Hacker News: ReliantGuyZ

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

ReliantGuyZ — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 22:59:20 +0000

This only addresses one axis of your concern, but if they are accessing YouTube via desktop browser (or Firefox on Android!), the "Youtube-shorts block" extension gets rid of the Shorts UI. You can still watch Shorts, it will just display them in the normal video UI without infinite scrolling. It's a huge quality of life boost.

Although obviously this does nothing for those using the mobile or TV apps.

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "This is not the future"

ReliantGuyZ — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:53:25 +0000

It's shocking and offensive to artists and to like-minded others because AI labs have based the product that is replacing them off of their existing labor with no compensation. It would be one thing to build a computerized artist that out-competes human artists on merit (arguably happening now), this has happened to dozens of professions over hundreds of years. But the fact that it was built directly off of their past labors with no offer, plan, or even consideration of making them whole for their labor in the corpus is unjust on its face.

Certainly there are artists with inflated egos and senses of self-importance (many computer programmers with this condition too), but does this give us moral high ground to freely use their work?

How many people is it OK to exploit to create "AI"?

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "Microsoft needs to open up more about its OpenAI dealings"

ReliantGuyZ — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:54:34 +0000

Yes, but it took 15 years after the bubble popped for life via internet to really cement for our society in a broader sense. The bubble mechanics still played out, even if the ultimate result was a new paradigm.

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom"

ReliantGuyZ — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:49:41 +0000

I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine that follows a tiny instruction set (at least in comparison to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the execution every time. This seems to me like the complete opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that Wall Street are cheering.

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game"

ReliantGuyZ — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 21:25:59 +0000

In the FAQ they explain that they use US federal data for the population simulation, including home and workplace locations, college student counts, and flight information from the FAA.

https://www.subwaybuilder.com/simulation

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes"

ReliantGuyZ — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 20:50:26 +0000

> Tho nowadays that means a trip to a FedEx store for me

I've really appreciated my local library for allowing 20ish pages of printing per day, which has allowed me to limp through the no-printer lifestyle. Plus I usually grab a DVD movie while I'm there.

Life's good in the mid-2000s.

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard"

ReliantGuyZ — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 17:24:30 +0000

By all accounts the sale agreement came together rapidly in the light of dark revelations about the state of Blizzard's work culture. I think the company has just been authentically bad without that pressure

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "NordVPN library and client code open-sourced"

ReliantGuyZ — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 16:03:38 +0000

Yes he does now, though if I remember correctly he makes absolutely zero claims about privacy or security enhancements and focuses on the region-shifting capabilities (especially as a Brit who frequently travels abroad)

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned"

ReliantGuyZ — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 20:37:11 +0000

Is it more expensive to find a new customer or keep an existing one? Sure, for lots of these games, continuing support means pouring money into a product which has already been paid for, and that investment means little to the continuing payoff of that product. However I would argue at this point in VR's tenuous life, Meta is burning its existing customers (its early adopter evangelists) in the hope that new ones will materialize. But then again they've run the numbers and I haven't,

New comment by ReliantGuyZ in "Storing UTC is not a silver bullet"

ReliantGuyZ — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 18:09:48 +0000

Autoplaying video right at the top. Never closed a tab so fast.