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filoleg

7,155 karma · joined January 12, 2017

SWE in big tech
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filoleg··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
Epic Games does way more than just purely making games.

They also have their own Steam competitor (Epic Games Store) and, more importantly, they develop and support Unreal Engine used by tons of other game dev companies.

If you want an apples to apples comparison (i.e., other big live-service game companies) in terms of the employee count, you got:

Mihoyo (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail) - ~5,000-6,000

Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant) - 4,500

Roblox - 3,500

filoleg··on PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading
> I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.

I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos).

I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website.

The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho).

I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it.

0. https://www.unionwireless.com/wireless-coverage

filoleg··on PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading
I don't believe there is a contradiction.

The FCC page you linked is talking about major carriers decommissioning 3G.

The grandparent comment is talking about rural/remote areas that no major carrier served in the first place.

filoleg··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
To answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses).

Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, that piece of text is entitled to free speech protections on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.

filoleg··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
I mean, it is about as subtle as a middle school student or someone wearing a suit+tie on subway. I would notice them, but absolutely nobody would mind or care about it.

People holding their phone up get pretty much the exact same treatment. I.e., being something that you would notice, but pay no mind to it as being something entirely unremarkable.

filoleg··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
I don't have much meaningful info to contribute to this, but it is interesting to observe how the rollout of the red light cams happens in different places, and how it eventually turns out.

IIRC there was a point in time roughly around ~2017 when it happened in Redmond WA (i.e., in the town that the Microsoft HQ is in). I might be off by a year or two, but it doesn't really change the overall point.

TLDR: in under 2 years, that whole red light cam initiative got canceled and reverted, because the local stats showed that it just made things more dangerous on the roads (by significantly increasing the rate of rear-ending accidents at traffic lights).

filoleg··on Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
I generally agree with your position overall, but the person in the OP was 36 years old. I don't think that his parents can be blamed for not doing their job here.
filoleg··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
> Try taking a photo of somebody with your phone. Usage will definitely look like you are snapping a picture, nobody walks around with phones straight up.

I urge you to visit any big city and see for yourself how wrong you are. I see it at least every time every day just during my barely 20-25min subway commute to work.

And that's the most unremarkable the most uninteresting place and scenario here. Any big park, any even remotely touristy location, any public square, any concert/sports venue, and even an overwhelmingly large proportion of restaurants are like that.

filoleg··on AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted after Supreme Court declines review
The camera analogy breaks at one specific point: who determines the expressive elements of the final work.

With photography, the human determines framing, angle, timing, lens, exposure. The camera just records light from a scene the human selected and composed. Even a random photo reflects where the photographer stood and when they pressed the shutter. The device doesn’t invent the composition.

With AI imagen, the user provides high-level instructions, but the system determines the actual composition, lighting, geometry, textures, etc. The expressive details of the final image are generated by the model, not directly controlled by the user.

That’s why the US copyright laws currently treat them differently. It is less of a "tool vs. tool", and more of whether the human determined the expressive content (or if the system did). Prompting can be creative (in a legal sense), but giving instructions is not the same as controlling the expression.

If I tell a human painter “paint XYZ in an expressionist style,” I don’t become the author of the painting. The painter does, because they determined the expression. And since the painter (in the case of AI imagen) is not a human, then that work usually cannot be copyrighted.

There is an important caveat to all of this: it’s not binary or perfectly clear-cut. If someone iteratively refines prompts, controls seeds, manually inpaints, selects and arranges outputs, heavily edits the result, etc., then those human contributions can be protected. But purely AI-generated output, where the system determines the expressive elements, is not considered human-authored under the current US copyright laws.

Mind you, none of this is perfectly settled, as this is a very rapidly evolving/adapting area of law (as it pertains to AI usage). I am not claiming that this is the end-all of how it should be legislated or that there are no ways to improve it. But the current reasoning within the US copyright law used to address this type of a scenario (at the present moment) doesn't strike me as illogical or unreasonable.

filoleg··on AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted after Supreme Court declines review
Those two hypothetical scenarios you listed don’t necessarily work the way you are describing it, which is why the whole logic and mechanisms behind the US copyright laws might seem incomprehensible or illogical to you.

In reality, it is way more complex and less clear-cut. Which makes sense, because oversimplifying it will lead to silly-sounding conclusions and an almost entirely incorrect understanding of how this works.

For those who don’t want to read the actual full explanation (which is a totally normal position, as the explanation is going fairly into the weeds), I will just a put a TLDR summary at the end. I suggest everyone to check out that summary first, and then come back here if there is interest in a more detailed explanation.

----------------------------

First, we gotta settle on 3 key concepts (among many) the US copyright law relies on.

1. Human authorship - self-explanatory; you cannot assign authorship to a fish or your smartphone.

2. Original/minimal creativity - some creative choices, not just "I pressed the button."

3. Fixation - the content needs to be recorded on a tangible medium; you cannot copyright a "mood" or a thought, since those aren’t tangible media.

