mmmmhafez retweeted
A few surprising things I learned from reading about Eiichrio Oda, the creator of One Piece:
1. He slept 3 hours a night for 15 years.
2. He created the most successful manga of all time with more than 600 million copies in circulation.
3. He said he would have missed his parent’s funeral because it conflicted with his work.
4. He is extremely private. He does not allow his face to be photographed and when he appears on video he has a giant fish avatar placed on his head.
5. When he hires a new editor the first thing he says to them is you need to be willing to die for One Piece.
6. His editor said he might someday encounter a writer more talented than Oda but he would never meet anyone who worked harder.
7. He doesn’t want ideas, he wants criticism.
8. He would hand draw entire Disney animated movies to learn how to give his characters emotion.
9. He said he only saw his family once a week because family time was too relaxing.
10. He holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author.
11. He is often described as a maniac due to his unbelievable work ethic and inhuman daily habits.
12. He believes in having the least number of people possible touching the work.
13. He says he gets his best ideas by not sleeping or eating. He says humans can only come up with truly new ideas when they reach their limit.
14. He started working on One Piece when he was 22. He is still working on it at 51.
15. He once spent 12 consecutive hours on the telephone discussing a single story with his editor.
16. He has an extreme tolerance for repetition.
17. Imagination is the organizing force of his entire life.
18. He's a perfectionist who has repeatedly admitted that he cannot make himself work in a more efficient way, even when he desperately wants to.
19. He never finishes before a deadline. He equates using every available minute with giving his maximum effort.
20. He believes it’s impossible to create something great unless you do everything yourself, attend to every detail, and test it exhaustively.
21. He believes the more experience he has the harder it is to create.
22. He was 4 when he decided to be a manga artist. He said he wanted to avoid ever having to get a real job.
23. He creates his work for an audience of exactly one person: himself at 15 years old.
25. He has dedicated his entire adult life to writing a story about freedom and adventure, while accepting an extraordinarily restrictive life in order to create it.
26. To this day he does not feel successful.
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Eiichiro Oda is a relentlessly obsessive creative genius who has devoted nearly every waking hour of his adult life to building one of the most extraordinary fictional universes ever imagined. You don't want to miss this episode:
mmmmhafez 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…
mmmmhafez retweeted
The world around you is designed in CAD. How well can AI build it?
Introducing CADArena, benchmarking AI CAD generation across the tools engineers use
Agents can now build accurate geometry, but struggle to create feature trees engineers can maintain and edit
mmmmhafez retweeted
String theory is probably a field that has set back quant trading by at least 10 years. Stealing top tier trading talent to do make believe 26 dimensional geometry, inflate boomer professors’s grant budget, and produce zero testable hypotheses or applications after 50 years
mmmmhafez retweeted
You have to understand. Spending 1 hour per day on brainrot is insane. That's about 6% of your waking day. About 5 years of your waking life. Half a decade. On brainrot. Just gone. Zero return. Zero fulfillment. Zero meaning. Zero contribution to the other parts of your life.
mmmmhafez retweeted
I’d rather hangout with a NYC nepo baby with a trust fund or go fishing with a redneck who rants about how the moon landing was fake than mingle with SF striver types. One of the most insufferable groups of people on earth.
