Readit NewsRileyJames commented on Ask HN: Could Microsoft replace its CEO with ChatGPT? · Posted by u/nothrowaways
To even ask this question shows no understanding of what a CEO of a large corporation does.
1) Investor relations: Yes an AI could answer questions about the financials on the quarterly earnings call. With a lot of careful handling you might maybe even get it to do this in a way that it wouldn’t hallucinate and lead to shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement action. But would it go out for lunch with a bunch of fund managers and convince them to keep their investment when you’ve had a bad quarter? No. Would it take a 3-hour meeting with investment bankers to talk through how to recapitalize or refinance debt? No. If you’re talking a startup CEO is it going to convince a16z, SVF, etc to invest? Nope. If you think it will you’ve never done any of those things. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle- not a process you can automate. For example, how did Adam Neumann convince Steve Cohen to invest in WeWork? (I have this on the authority of a friend who was one of about 10 people there) He showed up late, and drunk for a small dinner at Steve Cohen’s apartment and got everyone there doing tequila shots. This is not something an AI is capable of.
2) Corporate strategy. Yes you can get it to generate meaningless gibberish on powerpoint, so you might think corporate strategy would be covered, but consider just a few of the big calls Satya Nadella has made (off the top of my head) in the last couple of years. 1) betting big on OpenAI 2) Intervening to save Sam Altman’s ass after he was fired 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc? Gonna do that? No it won’t.
3) Managing the top executive team. Is it going to do this? Of course not.
Not saying an AI couldn’t possibly do a much better job than current CEOs in some hypothetical world where CEOs do different things from what they do now, but in our world, there is literally none of the black magic bs that CEOs pull to get corporations to be worth obscene bucks that an AI could do.
> 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc?
I’ve only seen this referred to as a strategic failure. You seem to be declaring otherwise. What’s the upside for Microsoft?
RileyJames commented on uBlock Origin Lite in Apple App Store apps.apple.com/in/app/ubl... · Posted by u/mumber_typhoon
As a side note, I personally HATE apps that opens links in an in-app web view (apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc). I really wish Apple could have a system wide preference where it could force in-app web views to open in the browser.
I couldn’t agree more.
I find gmail to be the absolute worst offender in this category.
1. They dark pattern you into downloading their browser (they give three options, two of which are chrome)
2. In not launching iOS, I’m not logged into the session I may already have open in safari. Which is incredibly painful for any product that sends notifications via email, which id like to action.
And if I do login, and it asks for an email verification code… fail. I can’t access it in gmail without closing the browser…
3. Their in app browser (or the way they re-write links?) doesn’t seem to play nice with opening the corresponding app. Never seems to work.
Incredibly user hostile.
Is there a better alternative mail client I can use with gsuite?
I love this! I prefer digital stuff (less things to worry about), but I miss the physicality, especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.
If you'd like to do something similar, but don't want to DIY it, check out Yoto Player [1]. This is a small music speaker and they sell a bunch of NFC cards to "play" them. You can also buy blank cards and use their app to add whatever you want to them (music, audiobooks, even audio recordings). It's really well made.
There are a bunch of other companies with similar products. Some use miniatures instead of NFC cards. If you search the web for NFC music player, there are a few FOSS apps on github so you can focus on the hardware part and use their software on a raspberry pi.
This is also great for elders.
P.S.: if you fancy a cool project, I'd love to see someone reverse engineering Yoto so it gets the audio from a local server instead. This way we can use their great hardware, but can use any NFC cards.
+1 for a yoto.
It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.
My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.
I bought one the next week without doing any further research.
When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.
I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.
Obviously wrong in hindsight.
Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.
But portable cassette recorders still exist…
RileyJames commented on Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/geox
My local electricity infrastructure provider is a private company, with the twist that all residents within their area are also automatically shareholders.
They operate "for profit", but profits are distributed amongst shareholders in the form of reduced bills, ie last year we didn't get bills for electricity transport for december, and the year before that there were no bills from august through december.
The "for profit" part pays infrastructure upgrades, so some years we pay the normal prices if there is infrastructure work being done, which in the end benefits all shareholders, meaning me (and other users).
Do you live in Auckland?
It sounds similar to the system I encountered there. I don’t remember all the details, I was only renting for a year.
It didn’t sound like it was NZ wide.
RileyJames commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger
I had this problem some years ago. Eventually I just told everyone I would be uninstalling whatsapp on date XX/YY, which I then did. Some people installed signal and stayed in touch, others didn't. Life didn't change much.
Now I'd like to move to my own matrix server but I think appx 0.0% of my social group would follow me down that rabbit hole. :-(
More extreme, a friend of mine one day eliminated his cellphone entirely but kept Skype on his laptop. So now it's email or nothing with him and sadly it's been nothing for some time now.
This message reminded me to email a few people. Thanks.
RileyJames commented on Show HN: AnydocAI – Every file exists as all file types anydocai.com/... · Posted by u/grandslammer
It’s an interesting idea.
I’ve definitely felt the pain of file formats in some unexpected ways recently.
Like airdropping a photo from iPhone only to discover a .HEIC file, which nothing will accept.
I’ve previously used “what ever turns up first on google”, but I now won’t for anything of significance (privacy)
I’ve recently discovered Automator (on Mac) and the quick actions menu. Which can achieve a lot of image and pdf related conversions, but takes some setup (not a mass market solution)
I like the idea of this product. But I think the challenge will be: - reaching the user at the moment they have this problem
- making your solution frictionless to solve their immediate problem, while also bootstrapping to solve it next time around (without them forgetting it exists)
If you can nail that experience for a single use case, I think this will be a winner.
Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record plants for many years, arguably until independent music started pressing in the 2000s) have mixed feelings about records. It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. And they’re cubersome to bring on tour.
But there isn’t another physical medium that sells at all as well as vinyl. Soft apparel always does well. But people want vinyl.
I don’t love the Gen Z framing of this though. Vinyl purchasing at this point is multi generational.
I don’t think it’s some mysterious Gen Z love of physical. I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love. Buying digitally is just isn’t the same for a lot of people (even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists).
And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD? (And I own more cassette players than the zero vinyl players)
I recently found out that some of my favourite vinyls, that I’ve been collecting, ONLY include the art/lyrics booklet in the CD version. These are from the early 2000’s (peak cd?).
I reckon I’d buy an art / lyrics booklet over a physical medium of the music itself. Particularly if it included flac download of the music.