rightbyte (u/rightbyte)

rightbyte commented on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams kirkville.com/i-now-assum... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

matheusmoreira · 4 days ago

I wouldn't say it's entirely hopeless. Just gotta know who's behind the posts. Checking for conflicts of interest is essential. HN is valuable due the fact many notable hackers post here. Makes it easier to know who we are interacting with, what they stand for and who they work for. Invite only communities like lobsters are even better in that regard. Less random accounts adding noise. Some degree of elitism is a good thing.

rightbyte · 4 days ago

Yeah I agree. The point I was trying to make is that you can't judge like the share of some actual collective agreeing to something from reading post on forums.

rightbyte commented on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams kirkville.com/i-now-assum... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

threetonesun · 4 days ago

Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.

rightbyte · 4 days ago

You could read obvious shilling here pretending to like or pay and use the boringest B2B SaaS products way back too.

Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.

rightbyte commented on Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft... · Posted by u/fortran77

jamesnorden · 5 days ago

Is sacrificing everything for short term gains really the right move in any situation?

rightbyte · 4 days ago

Dunno, hard question, but I think the payoff to executives is tied to stock performance in such a way that messes with the equation a lot.

What is on stake in the long term? Their legacy? Both in term of feel-good and getting the next job if they are not in the end of their career.

rightbyte commented on Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority" techoversight.org/2026/01... · Posted by u/Shamar

ares623 · 5 days ago

Problem is that social media doesn’t have negative connotations like guns/alcohol/drugs do. That makes it hard or impossible for individual parents to restrict it. They are perceived as crazy or paranoid or controlling. Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.

It almost sounds like multiple parents from a large number of households need to collectively act in unison to address the problem effectively. Hmm collective action, that sounds familiar. I wonder if there’s a way to enforce such a collective action?

To be clear, I do agree that putting the ban on the software/platform side is the wrong approach. The ban should be on the physical hardware, similar to how guns/alcohol/tobacco which are all physical objects. But I don’t have the luxury to let perfect be the enemy of close enough.

rightbyte · 5 days ago

> Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.

I don't think that is the case any more since social media isn't social like it used to be?

rightbyte commented on Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority" techoversight.org/2026/01... · Posted by u/Shamar

uniq7 · 5 days ago

More like saying parents are at fault when a gun salesman enters their home every day, talks for hours with their children, and sells them weapons.

Have these parents tried to not let the salesman in?

rightbyte · 5 days ago

The salesman is at their friends place. And is a prerequisite for soccer team meetups. Etc. You need most parents to cooperate to bar him... but yeah I guess being prudent at home helps.

rightbyte commented on Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft... · Posted by u/fortran77

anthonypasq · 5 days ago

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

rightbyte · 5 days ago

The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.

rightbyte commented on French streamer unbanked by Qonto after criticizing Palantir and Peter Thiel twitter.com/Ced_haurus/st... · Posted by u/hocuspocus

overfeed · 6 days ago

> For one, Gawker has orders of magnitude more visibility than this guy.

Which suggests Thiel doesn't care about the Streisand effect.

rightbyte · 5 days ago

Oh he does. But he uses the Streisand effect to his benefit to sell his product. Maybe you could argue it is not the Streisand effect if you want exposure by quenching stuff, though?

rightbyte commented on Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors notepad-plus-plus.org/new... · Posted by u/mysterydip

chvid · 8 days ago

“ The incident began from June 2025. Multiple independaent security researchers have assessed that the threat acotor is likely a Chinese state-sponsored group, which would explain the highly selective targeting obseved during the campaign.”

How do they know it was a Chinese group or even a state sponsored one?

rightbyte · 8 days ago

When you want to spread jingoist paranoia you can just make stuff up and claim any critique is from said actors.

rightbyte commented on Tesla ending Models S and X production cnbc.com/2026/01/28/tesla... · Posted by u/keyboardJones

Symbiote · 12 days ago

When I was a child visiting my grandma in a large city in England, we would often take the bus to the supermarket, but use a taxi to come back with the shopping. In the 1990s some local taxi company even had a special phone by the supermarket entrance with a single button to dial to request one.

I think my grandma could easily afford this, but there would have been others considering dragging the shopping onto the bus.

rightbyte · 12 days ago

Just a guess but she probably would have taken the buss back if you weren't there? Like, she wouldn't want to bore you waiting for the buss or try to time it shopping with a kid.