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mFixman

2,918 karma · joined May 16, 2011

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mFixman··on GPT-6.1 Sol replaces GPT-6 Sol after just 7 days, with near-Astra intelligence
The US government and most large companies drank the kool aid, and they will be the ones blaming Big AI if things go very wrong.
mFixman··on GPT-6.1 Sol replaces GPT-6 Sol after just 7 days, with near-Astra intelligence
Any strong enough model with weak enough safeguards can cause an AI Chernobyl event that will make people and governments against AI development and deployment, just like Chernobyl did for nuclear energy.
mFixman··on Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
You could say the same of PE, maths, literature, or almost anything learned in school. Few adults need them in their lives, but they provide good habits and virtue to students. People who don't read and write anything outside social media are a loss to themselves and to society.

Disabilities don't disappear after school, and children who struggle with motor control in school will continue struggling with it on adulthood. Half the point of school is finding out your weaknesses and learning to overcome them in a safe and controlled environment.

mFixman··on Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
And now instead of teaching disabled students how to improve their handwriting to improve their lives regardless of their circumstances, we lowered the bar and made all students have bad handwriting.
mFixman··on Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
Removing AI watermarks is still easier than doing a school assignment.

The only way to prevent AI cheating is to make the assignments in class in pen and paper. To be honest, I don't understand why schools moved away from that in the first place.

mFixman··on Kill The Cookie Banner
I have been successfully using the Consent-O-Matic extension [1] to auto-decline all cookie and GDPR banners. As much as I'm not comfortable giving potential access to every website to some extension developers, this improved my internet experience almost as much as AdBlock.

Does anybody here know of a better solution?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

mFixman··on OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
Lumon is currently hiring new candidates willing to undergo severance :-)
mFixman··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU and ISPs are funding fibre to remote locations _because_ of Starlink competition.

Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.

mFixman··on Organic Maps
The killer feature of Organic Maps and OSM is the POI markers for small things. If you are cycling, knowing where the nearest bike rack is to your location is crucial.

Google Maps is very good at showing car parking spaces, which is the requirement if you live in a suburb in California like its developers.

mFixman··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
What's the status of banking apps, Google / Microsoft authenticator, and Google Wallet? Those were the things preventing me from abandoning stock Android.
mFixman··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
Nobody in the chain of command thought this was a real emergency situation.

The point of turning Bluetooth off or having to turn around the aircraft was to follow the airline's rules on terrorism, which likely tell them to abort a flight route if there's any symbol that could be interpreted as a bomb.

The captains were risking their jobs if they didn't follow this stupid request. This is a good case for getting common-sense exceptions to checklist-style rules.

mFixman··on Googlebook
> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.

This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.

Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.

mFixman··on I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?
It was originally going to be scrapped by a Web 3.0 app-only proprietary events system, but we did a small campaign inside the university to keep the site on. As far as I know, the changes will now only be on the backend.
mFixman··on I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?
The Cambridge list of talks at https://talks.cam.ac.uk is unbeaten.

The site loads in less than a second, you can do anything intuitively with a single click, all pages have a lot of useful information with zero fluff or clickbait.

mFixman··on C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma
I used to slay with this in code golfing competitions from TopCoder, where you had to implement a function to solve a particular problem, thanks to C pointer maths and the gcc generally putting function arguments in order in the stack.

Turns out, these two are equivalent in practice (but UB in the C++ standard):

    double solve(double a, double b, double c, double d) {
      return a + b + c + d;
    }

    double solve(double a ...) {
      return a + 1[&a] + 2[&a] + 3[&a];
    }
mFixman··on You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account
My impression was that the EU did it to prevent people doing visa-free layovers from claiming asylum, while the UK did it to negotiate a dual exception with the EU in the future.

ETA is a visa to the entire world in all but name. I'm not looking forward to the future where every county implements is and visa-free travel becomes a thing of the past.

mFixman··on Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown
> We’re also adding a fill tolerance slider, giving you control over how precisely the Fill tool applies color. To get started, select the Fill tool and use the slider on the left side of the canvas to adjust the tolerance to your desired level. Experiment with different tolerance settings to achieve clean fills or creative effects.

