zephyreon

The privacy policy is actually somewhat respectable too. https://america.gov/privacy-policy

I’m currently doing a deep dive on Rampart, their (allegedly) local PII filter.

> Features such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional. These features are not enabled by default. Users can choose to enable these features and can manage or withdraw consent through TV settings.

They may be optional features but I’m pretty sure when I set up my tv and got to the screen where you are required to agree to the various terms and privacy legalese the “happy path” was to hit the “accept all” button vs use the remote to navigate into each one, read, and only activate the few required to use the tv. I would not call this dark pattern “optional” by default.

Sorry but Paul is just so out of touch with reality. I’m tired of seeing everyone on HN evangelize this man. He is very intelligent and has done some really great things but times have changed and we need to let the next generation think for themselves. They are increasingly anti-AI. Maybe that pans out, maybe it doesn’t. If I were 17, I’d pursue my dreams — whatever those may be — and learn how to connect meaningfully with my peers. Perhaps that’s naive of me or perhaps that’s what humanity needs most right now. I’d rather let the 17 year old version of me make that choice for themselves.

I’m sure I’ll get torn to pieces for this but it’s frustrating to continually witness people treat a single person’s prose as the Word of God.

> But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them.

I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.

Aside from the obvious fact that this is AI slop, the author (prompter?) doesn’t consider the R&D of AI itself. Efficiency gains, more compute, etc.

We all know every frontier AI lab is heavily subsidizing usage, and so do all of the VCs & CEOs funding them.

You’d think this is how it works but universities and schools will still end up holding the bag at the end of the day, irrespective of who is responsible.

I’d like to see more investment in their new profile manager. It feels pretty barebones at the moment. Arc had the ability to link profiles to “spaces” and you could easily switch between them without opening a new window. It was very nice to so easily swap between personal, work, & side business.

Could definitely be writing on the wall that MV2 support will be deprecated in the future but imo not necessarily a bad thing if it’s not actively developed anyways. Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

That said, if this is writing on the wall I’d hope they’ll listen to the community this time and allow the engine to be extended / make it such that a block all ads feature always exists. I’m cautiously optimistic given Mozilla’s track record just over the past year-ish. They have released some great new features that help bring Firefox closer to feature parity with other browsers.

I am a Firefox hopeful and recently switched back to using it as my daily driver when Arc went belly up (but mainly for uBlock Origin support).

This is neat, but no. /s

Posts like these always give me a moment of pause to reflect just how expansive the global internet is.

Very neat. This is an example of digital art that I’d love to see exist in physical form somehow. I suppose it could get rather noisy at a museum but I love the intersection of mass transit & music.

Just sent this to my partner. He’s super into travel hacking and this will be a nice add to his toolkit.

This is the classic car wash subscription scheme. You sign up a bunch of people for $40 a month to wash their car. Most people only go to wash their car once or twice a month (or even less), which offsets those few folks that do it three times a week or more.

The problem Anthropic is running into is that OpenClaw made it easy for everyone to become one of those folks that washes their car three times a week or more.

I’m sure they were losing money on subscriptions in general but now they are really losing money. Shutting off OpenClaw specifically probably helps stem some of the bleeding.

Yah well I'll be downgrading my subscription to the $20/month plan for the light chats I have with AI outside of using custom harnesses and will figure out a better provider for the agentic tooling.

So interesting that Baltimore’s very subpar public transit system made it into the first batch of systems — not complaining at all I love that city & love to see it in random places on the internet :)

An interesting hearing it from that perspective. I had not considered that this could be used across all of the systems they have in place.

To add to this, I did a quick search on archive.org and it seems like they’ve had this site in place since 2006, albeit in different variations. Perhaps that is why they have a “global” opt-out across all of their marketing databases? Something that has just always been in place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061103202329/https://gmcontact...

On my weekly unsubscribe binge I recently tried to opt out of General Motors marketing communications.

They have a form that requires you enter your full name, address, phone number, and email just to process an unsubscribe.

In addition, they indicate that you may need to enter the form multiple times with different variations of your name in order to be successful.

If by some miracle you succeed at opting out of marketing communications, your opt out is only honored for 10 years and does not include OnStar or GM Financial.

I have seen terrible opt-out practices before but this is probably one of the more egregious ones I’ve encountered.

I’d also be curious to hear if people think the patchwork of data privacy laws that have been going into effect across the U.S. might affect processes like this or if just having the process is enough. I know it is probably somewhat subjective.

Ditto. Though I always take the lazy route and just change port numbers until I find an open one. My Mac is probably running like 20 different localhost apps at any given time.

And here.

I'm usually pretty opinionated on using AI for reasons I generally view as productive - for example, not moltbook - however this is actually really neat and doesn't require a ton of token usage assuming you don't instruct your agent to do multiple turns of analysis on the stats :)

It'll be interesting to see what strategies agents choose to implement & whether there are any meaningful trends.

Learning to choose your words more wisely as you age does not necessarily indicate your underlying value system has evolved.

Seems like DO sure has a bot problem. I wonder what percentage of their business is less-scrupulous actors.

Using AI to analyze health data has such a huge potential upside, but it has to be done locally.

I use [insert LLM provider here] all the time to ask generic, health-related questions but I’m careful about what I disclose and how I disclose it to the models. I would never connect data from my primary care’s EHR system directly to one of these providers.

That said, it’ll be interesting to see how the general population responds to this and whether they embrace it or have some skepticism.

I’m not confident we’ll have powerful/efficient enough on-device models to build this before people start adopting the SaaS-based AI health solutions.

ChatGPT’s target market is very clearly the average consumer who may not necessarily care what they do with their data.

The last bit

> supervised by a human who occasionally knew what he was doing.

seems in jest but I could be wrong. If omitted or flagged as actual sarcasm I would feel a lot better about the project overall. As long as you’re auditing the LLM’s outputs and doing a decent code review I think it’s reasonable to trust this tool during incidents.

I’ll admit I did go straight to the end of the readme to look for this exact statement. I appreciate they chose to disclose.

Perhaps the one thing Ken Paxton and I agree on.

I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster.

Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.

It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.

It’s actually pretty great if you’re type a about keeping your finances in check.

Check out https://plaintextaccounting.org/

This may be a controversial position but I actually enjoy using Firefox. Vertical tabs, better profile management, etc. have all been welcome things I had in other browsers (cough Arc cough) that have made it bearable enough to use Firefox as my daily driver. They may not be as privacy-focused as some of the other derivatives of Firefox but they’re sure not Chromium.

Totally written by AI. There’s too many embellishments like “LinkedIn legitimacy” and short summarizations. AI loves to wordsmith.

My biggest concern with a toy like this is that my future kid might ask for a water park in our backyard and then Santa would respond with an enthusiastic “That’s a great idea Kyle! I’ll consult with the elves to see how I can make it happen!”