donmcronald

Yes. What if your connection is used for illegal activity?

Does the app function as a proxy? I always assumed that wasn’t possible.

I saw a lot of people get told they were too dumb to understand how the app stores or Adobe subscriptions were a good value proposition. A lot of people rolled in the mud and now they’re upset their clothes are dirty.

If it didn’t affect those of us that tried to resist, I wouldn’t care, but we got dragged along unwillingly and now it may be impossible to hit the brakes before corporations control everything by usurping control of our identity systems.

This is really the most important thing for me. I don’t want to be obligated by law to use some identity or attestation service tied to big tech. I might be ok with my bank handling it because they already require ultimate trust, but not if they simply defer to big tech or implement infrastructure on foreign ccTLDs (id.me, verified.me, etc.).

I’m Canadian and watching our government sell our souls to American tech companies is beyond scary.

> The True Believer came out in the aftermath of WW2 and tried to analyze why it happened, and laid out that the most dangerous group of people aren’t the ones who’ve been poor for a long time, but those who were recently poor, who remembered a more prosperous time.

Is it just people trying to sow division when you're potentially describing an entire upcoming generation?

> People need to have some perspective. You’re not permanently locked out of useful AI models, it’s within reach of most who can save a bit to go get a pair of used 3090s on eBay and run some pretty useful models.

I don’t agree. The current generation of young people can’t afford housing and education without taking on decades of debt. Buying a pair of 3090s for local AI isn’t even on the radar. Even if they could, it’s unlikely they’d be able to make productive use of them. The big AI companies haven’t even scraped the surface when it comes to memory, specialized knowledge, etc..

I see people downvoted my comment and I’m not sure why. I’m not trying to pile on to create drama. I’m trying to explain there’s a growing cohort of people that have a right to be angry because they’re watching global productivity increase as their standard of living is decreasing. Who wouldn’t be upset?

The dangerous part is that people angry about it are easy to sway with propaganda. It’s not the billionaire families colluding to fix food prices, which happened with bread in Canada, it’s the “insert another marginalized group here” that’s causing the problem.

It might just be frustrated young people. They're getting squeezed real hard by a system that was set up to put them on an impossible trajectory before they were even born.

You can see the divide everywhere. People with lots of money think supply and demand, congestion pricing, etc. are great tools because it doesn't impact them at all compared to people on the bottom. Those are only good solutions if you're not the one falling off the bottom rung of the ladder.

Is it really shocking that people are upset to see the supply of resources being cornered and hoarded by the ultra rich with the most likely outcome being the only way to get access to those goods will be to pay forever?

The possibility of AI becoming a must-have knowledge repository or memory assistant is scary if you couple it with the idea of never being able to own it. How much is your memory worth? What if you can't compete in terms of productivity without having access to AI? What about the people that can't afford the "first month of rent"?

People come in and make angry posts like the GP because they know they're getting disenfranchised and don't have the power to do anything to change it.

> Is a computer that lasts 5-8 really productive years (and is still serviceable for another 5-7) and costs $1500 really a deal-breaker just because it was $1000 and on sale for $850 a year ago? Even if it doubled again, it still doesn’t price normal people out, IMO.

Maybe it's different in the US. In Canada, the median income for 25-54 years old was just under $60k / year in 2024. When you're talking about a $3k USD computer, it's pushing 10% or more of the median after tax income. My gut reaction to that is that most people don't even end up with that much disposable income in total, let alone for a single purchase.

HN is skewed with people way at the top end of income earners, especially on a global scale. Imagine getting $30k / year to spend on everything you need and then consider how much $3k on a computer is.

My dad had to take a loan to buy our first computer. Who wants that? It's dumbfounding to see the number of people cheering on backwards progress where we end up where we were 3+ decades ago.

It'll be the same for Canada. We're already seeing satanic panic style action against things like TP-Link networking equipment and Hikvision cameras. Funny how those are a couple of the brands that can run 100% locally without a connection to the internet.

You don’t need to. As long as the dumb majority goes along with it, your options are to capitulate or get locked out of society.

This happens to my family :-(

I host an Immich server for us. They don’t want Google Photos syncing and they know to watch out for the dark patterns, but, eventually, they come over with Google Photos syncing.

