Hacker News: zephyreon

New comment by zephyreon in "I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets"

zephyreon — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:48:00 +0000

Yeah not a good look. This is probably the worst way to handle community feedback.

New comment by zephyreon in "Any window from your Mac, on your iPhone and iPad"

zephyreon — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 07:26:21 +0000

That CLAUDE.md file is eating up a ton of context.

New comment by zephyreon in "Ask HN: Are you a subscribed LLM or a locally deployed open-source model?"

zephyreon — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:19:37 +0000

Subscribed, swe, for dev. I could probably optimize local models and a custom harness to get much of the same outputs locally but it’s easier to throw something at Opus 5.5 & one shot it.

New comment by zephyreon in "America.gov"

zephyreon — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:01:19 +0000

The privacy policy is actually somewhat respectable too. https://america.gov/privacy-policy

I’m currently doing a deep dive on Rampart, their (allegedly) local PII filter.

New comment by zephyreon in "LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'"

zephyreon — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:01:33 +0000

> Features such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional. These features are not enabled by default. Users can choose to enable these features and can manage or withdraw consent through TV settings.

They may be optional features but I’m pretty sure when I set up my tv and got to the screen where you are required to agree to the various terms and privacy legalese the “happy path” was to hit the “accept all” button vs use the remote to navigate into each one, read, and only activate the few required to use the tv. I would not call this dark pattern “optional” by default.

New comment by zephyreon in "I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch"

zephyreon — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 03:55:44 +0000

Sorry but Paul is just so out of touch with reality. I’m tired of seeing everyone on HN evangelize this man. He is very intelligent and has done some really great things but times have changed and we need to let the next generation think for themselves. They are increasingly anti-AI. Maybe that pans out, maybe it doesn’t. If I were 17, I’d pursue my dreams — whatever those may be — and learn how to connect meaningfully with my peers. Perhaps that’s naive of me or perhaps that’s what humanity needs most right now. I’d rather let the 17 year old version of me make that choice for themselves.

I’m sure I’ll get torn to pieces for this but it’s frustrating to continually witness people treat a single person’s prose as the Word of God.

New comment by zephyreon in "Midjourney Medical"

zephyreon — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:40:26 +0000

> But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them.

I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.

New comment by zephyreon in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

zephyreon — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:32:09 +0000

Aside from the obvious fact that this is AI slop, the author (prompter?) doesn’t consider the R&D of AI itself. Efficiency gains, more compute, etc.

We all know every frontier AI lab is heavily subsidizing usage, and so do all of the VCs & CEOs funding them.

New comment by zephyreon in "Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

zephyreon — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:22:51 +0000

You’d think this is how it works but universities and schools will still end up holding the bag at the end of the day, irrespective of who is responsible.

New comment by zephyreon in "Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine"

zephyreon — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:28:26 +0000

I’d like to see more investment in their new profile manager. It feels pretty barebones at the moment. Arc had the ability to link profiles to “spaces” and you could easily switch between them without opening a new window. It was very nice to so easily swap between personal, work, & side business.

New comment by zephyreon in "Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine"

zephyreon — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:13:54 +0000

Could definitely be writing on the wall that MV2 support will be deprecated in the future but imo not necessarily a bad thing if it’s not actively developed anyways. Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

That said, if this is writing on the wall I’d hope they’ll listen to the community this time and allow the engine to be extended / make it such that a block all ads feature always exists. I’m cautiously optimistic given Mozilla’s track record just over the past year-ish. They have released some great new features that help bring Firefox closer to feature parity with other browsers.

I am a Firefox hopeful and recently switched back to using it as my daily driver when Arc went belly up (but mainly for uBlock Origin support).

New comment by zephyreon in "CSS as a Query Language"

zephyreon — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 23:09:30 +0000

This is neat, but no. /s

New comment by zephyreon in "2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email"

zephyreon — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:40:57 +0000

Posts like these always give me a moment of pause to reflect just how expansive the global internet is.

New comment by zephyreon in "I gave every train in New York an instrument"

zephyreon — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:59:53 +0000

Very neat. This is an example of digital art that I’d love to see exist in physical form somehow. I suppose it could get rather noisy at a museum but I love the intersection of mass transit & music.

New comment by zephyreon in "Show HN: Travel Hacking Toolkit – Points search and trip planning with AI"

zephyreon — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:46:21 +0000

Just sent this to my partner. He’s super into travel hacking and this will be a nice add to his toolkit.

New comment by zephyreon in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

zephyreon — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:04:43 +0000

This is the classic car wash subscription scheme. You sign up a bunch of people for $40 a month to wash their car. Most people only go to wash their car once or twice a month (or even less), which offsets those few folks that do it three times a week or more.

The problem Anthropic is running into is that OpenClaw made it easy for everyone to become one of those folks that washes their car three times a week or more.

I’m sure they were losing money on subscriptions in general but now they are really losing money. Shutting off OpenClaw specifically probably helps stem some of the bleeding.

New comment by zephyreon in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

zephyreon — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:36:01 +0000

Yah well I'll be downgrading my subscription to the $20/month plan for the light chats I have with AI outside of using custom harnesses and will figure out a better provider for the agentic tooling.

New comment by zephyreon in "Show HN: Public transit systems as data – lines, stations, railcars, and history"

zephyreon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:38:12 +0000

So interesting that Baltimore’s very subpar public transit system made it into the first batch of systems — not complaining at all I love that city & love to see it in random places on the internet :)

New comment by zephyreon in "GM requires you to submit their opt-out form multiple times with name variations"

zephyreon — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:24:26 +0000

An interesting hearing it from that perspective. I had not considered that this could be used across all of the systems they have in place.

To add to this, I did a quick search on archive.org and it seems like they’ve had this site in place since 2006, albeit in different variations. Perhaps that is why they have a “global” opt-out across all of their marketing databases? Something that has just always been in place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061103202329/https://gmcontact...

New comment by zephyreon in "GM requires you to submit their opt-out form multiple times with name variations"

zephyreon — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:15:05 +0000

On my weekly unsubscribe binge I recently tried to opt out of General Motors marketing communications.

They have a form that requires you enter your full name, address, phone number, and email just to process an unsubscribe.

In addition, they indicate that you may need to enter the form multiple times with different variations of your name in order to be successful.

If by some miracle you succeed at opting out of marketing communications, your opt out is only honored for 10 years and does not include OnStar or GM Financial.

I have seen terrible opt-out practices before but this is probably one of the more egregious ones I’ve encountered.

I’d also be curious to hear if people think the patchwork of data privacy laws that have been going into effect across the U.S. might affect processes like this or if just having the process is enough. I know it is probably somewhat subjective.