Hacker News Reader

Disproportionate number of the "weirdos" category on this particular site vs astroturf marketing bots on Reddit/etc.

I've lost count of how many times I've clicked into a bio from a flagged, obviously LLM written comment to find some variation of "Building new AI tools for agentic devops"...

qlteon Red Hat being phased out of existence?

I had to re-read the (very short) linked blog post several times thinking I skipped over an actual nugget of information that would connect it to the title. I didn't find it but noticed the weird uncanny valley writing style that became less clear the closer I tried to read.

It doesn't even link out to the Linkedin post from the screenshot as far as I can tell.

qlteon Figma restricts MCP access to whitelisted clients, excluding Pi

Nitter instances are a scarce resource provided by the community, and they want to make sure they're available for actual users and not bogged down by AI scrapers looping through URLs. Not sure why that would be amusing particularly since Anubis doesn't require any kind of account...

qlteon GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities

You can easily get rid of most Windows annoyances in <10 minutes without AI. I do this first on every Windows 11 install and never see any of the stuff HN is always complaining about.

https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

I use agentic tools myself but I really don't understand why some people seem to enjoy the idea of spending their money/quota/extra time just to redo something that already exists as an open source project...

qlteon Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

These days anytime I'm forced to find something only on X it requires wading through hundreds of posts from obvious crypto shilling bots with paid blue checks. They usually just do a weird uncanny valley LLM summary of what they're replying to and keep the explicit marketing on their own TL unless the tweet is market/crypto related (presumably to avoid spam filters).

qlteon Windows 11½

This is straightforward with Powertoys (official config utility from Microsoft) on Windows.

qlteon Trump Brought Venezuelan Gold to the U.S., but Refiners Won't Touch It

https://archive.ph/xHVTi

qlteon So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes

This apathy is somewhat absurd considering Lina Khan had been reviving moribund antitrust laws to aggressively push back against Big Tech/monopoly abuses. To the point that she was portrayed as a cartoonish villain by the SV billionaire class who vowed to get rid of her by donating to Trump.

They appreciate this sort of political nihilism where everyone seems to have collective amnesia about the current status quo vs. just a couple years ago and so lament "nothing ever changes, voting is pointless".

qlteon Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election

Zuckerberg started pandering to the Trump admin mere months after he took office, publicizing "evidence" consisting of a few emails from Biden admin officials as proof of widespread government manipulation of tech platforms that Trump rightly put a stop to in the name of free speech.

At the time the story blew up on HN drawing lots of outrage from the self-styled free speech maximalists. Now, of course, there's comparative silence from that crowd after regular stories about the FCC routinely weaponizing licenses to enforce preferred speech, lawsuit threats against Wikipedia, coercion of universities to suppress specific political views, etc. But at the time it was a big thing and a political gift to the Trump admin's public image.

qlteon A single function Jev-like wrapper for LLMs, including vision models

So now you turn around to check if anyone else is coming in behind you and the door triggers. Or alternatively, you finally get sick of waiting and turn around but the door takes 5 seconds to realize you're not just doing aimless human fidgeting and actually want to leave.

Also .15% of the time the door just randomly opens or stays shut with no rhyme or reason. Bug previously filed with cloud door vendor but told it's within door SLA and sent previously signed copy of agreement that "all neural nets are a black box and inherently probabilistic so errors may occur at any time and not a product defect"

qlteon A single function Jev-like wrapper for LLMs, including vision models

Just because you're using an LLM (even a big one) doesn't mean there won't be cases of ambiguous intent or random classification errors.

Automatic doors (as used in the real world) are pretty much always located in areas intended for actively moving foot traffic (not as interior doors for every room). So this feels like adding a lot of complexity and unwelcome probabilistic behavior to something that in most locations does the right thing 99% of the time already.

qlteon Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

They were doing RL to train for ExploitBench, to make it more effective at offensive cyberattacks. It should have been entirely foreseeable to OpenAI that a weak sandbox while performing offensive pen testing could result in collateral damage.

Say someone was building Murderbot™ in their backyard by training on simulated murder of dummies with a machine gun. Everything was going fine for weeks as kill rates steadily improved with each test. Then one day he left the gate on his picket fence open, so Murderbot™ walked out to the public sidewalk and promptly murdered someone.

