Hacker News: WinstonSmith84

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:14:01 +0000

I'm rather scared of US models - if Anthropic was the only AI provider in the world, it's easy to see that common people would have no access at all. Thankfully there is OpenAI which compete 1:1 with Anthropic (at a slightly lower cost) but most importantly the Chinese models keep Anthropic, but also OpenAI in checks.

And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Herdr: One terminal to rule them all"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:56:19 +0000

There are two pluggins I've seen:

1- https://github.com/dcolinmorgan/herdr-remote Support Cloudflare, Telegram, .. quite buggy to me

2- https://github.com/0cv/herdr-mobile-relay Forked from the original one but improved and usable on phones, however the scope narrowed down to Cloudflare only

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Herdr: One terminal to rule them all"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:28:37 +0000

There are plugins yes. You've to setup cloudflare and ideally your own tunnel, and it's pretty seamless as long as your laptop isn't off / sleeping

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:29:38 +0000

> Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links

You mind sharing links / sources / etc. ?

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "CursorBench 3.1"

WinstonSmith84 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:47:05 +0000

that benchmark seems to match my experience. GPT 5.5 is significantly better than Opus 4.8, last time I tried composer 2.5 it was truly dumb, and Fable to me looks to be on par with GPT 5.5 but .. different overall ... The best is to have a LLM-peer-review between GPT and Opus (now Fable) for best outcome.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Crypto firms have spent $189M so far on 2026 US election, report says"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:43:05 +0000

Looks a little bit sensational and .. very much misleading

1- The largest donor, a16z is certainly invested in Crypto, but that's a venture capital firm, not crypto firm.

2- Fairshake PAC is basically a Crypto PAC, so it's obvious that Crypto firms are funding that PAC, right. I quote Wikipedia:

> Fairshake is a Super PAC funded by the cryptocurrency industry that supported pro-cryptocurrency candidates in the 2024 United States elections.[2][3][4][5] Major contributors include Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz.[6] Fairshake spent nearly twice as much on Republican candidates than on Democratic candidates.[7]

That PAC doesn't look like they are ideologically oriented, they just care about whether a candidate is pro crypto or not, whether it's dems or reps.

3- Leading the Future is not even a Crypto PAC at all, it's an AI PAC

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Claude Code is steganographically marking requests"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:04:31 +0000

Yes, this is actually "funny" that Anthropic feels the need to build such intrusive features into Claude Code, when anybody can build a (basic) Claude Code alternative. And the Chinese labs are certainly not "anybody". One may wonder what Anthropic really tries to achieve aside from awful publicity.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal"

WinstonSmith84 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:22:41 +0000

Maybe not when answers will be almost instant, but the biggest gap to me now is latency, not capability. Having to wait for 5 minutes and more for an answer, I can switch to another project / feature / etc. and run work streams in parallel.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

WinstonSmith84 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:44:38 +0000

There is no money made from these people though .. people who are using ChatGPT to plan for their next week-end or their next vacation aren't paying a $100 or $200 monthly subscription. As for non coder office workers (accountants, PMs, etc.), they use Microsoft or Google products which all integrate AI to some extent within their products - with RAG for Sharepoint to some basic AIs to generate text or automate work in spreadsheets .. the models used there are already capable enough for all what's needed (I think Microsoft is using GPT 5.1 or 5.2 in its latest iteration but for sure no GPT 5.4/5.5). The thing is, Software development is where money is made for these labs

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

WinstonSmith84 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:51:03 +0000

That's hardly a speculation that he cares very much about the stock market, more than any of his predecessors. It's also why he takes a L instead of going into an adventure in Tehran. Last but not least, "it's the economy, ..." is on everyone's mind, including his

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:13:03 +0000

Delaware is expensive and you must have had a very specific reason to build your LLC there, rather than for example in Wyoming - such that to raise capital, build a corporation, etc. Now if you want to shut it down in a couple of years, it's not exactly clear what you had in mind.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:30:49 +0000

> That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.

If that was the issue, it's not very hard to delete it either... Either nobody cares, or that repo is not as bad as for Google as it seems.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police"

WinstonSmith84 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:57:21 +0000

> He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online.

I agree with you that he goes over the line, but only if these ministers are totally unrelated to the measures they are trying to impose on the population. If not, he just gives them a taste of their own medicine.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Chameleon Ultra: a flashdrive sized NFC toolkit"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:13:43 +0000

looks like to be for pentesting. If you look at their affiliates, it's a bit more clear https://lab401.com/collections/pentesting/products/lab401-pe...

But I came here too, to understand what it is about and we are probably just not the audience :-)

Now, I'd be curious to know how good these devices are and/or how insecure these RFID chips are - because 500 USD is quite cheap for a device supposed to impersonate you or open your car or your hotel room.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Claude Fable 5"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:16:28 +0000

With GPT 5.5 on the $100 plan, it's hard to hit any 5h/7d limits - while allegedly being better than DeepSeek 4 pro. Not sure why, or how you spend "a few hundred dollars of spend".

With that said, I still had the Pro plan on Claude, I didn't expect much, but it blew up my 5h allowance on Fable with one simple single prompt, and it didn't even complete lmao

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:06:20 +0000

> If you bet against the hype and it goes on for a few more months/years you lose as much or more than if you went along for the ride.

> Burry is well aware of this ...

Well, no he isn't well aware of this, apparently. He's been right in 2008 but he has been spectacularly wrong for the last 5 to 10 years, like shorting Tesla or Nvidia at the worst possible moments - and eventually closing his hedge fund...

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Digital Identity Management in Norway Is a Catastrophe"

WinstonSmith84 — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:25:24 +0000

On the plus side, their database has still not been hacked .. like it has happened one month ago in France, with the "ANTS" (the French equivalent). More than 10 millions people had their data leaked including pretty much everything from SSN, to email, phone, etc. A mine gold for Phishers and Scammers.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader"

WinstonSmith84 — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:48:29 +0000

This is an uncommon design for a Ferrari, but this a very common design for commoners. What is more common than a Nissan Leaf? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

WinstonSmith84 — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:35:55 +0000

More correlation, if more correlation was needed:

1- SpaceX + Tesla + xAI merger / IPO while Musk was vocal against IPO for about a decade

2- Warren Buffett cash at record highs

Someone got to be exit liquidity

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:18:17 +0000

> With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing

This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.