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jjani

1,330 karma · joined March 1, 2025

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jjani··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
Did you only extract the English versions or is this as usual another case where big tech only cares to censor in English?
jjani··on Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels
> But there are a few things we can learn from this:

> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.

This is almost the opposite of what we can learn about this, and the article does a great job at pointing that out. It's a very recent social phenomenon. Yes, that contradicts your abnornal psych class, but think about it. 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)? In elementary, middle and high schools, at the workplace, in other majors? IME absolutely not, very much the opposite. The only ones who did so were the diagnosed, and then only mentioned it when very relevant. Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.

This is a massive sociocultural phenomenon, absolutely not something inherent to the human psyche. Almost no one is born this way (strong desire to make themselves feel unique).

jjani··on Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice
I'm happy to be convinced, but so far this isn't really helping the point. What you've described applies to an extraordinarily small percentage of games. I'm looking at my Steam library with ~170 games. I see ~8 that have real brand names, 7 being shooters that contain gun brands - which have never cared about these things, given they're already appearing in the context of people killing each other in the first place - and the other 1 being Football Manager (an offline game).

> I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic.

Then please give us some proper examples we can learn from.

> Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.

GTA is hardly a "fantasy game", its entire schtick is getting as close to the real-world setting as possible, going as far as to parody real-life brands. They're quite unique in doing so, an extreme outlier.

Take a look at the current top 10 games on Steam by player count. You'll see that indeed the only real-world brands featured are potentially gun brands, and none of them have things like famous buildings. DOTA, Apex Legends, Stardew Valley, Rust, Palworld, Elden Ring and a bunch of idlers and shooters (CS2, PUBG, Delta Force).

jjani··on Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice
Don't you know? If I cmd+S the HN front-end and throw my own backend behind it, host my own instance, and post something illegal on it, then YC is liable!

Obviously they're not, but hey, just joining them in making things up. Protect the children!!

jjani··on The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning
> In a move that at first went unnoticed

Stopped reading here, if you're positioning yourself as if you have some kind of unique insight when there is none in order to boost youe credentials and sell your product there's little chance you have anything actually insightful to offer. Might sound like an overreaction/nitpicking but it's entirely needless LinkedIn style "thought leader" nonsense.

In reality it was immediately noticed by anyone using these models, have a look at the HN threads at the time, or even on Reddit, let alone the actual spaces dedicated to AI builders.

jjani··on Next month, saved passwords will no longer be in Microsoft’s Authenticator app
> Since sharing Netflix passwords is a breach of their terms of use, that's not really a compelling argument.

Like the millions of "terms of use" breached by the exact trillion dollar companies pushing for passkeys (Google, Microsoft) while training their AI models? Sounds like terms of use are entirely irrelevant in the first place.

jjani··on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers
A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.

What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.

Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.

jjani··on If AI Lets Us Do More in Less Time–Why Not Shorten the Workweek?
It is true, but they're in cultures and countries you haven't experienced. Here it's common for people who have experienced a sudden windfall to get a second child that they had been wanting to have but weren't having because of financial reasons. Zero chance this is the only place in the world where that's the case.

As the other person pointed out, a lottery jackpot is also far above the minimum, it was just the most obvious example of a sudden windfall. And even then I was considering lottery jackpots here which are usually $0.5m-5m, not tens or hundreds of millions which seems common in the US (I could be wrong on that).

jjani··on If AI Lets Us Do More in Less Time–Why Not Shorten the Workweek?
There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who would definitely have more children if they won the lottery tomorrow. Maybe not in your surroundings, or even in your country, but very much so elsewhere.
jjani··on Engineered Addictions
As long as the founders aren't looking to make billions, it's very possible to run a healthy social media platform, as evidenced by Front Porch Forum [1]. 20 employees, human moderators (gasp)! There's also Metafilter which is paid [2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/10/front-p...

[2] https://www.metafilter.com/

jjani··on Infrastructure at Roblox
I'm sure it's the #1 platform involved in "defending children accused of crimes involving online platforms" in whatever US state that attorney operates in. But even that sounds better than the lifelong dopamine system disabilities that the likes of TikTok causes. Every other adult I talk to about social media admits having had to very deliberately uninstall/disable TikTok, else they just couldn't detach themselves from the screen. Now imagine what it does to kids. And how big of a % of users ends up like this compared to the % of all Roblox users traumatized by it.