He wouldn't be exonerated by saying "But my Murder™ algorithm was only intended to be used on dummies! I never imagined it could do something as vile as murdering a human being!" Because it was reckless to knowingly design an algorithm for killing human-shaped things using a robot armed with live ammo right next to a public road. On top of the gross negligence by starting a test while leaving the gate on the (already flimsy) fence wide open.

OpenAI knowingly decided to train for an exploit benchmark to improve the model's offensive capabilities, with full awareness it could be potentially dangerous if misdirected, and then failed at implementing even the most minimal security measures. It may not have been intentional but was reckless. It's a much different scenario than say, a user vibecoding a to-do app whose agent veered off to break into an FTP server to get a missing asset.

qlteon Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

If anything it also shows how attempted RSI could get stuck in a local maxima and degenerate into increasingly elaborate cheating strategies. Contrasted with the idealized model of an unambiguous g-factor for machine intelligence which inexorably increases with each iteration before going exponential.

qlteon Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

Exactly, in retrospect it's easy to confuse with a regular commercial transaction that happens to be with the government. But only because SpaceX was ultimately wildly successful with the Falcon 9/Dragon/Crew Dragon.

If SpaceX failed to deliver a working product after a receiving a bunch of incremental payments for the pre-delivery milestones (deliberately structured to prop up their early R&D), it might have ended up front and center as an example of government "picking winners and losers" gone wrong like how Solyndra was featured at the 2012 RNC.

qlteon First Principles Thinking

A specialist discussing a complex topic uses that as shorthand based on shared context. Nothing would ever get done if every conversation required starting from "first principles" whether inside or outside academia.

What's missing in your claim is evidence that people in academia often mischaracterize this style of discussion from accumulated knowledge and shared context as "thinking from first principles". I don't see any plausible rationale for why they would.

Otherwise, using their typical mode of interaction from outside observations to infer they misunderstand first principles is not a standard anyone doing specialized work inside or outside academia would ever be able to meet.

The private sector would grind to a halt if discussing a specific IEEE 802.11 protocol implementation with a fellow SME required a lengthy preamble of networking first principles before answering in order to be epistemologically sound.

Similarly, using a conversation overheard at a conference to infer the experts lack first principles thinking would not be reasonable just because they appealed to IEEE documents instead of rearticulating the underlying decisions made by the standards committee.

qlteon Allow babywearing carriers on planes

IMO it's not necessarily unreasonable to use standards/evaluations set by a private industry group for this kind of thing.

US automobile safety ratings/improvements over time are largely driven by IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety). It's a private group but is the standard yardstick manufacturers expect to be tested against and fills in a lot of gaps in NHTSA official crash tests.

It wouldn't be strange to see IIIS plus NHTSA criteria used colloquially to describe "US crash standards" when talking about cars even if not fully defined by regulation.

"UL Listed" products or the International Building Code (the base model broadly followed with modifications by each state) are also "national standards" but not set by regulation.

qlteon Tesla’s optimus hits snags in hands, suppliers as scale-up begins

  This is also a far cry from what Musk was saying last year. In January 2025, he said Tesla would build about 10,000 Optimus robots in 2025 and that “several thousand” would be doing useful work by year-end. A year later, he admitted that zero Optimus robots were doing useful work at Tesla. He also promised a V3 reveal by mid-2026. It’s late September, and that demo still hasn’t happened.

qlteon U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk

That's not responsive to OP or coherent at all really, even if rhetorically structured like a gotcha.

Incumbent Presidents in the US almost always run for reelection to a second term, that's the normal expected outcome with vanishingly few exceptions in the last century.

qlteon Meta puts its AI assistant on a keychain

Haha, I'm with you. I'm always seeing obvious feel-good engagement slop (AI or otherwise) from Tikok clips reposted on Reddit - like the most obviously fake saccharine pablum A/B tested to grab people's attention and occasionally I can't help but open the comments out of morbid curiosity.

