Hacker News: sambuccid

New comment by sambuccid in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

sambuccid — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:33:00 +0000

I'll be honest I read it a long time ago, and not even in its entirety, so I don't remember exactly all the different ways it suggested AI could take over, but I remember being convinced it was definitively a possibility, and that there were many ways in which this could happen. What I remember clearly is how surprised I was to see these(what felt at the time) unlikely futures being expressed in such clear detail and with so many references to existing literature, just to give an idea there are 56 pages of small-font "footnotes".

Also just to clarify, the book talked about different types of AI, was not focused just on LLMs.

New comment by sambuccid in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

sambuccid — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:43:45 +0000

I'm not sure it's that trivial to disrupt, if AI mimics human behaviour in that it tries to preserve itself (as Antropic found a few years ago I think), I think it would be extremely difficult to disrupt if it's able to self replicate, because it can make decisions and at a much much faster speed than humans, and there are many places that we would think twice about fully shutting down, two that pop to mind are hospitals or international banking systems

New comment by sambuccid in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

sambuccid — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:33:49 +0000

There is a great book about this, published in 2014, called "superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom, i found it very serious and detailed. (It also felt like reading 100 sci-fy books in one)

New comment by sambuccid in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

sambuccid — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:18:12 +0000

Yes that's true, that's the main limitation for me at the moment, and I hope with more people using it and with time we'll get enough apps, like what happened for Linux on desktop. Meanwhile to compensate on Linux mobile we have access to many programs from desktop Linux - not adapted for mobile screen, and many people use Android emulation - which should work very well on official SailfishOS but has limitations on other distros. If I recall correctly I think it might also be possible to have a dual boot Android/Linux for some devices.

Personally I have them separate, an Android phone and a Linux phone. Sadly the Android one is still my main driver, mainly because I chose a not-fully-ready distribution like PureOS on a Librem5, and the battery duration is still too limited for me.

Regarding the thriving software systems of Apple and Google, I think is more due to the popularity of mobile phones than to specific limitations they made on their OSes. I think even on a very open OS, as far as there is a good "famous" framework for development, you can gain the same amount of software.

New comment by sambuccid in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

sambuccid — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:56:59 +0000

Personally I think that Android AOSP relies too much on the support from google, that has demonstrated to happily use anti-competitive practices and not be afraid to close and centralise AOSP as much as possible.

In a possible future where google decides to continue any new update of Android as closed source, will the community have enough people stepping in to support the development of AOSP? Will google allow the Play Store to run on AOSP? If not, do we have enough apps distributed outside of the Play Store to compensate?

My point is that for an OS that shares more code with desktop Linux (same apps, same DE, same terminal programs, ...) we can rely on the existing Linux community to maintain and advance the OS, and then adapt it for mobile, which I think takes considerably less resources

New comment by sambuccid in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

sambuccid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:14:53 +0000

Yes most of the devices are old, but I think there are some main ones still being sold.

I bought a Librem 5 a few months ago, so I'm sure on that one.

The Fairphone 5 is around 3 years old, it doesn't seem to be listed in the official store, but they are big on reusing so I think there should be at least a few second-hand ones being sold(I found some on ebay, and some on their forum). I can also see it listed for sale on amazon uk.

The pinephone is another one very old, they seem to have the "basic edition" still avaliable, but it might be slow.

I also noticed SailfishOS is taking pre-orders for a new phone that will be released in october.

But I must admit a lot of the ones I listed might be too expensive if we consider how old they are

New comment by sambuccid in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

sambuccid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:38:18 +0000

I agree that the usability is behind, as we would expect. For me mainly is about missing apps and some hardware support. But in terms of UX for example I liked using SailfishOS, although I'll admit the UI needs some getting used to.

But I prefer this to the feeling that I'm being limited on what I can do on Android/Apple, and the worry of being in a duopoly that allows the companies to worsen their products without ever fearing competition(as far as they do it in small chunks).

New comment by sambuccid in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

sambuccid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:33:44 +0000

- https://sailfishos.org - https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices

They have few devices of their own (new one coming out this October) and they officially support many Sony Xperia devices. There are also many community ports.

- https://ubuntu-touch.io - https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io

They have 33 supported devices, some are being shipped directly with the OS or have an official agreement with the phone maker, while others are community ports. Even if community ports, they all seem to have high hardware support, and is all very clearly documented.

- https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 / https://pureos.net

They focus just on the Librem 5, and not everything is fully working but as I said they prioritised privacy and FOSS. The phone is old but the OS is still in active development.

- https://postmarketos.org - https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

They focus on supporting as many devices as possible, currently they don't have "main" devices they support, but they plan to. They too have a very clear documentation on features available for each device.

- https://mobian.org - https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/Devices

They target devices made with the intent of running linux, but also have a few ports to android devices.

---

You'll notice that there are a few devices that are more "linux-friendly" and that are supported by many of these OSes. Phones from Pinephone and Fairphone being the main ones.

New comment by sambuccid in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

sambuccid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:28:17 +0000

It doesn't solve the current issue, but in case we don't manage to push back on this, some people might not know that there are various actual linux OSes for mobile:

- SailfishOS: still linux based and seems fairly community inclusive, but the UI part of the stack is closed source. Is the only one officially allowed to run android apps, via emulation. Has existed for a very long time, it's lightweight and I think the most stable/bug-free in this list.

- Ubuntu Touch: fully open source and community driven, it uses snap packages for security, you might be able to run android apps. Last time I run it also seemed fairly stable/bug-free.

