HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

knaik94

2,591 karma · joined September 29, 2015

knaik1994 a.t gmail d(o)t com github knaik twitter @knaikk
submissionscomments
knaik94··on The case for physical media ownership
I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it.

I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV.

I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical media but most people value convenience over true ownership. And most companies value market capture and "security" over user rights. In crypto the sentiment of "not your keys, not your wallet" is held a core truth, yet people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth. I am not arguing against the use of 2factor, but at the same time certain accounts can not be logged into freely without push notifications in Duo or Microsoft. I still don't see a universal ability to export Passkeys, and I believe that's by design.

I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods. I can't imagine companies choosing to open up their walled gardens otherwise.

knaik94··on Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play
This game was released via a physical release on the Nintendo Switch.

It's very clearly intended for teens+.

knaik94··on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
I think most small communities will stand bot-free because there's little incentive to have bot engage with it.

But I wonder if there's a size of conversation after which people will still choose AI assisted summaries. Discord had/(has?) a feature where it used LLMs summarize and then notify you about a discussion happening.

knaik94··on Ask HN: Do you still use physical calculators?
I tutor advanced math and science and so have updated my daily driver along with whatever students were most likely to come across. In the past it was a ti 84 and then ti 89 titanium. But in the last decade schools have also embraced Desmos, a simplified version is even accessible on their standardized tests now.

For personal use, I have an android emulator that runs TI 89 titanium. It hits the sweet spot for me in terms of completely covering basic and advanced features I would need from a calculator. If I need something extremely basic, I use the one built into Google search. If I ever feel myself limited by the 89, it's always been because I am trying to do something that would be better served by Excel or Desmos.

The best calculator is the one most easily available. I personally don't see value in keeping a separate device. On the other hand, I will go out of my way to make sure the keyboard I am using has a dedicated numpad. There's nothing that comes close to the efficiency of tactile keys when it comes to doing long numeric calculations.

knaik94··on Ask HN: How to go back to listening to MP3s?
I have had a bad experience using the modern iTunes/native music app. It's clear that Apple has moved away from local first features.
knaik94··on Tell HN: Merry Christmas
Merry christmas y'all and happy holidays. I can't put in to words how much I appreciate the culture on HN and the conversations I've been a part of. It's the only social media site where I enjoy reading my historical messages, I can see exactly how much I have grown and learned. I am thankful for the moderation and self-moderation.

I will continuing trying to give back in a small way, what the HN community has given me. Happy holidays.

knaik94··on Ask HN: How to do simple heartbeat monitoring?
The polar verity sense is what you're looking for. It connects to your phone via ble so it doesn't need a display. It's not as popular as a chest strap.
knaik94··on RIP Microsoft WordPad
I've never run in to that issue in the last 10+ years of using notepad++ with these plugins. Since my autosave location is dropbox, it's automatically backed up the moment the file is saved. I've set my control+n to a new note and not an empty file. The take notes plugin doesn't rely on the built in temp auto saves.

If a file is saved and then gets corrupted for whatever reason, I can also use dropbox to grab the previous known good version. I've tested it, but I've never had to actually use it.

knaik94··on RIP Microsoft WordPad
I use the autosave and take notes plugin in notepad++ which makes it perfect for this use case. I have it set to autosave when the window loses focus. And the take notes plugin lets me set a default filename with timestamp and save directory, which I set to my dropbox. The plugin also has an option to delete all empty text files when notepad++ is closed.

It feels as friction free as writing on a physical notepad with a paper and pencil.

knaik94··on Happy New Year HN!
happy New Year
knaik94··on Tell HN: Merry Christmas
merry christmas
knaik94··on Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
Yandex is a genuinely good alternative. For text search, it isn't overly censored in relation to DMCA risks. Appending terms like 'torrent' actually work. For exact text searching, I found Yandex results to be better.

And Yandex is leagues ahead of Google and Bing in terms of reverse image search.

Google is generally better if you have a more abstract or conceptual query, or if you're not sure what the best term would be.

knaik94··on LG halts production of ATSC 3.0-compatible TVs over patent concerns
DRM limits hardware options significatly. Open standards are embraced even when they come later, AV1 vs HEVC is a great example. The standard will exist but hardware adoption of the standards is often weaker, which I consider killed. DRM is how the patent holders maintain control over who can use the standards.