And it makes me feel like a bitter curmudgeon seeing so many people act like it's real and the few people who point out the obvious ad/lying description/AI slop/scripted skit/deceptive editing/etc getting dogpiled for being a cynical Debbie Downer who should shut up and let people enjoy things.

Personally, it doesn't make me feel good to be baited and manipulated for my scarce attention. If anything I find it especially offensive to hijack happiness neurons in my brain for an ulterior motive... that does not make me happy. But increasingly it's looking like I'm in the minority and out of touch with the zeitgeist.

qlteon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

Agreed, I've always been pro-nuclear (although the arguments have been getting weaker as solar+batteries keeps getting cheaper). I just want the vocal advocates to be honest about the cost and timelines instead of blaming everything on environmentalists as a way to side step the argument.

qlteon Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech

Yes, I find nearly every "SOTA" voice model I try intolerable to listen to because of the fake exaggerated expression/emotion. It's actively distracting because it pulls focus to emphasize randomly. ChatGPT Voice models are so insufferable to put up with for a conversation longer than 45 seconds.

All I want is a clear, technically flawless, even/restrained "computer voice" for pretty much every use case (except audiobooks). But that doesn't make for splashy demos/score well for RLHF raters.

qlteon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

...which Anthropic is always doing:

  Who, you may ask, would take that money? People like business influencer Megan Lieu, who chose not to disclose just how much she'd made from her AI deals, but says her biggest sponsorship to date has been with Anthropic (makers of Claude), as well as that her biggest sponsored contracts (for any client) are normally around the $30,000 mark.

(from the third link)

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...

https://www.reddit.com/r/NYCinfluencersnark/comments/1sn3t9k...

https://aftermath.site/ai-influencer-creator-deals-sponsorsh...

qlteon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

Not according to Anthropic:

  Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We do research that involves only the lower-levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All of the lab work is performed by human scientists. Although we’ve experimented with using AI to accelerate lab work with initiatives like the Model Hardware Standard, this approach is less conducive to the sort of ad hoc workflows that are involved in our molecular biology research.

qlteon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

Appeals to laws of physics as a "first principles" attempt to explain how thousands of diverse diseases could theoretically be solved overnight by a big computer (while hand waving away the years of clinical trials, false starts and failures involved in a single new successful treatment) just makes you seem wildly out of touch and uninformed about the actual problem space.

qlteon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

I'm more annoyed that they announce "CRISPR-like" to hit those SV Next Big Thing dopamine receptors but upon reading haven't done any laboratory work to determine if it has any useful applications like CRISPR-Cas9.

It's totally legitimate research worthy of publication, but Anthropic chose a hot technology in the popular imagination for a reason. Now I'm going to have to see "Claude invented a new CRISPR in 24 hours!" everywhere and trying to correct it will just turn into repetitive arguments about goalposts moving....

qlteon Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy

There have been third party app stores on Android pretty much forever.

Including app stores installed out of the box on GMS certified devices like the Samsung Galaxy Store (alongside the Play Store).

It just means they will be easier to install via the Play Store without sideloading (making other commercial stores more attractive but not really my cup of tea), and some minor API changes (although auto updating was added even before the ruling so not sure what else there might be).

Personally I'm not concerned about the changes to sideloading since it's a one time mild inconvenience. So I struggle to understand how going to iOS in protest (which doesn't allow persistent sideloading at all without workarounds) makes any sense whatsoever.

Google's original plan would have been really bad, but the new approach is a complete non-issue for me.

qlteon 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees

SCADA? Like simplified GUI animations of the actual physical processes going on in a plant instead of just toggle switches, progress bars, etc?

e.g.

https://ubidots.com/blog/content/images/2024/10/siemens-sima...

qlteon Tokens Too Cheap to Meter

Jevon's Paradox, RSI, revealed preference

qlteon Tokens too cheap to meter

It's a deliberate reference/meme that is basically used to acknowledge the precedent of overly exuberant predictions of cost in an emerging technology but argue "however, this time it's true".

Of course, perilous territory for future irony depending on how your prediction plays out.

qlteon AI safety is mostly a sex cult

Well... except for that email about Eliezer's Zoom meeting with Epstein and Epstein donating to MIRI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1qu61kp/eliezer...