I agree that the primary issue is that it's a software-controlled microphone with no off switch controlled by software written by Meta. I only emphasized the wake word listening in response to OP's claim that it's not always on when it must be.

Many people with uninvolved biological fathers would disagree with you that the guy who impregnated their mother counted as their father, especially if they were raised by another man who actually did stick around, and that's even for dads who actually impregnated the mother. Sperm donation takes this even further because he claims to have actually done it anonymously [0], meaning he's as uninvolved as he possibly could have been in the process of being a father.

Many or most of these kids have real men who were actually there helping to raise them through their childhood who they refer to as "father", and it's pretty disrespectful of Durov towards those men to attempt to usurp that title on the grounds of what was supposed to be an anonymous donation.

I'll grant that Durov is more likely than most sperm donors to have some of these kids actually claim him as their father, but that's in no small part because there's now a substantial amount of money tied to them identifying him as such. Cynically I wonder if that's a major motivator for him doing this, because he knows that the kids wouldn't otherwise know or care who he is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328289

> 15. "Loaded firearm" means any firearm loaded with ammunition or any firearm which is possessed by one who, at the same time, possesses a quantity of ammunition which may be used to discharge such firearm.

So I guess I'm using the New York definition of an always-on camera.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/265.00

I agree that it's pretty cringe to refer to all of them as his children when he's literally a sperm donor, but he definitely did call them that.

The camera may or may not be always on, but it can be turned on by software activated by the always-on mic (again, demonstrated by the promo video), so it would be best to treat it as though it is.

[0] https://about.fb.com/news/2025/06/introducing-oakley-meta-gl...

* Personality Forge uses a rules-based scripting approach [0]. This is basically ELIZA extended to take advantage of modern processing power.

* Rasa [1] used traditional NLP/NLU techniques and small-model ML to match intents and parse user requests. This is the same kind of tooling that Google/Alexa historically used, just without the voice layer and with more effort to keep the context in mind.

Rasa is actually open source [2], so you can poke around the internals to see how it's implemented. It doesn't look like it's changed architecture substantially since the pre-LLM days. Rhasspy [3] (also open source) uses similar techniques but in the voice assistant space rather than as a full chatbot.

[0] https://www.personalityforge.com/developers/how-to-build-cha...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200104080459/https://rasa.com/ (old link because Rasa's marketing today is ambiguous about whether they're adding LLMs now).

[2] https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa

[3] https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Always-on microphone and camera sold by one of the world's sketchiest privacy invaders? Check.

Display that actually takes advantage of the glasses form factor? Nope. Sounds like this could just as easily be the Humane pin.

Nvidia is just really really bad on Linux in general, so it's always a coin toss if you'll be able to boot your system after messing with their drivers, regardless of display server.

In this case, I'd have flagged them too if I saw them. The "long live" post is an aggressive tirade that reflects poorly on the author and led to a poor-quality discussion. The second is a link to a git commit history, which is weird in its own right and provides no explanation, and the context provided in the comments shows that a generally dislikable figure with extreme political views is now leading a fork of X11 that has yet to prove itself viable. So I'd probably have flagged that one too as pointless drama until proven otherwise.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44324556

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

More power to them. They can take responsibility for that code and maintain it and I don't have to worry about breaking them when I release a new version. Everyone's happy.

This talk is different from his others because it's directed at aspiring startup founders. It's about how we conceptualize the place of an LLM in a new business. It's designed to provide a series of analogies any one of which which may or may not help a given startup founder to break out of the tired, binary talking points they've absorbed from the internet ("AI all the things" vs "AI is terrible") in favor of a more nuanced perspective of the role of AI in their plans. It's soft and squishy rhetoric because it's not about engineering, it's about business and strategy.

I honestly left impressed that Karpathy has the dynamic range necessary to speak to both engineers and business people, but it also makes sense that a lot of engineers would come out of this very confused at what he's on about.

Much more rewarding too, because "we really don't know very much about this yet" is hard to expand to a full click-worthy essay and less likely to move product.

I started to write out another comment but it ended up just being a repeat of what I wrote above. Since we're going in circles I think I'm going to leave it here. Read the study, or at least read the extracts that I put above. They don't really leave room for ambiguity.