Hacker News: SamuelAdams

New comment by SamuelAdams in "America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?"

SamuelAdams — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 03:16:04 +0000

Maybe. As a contrast, look at the book industry. We have access to 500+ years of books digitally, and yet most people prefer to read books written in the last 50 years.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Why do we have so many meetings?"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:15:38 +0000

It’s about to get a lot worse too. Gen Z has had noticeably worse reading comprehension scores over the last 5-10 years and they are starting to enter the workforce now. Many prefer video over text and firmly believe that written text is “the harder medium”.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "It's still ok to enjoy programming"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:50:34 +0000

Send the coworker a few resources on this.

https://dontpastetheai.com/

https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Muse Spark Open"

SamuelAdams — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:15:30 +0000

The fashion industry has been doing this for decades. Medium means different things for different brands.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Apple: Switch to Safari (From Chrome)"

SamuelAdams — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:58:05 +0000

The other limitation, from my wife: you cannot change the browser header colours. It’s all the standard steel or cloudy style they have now.

It’s stupid, I know. But sometimes people like cars with a different colour of paint. Chrome has had this since maybe 2009?

New comment by SamuelAdams in "New Apple TV 4K"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:19:18 +0000

And now that the Nvidia Shield Pro is the same price, it makes the Apple TV an even tougher sell.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "New Apple TV 4K"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:12:43 +0000

> With built-in far-field microphones, Apple TV 4K also lets users talk to Siri completely hands-free.

Is no one concerned about an always-on, internet connected microphone being in their living room or bedroom? This needs a physical shut off switch.

Funny how when LG does it [1] it’s a privacy nightmare but when Apple does it it’s a cool new feature.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375

New comment by SamuelAdams in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

SamuelAdams — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:38:44 +0000

> Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.

I wonder how accurate this metric is. People may be coming into more contact with LLM generated content, although they may not be aware of it. Content on social media is becoming "AI enriched" already, or outright entirely created by AI for the purposes of triggering engagement and views. It starts with posters using AI to improve their writing, editing a photo, elaborating on an experience. It ends with bot accounts astroturfing certain communities to sell an experience or a product to a group of people.

In this case, people are not directly working with AI, but they are indeed influenced by it.

What's tricky about reporting this in metrics though is that half of the American population is literally too unintelligent to realize this - they believe Reddit comments are still written by real people, not companies advertising products, that "friends of friends" on Instagram are also real people with no incentives posting about their lives.

If there is anything at all that I have seen out of this AI work it is how easy it is to manipulate a massive amount of people.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

SamuelAdams — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:45:58 +0000

> I would like the price of my home to rise, because it increases my wealth, but I would also like the prices of all other homes to fall, so that I could sell my house and buy an even nicer house.

There’s a way to do this. Buy in a VHCOL area like San Francisco, wait for 3-10 years, then move to Texas, Florida, South Carolina, etc. Real estate is highly localized so you do not need to stay in the same area all the time.

The homelab guy at CloudFlare did this because the prices of real estate in Austin are actually falling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:17:04 +0000

So is wrong to use captive.apple.com for tests as well? It's nice to know your network can reach the internet and these pages are generally fairly reliable.

[1]: https://captive.apple.com/

New comment by SamuelAdams in "PS5 Relapse Exploit"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:00:09 +0000

I really wish the Ashai Linux team pivoted and spent more time making quality emulators for past platforms. The current crop of emulators are much better than they were 10 years ago, but the Ashai team has a real knack for reverse engineering and figuring out all the bugs. I think having a really well polished set of emulators would be really cool from a game preservation standpoint.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Pirating the Pirates"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:14:23 +0000

You jest but I know someone made a copy of all “The Hobbit” films spliced together, but removed all the made up portions. And removed all the Legolas bits, since he wasn’t even in the book. I think the total run time was something like 4 hours 15 minutes.

The icing on the cake was how popular this edition was.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Pirating the Pirates"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:11:42 +0000

Wait until you see how often Tolkien edited The Lord of the Rings. Most of it was name and print corrections, but still. You would think you’d fix it all after one or two reprints.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review"

SamuelAdams — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:56:30 +0000

I think Apple is really sleeping on making this run a Linux server. These things are very capable and draw very little wattage when idle. It would make an excellent homelab device, but MacOS currently holds it back in this regard.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?"

SamuelAdams — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 14:07:39 +0000

Maybe. As a parallel, I know C# and F#. They are programming languages. They are built on top of Microsoft products like the JIT and more basically Assembly language.

I have no idea how assembly works - in my years of experience I’ve never had an issue that required I dig that deep into it. Does that mean I can’t be effective with higher-level tooling because I do not know the absolute basics?

New comment by SamuelAdams in "What will our economic future look like?"

SamuelAdams — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:32:26 +0000

You really ought to study recent developments in the service industry. Olive Garden added a tablet to every table so that customers can place their orders without talking to or waiting for a waiter. The goal was faster, more accurate service, since now the waiter did not need to remember your extremely detailed order.

And yet most people prefer talking to a waiter. There are other restaurants that have tried similar approaches and people would almost always deal with people rather than a robot.

I would love a robot to clean my home and do household chores, but in the service industry I would prefer real humans doing the work.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue"

SamuelAdams — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:52:59 +0000

This is my recent experience as well. Models want to run linters, tests, etc. And that is all covered in GitHub actions. So I have been instructing agents to push a draft PR, then I validate the static checks pass and tell the agent if there are issues.

Agents and AI are getting expensive, it seems silly to waste tokens on static checks.

New comment by SamuelAdams in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:29:23 +0000

I do wonder what this does with HIPAA laws. Will TV's need to be removed from hospital rooms, or vetted specifically for microphones and cameras?

New comment by SamuelAdams in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:24:19 +0000

Cars already do this.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...

https://apnews.com/article/auto-car-privacy-3674ce59c9b30f28...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telematic_control_unit

New comment by SamuelAdams in "Jellyfin 12.0"

SamuelAdams — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:19:39 +0000

I currently use the plex direct play feature on android tv with a Nvidia Shield Pro. Is there an equivalent jellyfin android tv app?