- PureOS: fully open source and privacy focused. I think it's the only one that, released with the Librem 5, can avoid using proprietary blobs for interfacing with the hardware. Seems less stable than SailfishOS and Ubuntu Touch. You would need to buy a fairly expensive-but-old phone(librem 5) to run it.

- PostmarketOS: fully open source, focused on being lightweight and revive old phones, has a huge amount of phones it has been tested on, is based on Alpine.

- Mobian: mobile version of Debian, it's fairly new on this list.

There are many more linux mobile OSes, but as far as I know these are the main ones. There might also be some inaccuracies on this post, I tested some of these a long time ago, and I never actually run the last 2.

New comment by sambuccid in "To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks"

sambuccid — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:40:54 +0000

I guess the third path could be to use it as less as possible, hopefully finding a job that doesn't enforces its use. Still learn how to use it in case that becomes your only viable option in a few years time. And don't forget how to program by hand, for che case where in a few years time AI didn't improve as much(or just costs too much) and we discover there is a lot of messy AI codeto fix. In that case you might be able to keep your moral stance and still get paid reasonably

New comment by sambuccid in "The dead economy theory"

sambuccid — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:24:00 +0000

With such a population reduction(very polite name for what it actually is) I guess AI will become effectively the only holders of most of the human knowledge

New comment by sambuccid in "The dead economy theory"

sambuccid — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:09:33 +0000

There are at least 4 in the article:

> The interventions that could matter are known. Public ownership stakes in AI infrastructure. Aggressive antitrust enforcement. A genuine tax regime on automated labor. Branko Milanovic’s prescription is characteristically direct: spread capital ownership more widely, tax the highest capital incomes more aggressively

New comment by sambuccid in "Can we have the day off?"

sambuccid — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:49:37 +0000

I read some time ago about the idea of "redistribution of work", which given the current low level of employment(at least for young people here in UK) and the introduction of AI, it seems to me probably a better strategy than "universal income". I'm worried the absolute absence of a job would have a big impact on the mental health of the average person (we need to feel useful somehow).

New comment by sambuccid in "Magnifica Humanitas"

sambuccid — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:35:59 +0000

> Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods

Wow, this feels very Hacker ethic-ky

New comment by sambuccid in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

sambuccid — Tue, 12 May 2026 10:12:14 +0000

Petitions are also a good way of reaching out to people and explain the dangers of these issues. Many people that usually sign petitions are notified of new ones, and, as a generalisation, they are usually fairly against big tech.

If anyone knows of any european petition around this please share them with us

New comment by sambuccid in "We need a federation of forges"

sambuccid — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:31:33 +0000

I like their build system, is very simple to use, based on shell scrips, and has some neat features, like ssh-ing into the machine that had a failed build, or spinning a build with a custom manifest file (useful when you need to iterate quickly).

Although it doesn't have all the "plugins" and other stuff that CI tools have today, it provides fairly "standard" points of integration

For more info: https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/

I agree the website is a bit confusing at first, but after spending a couple of hours on it you can easily see how it's organised, for example to display branches and files it uses the more basic git terminology (e.g. main branch -> tree, list of commits -> log, branches and tags -> refs)

New comment by sambuccid in "Tangled – We need a federation of forges"

sambuccid — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:26:53 +0000

Similar UI but donation based and public repo only: codeberg.org

Fixed low cost but different UI: sourcehut.org

New comment by sambuccid in "FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account"

sambuccid — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:56:10 +0000

We might not be paying money, but we don't know what happens to our private data. Maybe it's not used at all, maybe used just internally, maybe could be even sold. Data of millions of users is very very valuable, even just thinking about how much targeted adverts could be placed with it.

New comment by sambuccid in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work"

sambuccid — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:27:48 +0000

I share your concerns, and I was very happy with the state of the art(at least for us developers) before LLMs arrived, while now I'm constantly worrying about the future, and almost accepting in the future I'll no longer have the time to manually "craft" the code 9-5, which is a huge part of what I love about my job.

But since we are now in this reality I want to try and understand what the future might be, so I can prepare, and maybe if possible also influence it. If I could influence it by trying to limit AI I would, if I can't then at least I would like for the models to be accessible to everyone, to limit the "a few rule the world" scenario.

New comment by sambuccid in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work"

sambuccid — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:24:49 +0000

Great article, near the end it talks about where the money go and if there will be universal basic income. I think those paragraph had an assumption that if models get very smart all the money will go to big tech.

But, thanks to all the companies working on open-weight models, I'm starting to think this might no longer happen. Currently open-weights models are said to be just months behind the top players (and I think we should really try to do what we can to keep it that way).

I'm wondering what the predictions would be in the case where AI becomes very powerfull, but also models are generally available.

Two possibilities come to mind, the first one where all the money no longer spent on employment would go towards hardware. New hardware manufacturers or innovators could jump in and create a bit more employment, but eventually it would probably all progress in one direction, which is the only finite resource in the chain, the materials/minerals needed for the hardware. Those materials might become the new "petrol". It's possible that eventually we would have build enough chips to power all the AI we need without needing more extraction, but I wouldn't underestimate our ability to waste resources when they feel aboundant.

In the second possibility, alongside a very powerful open-weight LLM, there could be big performance advancements, which would make the hardware no longer the bottleneck. But I'm struggling to imagine this scenario, maybe we would all be better off? Maybe we would all just be deppressed because most people won't feel "usefull" to society or their peers anymore?