The existing standard that people are going to use is the previous version of ATSC without DRM and encryption. Althrough DRM and encryption are not technically the same, they are practically in this kind of situation.

It's funny watching spotify try to move closer to radio with AI generated DJ curation. I hope it dies sooner rather than later so we can reallocate those bands to something more useful.

knaik94··on LG halts production of ATSC 3.0-compatible TVs over patent concerns
I can't imagine myself watching a livestream of something like LTT.

On the other hand, I have listened to 'Lofi HipHop' and 'oldies playing in another room' and aquarium/submarine streams. For videos where it's not live, you can create 'custom' channels with a looped playlist. It doesn't feel the same as broadcast to me.

knaik94··on LG halts production of ATSC 3.0-compatible TVs over patent concerns
Similar to how most people have shifted to permanent shuffle for the song selection queue, online streaming caused the same shift in how people decide what to watch. Familiary with existing media is what keeps people tied to services, and at some point viewers will move on.

The recommendation system around broadcast media seems immature and doesn't feel personal, the cable model makes it worse. People don't subscribe to every service every month, like they did for cable, people cycle through them. Keeping a viewer will always be cheaper than trying to regain a lost one.

Youtube and Twitch has gained social signficiance and some content is on par with traditional media. Kids who only watch YT, Twitch, and TikTok do not feel left out socially. Memes and social media fill in any gaps. I've noticed that the younger generations are more surprised when a peer doesn't know the Mr Beast YT channel than when they don't know a specific TV channel/show.

I think the future of live events and sports will look like Twitch, with a heavy emphasis on interactability. I think branding for shows/channels will get more focused on the characters/actors and creators. And larger categorization will be based on genre. Basically the same way it works with movies.

knaik94··on LG halts production of ATSC 3.0-compatible TVs over patent concerns
I am glad, I won't miss this feature. This will also mean there is less adoption of the new stanard and so the old standard will be kept around for longer. ATSC 3 was guaranteed to fail the moment it intoduced DRM into the standard. This is the situation with HD Radio all over again.

The DRM and patents effectively destroyed the value and purpose of having an open standard, for consumers. It's what gave spotify and google music room to kill radio and now online streaming will do the same to broadcast TV.

Even with live events and sports, Amazon has started live streaming thursday night football on Twitch, you only need prime to watch. Youtube and Twitch are also creating a new way to consume the content, adding interactability. A charity recent soccer match that included major content creators had 1.3m average live viewers, 2.5m+ peak on Youtube.

This was eventually going to happen, but these decisions accelerate it. The concept of being limited by tv "channels" has already started to feel foreign to me.

knaik94··on People Are Streaming Pirated Movies on TikTok, One Short Clip at a Time
Correlation is not causation.

Piracy related free web streaming has existed since the moment it became possible to profit/run with ads. Looking at a list of the most popular torrents makes it clear who the largest demographic is. Z Library is an example of just how giant the TikTok userbase and how it brought younger generations into piracy.

You are misinformed.

knaik94··on Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium
Since Google controls the implementation and the featureset of this API, they are effectively controlling the entire chain of access.

Having open source implementions does not make a difference, because a Google, or implementing website, server will control whether the content is served. Having the mechanism of access open sourced makes no difference in this situation.

It is the same situation with the "latent" passkey attestation mechanism. Apple and Google have general guidelines that the feature will not be used, but that only true currently. This should not be part of the browser for the same as with passkeys, it gives corporations final say in what you are allowed to use.

knaik94··on Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium
Yes, because a feature flag shows intent to implement it before any real discussion have taken place with privacy and non-corporate security advocates.
knaik94··on Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium
From a very top level view, this gives Google, and other websites, the ability to block requests from devices/browsers they don't approve.

This implements device level verification of the code running your browser. If the device identifies as something Google, or other implementing websites, don't approve, you'll get an error similar to how you see 404 errors for missing/wrong links.

knaik94··on Threads Usage Drops by Half from Initial Surge
Threads is still lacking a proper discovery algorithm, desktop interface, and compatibility with ActivityPub/Fediverse. Desktop viewing currently only works for reading, but not for interacting.

