Hacker News: robotbikes

New comment by robotbikes in "Leaving Mozilla"

robotbikes — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:09:14 +0000

I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use.

It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.

New comment by robotbikes in "The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)"

robotbikes — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:34:29 +0000

And I thought for a second they were talking about peer to peer meth but no that's what the DEA shut down by tightly controlling pseudoephedrine, where before meth using meth makers were making meth and distributing it.

It certainly seems like prohibition is just making things worse and making it more lucrative for the least ethical of black market producers.

Similar situation with fentanyl when compared to previous opiates.

New comment by robotbikes in "Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability"

robotbikes — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:55:32 +0000

The sociocultural dangers weren't the danger they were referring too, Claude Mythos was purported to be so powerful that if released to the public it would result in all software being 0-dayed and so they could only give select important groups access. Curl's analysis said ehh, it didn't really seem that much better.

Now people who are getting negatively affected because they think AI is more real and more intelligent than it actually is and get tricked by it, well that is dangerous but for different reasons.

New comment by robotbikes in "Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI"

robotbikes — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:33:31 +0000

I was being diplomatic for sure, but the regulators are often also pretty much working for the utility companies, sometimes quite illegally if you look at the HB6 scandal in Ohio where the head of the PUCO Sam Randazzo took massive bribes. He never faced the charges in court because he ended his life.

New comment by robotbikes in "Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI"

robotbikes — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:13:04 +0000

A lot of these rules happen at the regulatory level so lawmakers don't typically understand them in depth and get a lot of their explanations from utility lobbyists or the regulatory agency itself, if they even get involved or pay attention. The dramatic increases being directly linked to data centers is big enough for consumers to notice though.

That's why these independent counsels are pretty important such as the Maryland agency mentioned in this article. Since utilities at least on the distribution side are pretty much monopolies people have no choice but to pay the agreed rate.

New comment by robotbikes in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

robotbikes — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:05:52 +0000

I think this is still the role of human oversight, these tools will forever be imperfect and the instructions we give them as prompts will always been prone to inaccuracies/misinterpretation. I find it useful to evaluate the code and often ask for simpler solutions and so far it has produced slightly more elegant solutions. The tendency to spawn helper functions to solve every problem or doing things in a slightly weird or at least unconvential way when there is an easier/standard way of doing it that would create less code. Your ideas if automated would definitely make things more maintainable but even code produced my machines require a human to be responsible for making sure/verifying it works.

New comment by robotbikes in "Task Paralysis and AI"

robotbikes — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:57:12 +0000

I have found the opposite to be true. I really like getting stuff done for people and struggled for years with all of the specific syntax and details of solving any particular problem. I have a relatively in-depth knowledge of computers and how they work and algorithms and the like but always struggled with the exact details of how to do something so it feels like a blessing to be able to spit ball some conceptual understanding and get back real code. I always struggled with making my ideas real before the novelty of the inspiration wore off unless I happened to get hyper focused on solving a particular problem.

Now I can step through everything in a way that it feels like a super power. I have enough sense and knowledge to I think intuit whether the solution being provided is bloated or perhaps even unnecessary and I can reiterate over it. I've just been using Cursor for work as I adopted a personal restriction to only use AI I can run on my own devices for personal use, but if I'm getting paid and the tools are provided I'm going to do my best to solve the problems that I'm confronted with and so far the LLM connected IDE has been helpful.

It's best in my experience when I use it as a tool to augment trouble shooting and brainstorming but when you are fixing one liner bugs in other people's side it's not like me typing the fix is very different from a machine auto completing it.

It might feel like cheating on a crossword puzzle but that is also something I do if I get stuck and the fun of solving the problem has become a time sink.

I think the real risk is if you don't understand conceptually what you are commiting anymore and I've tried to make sure that I always understand what and how the code is working and also understanding the pitfalls of being able to propose bullshit hypothesis that the agreeability of the LLM will go along with.

I've yet to seriously use a LLM for a personal project and when I tried to use Devstral that ran on my Nvidia 4090 it hallucinated so much that it wasn't super helpful but it still shot out boiler plate code that I could then spend time fixing and helped me overcome my own task paralysis regarding initiating.

New comment by robotbikes in "How Cloudflare responded to the “Copy Fail” Linux vulnerability"

robotbikes — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:26:30 +0000

I would assume it was about protecting their servers from internal sources escalating privileges vs. them providing publicly accessible Linux shells.

New comment by robotbikes in "DIY Soft Drinks"

robotbikes — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:01:53 +0000

A lot of small co-op groceries and even food co-ops that are more like ordering clubs used to use a company called UNFI to put in their orders but I think they focused more on organic and other high end items but they were willing to service smaller stores so yeah it's probable. There was also IGA (independent grocers association) but I think most of the stores associated with that brand/network locally have closed down so not sure if it's a thing anymore. Many of the independent convenience stores here stock almost all of their groceries at Aldi.

