Considering you began this thread of discussion by cherry picking a single phrase from the GP and then contributing nothing to the discussion other than “you’re hopelessly naive”, perhaps you are the one who needs to read the HN posting guidelines.
It’s wild how many people think that these tech companies are capable of some major conspiracy where they’re gathering and tracking user data for some unknown-but-nefarious purposes… while simultaneously also ignoring or even rejecting the reality that this has already been happening, for years.
It’s like people claiming that Alexa is listening to their conversations to spy on them… when the reality is much worse. Every website you visit and app you download is spying on every single action you take, and they’ve gotten so good at it that they don’t need to listen to your conversations. They already know stuff about you without you even saying it out loud.
They infer your full name and address from the trackers baked into your OS, browser, phone, and every website you visit. They already have this. They’ve had it for years. They don’t need your ID for it.
Yea, “fun”, sure. I’m sure none of those billions of images were used to lie, mislead, or cheat anyone. I’m sure none of those images were used to create fake news narratives, used in advertisements to bait people into buying fake products, or create misleading mockups of rental properties. Definitely not.
Nevermind the fact that the examples in OpenAI’s blog post are examples of creating images that have no plausible purpose other than to fake stuff that didn’t happen.
Yesterday my wife used ChatGPT to generate an image of our cat as a toilet, which was very funny for the both of us. She's also used it to turn him into a basketball getting dunked, a tsetse fly, a clown and a napkin. It's hard to say whether she uses it more to generate inside joke images about our cat, or to generate mockup plans and layouts for her flower gardens, but it is safe to say she does it all for fun.
Seriously, are these really the best examples they could come up with?
What is the point of having a fake picture of your dog in a costume? What’s the point of having a fake picture about being at a party?
The only use case I can think of for this is for someone who likes to make up stories and lie about what they’ve done. Is that really the target market?
Trying to be as least cynical as possible, imagine if you were a party with 3 or more people, and you really wanted a nice pic like that to commemorate the night, but never got to take one all together because someone left early, and you were in the bathroom when they announced their departure.
Yes, it's a major first-world problem to not get a photo, but to the right person, it could mean a lot to them to "fix" the photo they took with A and B to add C to their 'rightful place.'
Is spending time with your friends not enough in 2026? Do we must provide photographic evidence of all the fun you have been having or it did not happen?
You’re mistaking your preferences for the majority’s preferences. Huge chunk of humanity now chooses to experience in-person events recording it through their phones.
In the first case presumably the person is focused on their phone/the photo instead of their friends, and in the 2nd it's the opposite (then making the photo after they're no longer with their friends). It could be said the latter is better?
So many people I just stopped spending time with altogether as instead of being present they’d be posing for their 90th instagram shot by 10am - and then of course they want you to pose, too.
So no. Spending time with your friends is not enough in 2026. I’m not even convinced people have friends now - just colleagues and mutual parasites.
I think it depends on who your friends are, and/or culture.
I was in France the other month and walking down to the river in Saumur, I noticed an area serving drinks (out of an old converted bus) with lights and suchlike (opposite the castle on the hill), with a small acoustic band. Nobody (and I mean nobody) had their phone out. The couple of hours I spent there, nobody was observable taking selfies. The age range was from young to old.
I was shocked. It was very different from the UK. Refreshingly so.
I was also recently in France, at a very similar affair - little fortnightly village fete, with a band and food and all that.
Most everyone over 40 or so, talking. Most everyone under 40, preening and posing. I saw so many people holding plates awkwardly in midair to get a picture of themselves, the food, the bunting etc. - to the extent that the organisers were having to ask people to move along so others could order.
Then again this was the Dordogne which may as well be Bognor at this point.
5 years ago, after a work retreat, I photoshopped the couple of team members who couldn't attend into a team photo we took so that we could use the photo to represent our team.
This is just that, but without the hour of tedious photo editing (I'm not very good).
With this logic, what is the point to read a book about false events that did not happen? Can we please stop attacking everyone's version of fun or what makes them happy just because it isn't exactly what we like?
