HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zaptheimpaler

8,760 karma · joined November 15, 2011

email: hn AT nopeslide
submissionscomments
zaptheimpaler··on The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
This seems more like a technical problem that we could actually solve well if we wanted to and had competent people advising the governments. You go to DMV and they generate a keypair and an entry in a DB. App looks up your age with your public key + signed private key authorization from you. Apps can ask for specific checks like is_over_21, is_citizen or whatever without any more data. Something like that, details are probably off ;) The whole infrastructure could be open source. Age verification doesn't need to equal identity verification by a 3rd party company that will leak your IDs.
zaptheimpaler··on OAuth for all
Yeah I was doing some similar stuff. I think I tried copying the auth file for codex or claude and even that didn't work - the tokens were somehow tied to some machine identifiers just to make it even more annoying. Claude Code has long lived oauth tokens which were working well for me, but then it turns out you can't use Remote Control if you use those, so I had to go back to the standard oauth web login trash everytime I spin up a new devbox. At every step the enterprise auth mindset makes my life more difficult by assuming I'm running some clownshow with bad code fully open to the internet unable to secure an API key, and gives me no way to just say "no thanks, i accept the increased risk ” and opt out of their junk.
zaptheimpaler··on OAuth for all
Oauth and enterprise auth has to be the worst thing ever made, it might be the most confusing and frustrating part of dealing with the cloud. Even the AI tools took a year to just get basic Oauth working on headless systems without assuming you could open a browser. If they're going to go down the auth rabbit hole with RBAC/IAM/Workload identities?/service accounts and all the trash the big cloud providers have, I just hope to god they leave in the simple shit for personal use. I just want a damn API key, I keep it a secret and revoke if necessary and don't need 10000 layers of auth bullshit tangled up in every layer of every platform.
zaptheimpaler··on Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police
This is the slave mindset that is letting politicians all over the world erode our rights. More and more and more. Every country is now passing deep anti-privacy, anti-VPN, anti-encryption and age-verification laws. The law is not written by us, its written by people who are only barely accountable to us once every couple of years. Authoritarianism is rising very sharply all over the world, corruption amongst the elites is high, they are increasingly unaligned and unafraid of common people. There's a million tricks to pass laws that citizens don't really want, including skipping public debates, secret amendments, or just relying on plain old propaganda and ignorance/inaction by the majority. The only actual power we have is in action and organization. Following the laws that they write with barely any input from us off a cliff is not right or noble, its death.
zaptheimpaler··on Identity verification on Claude
AI is weapons now. Need a gun license to buy and operate pistols (Opus), assault rifles (Fable) will be highly limited, even higher tiers of weapons will only be accessible by corporate and state-level actors - we might not even know they exist or what they're capable of. Democratization of AI is dead. Gen pop is completely asleep to all of this so its going to get locked down in the name of safety before anyone even wakes up.
zaptheimpaler··on Iran requires insurance on ships using Strait of Hormuz, fees likely to follow
LMAO they're learning how to do legally defensible racketeering the way US insurance companies do, very smart.
zaptheimpaler··on ChatGPT's image generator can be manipulated to produce violent, sexual content
No I agree its very interesting, I tried similar prompts before and it generated some very spooky/weird images like this [1]. The problem is using that as an argument to curtail access to AI.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a336e6b8534819196946f65251eebb0

zaptheimpaler··on ChatGPT's image generator can be manipulated to produce violent, sexual content
>Idiot: Say I'm a scary robot

>AI: I'm a scary robot

>Idiot: Oh my god!!!