Before anyone comes in accusing me of unfairly pointing fingers when Meta (Instagram reels) and Google (Youtube shorts) are just as bad, truth is the latter two just haven't managed to make their algorithms half as addictive. I'm sure they'd love to, there's nothing inherently better about them, but so far they haven't cracked it.

jjani··on Tell HN: Meta developer account suspended
Yet you're implying the actual revenue comes from the B2B side.
jjani··on Tell HN: Meta developer account suspended
> b2b

There you have it. Now try B2C.

jjani··on PlasticList – Plastic Levels in Foods
Super cool project, but I think there's pretty valid nitpick here:

It should clearly state the container (when multiple are possible) as that's likely the origin of 99.9% of the microplastics, as well as temperature. Prime example: "Starbucks Matcha Latte". I bet there are orders of magnitude difference in microplastic content between getting a hot one in a plastic (coated, if not fully) takeaway cup vs an iced one in a mug.

In general, containers and the way they're used generally make the difference, but all the focus here is only on the food item.

jjani··on We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
> I don't know, with that argument you can argue that everything is dependent on everything

It is. And China have been the only ones intelligent enough to have understood this very long ago. They also show that while entire independence on their scale may be a pipe dream, getting close to it is feasible.

jjani··on We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
I can guarantee that if you read your comment with Amazon substituted for Huawei, you'd object against the okayness of that arrangement. Same thing.
jjani··on We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
Interesting, comparing commodity services (VMs, storage etc) like-for-like, DO has always seemed more expensive than AWS. Do you remember what was the main source of savings?
jjani··on We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
> There will be a new AWS European Sovereign Cloud[1] with the goal of being completely US independent

The idea that anything branded AWS can possibly be US independent when push comes to shove is of course pure fantasy.

jjani··on What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding
To give you an even more shocking one; in Korean, known for its various formality and politeness levels, the standard form when ordering is saying "Give me X"!
jjani··on What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding
It's only a matter of time before they have an LLM both 1. cheap 2. fast 3. good enough that they'll replace Google Translate's current model with it. I'd be very surprised if they'd put more than 1 hour of maintenance into Translate's current iteration over the last 12 months.
jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Gmail was in beta for what, 2 decades? Did you never use it during that time? They've been using these "Preview" models on their non-technical user facing Gemini app and product for months now. Like, Google themselves has been using them in production, on their main apps. And gemini-1.5-pro is 2 months from depreciation and there was no production alternative.

They told everyone to build their stuff on top of it, and then jacked up the price by 4x. Just pointing to some fine print doesn't change that.

jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Correct, though pretty much anything end-user facing is latency-sensitive, voice is a tiny percentage. No one likes waiting, the involvement of an LLM doesn't change this from a user PoV.
jjani··on Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up
Just to vouch for this, I've been using Brave for many years. Haven't done a single crypto transaction in my life. Whatever crypto features it may have don't get in the way at all.
jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Yes, by setting the thinking budget to 0. Which is very common when a task doesn't need thinking.

In addition, it's also relevant because for the last 3 months people have built things on top of this.

jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Not at all. Non-thinking flash is... flash with the thinking budget set to 0 (which you can still run that way, just at 2x input 4x output pricing). Flash-lite is far weaker, unusable for the overwhelming majority of usecases of flash. A quick glance at the benchmark reveals this.
jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
> When regular software declines in quality, it’s usually noticeable through UI changes, release notes, or other signals.

Counterexample: 99% of average Joes have no idea how incredibly enshittified Google Maps has become, to just name one app. These companies intentionally boil the frog very slowly, and most people are incredibly bad at noticing gradual changes (see global warming).

Sure, they could know by comparing, but you could also know whether models are changing behind the scenes by having sets of evals.

jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
This was not my experience with the earlier preview (03), where its insistence on comment spam was too strong to overcome. Wonder if this adherence improved in the 05 or 06 updates.
jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Classic bait-and-switch to make developers build things on top off models for 2 months, and then raise input price by 2x and output by 4x. But hey, it's Google, wouldn't expect anything else from an advertising company.
jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
The real news is that non-thinking output is now 4x more expensive, which they of course carefully avoid mentioning in the blog, only comparing the thinking prices.

How cute they are with their phrasing:

> $2.50 / 1M output tokens (*down from $3.50 output)

Which should be "up from $0.60 (non-thinking)/down from $3.50 (thinking)"

jjani··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
4x price increase over preview output for non-thinking.
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