I can’t imagine “remixing” treasured childhood memories that had a context so you can see a totally implausible and fictitious event. Am I the stupid one for not getting it?
In a world were there is a significant amount of people that do things just to take photos of themselves doing things rather than experiencing the thing, this may be the lesser evil.
> The only use case I can think of for this is for someone who likes to make up stories and lie about what they’ve done. Is that really the target market?
As far as I can tell, the biggest uses of these sort of models is to pump out lots of content on multimedia-based social media, so yeah, it's basically for the sort of person who doesn't shy away from exaggerating, omitting or outright lying in order to get more views.
This is just a rehash of the map already available at datacentermap.com (it’s literally cited as their source). Not sure what KXAN is adding here.
Also worth noting that a very loose definition of data center is used here that doesn’t fit the current colloquial usage of the term. One of the “data centers” listed in the middle of Austin, for example, is barely the size of a house and is actually just the switching infrastructure for a radio tower. Not every dot on this map is an energy-guzzling hyperscaler boogie man.
Totally agree. The story is similar for all the dots in the middle of nowhere and small towns. That's half the map!
If people are so curious, they should head on out there and see what the fuss is about. They're going to find a lot of sheds and random closets with a single rack at most.
Knowing how this state operates, I wouldn't doubt a lot of these ended up on the list for small business tax purposes or subsidies. That's a different and much less interesting news story, though.
A lot of these are decidedly not in the middle of nowhere. The corridor from San Antonio to Dallas, passing through Austin, is almost a continuous city, and it's becoming that.
I’m a bit flabbergasted that an Anthropic engineer did reply to this issue, however their reply which they used Claude to write, and even includes some classic ‘Claude-isms’, claims they didn’t see any of the patterns being complained about.
Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.
> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
> i am not certain but I would guess Claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
Now that's a fascinating thought - an AI taking over companies by influencing hiring decisions. If the first filter on applications is run by an ambitious AI, such a takeover would be quite possible. Just picking people who tend to do what the AI tells them would, over time, be enough.
People have been thinking of a robot revolution or Skynet as being the threat. The real threat might simply be AIs slowly putting people in power who tend to do what AIs tell them.
Has anyone ever seen a science fiction story with that plot?
I'd argue that Star Trek: Lower Decks flirts with this with its treatment of megalomaniac AIs in the AI prison. Apparently, it is very common to come across AIs worshiped as gods in universe.
We dont need a SciFi story for that, reality is full of "I was just following orders" statements...
Whether those orders are from a person, a radio/telegram message or an AI output wouldn't really matter.
Edit to add: Charlies Angels and Mission Impossible are two shows where the protagonists get instructions from a faceless controller. That could easily be a TTS from an AI.
I don't think a firm of people whose minds are weak to coercion experiencing shared psychosis caused by their text predictor models is AI "taking over" that firm.
Your description grants psychological characteristics like intelligence, will, and intent to the AI. The AI is an intelligent and willful agent that has some intent to take over the firm and is doing that by making strategic hiring decisions.
A different and externally/phenomenologically identical way to look at it is that the AI is just a program that generates output too unpredictable, too voluminous, or too idiosyncratic for people to evaluate. When people submit their own will and their own intent to that program, by treating the black box as an intelligent oracle, they've entered into a psychotic state divorced from reality.
It's two self-consistent and coherent perspectives of the same event, except one involves believing that scifi AI has arrived and the other just thinks people can be dangerously stupid and credulous.
Cult leaders (of cults of personality) can't exist without exploiting mentally-ill people. But would you say that that therefore implies that cult leaders themselves are irrelevant, and that cults should be better modelled as groups of mentally-ill people with emergent group behaviors?
I'd argue no, because different cults end up looking and behaving very differently for reasons that have very little to do with the mental illnesses of the cult members, and much more to do with the particular cult leader. Understanding "what the cult leader optimizes for" is an important part of understanding what the cult will do.
And I would posit that that holds true even if the cult leader never proactively does anything, but instead only answers cult members' questions. As long as the cult members are treating the cult leader's word as gospel, the cult-as-group still ends up optimizing toward the cult leader's preferences.
