HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

shostack

6,015 karma · joined October 1, 2013

I like digital media and have been in the online advertising and analytics space for a long time. If you're interested in reaching out, my email is "michael.myHNusername@gmail.com".
submissionscomments
shostack··on 1,700 free online courses from top universities
There are so many things I wish I had time to learn about. I don't need my learning resources, I need a way to jack in and have them uploaded to my brain.
shostack··on DeepSeek Introduces Vision
With a sufficiently sophisticated harness you can actually do quite a lot by just talking to your AI. I have regularly dictated to build things on my phone while walking to lunch for example.
shostack··on GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis
Which of those providers are:

1. Keeping your data private on in the US

2. Not training on it

3. Not quantizing the model

4. Offer reasonable latency adds rate limits

shostack··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
This is literal whataboutism. Refute the comment if you have a valid point to make.
shostack··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
I wonder how many issues 5.1 could have caught if you ran it as multiple adversarial reviews against the original output it gave you.
shostack··on OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users
And how does this compare to openai which is an ad company now? I am interested in trying codex but I want to know how my data will be used for ads or measurement and training data if I become a paid subscriber. And what happens to that data when I stop subscribing?
shostack··on Waymo Premier
10% off is practically nothing and also irrelevant because it is the total cost of the trip that matters and they can easily increase that over time behind the scenes in a way that makes up for that 10% and then some once they determine the price elasticity of these premium customers which I imagine is quite higher.
shostack··on Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)
Also, a lot of people have dreams about a perfect idealized version of something instead of the reality. If they actually got to experience the reality they might find that they no longer hold that dream as they originally knew it.
shostack··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
More like incredibly lucky that the global hardware market dried up for compute capacity even as his AI product flopped. Right place at the right time.

I just dislike that it is now harder to avoid giving Musk money directly or indirectly.

shostack··on The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
Look up differential privacy. Done right, it is impossible to do what you said.
shostack··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
Yes. Happy for the team but I do not like that this likely means for the future growth expectations as a customer. Hint: probably higher costs and being squeezed more.
shostack··on OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid
BMO offered the ability to link plaid and some other company to automate it vs me sending updated statements manually. I chose manual. I hate that this is the only option for convenience.
shostack··on Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era
I am moving full remote because dictation is such a better input mechanism for most of my AI interactions that I have become less efficient sitting in my open floorplan desk at the office because I cannot dictate there and the latency adds up. Typing is just achingly slow these days.
shostack··on Ti-84 Evo
My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it.

Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.

shostack··on Claude Opus 4.7
Looks like they are adding Peter Thiel backed ID verification too.

https://reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1smr9vs/claude_is_abo...

shostack··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
Facial recognition scan for ICE
shostack··on AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks
I get into the same flow state as any fast paced strategy game like StarCraft.
shostack··on Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model
The pricing changes are interesting. I wonder if at some point they will deprecate the less expensive model to increase their margins.

Original Nano Banana (gemini-2.5-flash-image): $0.039 per image (up to 1024×1024px)

Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview): $0.045 per 512px image $0.067 per 1K (1024×1024) image $0.101 per 2K image $0.151 per 4K image

Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image-preview): $0.134 per 1K/2K image $0.240 per 4K image

So at the most common 1K resolution, NB2 is ~72% more expensive than the original NB ($0.067 vs $0.039), but still half the price of NB Pro ($0.134).

shostack··on Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model
What tooling are you using to use this and manage it?
shostack··on Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
Tried to use it, installed, enabled permissions, downloaded the parakeet model for English and then it crashed every time I released the button after dictating. Completely unusable.
shostack··on The Codex App
I did a whole feature in a game I'm building while riding in a car to dinner in Claude this weekend. It could do everything itself except the PR (kicked me over to the GitHub app for that).

I do wonder how that impacted my usage vs doing it locally, and I do with usage were more visible in the mobile app (at least give me my statusline). But it worked.

shostack··on The Codex App
So much this. I'm eagerly waiting to see what anthropic and OpenAI do to make dictation-first interaction a first class citizen instead of requiring me to use a separate app like Super Whisper. It would dramatically improve complex, flow-breaking interactions when adding files, referencing users or commands, etc.

Importantly I want full voice control over the app and interactions not just dictating prompts.

shostack··on Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
That feels like a feature and not a bug given the way some of this stuff is heading.
shostack··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
But... They are testing ads.
shostack··on McDonald's is losing its low-income customers
You can easily reduce the cost of coffee and drink much better coffee. A relatively inexpensive home setup can easily get you to $.75-.50/cup and that's using good beans.
shostack··on Work from Home in Skyrim VR [video]
Love his channel in general. I actually tried something similar and attended team meetings while sitting in a private jet in VR in Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was such a cool experience and totally immersive. Especially pulling up pinned windows for the work like a laptop on a plane.

There is something to be said for a change in scenery to somewhere stunning. Staring off somewhere beautiful while listening to what people are saying actually helped me stay focused on the content of the meeting.

shostack··on Nano Banana Pro
Hopefully the mobile version of AI Studio gets some improvement. There are some pretty awful UI bugs that make it really difficult to use in a mobile first manner.

Though I still managed to vibe code an app using nanobanana. Now I just need to sort API billing with it so I can actually use my app.

shostack··on ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
Do they partner with Clearview or Flock or anyone else? "Collect" seems like a weasel word that still leaves lots of options on the table.
shostack··on How to rig elections [video]
This. The fact that democracy is up against an extremely organized, centralized, and well resourced effort decades in the making with seemingly nothing comparable to combat it has those opposing this on completely reactive footing.

It is hard to see how a reactive group can come out on top in such a case.

shostack··on GPT-5
This behavior should be an early warning sign of future potential enshitification and a reason to consider open weight models you can host elsewhere.

If you are building on models that could disappear tomorrow when a company needs to juice the launch of a new model (or increase prices), you are introducing avoidable risk.

← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →