Hacker News: edot

New comment by edot in "Flock updates privacy, accountability, security, and transparency safeguards"

edot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:26:35 +0000

I highly encourage everyone to start organizing locally. It’s extremely easy to do. Read your city’s local meeting transcripts (LLMs can help find ones with Flock mentions), see who said what, email them. Make a website, find who else has publicly commented and reach out to them, reach out to local newspapers.

Make a site specific to your area. I’ve created https://stopflock419.com for my part, and I’ve already had five people in my area reach out to me (after spreading it around via friends and family).

Local campaigning is easier than you think! Most of the councils who approved these were a) lied to about the cameras’ capabilities and b) generally just on autopilot, they aren’t Flock fanboys, they just kind of take the police chief at their word that these are good tools.

New comment by edot in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

edot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:50:22 +0000

Yeah I’d have to imagine that as long as you have the same fundamental ideas (variables, functions, loops, arrays, etc.) the syntax doesn’t matter at all. Plus it can just try, see and error, and read the error. I doubt there’s a language out there that they haven’t a) ingested and b) can’t handle.

I think perhaps the equivalent would be “this environment quite literally can’t support having an LLM attached to it”, as in say some totally airgapped AND low-performance things (industrial computing, PLCs, military stuff, etc.).

StopFlock419

edot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:12:39 +0000

Article URL: https://stopflock419.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284281

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by edot in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

edot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:34:04 +0000

My understanding of manual machining in the modern day is that only really big or really specialty jobs (as in, just a weird process that there isn’t a good CNC machine for) are done manually anymore. But specialty and low volume, which is exactly where LLMs are nice because I can spec it exactly how I want. I wonder what the software equivalent of “big” is. Like, you need a part made on a lathe with a 3 foot diameter throat, only one guy in a 500 mile radius has a machine that big, from 1962, so he’s your guy. That guy can stay in business with manual machining. But standard, high volume parts need to be on CNC to be competitive.

New comment by edot in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

edot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:24:50 +0000

That’s his point, there isn’t one. You don’t need bespoke software anymore. We’ve got the basics already, all the standards we’d ever need, the agents can figure out how to put them together for whatever thing specific you need.

New comment by edot in "License plate reader searches should require a warrant"

edot — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:39:25 +0000

Yeah China is not dystopian at all! They don’t keep millions of people in open air prisons, they don’t keep track of people’s compliance with the government, they don’t support brutal dictatorships, and they definitely don’t pass any laws that would enable them to use their surveillance technology to suppress democratic behavior!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...

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

https://www.csis.org/analysis/old-friends-new-calculations-r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hong_Kong_national_securi...

Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim (2018) [video]

edot — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:45:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270884

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by edot in "Grok Bot"

edot — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:57:16 +0000

Not a big deal at all. Claude Code and Codex both support keeping your computer awake. That'll just be a default thing that gets turned on when you install one of these apps.

New comment by edot in "Flock wanted to tap dashcams in rideshare vechicles to add to surveillance data"

edot — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:08:04 +0000

Sure but is that worth the rest of us giving up our rights? Also, historically, dictatorial governments do the most child abductions by orders of magnitude. These cameras are a Stasi or NKVD wet dream.

New comment by edot in "Flock wanted to tap dashcams in rideshare vechicles to add to surveillance data"

edot — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:31:48 +0000

Kidnapping like how you’re thinking of it (stranger grabbing your kid from the park) is a myth. Non-family abductions are 1% of cases.

Straight from the horse’s mouth: https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily

New comment by edot in "Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse"

edot — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:54:32 +0000

Absolutely not. Horrible advice. You give the rest of us peaceful majority a bad name. Protest legally. Your post glows.

New comment by edot in "Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse"

edot — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:53:15 +0000

Right, because you don’t want to let the little guys mess it up for the big guys: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/fbi-seeks-us-wid...

Gotta make a statement with the low level grunts so the citizenry think these systems have accountability.

New comment by edot in "Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength"

edot — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:26:01 +0000

So what’s the goal of a bot post like this? If you look at its user account, you can see it has some links to some of its websites which I assume are scams of some variety.

New comment by edot in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731"

edot — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:24:11 +0000

What are you doing where you're getting Sol on XHigh or Max to run out on the $200 plan? Last night, I had 48% of my weekly limit left, so I spun up 4 projects I had been working on and ran them all on Ultra with Fast mode and /goal, and it took over 4 hours to burn through that. I mean, I was reeeeally trying to use it up because I just can't use it up with normal usage for weekend and after-work programming. I've had Max crunching on something this morning for 3 hours now and I've only used 4% of my weekly limit ...

New comment by edot in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731"

edot — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:13:37 +0000

Subsidy doesn't matter once the weights are released. You're conflating subsidized training and research with subsidized inference. DeepSeek's (allegedly government-) subsidized inference is coming to an end soon per their docs, but that's fine because the weights are open. You can run this on-prem with very modest hardware. And you can fine-tune it to your business with your data.

New comment by edot in "U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative"

edot — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:50:23 +0000

This is not the same thing, right? IIUC, the awards for what you linked have already been given out. There aren't awards for the linked initiative - I think that's just Argonne National Lab asking for volunteers to make their (ANL's) award money stretch further, right?

New comment by edot in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

edot — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:48:02 +0000

But if you just want a high-quality bar just for you, you don’t want to take over Mars Inc.

New comment by edot in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

edot — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:56:56 +0000

Just looked this up, no longer true. Explore subagents inherit whatever model the parent is. And you can of course make other subagent configs.

New comment by edot in "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel"

edot — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:48:08 +0000

That’s literally how AlphaEvolve works. And presumably how OpenAI’s research loop works if they’d ever publish it.

They put an LLM in a loop, with a reward function, and keep trying to get a higher score. The reward function for AlphaEvolve is “did this code get a better score or faster”, for math research it’s “did it write a LEAN proof”.

I’m open to hearing that I’m wrong but I don’t think I am. I agree that LLMs make connections that humans wouldn’t, but eventually you need to verify those because otherwise the connection it made may as well be a lie unless proven otherwise.

New comment by edot in "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel"

edot — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:09:26 +0000

Right, which was true at the time. So hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into making LLMs better at these tasks via pretraining, RL, RLHF, post training, etc. again all with something verifiable in the loop. In order to improve the thing in the loop, the loop itself needs to be verifiable.

There have only been a few thousand wars, and they’re all different and all different in the world in which they occurred. The dimensionality is absurd, which is not a problem for LLMs if there’s enough data, but in this case there isn’t.