Hacker News: themythfable

New comment by themythfable in "The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras"

themythfable — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:40:44 +0000

Passed an old guy sitting on the side of the road with a lawn chair today, he was holding a pool skimmer with cardboard attached at the end to block a flock camera. There was a local news story about it [1]. Happy to see it.

[1] https://www.cltampa.com/news/a-77-year-old-republican-man-is...

New comment by themythfable in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

themythfable — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:41:17 +0000

RIP smoke breaks

New comment by themythfable in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

themythfable — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:40:12 +0000

Betteridge law [1]

> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no

Afaik Tim Feriss hasn't done anything notable in the past decade. No surprise that his one best seller is finally dropping off the cliff.

Without some incredible developments in AI, and as long as competition and desire for a better life still exist, I see no future where self-help books go away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

New comment by themythfable in "UK to require ID or face scan before you can make social media accounts"

themythfable — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:10:18 +0000

For all the noise about "EU consumer protections" this certainly seems quite the opposite.

So, to be clear, I have to tiptoe around cookies but eu-users will simultaneously do this so they can share pictures of their ...

New comment by themythfable in "Running local models is good now"

themythfable — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:23:25 +0000

Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average.

Besides those with effectively unlimited budgets for their personal compute, local models are still a long ways off.

Though, that shouldn't be conflated with the value of open-source models, which can be used by cloud providers to significantly reduce cost of intelligence.

New comment by themythfable in "I Fired Google"

themythfable — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:00:43 +0000

Same thing with Google homes.

Pre-gemini, you knew what you would get, basically the structured snippets that would appear at the top of the search results.

Now it's much more verbose.

My biggest gripe is that it basically stopped listening to me, since "upgrading" to Gemini, which is frustrating because I've used it to control the Hue lights for the past decade.

It listens to my partner though, so after it fails to listen to me, I have to ask her to ask Google to adjust the fing lights.

Welp