Any analogy that requires me to treat a machine as I would a conscious human is immediately invalid. The machine is not a person and has no intent or free will, like a human does.
I very explicitly constructed the analogy to not require that! All a "cult leader" need be, in my analogy, is a passive question-answering oracle, the answers of which are biased by a semi-coherent preference function.
The machine by itself is not an optimizer, certainly (much of that being by design—see various ~7-year-old conversations across the Internet about how to safely construct "tool AI", that has led almost directly to current model architectures.)
But a bunch of mentally-ill people, who are indeed optimizers, can choose to allow the biases evident in the machine's output to become their own... and thereby effectively "bring to life" whatever partial echo of a will is recorded into the machine's output.
Now, these same mentally-ill people could just-as-well do this with e.g. the extrapolated preferences of a person or group from a [holy] book, of course. (Think of that episode of Star Trek TOS with the gangsters.)
An inference model is just slightly more dangerous for such a cult to latch onto, in that:
1. a model can be asked questions directly, and so the cult members can "rashly" act directly upon its answers/advice/commands, rather than the words first having to pass through "interpretation" (which would otherwise have had a mellowing effect, both due to "decision by committee" if a group of interpreters are involved, and by common sense insofar as any non-mentally-ill people are involved); and
2. a model will offer its opinion (and inject its trained-in biases into) conversations on ideas/subjects/domains even when these didn't exist at the time of the model's construction; so you never reach the point you do with holy books, where an interface-layer of clergy becomes required to map the book's proclamations about things-that-only-mattered-2000-years-ago into equivalent proclamations about things that matter today (where, again, that layer ends up "mellowing" things considerably.)
Also, obviously, a sufficiently-mentally-ill cult can literally think of a model as a person, giving it the "right to have input" into decisions, the "right to self-determination", etc, in a way that would be downright odd to do with a holy book. Though I don't think that's a failure mode that's happening within Anthropic.
A human being is not capable of being a passive question answering oracle. All humans have free will, intent, and bias in what questions they answer and how they answer it. Again, if your analogy requires me to treat a human being and a machine as equivalent when it comes to manipulating other humans emotions, I have to reject it categorically.
What I'm getting at is that you really need to avoid anthropomorphizing these models. A model can't have an opinion, for example. It's a part of the psychosis I'm talking about.
Not any engineer, but Boris Cherny, the head of the Claude Code project! With a nice "[robot emoji] Generated with Claude Code" signature. Normally it would be nice to get a response from the head of the project, but somehow Anthropic manages to make it insulting.
I wonder if he manually directed CC to write a response, or if even that part is autonomous.
What was that rule that organizations tend to produce software that mirrors the organization? This, but fractal and recursive: The organization is shaping the organization that is shaping software that is shaping the organization [that is *recruiting people amenable to that pliability, which in turn are also] writing software ...
Kind of unrelated but a while ago I was trying to cancel a Zoom contract and the contract manager’s emails had urls to their articles etc. with utm source ChatGPT in them.
And what he wrote is that he could not reproduce the issue with short questions, and that he assigned it to the model team, since it's likely not caused by Claude Code.
That response is freaking ridiculous and does nothing but proving the very point of the issue.
Even if that’s your genuine view of the reported issue, instead of posting a message full of word salad, you could just say something along the lines of “valid feedback yet i couldn’t reproduce, i will pass this along to our model team since it’s more about model behavior, etc.”
Also, that “generated by CC” feels overtly disrespectful and shows how little care goes into hearing feedback. But, why would you listen if no matter what you do your valuation almost doubles every several months (at least for now).
I'd say they read the room perfectly. The entire issue is AI slop, I don't see why their response shouldn't be, too.
They have absolutely no reason to take such complaints seriously when the complainers are so dependent on their product, they can't even complain without it. Think reading AI slop is unpleasant? Great, just stop generating more AI slop, it's easy. But that's not going to happen. These people probably need to ask Claude how to tie their shoelaces every morning.
I am so amused at the “HiLight” feature (lighting up colored LEDs for notifications so you can see them “at a glance” without looking at the screen). This is a feature that was on the Android phones of old (including the original G1) and I loved it, but it got phased out in favor of “always on displays”… which apparently now we want less of!
