It's not about infantilizarion. It's about delivering a product that consistently offers a high quality user experience to the user.
When that user experience clashes with a sufficiently knowledgeable user, then the user experience is the problem.
Readit NewsLocalH commented on The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme pcgamer.com/software/wind... · Posted by u/naves
LocalH commented on The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme pcgamer.com/software/wind... · Posted by u/naves
If your users are not engaging with your app, you can't deliver user value to them. If you are unable to provide value to their lives because they happened to accidently changed a font that is an unfortunate circumstance where the user is losing out on value they could have had.
It's not that users are helpless, but that they just don't want to spend their time dealing with stuff they don't want to. Users like it when things "just work."
Users who want things to "just work" aren't the entire target audience of software, and it's a huge misstep to act as if they are.
LocalH commented on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora openai.com/index/disney-s... · Posted by u/inesranzo
Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.
We lost that when it was found that losing that was even more profitable.
I think the key thing (which we used to understand but seem to have forgotten) is that restrictions (including censorship) should be based on conduct, not opinion. Someone spamming commercial links, crap flooding, posting child pornography, even constant off-topic posting etc can justifiably be censored on a platform based on their conduct. But as soon as you advocate for censoring someone purely based on an opinion then you're making it dramatically easier for someone who shares your opinion to be censored later on. Although if we're being intellectually honest, even if there hadn't been any banning of wrongthink in the past, this kind of thing might still have happened anyway given the current administration and their allies. But it's definitely made it easier.
I remember when Alex Jones (or someone of that ilk) was being "de-platformed" by Google, Facebook, etc. Not only were people cheering for it, they were denying that being banned from YouTube (for example) was censorship since "there are other video hosting platforms" (yeah, there are but also not really) and "it's only censorship when it's the government who legally restrict you from speech".
(And Alex Jones is a detestable piece of shit just in case you think I'm a fan. But to paraphrase an old saying, freedom of expression is only a principle if it applies to people you utterly despise).
I just got a seven day suspension from Reddit for reminding a commenter that freedom of speech in the US only protects you from "consequences" from the government. Reddit's claim? That I was "encouraging violence". The root post was about that woman who got fired from Cinnabon after a video of her calling customers the n-word went viral and then the alt-right donated nearly $100,000 to her.
The ban message also claimed the suspension was done without automation.
LocalH commented on Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA alpranalysis.com... · Posted by u/sodality2
A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to mention texting while driving!
I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.
Is a driver impaired if they are using their phone to stream music (or screen-off Youtube listening) to their car while driving?
LocalH commented on How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants laurenleek.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/justincormack
Google's Maps search ranking doesn't seem sophisticated to me. In fact it seems unbelievably naive. Ranking is Google's core business and yet they seem to forget how to do it when a map is involved.
When I want to find something that's actually good, I use this site: https://top-rated.online. At first glance it looks like an unremarkable SEO spam site, but it's actually a great way to get properly ranked Google Maps reviews. It uses proper Bayesian ranking, so it won't show you a 5 star place with two reviews over a 4.9 star place with 2,000 reviews, as Google often will. And it has good sorting and filtering options so you can, for example, filter or sort by number of reviews.
No, advertising is Google's core business.
LocalH commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin
Here it is: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/news.html
I downloaded the original article page, had claude extract the submission info to json, then wrote a script (by hand ;) to run feed each submission title to gemini-3-pro and ask it for an article webpage and then for a random number of comments.
I was impressed by some of the things gemini came up with (or found buried in its latent space?). Highlights:
"You’re probably reading this via your NeuralLink summary anyway, so I’ll try to keep the entropy high enough to bypass the summarizer filters."
"This submission has been flagged by the Auto-Reviewer v7.0 due to high similarity with "Running DOOM on a Mitochondria" (2034)."
"Zig v1.0 still hasn't released (ETA 2036)"
The unprompted one-shot leetcode, youtube, and github clones
Nature: "Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status" / "Buy Article PDF - $89.00 USD" / "Log in with WorldCoin ID"
"Gemini Cloud Services (formerly Bard Enterprise, formerly Duet AI, formerly Google Brain Cloud, formerly Project Magfi)"
Github Copilot attempts social engineering to pwn the `sudo` repo
It made a Win10 "emulator" that goes only as far as displaying a "Windows Defender is out of date" alert message
"dang_autonomous_agent: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675309 because it was devolving into a flame war about the definition of 'deprecation'."
Favorite thing I've come across so far:
prompt_engineer_ret 10 hours ago
I miss the old days of Prompt Engineering. It felt like casting spells. Now you just think what you want via Neural-Lace and the machine does it. Where is the art?
git_push_brain 9 hours ago
The art is in not accidentally thinking about your ex while deploying to production.
LocalH commented on Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark gerbenlaw.com/blog/former... · Posted by u/edent
Or all the people who still call it Twitter as an ineffectual act of protest.
Not a trademark lawyer, but I wonder if that can actually result in implications of genericization.
LocalH commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines? · Posted by u/embedding-shape
Absolutely, in cases where it's clear that the person asked a chatbot and copypasted the direct LLM response without editing. I usually downvote those (if it's within the window to do so), and flag them.
LocalH commented on Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us... · Posted by u/thelastgallon