The other day my mother came to me with a OneDrive prompt on her Pixel. It was asking if she wanted to “free up space”. I’m pretty sure it was trying to get her to sync photos. I wish I would have taken a screenshot. She’s not low on space.

Of course, the only way space gets freed up is if they delete your local copies. It’s practically ransomware and they can’t figure out why people hate them.

> Well, I don't understand why he did not complain to ICANN?

It’s slow. At ICANN, IMO, registries > registrars > registrants.

What? Where can you register online? In Canada you basically have to hire a lawyer and the wait time for issuance is crazy. The backlog peaked at a 4 year wait after Covid.

I’d love to be able to register an trademark online.

People get tied to their registrar by using their DNS or other services. It's a mistake, but it's extremely common.

So if you have someone using GoDaddy, and everything is working, how do you sell them on the idea of migrating DNS or hosting or email if they've never had an issue?

Domain registration and all other services should be separate. You don't want DNS, web hosting, mail hosting, etc. ToS applied to your registrar account because it increases the risk of the account getting locked.

I don't like the way remote editing works with plugins. IIRC, the remote agent pulls the plugins from the connecting client. I get why it's done like that, but I'd way rather have it go the opposite direction.

I want a setup where I can have an immutable devcontainer with local copies of everything I need to develop 100% offline; dependencies, tools, etc.. Having my local editor pull plugins from a devcontainer for the project seems to make more sense to me.

I didn't dig in too much. Maybe there's a way to make it work somehow.

Devcontainers always disappointed me. The sales pitch is that everyone uses the same container, but that's not accurate. Everyone builds a container from the same config and it'll be similar, but it takes a ton of effort to make sure it's identical.

The idea that a devcontainer gets built on-demand instead of checked out like 'docker pull ..." has always felt weird to me. It's so close to being awesome, but ends up being barely useful.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Is there a way to checkout an immutable devcontainer?

Given the very limited experience I have where I've been trying out a few different models, the quality of the context I can build seems to be much more of an issue than the model itself.

If I build a super high quality context for something I'm really good at, I can get great results. If I'm trying to learn something new and have it help me, it's very hit and miss. I can see where the frontier models would be useful for the latter, but they don't seem to make as much difference for the former, at least in my experience.

The biggest issue I have is that if I don't know a topic, my inquiries seem to poison the context. For some reason, my questions are treated like fact. I've also seen the same behavior with Claude getting information from the web. Specifically, I had it take a question about a possible workaround from a bug report and present it as a de-facto solution to my problem. I'm talking disconnect a remote site from the internet levels of wrong.

From what I've seen, I think the future value is in context engineering. I think the value is going to come from systems and tools that let experts "train" a context, which is really just a search problem IMO, and a marketplace or standard for sharing that context building knowledge.

The cynic in me thinks that things like cornering the RAM market are more about depriving everyone else than needing the resources. Whoever usurps the most high quality context from those P99 engineers is going to have a better product because they have better inputs. They don't want to let anyone catch up because the whole thing has properties similar to network effects. The "best" model, even if it's really just the best tooling and context engineering, is going to attract the best users which will improve the model.

It makes me wonder of the self reinforced learning is really just context theft.

I have an Mini M4 Pro with 64GB of 273GB/s memory bandwidth and it's borderline with 3.5-27B. I assume this one is the same. I don't know a ton, but I think it's the memory bandwidth that limits it. It's similar on a DGX Spark I have access to (almost the same memory bandwidth).

It's been a while since I tried it, but I think I was getting around 12-15 tokens per second an that feels slow when you're used to the big commercial models. Whenever I actually want to do stuff with the open source models, I always find myself falling back to OpenRouter.

I tried Intel/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-int4-AutoRound on a DGX Spark a couple days ago and that felt usable speed wise. I don't know about quality, but that's like running a 3B parameter model. 27B is a lot slower.

I'm not sure if I "get" the local AI stuff everyone is selling. I love the idea of it, but what's the point of 128GB of shared memory on a DGX Spark if I can only run a 20-30GB model before the slow speed makes it unusable?

> And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered.

What do you use and how do you test / reconcile to make sure it’s not missing files? I find OneDrive extremely hard to deal with because the backup systems don’t seem to be 100% reliable.