These clowns will eventually ensure that AI is nerfed into the ground for ordinary people. It's already happening with Fable. Soon we'll get locked into a tiny corner of Opus 4.8 for "safety" while companies and governments will be on Fable 50. Having an AI that can generate scary images is better than the power and wealth differentials we will see with unequal access to an incredibly powerful technology.

zaptheimpaler··on Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them
So far the other countries are doing a lot of talking and big government initiatives but nothing has really changed. All the best talent still moves to the US, all the VCs are still unimaginative losers who want 5 meetings to give you $50K, the industry titans are still sclerotic and unable to distinguish their head from their ass, the culture doesn't support risk-taking or innovation. The biggest boom of the next 10 years is AI and it is firmly HQ'ed and centred in the US, as usual. The EU had a predecessor to the Chips Act in 2013 [1] that went nowhere, then a Chips Act that went nowhere, and now a Chips Act 2.0! It would be great to have more options but it doesn't seem like other regions outside China are capable of doing anything at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqoX9OIR-DI

zaptheimpaler··on Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
I tried gemma-4-26B-A4B just to see if it could help me read/sort my emails on a relatively under-powered setup (16GB VRAM + 32GB RAM) and it's not going well.. the model burns 24K tokens just on searching for the right tool and then dumps the email contents into context - i tried to get it to use code-mode to save context but the code-mode implementation can't save files so it was useless and im going to try to switch to "ssh-mode" into my devbox container. Still relatively new to this, so I'm probably doing something wrong
zaptheimpaler··on My Homelab AI Dev Platform
0? OpenCode is just a harness, it can connect to any model hosted online.
zaptheimpaler··on Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models
They would have no internally/externally defensible justification to stop the launch as they are partners/part-owners of Anthropic. They would have to let the rank-and-file keep moving on the Fable launch.
zaptheimpaler··on Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models
This is corporate Game of Thrones, nothing more. Amazon, maybe in alliance/deals with others as well saw an opportunity to hurt their rival. Or maybe they were instructed to report this by the WH themselves. Hegseth and the WH will happily take any excuse to hurt Anthropic after the confrontation with DOW, being the vindictive cronies they are.
zaptheimpaler··on Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos
If you don't trust them, then no policy is enough. Technically everything you send to the model could be stored by them. Personally I do worry about that especially as an average consumer not an enterprise, no one is looking out for us and we don't get any guarantees. But enterprises will get the right treatment because they would find out and sue Anthropic if they lied.
zaptheimpaler··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
I made a little tool where I can just drop HTML into a folder and it will deploy it either to my internal Caddy or publicly on Cloudflare based in folder. Can be a single html or a folder.

https://github.com/ankitson/webby

CF pages still required too much confusing clicking around on a webpage for me. This way I can just point any little report or app at a directory and done.

There’s others that are more server shaped and tightly coupled - a pipeline to pull in all my data like Garmin, Twitter bookmarks, messages into a Postgres DB. Kind of a personal data warehouse that i can use with apps/automations, like alerting me if my sleep schedule is drifting, and a custom web interface to my Garmin data

zaptheimpaler··on WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access
I was trying WSL years ago and this is one of the reasons I just moved to a full linux server instead. We still have way too many problems interfacing across filesystems. I hope with AI we will see an iteration on ExFAT that has all the journalling, versioning etc. magic of modern FS' and can be adopted across all 3 OSes. Probably a long shot but I can dream :)
zaptheimpaler··on Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
Yes that would be great. Right now, there are many applications that use pinned certificates to communicate to servers meaning there is literally no way to see the data your own device is sending/receiving from the internet. It's an insane thing that should be banned.
zaptheimpaler··on The ways we contain Claude across products
I tried the VPS briefly, it didn't really solve anything for me. The personal assistant agent is only as useful as the data & tools it has, that's where the real risk is. Separate box gives you isolated FS but docker also does that very easily.
zaptheimpaler··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Yes literally it threw an invoice from AWS into spam recently. Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like you, i have a problem with false positives not false negatives.

I brought it up with support once and the domain was failing DMARC. Headers from the AWS email that has a spam score of 9.1! I don’t know much about email but something must be wrong there on Fastmails side.

x-sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0

X-Spam-known-sender: no

X-Spam-sender-reputation: 500 (none)

X-Spam-score: 9.1

X-Spam-hits: DCC_CHECK 1.1, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.249, HTML_MESSAGE 0.001, ME_SENDERREP_NEUTRAL 0.001, MIME_HTML_ONLY 0.1, MPART_ALT_DIFF 0.724, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_H4 0.001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_WL 0.001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001, T_REMOTE_IMAGE 0.01, URIBL_DBL_ABUSE_PHISH 7, LANGUAGES en, BAYES_USED none, SA_VERSION 4.0.1

X-Spam-source: IP='54.240.9.110', Host='a9-110.smtp-out.amazonses.com', Country='US', FromHeader='com', MailFrom='com'

X-Spam-charsets: subject='UTF-8', html='UTF-8'

zaptheimpaler··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Are you talking about false negatives? The problem I have is with false positives. It regularly throws important legit email into spam.