Meta was very tactical about the timing. Each additional main feature will likely bring a new wave of users that stay.

knaik94··on France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
From what I've read, the current theory is that access is initially possible using the cellular modem. Building and running a custom Android wouldn't necessarily help in that case, because the modem/baseband firmware is completely isolated and runs independently of the OS.

It seems like general camera/audio recording would need a secondary exploit.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/219230/where-is-...

knaik94··on France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
From an opsec standpoint, would leaving the phone in airplane mode and turning off location services effectively block access to the phone?

From my understanding airplane mode disables the sim, wifi, gps, and bluetooth entirely, but it's possible to re-enable wifi, gps, and bluetooth. It's something I got into the habit of doing because my phone searching for 4g cellular data ate into my battery.

knaik94··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://knaik.github.io/ small personal blog, still a work in progress
knaik94··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
I see your perspective better now. The Linkedin case was specifically regarding CFAA and is relevant to the original suit against OpenAI and web scraping, but I now see you weren't discussing that. The copyright limit you mention is related to completely automated generations, it's not as clear when a human uses it. The UK assigns the copyright to the user/custodian of the AI. The neural network models can repeat data, but it requires a certain frequency, and still relies on a probabilistic output. The complication comes from the fact that there is no "copying" when training a model. Fundamentally, I think we disagree on how data use laws apply in this situation. I appreciate you discussing this with me, it did helped clear some misunderstandings I had.

https://www.bloomberglaw.com/external/document/XDDQ1PNK00000...

knaik94··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
I've been thinking of the output as fanfiction/fan art. It shares many of the same complications regarding the ownership of ideas, commerical intent of writing, competition, and copyright. Fanfiction is generally a protected form of expression, but requires the work to be "transformative". Unlike with parodies and critisisms, fanfiction can be much harder to distinguish from original work. From that perspective, a large amount of the output of LLMs is so generic, that it's not possible to attribute it to one person. It's like trying to find the original author of "Once upon a time".

https://theinnisherald.com/the-other-once-upon-a-times-a-his...

knaik94··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
What you describe misrepresents how LLMs/neural networks and the math works, your analogy does not apply. There's no static data in the networks. The output of LLMs are much closer to parodies and fanfiction. In that case, you very clearly own the copyright to the new work you make.
knaik94··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
The fundamental issue in that situation isn't about profit, it's about the definition of what is considered publicly accessible and what consent that implies.

I disagree with you on whether it should count as being exploited. I don't see fanfiction writers professional impersonators or as inherently exploitative. I understand that some people would disagree because there is a difference in scale. But using technology to mimic and, in some sense, replace human effort is the reason it is useful.

I believe this will shift how and why people value organic media. The standard of what makes content "good" will rise in the long term. When stable diffusion first came out, I compared the generated art to the elevator music. I feel the same way about the output of LLMs. I might feel differently in a few years if models get better at the rate they currently have been, but that's not likely.

I agree that people should have more control over how their data is used, and I'd love to see this suit lead to stricter laws.

knaik94··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
I agree that there is additional nuance, but so far public data scraping has very clearly been ruled as legal. It's possible that at the time of scraping, copyrighted data was incorporated into the training data because it hadn't been taken down by the host platform yet. But in my opinion, the core idea proposed by the suit that private data was used intentionally, is not true. The GPT4 browsing plugin is equivalent to web scraping.

And another complication is that OpenAI is not exposing any static data. A response is generated only after prompting. I'd argue that LLMs are closer to calculators than databses in function. The amount of new information that can be added is also limited, it's is not a continuous learning/training architecture.

I do hope this leads to more clear laws regarding data privacy, but I can't imagine the allegations of "intercepting communications", violating CFAA, or violating unfair competition law will hold.

knaik94··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
California is the only state that has active data privacy laws. Although, I don't think there's any financial transactions, it's just public data scraping. I wonder if the company can even be held liable for the output of these LLMs. There's no direct hosting of any static data.

https://iapp.org/resources/article/us-state-privacy-legislat...

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

Page 1 of 23Next →