Hacker News Reader

brookscon Gemini 3.5 Flash

I asked gemini 3.1 Pro to search for the linkedin URLs for a list of peers. It generated a plausible list of links -- but they were all hallucinated. On a follow up it confirmed it couldn't actually search, but didn't tell me that without prompting.

brookscon 'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens

Thoughts and Prayers to those affected

brookscon Show HN: State of the Art of Coding Models, According to Hacker News Commenters

It'd be interesting to also graph this over time to see how sentiment changes from when a model is released to today.

brookscon Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

During the Longhorn project (before the reset to use Win 2003 code and create Vista from it)... There was plans for a "Castle" feature which would allow you to roam your profile, data across multiple PCs in the home. Parts of castle made it into Win7 homegroups later, but it was very much scoped back.

At the time I was in the WMDRM team which handled content licensing. We had a feature that built on Castle if you purchased audio/video content (purchased music still had DRM then) we'd automatically roam the content licenses among all the PCs in the home. We had the typical challenges from content owners that this could be used to share content in a dorm, over the internet. We had to design in things like proximity detection to ensure you aren't sharing beyond a home network. It was somewhat complicated (DRM couldn't be simple), but it would have provided a far better user experience.

We also planned a centralized DRM licensing backup/restore service so you weren't beholden to the service you bought content from deciding to let you have another license years later.

All of this was cancelled with the reset unfortunately...

brookscon Amazon Echo Dot

Whenever I read these, I can't tell if the group is paranoid or prescient. But anyway I ordered one via my alexa. Amazon probably already knew I would.

brookscon Tech workers are increasingly looking to leave Silicon Valley

Having moved from Seattle area after 15 years to Tampa -- and having purchased a 2 acre property for my family (wife, 3 kids, 3 dogs). we need 2 acres.

Having owned a number of houses - the biggest reason is peace. I've owned houses where I felt the neighbors looked in your back window, everyone could hear what others are doing in their yard around you...

Walking out and having a bit of space is wonderful. And tools like slack and hangouts are making it easier to work remotely as well.