Readit News logoReadit News
beachy commented on Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/jwilk
mschuster91 · 2 days ago
> Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.

At least a bunch of lawyers already got hit when their court filings cited hallucinated cases. If this trend continues, I'll not be surprised when some end up disbarred.

beachy · 2 days ago
This seems self-correcting. Every lawyer, and maybe court, will use AI to review the other party's filings for such things. AI overseeing what is true and what is not - nothing disturbing about that distopian future.
beachy commented on Launch HN: Didit (YC W26) – Stripe for Identity Verification    · Posted by u/rosasalberto
btown · 3 days ago
Great to see innovation in this space!

If I could make one giant request, it's around giving (properly authorized) humans the ability to override the system when needed. When you make a simple API, it's all too common for a company integrating the solution to rely entirely on the identity service's yes-no outcome. But all too commonly, there's no way to override a decision, or bypass the need for identification.

In the travel space, I've seen situations, especially with luxury and celebrity clients, where there's human levels of trust across the board, all parties are agreed at senior levels that they'd like to fulfill with a one-off exception to identity verification... but the technology refuses to let them proceed without going through the full verification flow, and if they're integrated in the simplest way, there's no "escape hatch" on the integration's side.

And similarly, if a person happens to trigger false negatives on video matches (say, due to medical reasons) giving support teams an ability to build exceptions is key. Having a way to tell the system "for this transaction/account ID, when they get to this node in the flow, let them through as if checks proceeded, or treat them as pre-authorized" would set you apart.

(Obviously, for things involving KYC, there's a lot of considerations around permissioning - but for many use cases, you want to empower senior support teams.)

beachy · 3 days ago
This sounds innately wrong. When we think of celebrity clients traveling but skipping any identity checks because their entourage can vouch for them and don't want to hassle them - then who's to say later whether that person did or did not travel to that island or authorize that money transfer?

Instead, this should be handled not by fudging identity verification but by skipping it and maybe tagging the skip event with some verified identities of the people authorizing the skip.

Deleted Comment

beachy commented on FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale   engineering.fb.com/2026/0... · Posted by u/sudhakaran88
sergiotapia · 3 days ago
I agree with you - but the tools they gave out for free still stand no?
beachy · 3 days ago
They stand out as great examples of commoditising your complement.

When your business is pushing ads to people while they watch cat videos, then video processing software is your complement, and you want it to be as cheap as possible.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

beachy commented on The window chrome of our discontent   pxlnv.com/blog/window-chr... · Posted by u/zdw
nycticorax · 3 days ago
The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!
beachy · 3 days ago
For some reason UI taste influencers have outsized influence within companies. IMO it's because they have the ear of execs who react viscerally to eye candy - as we all do - but lack understanding of basic usability principles.

As an exec sitting there frustrated by the slow pace of software development, at least you can always yell at the UI guy and demand changes that your gut tells you "look cool", and you can be an active, though uninformed particpant in sessions with design mockups.

Car UIs are a great case in point. People have been yelling for years at the poor usability of touchscreens in cars as opposed to discrete buttons/controls. Yet the enshittification of car UIs continues unchecked. My ioniq 5 has multiple touch panels and buttons, yet something as simple as directing air flow to the dash vents requires me to prod at a tiny touch area and look at a separate tiny display area well away from the touch control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate instantly by touch alone. My workaround now is to prod the control, wait for 5 seconds to see if I feel air start flowing, and if not, prod the control and wait again.

Peak usability of most computer UIs was back in the 90s when simple (to use) but deep and powerful hierarchical menus were uniformly placed at the top of the page, and right clicking on objects in the UI opened context-sensitive popup hierarchical menus.

For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.

beachy commented on Claude struggles to cope with ChatGPT exodus   forbes.com/sites/barrycol... · Posted by u/perakojotgenije
fluidcruft · 4 days ago
The difference is that Anthropic actually dotted the i's and crossed the t's whereas OpenAI fell for the weaselwords and is now desperately trying to renegotiate.
beachy · 4 days ago
OpenAI didn't fall for anything, they knew exactly what they were signing and went ahead anyway, then started gaslighting people about what they had signed.

For a lot of people (me included) the lack of integrity and the gaslighting is what has soured them on OpenAI, rather than them signing up to build surveillance and weaponry.

To non-US citizens, all AI companies are as dangerous as each other, OpenAI just really botched the optics here.

Deleted Comment

Deleted Comment

beachy commented on GPT-5.4   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/mudkipdev
abustamam · 7 days ago
I agree! I recently migrated from ChatGPT to Claude and it is just superior in every way. It doesn't blather on the at the end ask me for clarification. It's succinct and clarifies vital information before providing a solution.
beachy · 7 days ago
I held off migrating from ChatGPT to Claude Code due to being a laggard that lived in the Eclipse world. I didn't believe what I was told that I wouldn't be writing code any more. Pushed into action by recent PR gaslighting from OpenAI, I jumped to claude code and they were right - I barely venture into the IDE now and certainly don't need an integration.
beachy commented on You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)   newsletter.danielpaleka.c... · Posted by u/fi-le
runarberg · 9 days ago
xkcd did one about graphic calculators

https://xkcd.com/768/

But other that comes to mind are MRI scanners, superconductors, quantum computers.

I think in general this market law is subject to selection bias. The technology which does decrease in price will become commonplace and easy to find, whereas the technology which doesn’t risks becoming obscure and maybe even removed from consumer markets.

EDIT: just to clarify, the point about black swans is that the prediction is always close to 0 probability of the existence of black swans, until we actually observe one, then the probability is suddenly exactly 1. If LLMs are a black swan for this market law, most people will assign a close to 0 probability ... until they don’t.

beachy · 9 days ago
Oops my bad formatting - instead of "high volume/consumer electronics/computer technology" I meant to say "high volume consumer electronics/computer technology" which would have ruled out those examples. But your other point is true, there are always shortages of MRI scanners.

u/beachy

KarmaCake day7731August 5, 2015View Original