Just the other day it threw an invoice from AWS into spam! Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like it’s hard for me to imagine how that happens.

zaptheimpaler··on SQLite is all you need for durable workflows
SQLite does not support concurrent writes at all (on a single machine), a single writer process locks the entire database.
zaptheimpaler··on SQLite is all you need for durable workflows
Personally I like Postgres for this reason too. Its extremely easy to run with Docker, I can dump data from all kinds of apps in there and I know it's not going to take any rearchitecting as soon as I need multiple concurrent writers.

I think docker is still super underappreciated so setting up any kind of server is seen as a chore. In my eyes it makes running tons of services like this very easy, so ill take the extra functionality, extensibility etc of postgres.

zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Maybe they've heard of email, faxes, phone calls?
zaptheimpaler··on Claude Opus 4.8
All the 4.x models are still available, and they all cost the same.
zaptheimpaler··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
DS4 is open weights so it could even be run free in quantized forms, is 10x cheaper than Opus and performs basically as well in most real world tasks. No one cares about benchmarks. In practical terms, it’s obviously a better option in most cases.

You’re defining “better” is “absolute best at any cost” instead of the more balanced price/performance considerations consumers actually take, so you can declare America #1 again. In a practical sense DS4 is so much cheaper at similar quality that it’s better in most cases. If i can throw 10x the tokens at the same problem at slightly lower quality, i can probably do a better job.

zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
This is so confusing. What does GC -> citizenship have to do with this? The rules work fine now because they apply for the change of status and keep on working until its accepted and leave if not. This new rule means they have to leave the country they are living and working in for anywhere from 1 month to 2 years, probably losing their job and majorly disrupting their lives for seemingly no reason at all. People who have lived in the US for a decade with a job, mortgage, family and children randomly need to leave to years, and what does that accomplish for anyone? If the govt. wanted to deport them, they could do it at any moment. The govt. can process their change of status paperwork exactly the same whether they're in or out of the country. So what is the point of any of this?
zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Even if it is common (i don't think this is required any more anyways), just why? Why do we need to make someone run back and forth across the border for the immigration department to do some paperwork? It seems purely designed to inconvenience people for absolutely no gain to anyone.
zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
It’s sad you don’t realize who you’re getting in bed with. H1Bs and their families are only 0.4% of the population and yet they’re being blamed for -all of americas problems. Must be your first rodeo around the american political system if you actually think they will no longer blame you even if that number shrinks to 0.1%. The economic considerations have always been a pretense. Some of them hate you because you’re brown but not the kind of exploitable cheap labour brown that serves them food and cleans their houses. Politicians see an easy scapegoat to blame for their mismanagement of the country and lean on the narrative. Indians keep leaning republican and learning this lesson over and over again.
zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Yeah look at like any one of the 10,000 things this administration, Trump, Miller, republicans have said about immigrants. Look at ICE detention centres, how many hundreds or thousands of people have literally died, denied basic medical care or humane conditions, ICE agents who executed US citizens facing 0 consequences. ICE agents on camera ramming a car, radioing in to say that the car rammed them, and then shooting the driver. Cold-blooded execution. I could go on forever. Tell me again how stating that they hate immigrants is being dramatic.

It’s just facts but they’ve been boiling the frog and doing so many idiotic and horrific things at once that people have completely checked out.

zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
That's why I said long term. This logic might as well argue it would be better for China to have had huge immigration to the US 50 years ago and contribute to the manufacturing or automobile industries there. But they didn't, and now they've built up their own ecosystems instead that are more efficient and ahead of the US' ecosystems. You can create Google in India or BYD in China, it just takes time for the ecosystem to build. It has helped China at least, and maybe the world more than if they had immigrated en masse.

The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.

It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.

← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →