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San Francisco, CA, USA
Joined October 2007
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Imagine you have been looking at the Earth from space, for millions and millions of years. It always looks the same. All of a sudden it lights up, in a matter of decades. The blink of an eye. Could you have predicted that? Of course not.
Humans love to predict things. People imagined insane urban landscapes when cars started becoming popular (look at the Western US and its unwalkable cities), or a dystopic life in virtual reality when the internet was invented. Look up the word "teledildonics."
Now we live in one of the most unpredictable periods ever. We have a weird new technology, and the predictions are all over the place. It's pointless to predict whether AI is going to replace job X or job Y, whether it will kill us all (it's increasingly looking like it won't), whether jobs will disappear, or whether it will cure cancer. We're just going to have to ride it and see what happens.
When an expert predicts with arrogant certainty that "in 10 years AI will..." just stop reading. Rolling your eyes is optional.
Interesting how the prediction markets were so wrong about the Brazilian election. Large elections are the ideal case for prediction markets, and they have proven to be pretty useless.
Diego Basch retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Hey @Zoom, the public company worth 30B. I have a feature idea for you: how about keeping the user's history on the server so a previous meeting can be found on all devices? You're welcome.
My agents found a RCE in the US Constitution, unnoticed by legislators for 237 years. I'll release the details tomorrow morning.
The other day at the airport I observed gate agents and they seemed to be having fun. So I made myself a gate agent simulator. I just worked a shift. Some of these people are on their way to Lisbon and I'm sure at least one is being waterboarded.
I say the best defense is a good offense. Last company standing wins.
I guess I'll go into hibernation until 2047. Can someone water my plants until then?
AI is the most profound technology I’ve seen, both in its ability to help people and to disrupt their lives. I’m optimistic about the good it can do, but we need to take its risks seriously. b-gat.es/4zLk2T3
This is partly why IPOs are now delayed until VCs have extracted as much value as possible from the growth stage, and good luck retail investors.
Doug Leone on the mistake every VC makes: Selling their winners too early.
“We owned 20% of Nvidia and sold. We were the first investor in Apple and sold. We owned 10% of Google and sold.”
“If we hadn’t sold Google that would be half a trillion dollars.”
“We owned a quarter of Cisco and sold.” ($411 billion market cap)
“We had big ownership in very big companies.”
“The great companies compounded 20+ years after the IPO. If you had a little sniffer that this thing has essentially an unbounded market for many years, you should never sell a share.”
“You can make way more money holding those. If you're compounding a $5 billion gain that can turn into a $50 billion gain.”
Funny how lots of poorer places manage to have free healthcare for kids (and everyone else) without the tech industry. You are the most inefficient administration in the world.
I predict that once Anthropic and OpenAI have gone public, and the Series W investors have cashed out, we're going to see a significant slowdown in model progress, as in iPhone 17 -> 18. We will enter the Gmail era of AI.
I can't wait for this event. I'll be the Simon Cowell of the panel.
El futuro está a la vuelta de la esquina.
Este miércoles 28 suma tu superpoder y empezá a construir la integración de las finanzas con la IA en el Buidathon de Belo Agentic Banking.
Anotate acá: agentic.belo.app/hackaton
Before serving the steaks, we ran a quick smoke test to ensure the grill was functioning as expected and the meat passed basic doneness checks.
Humanity is a superorganism that hates scarcity. We have been fighting it since the dawn of times and we're kicking its ass. But as individuals who evolved, we are very confused when something that used to be scarce is now abundant. Food is the prime example of this, but there are others.
So far, AI has been helping us create an abundance of things that don't matter that much. Entertainment and apps that nobody needs, for one. But even if we manage to defeat scarcity completely, that's not a utopia. We will be like hammers without nails. Either we invent a lot of artificial scarcity, or we modify our nature.
Do you think companies are going to take it sitting down? Let me tell you a story. Apps hate churn, and they will do everything legal (in their jurisdiction) to charge you indefinitely. Case in point: my 82-year old mother had a bunch of odd app store subcriptions. Korean dramas and the like, free first week and then pay. She deleted them, thinking that was it. Little did she know she was still being charged.
"Leave it to me, mother. I'll unleash the agentic power of my AI agent to agentically unsubscribe." The agent: "... and it turns out the maker of this other app is located in Krakistan. They don't have a phone number but I found their office in Krakabad. We could try to get someone to show up in person. However, at this point I think it's easier to just cancel the credit card."
In Soviet Russia, Claude prompts you.
