AI worker at Team Green, Ex-@BrexHQ. Tweets dalam Bahasa Indonesia and in English. Opinions are personal.
Bay Area
Joined June 2009
- Tweets17.9K
- Following478
- Followers479
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Jensen mentioned about AI factory many times.
I didn't get what it is about until today.
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"Indonesian fraud ring"
😞
Vulnerable post: I spend 90% of my time on @chatprd dealing with increasingly creative international token fraud operations, and it makes me want to shut down the company. Mostly to steal Opus tokens on resold promo codes or in the time between a trial start + our fraud alerts infra.
It's cost me tens of thousands of dollars and it gets worse every day. Luckily the company is nice and profitable, but every time it happens it bums me out in extreme ways.
I love ChatPRD, I think at this point we've helped PM, engineers, and founders with millions of products + features. We are still a top 3 writing GPT (completely free!) on ChatGPT, we've kept generous trial periods, and have kept annual sub costs super reasonable, even for the enterprise. We've let people use the latest models when they come out, and have built in new features like prototyping without adding to our fees. We haven't had to limit usage, because our customers have been so great.
Building the product is incredibly fun, it's an actual footprint by which I get to test all this AI stuff, as an engineer, founder, and product builder. I have my little grok bot army that runs ops. We've been pen tested multiple times, SOC2ed, and work with some of the biggest companies out there.
It's my labor of love, and I keep it going (even though there are probably higher leverage things I could be doing with my time.)
But it's horrible to have our small team spend basically all of our time shutting down that Indonesian fraud ring, or that Egyptian code farm, or the Chinese signups that have been on an auto loop for the last 24 hours. I feel like I'm constantly making product calls that trade protecting from abuse vs giving our users an amazing experience (and keeping maintenance overhead low.)
It's basically sucked the joy out of my first little AI win, and I'm really sad about it.
And before you bucket me into dumb-little-vibecoder, trust that I know what I'm doing. I run our firewall like it's my full time job. We are stripe radar'd up to the gills. We have rate limits + so many automated triggers and controls.
But each one of these things ends up touching legitimate users and prospects. And every time I rachet up one control, I end up causing annoyance or pain to a real user. It's a trade that's hard to manage.
And honestly? It's not fun.
It just feels bad to see so many bad people.
So I have some thinking to do, but for now
- free trials are dead on chatprd, sorry kids
- i think in 2027 i might ban all non-US business
- and tbh, may retreat to the warm waters of 100% enterprise business, who are a) willing to pay more and b) have more interesting product needs
And if you're a little solo founder or startup that has dealt with this - I see you. I have some tips + tricks that might help. You're not dumb, and it's not easy.
Ok. Rant over.
Back to building the little wrapper who could 💕
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Grok Bot got a reset. Thanks @thsottiaux for leading the way and showing @elonmusk how it's done. ;)
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When I was a junior, my first professional book is @edmondlau's Effective Engineers, recommended by @lwastuargo
Being effective let you multiply your impact.
Effective != Productive, but it's part of the equation.
Then I'm being taught scaling myself is the largest impact. I put effort to improve my likability, communication skill, clarity, to influence without authority. So people can copy what I'm doing, cloning myself for the company.
Now?
Well, AI agent can clone my technical skill and produce good enough code to achieve impact. That multiply myself immediately.
The gap between an average engineer and the best engineers was never quite 10x, but it was meaningful.
AI has made the gap at least 100x.
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Aluminum isn't magnetic, but apparently you can still use magnet to separate aluminum from trash.
And a lot of people's comment stuck on aluminum isn't magnetic.
Ryan asked a curious question to Grok to educate others. I'm 100% sure he already knew how magnet used to recycle for aluminum.
Isn't that interesting? Some of them even immediately degrading the person... "you are CEO, but... don't you know aluminum isn't magnetic?"
A value I observe on a lot of highly effective people are being curious. Asking effective question. Trying to understand the other's perspective.
But also people's default is being prideful of "being correct", and aren't humble to acknowledge that they know less. They'll take any chance to show they are superior than others. I'm guilty of it.
Another observation I have is, great leaders are confident, strongly opinionated, weakly held.
So, a great leader in my opinion are curious but strongly opinionated, and weakly held.
Done incorrectly, you'll sound arrogant.
Any suggestions to be a better leader?
This quoted post is unavailable.
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junior = engineers without social capital, status, or power.
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: felixrieseberg.com/hunger-be…
Dean Thayib 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.
nitter.gq/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…
Going back to Claude with Opus 5.5. It’s Claudish, but dang the visual result is amazing. It's clear winner compared to Sol 6.1/Astra
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Have we, as humans, decoded smell into bytes?
And when we do, how can we be sure we aren't living in a simulation?
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My heart goes to people in France. Violence is never the answer and I condemn them.
I have a lot of nasty word to says, but I'll keep my mouth shut and pray and focus on delivering value.
Shame on people who use violence to get to the answer.
Also don't abuse your AI
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Did GPT suddenly become so bad? 2 or 3 days ago it was fine but it suddenly so bad yesterday.
The reasoning become weird, the task horizon become shorter. I've exclusively use codex to the limit and have no complaints until today.
Did I work it too hard??
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Everyone lives in bubble. I live in a bubble where incidents, oncall, reliability is my day to day job and put it upfront on my frontal lobe.
Doesn't give me revenue tho
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Quote of the day "why think about reliability bro? think about revenue"
@radjathaher