I think there are a lot of solutions these days that error on the side of claiming success.

I would guess they realized they missed a notification or warning and feel a bit bad about the whole thing blowing up. Hopefully not though. The fact there were several high profile projects that got caught off guard puts the blame mostly on MS IMO.

I think the reason these things go viral is that a ton of people reading about them can see themselves in the same situation, minus the clout needed to get it resolved. A short term PR crisis is the best we can get, so everyone piles on.

I don't think MS will fix it though. IMO, they're more likely to create a program for open source code signing. That way they can capture all the high visibility projects, get a bunch of goodwill for being philanthropic, and all the small projects that don't qualify are too small to cause a fuss, so they can continue to treat them poorly.

> "We worked hard to make sure partners understood this was coming, from emails, banners, reminders," said Davuluri.

Emails are useless given the volume of trivial crap that MS emails about. Banners don't help for systems on auto-pilot. Reminders how?

Break my workflow and let me un-break it when I notice.

I hope you're right. I played around with a bunch of AI stuff recently and that's kind of the conclusion I came to. Use local AI for mission critical stuff, if you're confident in that, and use the SOTA models for reviewing.

Tap the latest general knowledge for asking "could this be improved", but make the improvements with local systems and models. But then the obvious problem becomes finding new data to train the AIs. In my opinion, there's no way their plan doesn't involve stealing from everyone to keep training, so is it really going to be safe to use the cutting edge models at all?

> Whats next?

I think Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. are happy with the collateral damage caused by false positives and bad product decisions. And the way they implemented this was a bad product decision.

Think about it. If they "accidentally" destroy distribution for small projects that don't have the visibility to make waves, that's fewer possible startups that can eat their lunch. The cynic in me thinks that "at scale", "AI false positives", etc. are just an excuse for them to eliminate small developers.

They don't have to ban them all either. All they have to do is increase the risk to the point where rational people won't take the risk.

There were people that warned not to get into iOS development because it was impossible to guarantee distribution of an app. How do you build things like LoB apps under those circumstances? And who benefits when it's impossible to promise delivery of custom built apps? It favors big companies with the visibility to short circuit the system.

It's asymmetric rules; one set for big companies and another for small developers. I really hope the renewed interest in Linux takes off because it's the last chance we have at holding off big tech from taking over every little aspect of our lives.

It could be dead simple. Lock the account, but let the owner temporarily unlock it for X days so they have enough time to undergo verification.

If they manage to build good memory systems, people will stop keeping personal docs and rely on the “AI” for everything. Imagine 20 years from now when people don’t even have copies of the recipe to bake bread and then you’ll see what the goal is.

Software distribution is largely controlled by 3 companies; Microsoft, Google, and Apple. We used to have the web and web apps as an escape hatch, but, surprise, all 3 of those companies use a shared “safe” browsing blacklist that can be used to wipe your domain / website out of existence. Mozilla participates by using the same list which is a shame.

Big tech shouldn’t be allowed to control the platforms and the ability to distribute / blacklist software and sites. That needs to be legislated against and those companies need to be broken into a thousand pieces each.

> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.

What's the math on that?

It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.

“Action Required” followed by the shittiest, least detailed, most ambiguous instructions on the planet is a Microslop staple. It’s exhilarating to get a couple of them in the same week.

The ones that tell you there’s a problem with your MS365 subscription, but don’t tell you which one are an especially exciting challenge to deal with. Bonus points if they warn about “possible data deletion” without specifying what.

$300 / year for a code signing cert that won’t pass Smartscreen Filter is wild.

> Why don't you want every device to have a public IP?

Big companies would abuse that beyond belief. Back around the late 90s ISPs wanted to have everyone pay per device on their local networks. NAT was part of what saved us from that.

IMO, IPv6 should have given more consideration to the notation. Sure, hex is "better in every way" except when people need to use it. If we could just send the IPv6 designers back in time, they could have made everyone use integer addresses.

    # IPv4 - you can ping this
    ping 16843009
    # IPv6 - if they hadn't broke it :-(
    ping 50129923160737025685877875977879068433
    # IPv7 - what could have been :-(
    ping 19310386531895462985913581418294584302690104794478241438464910045744047689

It's simple, unambiguous, and scales infinitely.