. You might be surprised, people write about all sorts of things.

baconbrandon Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

It doesn’t imply any of that at all.

There certainly is a huge army of people ready to spout this sort of nonsense in response to anyone talking about doing anything.

Hard to know what percentage of these folks are trying to assuage their own guilt and what percentage are state actors. Russia and Israel are very chronically online, and it behooves us internet citizens to keep that in mind.

baconbrandon Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

Doing something is literally the opposite of doing nothing. This is complete gibberish.

baconbrandon Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

We cannot coordinate large scale positive change without connecting genuinely with each other.

I don’t think violence is necessary. The common people have access to many levers of power, we only need to overcome lack of coordination and awareness.

But violence is an important part of our history. It is human nature and it serves a purpose. I won’t shy away from it.

baconbrandon Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

The future certainly does look bleak. I think not giving up on normal human expression, connection, and creativity is a good way to combat that.

baconbrandon Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has something to with payment processing overhead, but Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and always has. Strange.

baconbrandon Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

How is she doing now?

baconbrandon Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

I don’t think it’s a good reason.

I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.

But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.

Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.

And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.

Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.

I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.

baconbrandon Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.

It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.

baconbrandon Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

The way things are going, I’m not sure if the mega corps will ever truly turn a profit off the blood sucking. Maybe suck some USA tax money for a bailout…

In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.

baconbrandon Grokipedia and the coup against reality

I’m sure there could be some argument to be made for obstruction of justice considering he oversaw the firing/dissolution of agencies and people investigating his dealings. Plus wherever those investigations lead.

The SSA data heist also sticks out.

baconbrandon Tell HN: Azure outage

I have never noticed that page being updated in a timely manner.

baconbrandon Tell HN: Azure outage

Our Azure DevOps site is still functioning and our Azure hosted databases are accessible. Everything else is cooked.

baconbrandon Tell HN: Azure outage

All of our sites went down. This is my company’s busiest time of year. Hooray.

baconbrandon Grokipedia and the coup against reality

I don’t find it particularly childish to hate on a man who led the charge to destroy food and medicine meant for orphans. Among other things.

If he didn’t want bad publicity for everything he touched, he shouldn’t have done that.

baconbrandon Grokipedia and the coup against reality

Spot on. These people are all severely emotionally stunted and it is both pitiable and dangerous to me. They will never experience the full breadth of human emotion. And they have inflicted incalculable damage on the rest of us.

baconbrandon Grokipedia and the coup against reality

The next administration should imprison Musk. I don’t think I need to elaborate.

baconbrandon The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

I am highly skeptical that we will see AI pay for itself by the end of the decade.

More likely Americans’ tax dollars will be shoveled into the hole.

baconbrandon The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

This is phenomenally conceited on both companies’ parts. Wow.

baconbrandon Claude for Excel

That’s great and the only legitimate use case here. I suspect Microsoft will not try to limit customers to just writing scripts and will instead allow and perhaps even encourage them to let the AI go ham on a bunch of raw data with no intermediary code that could be reviewed.

Just a suspicion.