New comment by robotbikes in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

robotbikes — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:04:53 +0000

I once had an HP with an aluminum case and it had a grounded power supply but if you plugged it in without grounding his an adapter (sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do). You could feel it straight up vibrate while conducting current if you rubbed your hand over it. Not enough to shock me but it felt like kind of a shoddy design and leaked a lot more current than I've felt on a MacBook.

New comment by robotbikes in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

robotbikes — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:45:04 +0000

I think a lot of it has to do with the somewhat complicated engagement protocol, if everyone assumes that nobody else wants to talk then it's easier to just keep your head down and at best nod or even avert eye contact but when someone extends a level of conversational courtesy I think people often respond in kind. My challenge is that I don't often have the impulse to break the ice but when I do and feel genuinely outgoing people tend to appreciate the chit chat even if it's just about the weather but I also have many moments of standing awkwardly in elevators silently ascending or walking down the street silently and even feeling awkward ordering food. Being able to consistently be outgoing I feel would be a net positive but I'm not sure what the trick is to just turn it on without it feeling forced.

New comment by robotbikes in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

robotbikes — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:37:17 +0000

I remember when they were briefly owned by Google (I think) and assembled the MotoX in the US so you could buy a bamboo or customized case. It had one of the first low power always listening CPUs to listen for you to say Ok Google. Once that didn't work out Lenovo bought them and they had decent but not many flagship midrange phones. Moving forward a phone with decent security running grapheneOS that isn't a Pixel sounds good especially considering how other manufacturers such as OnePlus are embracing AI integrations. I think a number of people get sold on Apple devices based on their purported security so this collab could bolster some sales, let's hope they make it work and keep it open. I'd buy another one especially if I could get a bamboo case.

New comment by robotbikes in "The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice"

robotbikes — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:31:37 +0000

Ohio was populated with numerous earthworks, the Hopewell Earthworks finally being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage spot after being preserved for years by being used as a golf course. Unfortunately many of these have been lost as European settlers destroyed many of them. This continues to this day as Google is building a data center in central Ohio a top of land that was home to numerous native american burial mounds - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-breaks-gro...

New comment by robotbikes in "Backing up Spotify"

robotbikes — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 22:47:45 +0000

This already exists and is interesting to play around with - https://github.com/ASLP-lab/DiffRhythm

New comment by robotbikes in "Global Village Construction Set"

robotbikes — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:32:03 +0000

The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established. The creation of the notion of the tragedy of the commons was quite possibly propaganda so that large land owners could consolidate and enclosed the commons under the guise that they could manage it better especially after traditions were disrupted.

New comment by robotbikes in "Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines"

robotbikes — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:51:50 +0000

This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past.

New comment by robotbikes in "Copyparty – Turn almost any device into a file server"

robotbikes — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 03:51:19 +0000

I remember that...

New comment by robotbikes in "Snorting the AGI with Claude Code"

robotbikes — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 02:01:35 +0000

This looks like a good resource. There are some pretty powerful models that will run on a Nvidia 4090 w/ 24gb of RAM. Devstral and Queen 3. Ollama makes it simple to run them on your own hardware, but the cost of the GPU is a significant investment. But if you are paying $250 a month for a proprietary tool it would pay for itself pretty quickly.

New comment by robotbikes in "I let Claude Code write an entire book"

robotbikes — Fri, 30 May 2025 13:34:06 +0000

Honestly there are some interesting concepts and broad overviews of them but this is hardly a "book" but just a verbose LLM document that briefly lists a lot of concepts without sufficiently or consistently fleshing them out into actual meaningful chapters. Not to say that this sort of thing isn't potentially useful but it seems more like the starting point of an outline of a book rather than anything resembling a finished published book.

New comment by robotbikes in "I let Claude Code write an entire book"

robotbikes — Fri, 30 May 2025 13:03:45 +0000

I really found the story in chapter 14 (recursive self-improvement) about the guy who got so addicted to self-improvement that he ended up in his own meta-reality unable to understand even himself because he was getting so much better and hacking his learning. A completely fabricated story with no basis in reality that I'm aware of but man there are a lot of bullet points to make it seem factual. What are we going to do about the worrying trend of 10X hackers self-improving so much that they aren't able to exist in the real world. Here's an excerpt

"The Addiction to Acceleration The fourth uncomfortable truth is how recursive improvement becomes compulsive. Kenji can’t stop because each day of not improving his improvement feels like stagnation. When you’re accelerating, constant velocity feels like moving backward.

This addiction manifests as: • Inability to accept plateau phases • Anxiety when not optimizing optimization • Devaluing of steady-state excellence • Compulsion to add meta-levels • Fear of falling behind yourself Recursive improvement can become its own trap."

I find that this criticism is far less applicable to say individuals but perhaps it could be levied against the way companies are currently treating AI. Which of course is where this comes from.