Hacker News: a2128

New comment by a2128 in "A $20/month user costs OpenAI $65 in compute. AI video is a money furnace"

a2128 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:57:26 +0000

Other than money, a really good reason to shut down Sora is that it was a horrible idea in the first place that went completely against OpenAI's mission to make AI benefit humanity and improve lives. Sora was like TikTok, an app already thought to waste time and ruin attention spans, except even worse because there was no real information as everything inside is AI generated. More than that, it had a dual use as it allowed generating fake footage of protests etc that people then reuploaded to other platforms to mislead people. There is nothing about Sora I can think of that benefited humanity, it was only a net negative and a race to the bottom for more extreme memes and desensitizing people to reality.

New comment by a2128 in "I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced"

a2128 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:43:40 +0000

I don't know of a solution. I don't think even identity verification will meaningfully solve this. People will get hacked, or provide their SEO-spamming agent with their own identity, or purposefully post fake videos under their own identity. As it becomes more normal to scan your ID to access random websites, it will also become easier to steal people's identities and the value of identity verification will go down.

New comment by a2128 in "I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced"

a2128 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:24:41 +0000

AI companies love to hype up how AI will provide a great benefit to the economy and transform intellectual labor, but I hardly see any discussion about how much damage it will cause to the economy when you can no longer trust that you're on a video call with an actual person. Maybe the person you're interviewing is actually an AI impersonating someone, or maybe they never existed in the first place. Information found online will also no longer be trustable, footage of some incident somewhere may have been entirely fabricated by AI, and we already experience misleading articles today.

Money will have to be wasted on unnecessary flights to see stuff or meet people in-person instead of video, and the availability of actual information will become more and more limited as the sea of online information gets polluted with crap. It may never be possible to calculate the full extent of the damage in monetary value.

New comment by a2128 in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

a2128 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:06:06 +0000

    OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.

I can't take articles like this seriously when they so confidently make such statements that so directly conflict with reality. I use Wayland exclusively everyday and I screen record with OBS on both KDE and GNOME on multiple machines with no issues, my KDE shows window previews, and copy pasting works fine. Maybe the author's problems aren't Wayland issues?

New comment by a2128 in "A tool that removes censorship from open-weight LLMs"

a2128 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:49:29 +0000

    You're not just using a tool — you're co-authoring the science.

This README is an absolute headache that is filled with AI writing, terminology that doesn't exist or is being used improperly, and unsound ideas. For example, it focuses a lot on doing "ablation studies", by which it means removing random layers of an already-trained model, to find the source of the refusals(?), which is an absolute fool's errand because such behavior is trained into the model as a whole and would not be found in any particular layer. I can only assume somebody vibe-coded this and spent way too much time being told "You're absolutely right!" bouncing back the worst ideas

New comment by a2128 in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

a2128 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:35:57 +0000

You are misrepresenting the situation. The debate isn't about whether they should go with another vendor or not. Everybody can agree that they would have the right to pick a different vendor. That's not what they're doing, they're instead trying to force Anthropic into doing what they want by applying a designation previously only reserved for Chinese companies like Huawei as punishment for taking their stance, with an unspoken agreement that if Anthropic backs down and allows full usage then the designation will be removed

New comment by a2128 in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

a2128 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:50:33 +0000

Has there ever been any documented circumstance where significant inside information became public and known thanks to a trade? Most often, the trade is made at the last minute, and the information gets subsequently revealed anyway. And it's impossible to tell whether somebody is an inside trader, a wealthy gambling addict making a stupid decision, or hypothetically a foreign agent pretending to be an inside trader to make people believe in a particular outcome.

New comment by a2128 in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

a2128 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:41:35 +0000

If you believe Polymarket as a serious source of truth, consider that somebody manipulated "Will Jesus Christ return before 2027?" because there was a secondary market on whether that market will rise above 5%. Which defeats the whole idea that the betting odds will reflect the truth. Also even pre-manipulation I don't think a 2% chance that Jesus will return was reflective of truth.

https://gizmodo.com/checking-in-on-polymarket-bets-on-christ...

New comment by a2128 in "Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps"

a2128 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:13:11 +0000

I don't think Google considers such legislation to be their enemy. It would effectively kill F-Droid and other third-party app distribution methods, and would fully lock them in a place of high power over their platforms and pull the ladder up beneath them, and nobody would be able to blame Google for it. I mean, why would anybody submit their ID to a brand new unproven app store? Seems quite risky, better to just use Google Play

New comment by a2128 in "News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns"

a2128 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:10:46 +0000

This is terrible for transparency and record keeping. X has also blocked internet archive access under similar concerns, but the end result was that now it's very difficult to tell who said what and when, posts can be deleted or edited, and no public figure can be held accountable for something wrong they said, or making contradictory statements over time, via a trustworthy archive.

