Hacker News: rpdillon

New comment by rpdillon in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

rpdillon — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:43:13 +0000

Rather than lying, I think of it more as financial dead reckoning.

New comment by rpdillon in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

rpdillon — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:38:45 +0000

I wonder what percentage of services run on the Internet exceed a few hundred transactions per second.

New comment by rpdillon in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

rpdillon — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:14:09 +0000

This is a nice point that I haven't seen before. It's interesting to regress AI to the simplest form and see how we treat it as a test for the more complex cases.

New comment by rpdillon in "EFF is leaving X"

rpdillon — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:48:29 +0000

I trend libertarian because I have a strong anti-authoritarian streak. I used to think of myself as closer to the Republicans, but these days I mostly only agree with the Democrats. Weird times.

New comment by rpdillon in "Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU"

rpdillon — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:13:35 +0000

Been running lemonade for some time on my Strix Halo box. It dispatches out to other backends that they include, like diffusion and llama. I actually don't like their combined server, and what I use instead is their llama CPP build for ROCm.

https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/llamacpp-rocm

But I'm not doing anything with images or audio. I get about 50 tokens a second with GPT OSS 120B. As others have pointed out, the NPU is used for low-powered, small models that are "always on", so it's not a huge win for the standard chatbot use case.

New comment by rpdillon in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

rpdillon — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 01:13:05 +0000

Sure. I'm just more optimistic than you are about the enduring value of AI. Time will tell.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

rpdillon — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:44:09 +0000

These numbers aren't credible. Total credit card fraud globally is projected to reach $43 billion in 2026. You're arguing that fraud on Android alone is equivalent to that. Doesn't smell right.

New comment by rpdillon in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

rpdillon — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:16:31 +0000

That's primarily a function of the time for adoption, though, not the utility of the technology. In 20 years, people would not be able to so easily say that they could turn off AI with no impact.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android Developer Verification"

rpdillon — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:06:37 +0000

That article's premise is that the Android security model is something that I want. It really isn't.

The F-Droid model of having multiple repositories in one app is absolutely perfect because it gives me control (rather than the operating system) over what repositories I decide to add. There is no scenario in which I wish Android to question me on whether I want to install an app from a particular F-Droid repository.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

rpdillon — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:43:19 +0000

All they say is that the apps are malicious, though. The majority of malicious apps distributed on Android are through the Play Store. I really wish they would provide concrete details here because I just don't believe that this is all hinging on sideloading.

New comment by rpdillon in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

rpdillon — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:02:31 +0000

My personal take is that LLMs are so transformative that they are likely not going to qualify under derivative works and therefore GPL wouldn't hold sway. There's already some evidence that courts will consider training on copyrighted material fair use, so long as it is otherwise obtained legally, which would be the case with software licensed under GPL.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I believe it is best because it's a weakener interpretation of copyright law, which is overall a good thing in my view.

New comment by rpdillon in "TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters"

rpdillon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:19:05 +0000

Yesterday morning, CNN:

> In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.

> Then, they left town.

It's obvious what's happening.

https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/dhs-shutdown-fundin...

New comment by rpdillon in "Private equity turned vulnerable elderly people into human ATMs"

rpdillon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:15:26 +0000

I got this email in mid-March:

> I’m reaching out to start a dialogue regarding a possible non-executive founding directorship role for a new senior care deal.

> We are doing a roll-up. Acquiring and consolidating various senior living revenue generating companies, eliminating redundant operations, improve and expand service offerings and ultimately exit via private sale or IPO.

It was so bonkers I forwarded it to my wife, who works in a research center on aging, and she was like, "how many red flags can you fit into one email?"

This stuff is depressingly real.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

rpdillon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:09:24 +0000

I think those are features, not a bug.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

rpdillon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:07:16 +0000

You need root to get around all the stuff that Google won't let you do. There's tons of examples I've encountered over the last 20 years, but the one I encountered most recently is that without root, when I plug in an external display to my phone, I can't actually make the phone display go off. So it sits there powering the external display and its own display (that I'm not using) because of permissions.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

rpdillon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:04:31 +0000

It's not clear at all that a scammer is on the phone, instructing people to click through every warning that they see while sideloading a malicious app. As I stated up thread, the majority of these scams are happening through apps in the Play Store.

To address your question, there should be a straightforward option during device setup. If you're first attaching your account to the device, you simply check a box that says this is an advanced user's phone. You can put it behind the same kind of scary pop-ups that web browsers have when they're about to serve you an HTTP page, or when the HTTPS certificate is self-signed.

It's the most obvious, straightforward, user-friendly approach, and it was never even discussed.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

rpdillon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:59:46 +0000

You don't need to side load a specific app with malware. All you do is tell the person to go to the Google Play Store and install any Anydesk. Heck, even the reviews for that app point out that people that are scamming you often tell you to install it. Kelly Walters' review from '23 has 215,000 upvotes for warning people about this.

New comment by rpdillon in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

rpdillon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:55:08 +0000

I don't find the assertion credible that people are getting scammed out of more money than the entire platform is worth. But given that Google does not make the revenue for Android public, what kind of numbers do you think you're talking about here?

Also, I think it's disingenuous to say that scams are predominantly powered by sideloading. I think the vast majority of the scams that are perpetrated use apps directly from the Play Store.

New comment by rpdillon in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

rpdillon — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:40:53 +0000

Nah, I suspect any app that's loading arbitrary JS from somebody's random GitHub page would get called out for that behavior. We're getting supply chain attacks daily.

New comment by rpdillon in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

rpdillon — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:39:08 +0000

The dependencies weren't vendored, meaning their behavior can change at any time if a malicious actor gains control of that third-party repo.

This is bad for security.