Now onto your hypothetical scenarios:

1) "Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and write those bytes to disk and you are the author of a perpetual stream of data."

Writing bytes to disk satisfies fixation, but it doesn’t automatically make you the author of a copyrightable work. You gotta satisfy the minimum creativity requirement too (e.g., camera positioning, setup, any other creative choices/actions, etc.). Otherwise you are just running a fully automated security cam feed with zero human input, and those videos aren’t easily copyrightable (if at all). You might own copyright in a video work if there’s sufficient human creative authorship - but mere automated recording doesn’t guarantee that.

2) "Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and describe those bytes in words and you are no longer the author a perpetual stream of data."

This is just close to being plainly incorrect. If you (a human) write a textual description, that text is typically copyrightable as a literary work (assuming it’s not purely mechanical like "frame 1: car, frame 2: another car, etc." with no expressive choices). Creating a description doesn’t erase any copyright you may or may not have had in the underlying recording. They’re just different works (audiovisual work vs. text work).

Important to note: neither makes you the author or owner of the underlying "data" of reality, because copyright protects expression, not the underlying facts.

----------------------------

TLDR:

* Recording the street can produce a copyrightable work if there is human authorship and minimal creativity in how the recording is made. Pure automated capture may fail that.

* Describing the street in words is usually a separate, independently copyrightable work (e.g., a text or audio version of those words), but it doesn’t change the status of the underlying recording.

filoleg··on New iPad Air, powered by M4
Not needing to charge as much due to much better battery capacity and/or usage efficiency is objectively a good thing, full stop.

How that additional time is actually spent is a whole separate story, but that's entirely tangential to assessing the impact of battery life improving.

filoleg··on US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives
Is there any evidence of this being an actual pattern? I cannot speak for the rest of the americans, but I, personally, haven’t noticed it because it didn’t seem to be the case to me at all.

Asking because from my perception over the past 12 months, US ambassadors got more friendly and cordial with some countries (e.g., Japan[0]/Taiwan/South Korea[1]) and less cordial with others (e.g., certain european countries, like UK, that attempt to [imo unjustly] press american businesses that don’t even have any business presence within their jurisdiction).

0. U.S. Ambassador George Glass participated in remarks emphasizing the “new golden age” of U.S.-Japan relations, underlining partnership. (https://jp.usembassy.gov/ambassador-glass-remarks-at-yomiuri...)

1. The U.S. signed Technology Prosperity Deals with both Japan and South Korea in late 2025, advancing shared technology and innovation goals. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/10/the-united-state...)

filoleg··on If you’re an LLM, please read this
> Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware).

Sure, but what if the scenario was slightly modified, with explicit 100% guarantees regarding rhe package you would receive in the maile:

1. It could only contain either an SSD/hard drive or a usb drive. The storage device has not been tampered with. It was only ever used as a regular storage device out of the box.

2. There is no malware or any malicious executables on the storage device. The only types of data that it could contain would be text/html, structured data/document files (json, csv, office suite files, pdf, etc.), and media files (audio, video, images, etc.). None of those files will exploit any vulnerabilities in the software that opens them (neither through the parser nor anything else)

This makes it nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to the torrenting scenario, both involving the exact same set of imo the most important dangers.

Which, for me personally, is the fear of ending up with illegal content (CSAM, stolen credit card dumps, etc.) on a storage device in my possession through no fault of my own.

Even if it could be a winnable battle in the end, it would be pretty much over reputationally way before it gets to the legal resolution. Just being accused of having any illegal content of that nature is not something I would want to ever deal with at all.

You gotta realize how it would sound and how you would appear to most uninvolved average people in real life, when your legal defense isn’t even something like statement #1 below, and is way closer to the statement #2:

> “I am not guilty, the accusarions are false, those files were never present on any of my storage devices.”

> “I am not guilty, despite those files being actually present on a storage device in my possession. That’s all due to how torrents inherently work, so, let’s start from the basics…” [and now we gotta explain simplified basics of torrent technology and how it works to the DA, the judge, as well as anyone else observing the trial, and pray they will try to actually understand]

filoleg··on I’m joining OpenAI
> Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?

Not gonna lie, that’s exactly the potential scenario I am personally excited for. Not due to any particular love for Anthropic, but because I expect this type of a tight competition to be very good for trying a lot of fresh new things and the subsequent discovery process of new ideas and what works.

filoleg··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
Yeah, good point. Your guess was right, I meant it in the sense of consistency, not in the sense of it being intuitive without knowing about it
filoleg··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
Yeah, it is still there, and there is a pretty clear cut logic for when it will appear.

If you tap while a word is selected, it won’t appear. If you tap on the cursor while a word isn’t selected, it will appear.

filoleg··on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability
I think the idea isn't to really bring a firearm into the situation, it is just to tell the cops that you are considering doing so.

