Hacker News: crisnoble

New comment by crisnoble in "Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages"

crisnoble — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:28:31 +0000

> plays it while it is on screen, and holds the first frame for anyone who prefers reduced motion.

New comment by crisnoble in "People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms"

crisnoble — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:12:55 +0000

No need. Just create (using an llm) a corpus of websites of "facts" about candidates, made up to your liking, that the LLMs will happily slup up and spit out.

New comment by crisnoble in "America.gov"

crisnoble — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:46:15 +0000

"chat is unavailable right now"

New comment by crisnoble in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

crisnoble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:36:58 +0000

Personally I just set a timer. Having a wifi connection to have your appliance use an api to ping your app which has to be signed in introduces quite a lot of failure modes.

New comment by crisnoble in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

crisnoble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:31:56 +0000

its not

New comment by crisnoble in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

crisnoble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:20:56 +0000

These sound useful but hard. Putting a tablet on the front sounds easy but adds no value. Guess which one they picked? Apparently people will still buy.

New comment by crisnoble in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

crisnoble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:11:28 +0000

Everyone is arguing over a feature that this fridge does not have.

New comment by crisnoble in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

crisnoble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:09:52 +0000

Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.

Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:

Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)

SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.

Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-30-cu-ft-Smart-French-Door-...

Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.

New comment by crisnoble in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

crisnoble — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:04:11 +0000

So you spend 11k on a smart fridge, have a nanny, but maniacally control the temperature depending on contents, possible weather scenarios and and if you are vacation. Makes sense. Maybe that is why I'm still poor, imagine all the money I've wasted never once adjusting my fridge temp remotely (or even manually) in the last 14 years.

New comment by crisnoble in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

crisnoble — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:52:27 +0000

Honestly baffled by this. You load the dishwasher and then go sit down on your phone, open an app, and turn it on? And that will be preferable to clicking start as you close the door?

New comment by crisnoble in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

crisnoble — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:56:18 +0000

No, aesthetics really don't come into play in graphic design classes. Students learn, and are expected to follow, the technical rules of design just like CS students learn general concepts of programming. You would probably fail your class if you decided to come up with a brand new data storage concept instead of using a database. Hierarchy of information, typographic consistency, grid structure, and information density.

New comment by crisnoble in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

crisnoble — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:04:27 +0000

If you can convince Chat GPT to stop putting icons next to every single thing, it would be loads better. 1940s cubist style seems sort of there, then bam a tiny cake icon next to the word cakes and drinks. Why? Each of these posters, including the original would be so much better without these tiny stupid icons. No one at the Bauhaus ever made a poster with tiny icons! Chat GPT just cannot drop the icons. Like just have it read a graphic design history book. These secondary attempts might pass more people's AI aversion filter but they would all receive an F in a graphic design class.

New comment by crisnoble in "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"

crisnoble — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:27:18 +0000

And does having an AI call the restaurant instead of you doing it sound cool to you?

New comment by crisnoble in "There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet"

crisnoble — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:41:35 +0000

Did you know that just going to a hospital for an emergency without checking it was in network can run you a 100k bill even if they do nothing but MRI and monitoring performed for one night?

New comment by crisnoble in "There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet"

crisnoble — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:24:51 +0000

It is absolutely a problem. One that will not be solved with LLMs.

New comment by crisnoble in "There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet"

crisnoble — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:20:05 +0000

How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?

New comment by crisnoble in "Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT"

crisnoble — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:09:10 +0000

This is why normal people saying they are using ChatGPT to "research" which X to buy makes me so sad. Even if it is not a sponsored answer (yet) it is using data it found on random websites that it trusts are telling the truth. It is the dumbest game of telephone where the start of the chain is made up marking mumbo jumbo or straight fake, and each successive layer somehow speaks with more confidence and the end user thinks that because these LLMs have "access to all data from all time" that it means their answer will be correct.

New comment by crisnoble in "Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT"

crisnoble — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:59:36 +0000

I suppose Google could distinguish an fully astroturfed site via historic traffic and search data to see that a site with the first known views of all time within the last month couldn't possibly have the claimed 10 year history and millions of happy customers, but it is certainly not filtering it out today. These signals are not perfect, what about a company trying to go direct to consumer after years of big box distribution? Relying on historic data would also lead to old domains getting bought to peddle new crap. The biggest source of GEO gains today is to have humans go into subreddits and niche forums to add "organic" recommendations that will get slurped up and treated with high value to LLMs. Other than that I have seen companies literally create pages called "for LLMs" with very specific instructions about how to talk about their brand, their history, and how amazing they are. The dumb thing is all of the techniques work great and the Chat interfaces will obediently regurgitate.

New comment by crisnoble in "Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT"

crisnoble — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:39:01 +0000

Marketing companies are already selling their ability to influence the training phase. I've seen entirely fake companies with fake products getting recommended for real queries, and the companies behind them selling this as proof to real companies. How would the models know the difference between a completely astroturfed e-commerce site and a real one? What data are they going to use when you ask for the "best natural deodorant" other than their corpus of scraped sites, more of which are fake everyday?

New comment by crisnoble in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

crisnoble — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:17:28 +0000

Please go do it then. I've done this in San Diego, it was 19/20 failing to stop for cars, the one who did failed to stop behind the painted line. There were only 2 cyclists and they also slowly rolled through the intersection.