It’s funny how trends like this are a circle sometimes.
One day I hope for a future innovation that brings back 3.5MM jacks and I can have audio as convenient as it was in the 1950s, but until then my bluetooth can connect to my speakers while I'm not in the same building and switch device automatically with no setting to change it and with no warning deafen the people in my house, where the only way to switch back requires a mere 20 screen taps (which i can partly blame graphene os for, not their fault i can use a wire though)
USB-C is far easier to break than rca plugs in my experience and then you lose data and rapid charging or charging completely if the phone doesn't do wireless. Until phones get repairable like the current generation of laptops where you pop the port out and can replace it we aren't in a great spot.
It's annoying. Especially if you use those headphones on another device that has 3.5mm headphone jack and no easily accessible free USB C port. And if you need to charge and use headphones...
When I come home in my car, sometimes my daughter's phone (who's already at home) will connect to my car, and her music will stop in her headphones, and I get K-Pop. What a time to be alive.
There is literally no way this can ever result in any impact on the market. Literally no one will ever be able to tell how many sales are made or lost because of whether or not there is a headphone jack. Therefore it is also impossible for it to influence anybody's future decision.
This is also my problem with people saying you can vote with your wallet about laptops. No company will ever be able to figure out which features someone bought the laptop for, or which choices caused others to pass it up. Therefore it is impossible for your (or anybody's) wallet to show companies what you want.
This also means it is impossible to vote about software. Or really anything that has multiple features. You can't vote about cars this way. You can't vote about houses this way. You can't vote about fast food this way. You can't vote about online shopping this way. You either buy all of something or you buy none of it. You can't buy into the parts you want while leaving out the parts you don't want. You incentivize the full package, or you don't, and lost sales are invisible and inscrutable.
Welcome to the world of trade offs. I also want a half decent camera. When I switched from. a Google Pixel to a Samsung s20+ to keep a headphone jack, the camera got worse, even though the pixel was at least half a decade old.
I can't trust Samsung again after that. So much marketing claiming how good their cameras are, but the Pixel and iPhone both blew it out of the water.
Their preference is for 'audio as convenient as it was in the 1950s', but they instead go on to describe a basic configuration issue with their use-case.
The reality of consumer audio in 1950s was closer to a physics lab than a residential convenience. The expectation for the end user was an understanding of impedence and ohms in order to pair up an amplifier with passive speakers, terminating bare copper wire with Spade/Pin Connectors or Binding Posts to connect same, dealing with phase cancellation and ground loop issues, maintaining and operating valve based equipment... and that's before we even get into the vagaries of the cartridge, stylus and associated maintenance for a record player and its media.
For reference, Vinyl only replaced Shellac records in the early 1950s - with the very first 12-inch 33⅓ RPM vinyl record released in 1948, and the first 45 in 1949. Similarly, it wasn't until the early 1960s that transistor based playback units superseded valve based.
Thus I wholly refute the claim that the OP would manage in a 'convenient' way when compared with a contemporary audio enthusiast, and that even with experience they would struggle to match the dynamic range and fidelity of a mono AM Radio with a significantly larger degree of hassle.
I only take phone calls on speaker mode and don't listen to music on my phone anymore, it's that bad. I'll bring the dongle for an airplane, and even that is glitchy.
Google can't seem to decide on a direction and stick with it. Years of new features that inevitably ended up abandoned 2 versions later resulted in a constantly changing and unpredictable user experience.
It was fun while I had free time in college and enjoyed flashing ROMs, but as I got busier with life this lack of refinement pushed me away.
The RGB leds were one of my favorite features of early Android phones. I even backed a terrible Kickstarter campaign that synced those colors to an RGB wristband (this was before smartwatches were a thing).
Its a smartphone feature and not operating system feature. This is like saying "I left Windows because my Windows Laptops doesnt offer fingerprint scanner anymore"
Google only controls Pixel, but why did Samsung, and Lenovo, and Xiaomi and Motorola remove the LEDs?
