Hacker News: solfox

New comment by solfox in "GPT-6 Astra on robot arms"

solfox — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:45:53 +0000

Was just in a Waymo in SF and we were attacked by a gang of cyclists repeatedly swerving at and trying to cause our waymo to crash. Really powerless feeling. And they were doing this knowing humans were inside. I don't pretend to know their motivation other than perhaps misplaced social rage, but I'd imagine a litter robot would be immediately destroyed.

New comment by solfox in "Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com"

solfox — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:28:40 +0000

Calling it now: they will reverse this decision by December after they realize how many gmail customers they are losing.

New comment by solfox in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

solfox — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:40:31 +0000

Would be interested to see this compared to the costs to take off a comparable small jet fuel aircraft.

New comment by solfox in "Playa Phone"

solfox — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:32:33 +0000

How has it evolved over the years? Certainly internet access on the playa has gotten easier than when you first launched it. What was the first connectivity solution?

New comment by solfox in "Playa Phone"

solfox — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:41:37 +0000

Our first time out on the playa together, my girlfriend and I stopped by this phone booth and made a couple of calls. And because we stopped, we saw the FSM camp next door, and a giant sign saying "Weddings Here", so we inquired. They offered us free rings and then announced our wedding over a loudspeaker. In 2 minutes we had an entire wedding party, complete with best man, an elder to give away the bride, 25+ guests, and an officiant. My newly-minted best man even gave me one of my favorite playa gifts ever as a wedding gift. We opted not to "make it official", though they offered. It was a truly incredible experience. Thanks FSM!

New comment by solfox in "Playa Phone"

solfox — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:34:10 +0000

It has always been a challenging but highly rewarding experience for me. It is what you make of it - if you choose to be cynical about "very well off tech people", that's all you'll see. But Burning Man is multitudes. For me, it's about witnessing pure human creativity and playfulness. Your first time out on the playa at night will likely be one of those lifetime memories you'll appreciate having.

New comment by solfox in "Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?"

solfox — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:27:35 +0000

Many microsoft services are down/failing today, including sites hosted on Azure. I'm guessing it's a larger MS outage.

New comment by solfox in "US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters"

solfox — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:24:45 +0000

Imagine being so hungry for power that you justify this.

New comment by solfox in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"

solfox — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:52:16 +0000

> they're serving companies at Google scale first

I think that's actually a very interesting insight that would be helpful for PMs on GCloud to take note of. As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco, forcing (I assume most) of their users into a arduous process of removing components they don't need.

Google AI Studio is one of Google's solutions to this problem, but in typical Google fashion, it's bolted-on without any clear connection in the ecosystem. If you're also using GCloud, it's hard to remember it's even there.

OpenAI's platform, by contrast, is streamlined, easy to use. With Google, I feel like I need to wade through the documentation first before even using the darn thing.

New comment by solfox in "Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI"

solfox — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:12:14 +0000

I'm no OpenAI apologist here, but I appreciate this perspective. Apple definitely played their timing right for maximum pre-IPO damage. It gives them tremendous negotiating leverage on a possible settlement which could give them a chunk of OpenAI.

New comment by solfox in "Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI"

solfox — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:13:45 +0000

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

New comment by solfox in "Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI"

solfox — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:11:59 +0000

Laws around breaking and entering date back to WELL before mechanical locks were commonplace or even affordable to residences.

New comment by solfox in "Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions"

solfox — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:26:56 +0000

I get this sometimes when I wake up at night and once or twice when looking in the mirror. A persistent notion that "wow, this is really weird to be in a body, what a weird experience!" It used to be a little scary, but as I've gotten older I've come to like it. I think it's funny that we call this state "dissociation", when, frankly, not one of us knows what the heck any of "this" is anyway. Is it "real"? What if the dissociative state is actually more like a temporary loss of the illusion of life?

New comment by solfox in "Elevated errors on Claude Opus 5"

solfox — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:10:41 +0000

Quality of output of both Fable and Opus seems to have gone down quite a bit over the past week. Many mistakes.

New comment by solfox in "Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall"

solfox — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 04:32:02 +0000

Generally the industry DOES lobby for regulation. In a deregulated industry, there's a rush towards the bottom - which means trust in the industry implodes. They don't want that. I don't believe the current administration is actually in line with the industry as a whole.

New comment by solfox in "ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud"

solfox — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:33:11 +0000

I reckon that if you replace "find" with "make", you might be closer to the truth about what this data will be used for.

New comment by solfox in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

solfox — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:49:44 +0000

Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.

New comment by solfox in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

solfox — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:51:02 +0000

You could call it the El-e-vator!

New comment by solfox in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

solfox — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:27:03 +0000

Love the name!

New comment by solfox in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

solfox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:34:05 +0000

I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.