You just have to rely on screenshots that may or may not have been fabricated, and maybe nobody's even captured a screenshot. If it's a public figure you normally trust, versus some random people's screenshots, of course you're gonna dismiss the screenshots as fake. It feels almost intentional to bring the platform into the dark ages.

New comment by a2128 in "Oh, good: Discord's age verification rollout has ties to Palantir co-founder"

a2128 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:01:24 +0000

1. Citation needed. Why would Google be secretly ingesting all of your Discord messages and be using it for... YouTube recommendations? Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a more likely explanation

2. Already collecting a lot of data is not a reason to collect even more sensitive data. Plenty of people use Discord differently than you do. Anonymously participating in projects that use Discord and never saying anything personal over it, for example. This would possibly remove the ability to do so, for example if Discord's secretive AI decided that an LGBTQ+ project's Discord should be age restricted, and you would be forced to submit enough information to be fully identified and deanonymized, and now some foreign government could build a database that includes your full identity and your affiliation to such project

New comment by a2128 in "Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers"

a2128 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:32:24 +0000

This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?

The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying

New comment by a2128 in "Software Pump and Dump"

a2128 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:07:49 +0000

It was only through external review that the problems with the project were discovered, and the blog post was clearly written for marketing as it hardly shared any actual details about the result other than an unexplained video they called a screenshot. Good faith research would have pointed out the limitations of their system

New comment by a2128 in "Kimi Released Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual SOTA-Agentic Model"

a2128 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:05:50 +0000

You don't need to wait and see, Kimi K2 has the same hardware requirements and has several providers on OpenRouter:

https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2-0905 https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2-0905:exacto https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2

Generally it seems to be in the neighborhood of $0.50/1M for input and $2.50/1M for output

New comment by a2128 in "Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux"

a2128 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:43:42 +0000

The last update was 2 days ago, see https://github.com/KDE/falkon/tags

New comment by a2128 in "Changes to Android Open Source Project"

a2128 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:53:17 +0000

Every time Android gets worse and less open, especially with recent ID verification for APK installs, I think Canonical's 2013 comment on closing Bug #1 ages even more like milk: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

    Bug: Microsoft has a majority market share

    Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. [...] A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software.

Closing comment:

    Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing.

    Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it's important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed.

New comment by a2128 in "Show HN: Mephisto – A RAM-only, ad-free disposable email PWA built with React"

a2128 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:53:34 +0000

Looking at the automatic first email and the network tab, this appears to be just wrapping around guerrillamail which is a classic disposable email website, and polling their API (doesn't seem to use websockets). Can you clarify what relationship you have with guerrillamail, if any, and whether or not the encryption and zero persistence claims extend to guerrillamail's service?

New comment by a2128 in "Big Tech are the new Soviets"

a2128 — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:41:44 +0000

If you read the parent comments we've already established that Amazon punishes sellers for pricing lower on other platforms than Amazon, and Amazon's margins affect item pricing everywhere. You could have zero margins, you could have negative margins, Amazon will see that Seller X's items are available on your Amazon competitor for $2 while it's $20 on Amazon and say that they're in violation of policy. Unless you make it worthwhile for Seller X to abandon Amazon you will not be able to compete.

New comment by a2128 in "LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted"

a2128 — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:34:09 +0000

What is legitimately the expected use case for Copilot on a TV?

TVs are for consuming video. As far as I know, Copilot doesn't generate videos yet, and it certainly won't be possible or cheap enough to generate anything on the level of TV shows or movies any time soon. So are they expecting people will sit in their living room home theater to... chat with Copilot... instead of doing it on their phone?

I genuinely can't come up with any realistic use case where it would be convenient or useful to use Copilot on a TV. It feels utterly deranged that they would put it there.

New comment by a2128 in "Big Tech are the new Soviets"

a2128 — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:00:56 +0000

Plenty of people do want to make the efforts and have tried. Physical retailers like Walmart have opened online retail but adoption remains limited. Startups like Jet.com, Quidsi, Fab.com, Rakuten/Buy.com, Woot and many others have tried and failed to take on Amazon, leading to bankruptcy or being sold. The reality is that nobody can take on Amazon due to their slimy tactics but also nobody can realistically provide something to customers that Amazon doesn't already provide. Fees will keep increasing and costs inflating as much as Amazon wants, while customers are none the wiser and sellers can do nothing about it.