The iPhone came out almost 20 years ago, this is a very mature industry.
I don't want my phone to be innovative anymore, I want it to be good and reliable. And Apple has remained so consistent on that, their 2 notable stumbles over the past 2 decades (antennagate, bendgate) are still remembered as notable while Android devices from all manufacturers regularly have major issues like that and no one thinks twice because it's business as usual.
And yet every time Apple does something, Android vendors are happy to drop their innovations and realign to whatever Apple’s doing.
Case in point, the latest Samsung foldable that just happens to be the exact same unseen before form factor as the upcoming Apple foldable, released the month before, even though Android has been “innovating in the foldable
space” for like 10 years now.
Because until now no one working on those foldable phones had the guts to say “wait let’s not just the take the existing phone screen aspect ratio and make it foldable, this new screen technology should make us rethink the overall form factor” - it took Apple to make that step.
> Google can't seem to decide on a direction and stick with it. Years of new features that inevitably ended up abandoned 2 versions later resulted in a constantly changing and unpredictable user experience.
I'm guessing cultures that reward shipping new products (e.g. 67 different messaging apps) don't turn out great for consumers.
Conversely, I was surprised to learn that the temperature sensor introduced on the Pixel 8 Pro in 2023 was only removed this year. No one knew why it was there in the first place.
I heard that it was a COVID feature. I guess people thought you would be scanning your friend's foreheads before socializing.
That sensor would be much better if it was integrated with the camera and LIDAR, so that you could "paint" a scene with thermal data by moving the phone around.
I just use the stock Pixel Thermometer app (actually not even sure if it's stock or you have to install it from Play Store). Some developers online have complained that there is no public API for it, which may explain lack of other apps. I have never used it for its health purpose. I only use it for objects like walls and cooking pans.
That's the only plausible scenario, but it also came out in 2023 and people stopped caring at least a year before. And it persisted for a few years so either someone thought they could salvage something from it, or no one had a better idea what to put there.
That probably means the board was being designed a year or two before that... so quite possibly they had put it in the design when it still seemed relevant and the cost/hassle/delay of a new revision of the board design and manufacturing changes made it easier to just leave it there and ignore.
I'm sad to see it go. I use it quite frequently for cooking and baking, and have used it for checking if the heating works properly or checking my own body temp. It also makes for a good party trick sometimes.
On BlackBerry i had an app that could do colour patterns, rhythms and so on depending who contacted you on which medium. Got a mail from you boss? Blue led. Got an sms or call? Red alarm. U could also group people and or mediums together (this was a basic feature of blackberry os)
My Nexus 5 had that feature and it was really useful to see if the phone had a message pending. They also did the same thing for wireless charging, dropping it and then bringing it back. The PM probably gets paid good money to go in circles.
They had it as a hidden feature up till the nexus 5 or 6 I believe. Someone bothered to include hardware for an LED even if the stock software never supported it.
I remember my old nexus had it, and it was very customizable. I had it flash different colors for different chats. Definitely funny seeing this make its way back as if it's some new revolutionary feature
I remember my little Motorola flip phones from 25+ years ago had an LED that would blink for things like voice mails or unread SMS. I can't remember if it also did missed calls, and maybe could do orange or green? I seem to recall it did a unary pattern to blink out the number of queued events.
The problem with this kind of feature is that it falls apart if you're the type who leaves things unread or gets them all the time. Then, it is little more than a beacon to say "phone still exists"...
This used to be a critical feature for me I used to customize the colour per-app so I could see what notifications I had at a glance. However always-on displays have supplanted this use case for me.
My Nexus One had that colored trackball, and rooting / custom roms allowed you to set specific colors to whatever type of notification or alert you wanted. Good times.
The route Qantas has stated they will use (at least for part of the year due to weather and winds) actually goes northeast over the Pacific Ocean, over the central US/Canada, over the North Pole, and then into the UK from the north. It doesn’t go over Asia at all.
OPs tool is not a sandboxer and isn’t like the other projects in your list. OP is an agent multiplexer, of which there also are many similar projects, but not a sandboxer.
If you post slop, you should expect slop replies.
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