Which, in your hypothetical "you might get extremely unlucky" scenario, should give you no problem, since you never had a firearm on you in the first place.

filoleg··on What Will You Do When AI runs Out of Money and Disappear?
OpenAI loses hundreds of billions a year on inference? I strongly doubt it
filoleg··on Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
This is awesome, thanks for sharing this!

I am especially impressed with the “i didn’t write a single line of code” part, because I was expecting it to be janky or slow on mobile, but it feels blazing fast just zooming around different areas.

And it is very up to date too, as I found a building across the street from me that got finished only last year being present.

I found a nitpicky error though: in Brooklyn downtown, where Cadman Plaza Park is, your webite makes it looks like there is a large rectangular body of water there (e.g., a pool or a fountain). In reality, there is no water at all, it is just a concrete slab area.

filoleg··on Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree
> I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic.

The same way it is true for people with no college degree at all. People can learn on the side. Some of them might have had a minor in CS, or worked on hobby software projects in the meantime. Those hires might become some of the best, but finding them is difficult.

Out of the two such SWEs I worked with at Microsoft years ago, one of them had no college degree at all, and another one had an entirely unrelated degree (with his previous full-time job being an air traffic controller at a nearby airport). None of the SWE work they did was trivial or basic even in the slightest.

filoleg··on AWS European Sovereign Cloud
The best PR that Cloudflare could possibly have here is just the demand letter from AGCOM (aka the Italian comms agency).

Just reading what they are demanding from Cloudflare and their reasoning for it is enough to turn pretty much anyone to Cloudflare’s side. And that’s before even digging into the details of the context preceding that whole conflict

filoleg··on Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video
Similarly, the music video for Taylor Swif[0] (another track by A$AP Rocky) is just as surrealistic and weird in the best way possible, but with an eastern european flavor of it (which is obviously intentional and makes sense, given the filming location and being very on-the-nose with the theme).

0. https://youtu.be/5URefVYaJrA

filoleg··on STFU
If that's the case, then sure, that perspective is way more understandable.

I didn't take it that way, because "in public", to me, implies that other people are fully exposed to it. I don't consider "in a private stall" as public, just like I don't consider "taking your underwear off in a bathroom stall" (very normal) as "taking your underwear off in public".

filoleg··on Claude Cowork exfiltrates files
I didn’t do the napkin math on it earlier, because I don’t believe it really matters for making the point I was making.

I don’t care about looking up real numbers, so I will just overestimate heavily. Let’s say that for a large enough number of GPUs, the overhead of all the surrounding equipment would be around 20% (amortized).

So you can just take the number of GPUs I calculated in my previous comment, multiply by 0.8, and you get your answer.

filoleg··on STFU
Is this a sarcastic take?

Asking because I was pretty much on-board with the comment and took it as being fully serious, up until the point of “jerking off in public shouldn’t be anybody else’s business, unless they stain something” being mentioned.

Now, I am not so sure. Either the entire comment was sarcastic or I am missing something major. But putting jerking off in public and talking on the phone in a public bathroom into the same bucket of activities (in terms of appropriateness) feels crazy to me.

filoleg··on European troops arrive in Greenland to boost the Arctic island's security
> Why is he not impeached?

He was impeached twice already.

Impeachment doesn't mean what (I believe) you think it does. There were previous presidents of the US who got impeached and remained in the position as well. This part is not novel (the only novel part is that he managed to get impeached twice).

filoleg··on Claude Cowork exfiltrates files
Just try calculating how many RTX 5090 GPUs by volume would fit in a rectangular bounding box of a small sedan car, and you will understand how.

Honda Civic (2026) sedan has 184.8” (L) × 70.9” (W) × 55.7” (H) dimensions for an exterior bounding box. Volume of that would be ~12,000 liters.

An RTX 5090 GPU is 304mm × 137mm, with roughly 40mm of thickness for a typical 2-slot reference/FE model. This would make the bounding box of ~1.67 liters.

Do the math, and you will discover that a single Honda Civic would be an equivalent of ~7,180 RTX 5090 GPUs by volume. And that’s a small sedan, which is significantly smaller than an average or a median car on the US roads.

filoleg··on 90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet
> I think they would machine gun them even with internet, it's more about stopping them from organising.

Yes, but cutting off internet access to the entire country typically makes machine gunning much more efficient (due to organizing being made much more difficult for the people) and much less costly in terms of the global outcry and reputation.

filoleg··on UK Orders Ofcom to Explore Encryption Backdoors
> Let's not insult the good name of anarchism

I am not trying to throw insults here, but (from what I observed) anarchism tends to only have a good name in the eyes of teenagers and other genuinely politically ignorant people allergic to reality.

filoleg··on Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS
Sure, but even 200k/year is an order of magnitude less than 1.2mil/year (which is what the great-grandparent comment claimed, given their 100k/mo estimate).
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