I think it is obvious that the author just wants to come out as the great hero bounty hunter he is and in fact did reach the HN front page, so good for them.
If he wanted to solve it he would automatically sue them back for breaching his and his clients' personal data and not make any publicity blog post.
HN is not the rest, it is not the majority. It's for a specific tech-savvy social category. This category does want skepticism and criticism because they tend to be perfectionists. This is not "negative sentiment" anything but very positive "evrika!" sentiment for members of the aforementioned category.
Would one say: nice attempt trying to tell people how they are supposed to feel around here?
It happened to me too, started seeing and dreaming of AI zombies and lemmings everywhere but I got over it pretty fast. This was ~1 year ago. I hope it will turn out just fine for you too.
Well at least the last jokey comment was somewhat amusing. What does this even mean?
No need to be defensive about this. I just want to know what compels some people to automate HN comments with AI. This site doesn't have the same social incentive as Reddit or some other social media hellhole.
Maybe HN should hide the number of votes to get around this.
You decided it was AI (doesn’t look it to me) and are AI-policing. If you think AI comments lower the quality of HN discussions, then I’m just letting you know that accusing people because their grammar doesn’t seem natural to you, is also bad.
I’ve reconsidered and you’re right. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, and I hope my initial doubts didn’t come off as contrarian or argumentative. Maintaining the quality of discussion in this community is very important to me, as I'm sure it is to you.
When i think about it, I would be absolutely terrified by smartphone cameras. Think laptop accessories that cover the webcam - haven't seen any of those for smartphones. Yet we trust a green dot with all our heart nowadays. Back in the day when cameras started showing up on mobile phones there were even versions of popular business feature phones that lacked the camera (Nokia E51 if i recall correctly), probably triggered by requirements of clients with strict information security standards.
It seems we all learned to stop worrying and love the cameras.
when i go into secure zone at factory, they cover our phone camera lens with a piece of sticker. It was quite trouble some because my phone has 5 camera(S21U). The sticker is similar to the warannty sticker you find on electronic device, so if you try to remove they will know.
But the sticker seem generic, so i bet someone can prepare it before hand if they really want.
My wife worked in a facility that didn't allow phone cameras. You had to check it in anytime you went into one of the secure areas or prove you had one of their phones that had the camera disabled if you were important enough to require being contactable. While I'm sure one or more of the thousands of employees managed to leak some valuable info through conversations, pictures would have been worth 1000x as much if not more.
I'd be far more worried about an ability for 3rd parties to record audio at any moment than for them to be able to record video of what's likely my pocket or desk surface at any given moment.
Same concern of many I have with laptops and theoretical webcam recording. Theres far worse things they could be stealthily doing.
You trust the green dot with your heart simply because they wired it in series with the camera. Can’t be bypassed unless you opened the device and bypassed the green light. This is why people with webcam covers on macbooks are fools: they fear and yet they do not care to understand what it is they fear to see if it is actually worth fearing.
The problem is that apparently, often enough that is just not the case.
On laptops, the LED is not powered with the camera, but controlled by it. And on smartphones, if it's a green dot on the display it can obviously be bypassed in different ways given the right vulnerabilities.
Also, aside from that, your condescending attitude is frustrating.
The API calls to turn on the camera, wait for + grab the first frame, and terminate it, are 1) non timing deterministic and 2) always take more than 30ms so that’s a pretty bad “hack”
Even zuck doesn’t understand this. There are shots of him out there with macbooks that have that circuit setup with a piece of tape still. Even if it was a risk, what about the mic there zuck? Stuffed with beeswax already?
Lol it's like calling people taking vaccine is a fool. The indicator light only tell you that you have been compromised, they do not prevent that malware from running at all. And when the light is turned on, the hacker will already have hundreds pictured of you(60 fps is 60 frames per second after all)
There are so many things that would have to go wrong for a third party app to surreptitiously activate your camera and pick up images in the background on iOS, this is tin foil hat level concern.
It’s also hilarious how many people worry about covering up their camera on the laptop not thinking that the microphone can pick up much more information in the surrounding area - again worrying about the wrong thing.
Also see, not using biometric security because in the US, police can’t legally make you give up your password - even though police are not above rubber hose decryption, judges hold people in contempt indefinitely and iPhone and Android phones are laughable insecure after first unlock after rebooting your phone.
>It’s also hilarious how many people worry about covering up their camera on the laptop not thinking that the microphone can pick up much more information in the surrounding area - again worrying about the wrong thing.
Or they worry about the right thing, its just not what you worry about.
You ever see The Accountant? That scene where he goes home and ups the stimulation to 13/10? I live my life in that world. Good luck getting any useful intel from my phone's microphone.
Ive been thinking about that a lot too. Fundamentally it's just a different way of telling the computer what to do and if it seems like telling an llm to make a program is less work than writing it yourself then either your program is extremely trivial or there are dozens of redundant programs in the training set that are nearly identical.
If you're actualy doing real work you have nothing to fear from LLMs because any prompt which is specific enough to create a given computer program is going to be comparable in terms of complexity and effort to having done it yourself.
I don’t think that’s clear at all. In fact the proficiency of LLMs at a wide variety of tasks would seem to indicate that language is a highly efficient encoding of human thought, much moreso than people used to think.
Yea it’s amazing that the parent post literally misunderstands the fundamental realities of LLMs and the compression they reveal in linguistics even if blurry is incredible.
Ubuntu 22.04 user here. Indeed it hangs when out of memory, never had the time to properly address this but i will try to follow the advice provided here in the thread. My servers that run Centos or Debian just do this thing called OOMkill on a ram hungry process, out of the box.
If he wanted to solve it he would automatically sue them back for breaching his and his clients' personal data and not make any publicity blog post.