This tool would have been so useful 25 years ago when I had to manually recolour every pixel in the contour of the cool photo I was editing for my new desktop background because the fill tool didn't recognise the background properly.

mFixman··on C++26: Std:Is_within_lifetime
Is this the first type of sum-type option choosing statement present for C++ unions? I've been waiting for this feature since the year 1978.

Still, it's a wasted opportunity not to have a language-level overload to the `switch` statement that allows nice pattern matching. Even with std::is_within_lifetime C++ unions are prone to errors and hard to work with.

mFixman··on GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
Why do we need a log viewer at all?

My browser can handle tens of thousands of lines of logs, and has Ctrl-F that's useful for 99% of the searches I need. A better runner could just dump the logs and let the user take care of them.

Why most web development devolved into a React-like "you can't search for what you can't see" is a mystery.

mFixman··on GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
Good place to ask: I'm not comfortable with NPM-style `uses: randomAuthor/some-normal-action@1` for actions that should be included by default, like bumping version tags or uploading a file to the releases.

What's the accepted way to copy these into your own repo so you can make sure attackers won't update the script to leak my private repo and steal my `GITHUB_TOKEN`?

mFixman··on Claude Opus 4.6
I found that "Agentic Search" is generally useless in most LLMs since sites with useful data tend to block AI models.

The answer to "when is it cheaper to buy two singles rather than one return between Cambridge to London?" is available in sites such as BRFares, but no LLM can scrape it so it just makes up a generic useless answer.

mFixman··on Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT
If you go to Settings -> Personalisation -> Memory, you have two separate toggles for "Reference saved memories" and "Reference chat history".

The first one refers to the "memory updated" pop-up and its bespoke list of memories; the second one likely refers to some RAG systems for ChatGPT to get relevant snippets of previous conversations.

mFixman··on Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT
I've been impressed by how good ChatGPT is at getting the right context old conversations.

When I ask simple programming questions in a new conversation it can generally figure out which project I'm going to apply it to, and write examples catered to those projects. I feel that it also makes the responses a bit more warm and personal.

mFixman··on Prism
You can tell that they consulted 0 scientists to verify the clearly AI-written draft of this video.

The target audience of this tool is not academics; it's OpenAI investors.

mFixman··on OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026
Because there is only so much programmers and companies will pay for AI coders. The big prizes is AI-generated TikTok.

The entertainment industry is by far the easiest way to tap into global discretionary income.

mFixman··on Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?
I was very disappointed with Supernova in the East. What started as a telling of the Pacific War from the point of view of the Japanese empire morphed into the usual "war is bad but American soldiers are heroes" that's very common for this period.

I tuned out when he spent 30 minutes describing a famous photo-op of General MacArthur going ashore to the Philippines. That is the complete opposite of the original promise of the podcast.

mFixman··on Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?
Robin Pearson ended the 1000-year long epic of The History of Byzantium earlier this year: https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/

The podcast started as a sequel to Mike Duncan's classic The History of Rome, and in my opinion surpassed it. Where THoR eventually falls into the narrative trap of turning into "The Lives of Roman Emperors", THoB spends a lot of time talking about economic, demographic, societal, and technological changes within the Empire and the world.

Extremely recommended if you want a proper history podcast.

mFixman··on Claude in Chrome
The thing AI miss about the internet from the late 2000s and early 2010s was having so much useful data available, searchable, and scrappable. Even things like "which of my friends are currently living in New York?" are impossible to find now.

I always assumed this was a once-in-history event. Did this cycle of data openness and closure happen before?

mFixman··on How I block all online ads
You -> Gear icon -> Revanced Settings -> General -> Navigation Buttons -> Hide Shorts.

You need to also hide them from the feed and a few other places. You are not stupid; Revanced has too many options and the settings and large and confusing. It's easier to search "shorts" and toggle everything.

mFixman··on How I block all online ads
Search "YouTube Revanced" on Android. It's a bit of a pain to install, but it lets you customise your YouTube app and add or remove as many features as you want.

These kinds of customisations should be standard for apps people use every day.

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