"Fixel Smith" is an AI-generated person, with an article that has very little to do with fraud analysis. 'This' is also a music artist (1), novelist (2), fraud analyst (3), influencer (4), and whatever else you can imagine.
220+ points and 70 comments, and very few notice it's quite a fake post — and no one that it's an AI generated person?
Hacker News has developed recently a frustrating habit of upvoting such low quality AI sloppy submissions.
Makes me wonder if this AI flood uncovers the unflattering truth about this community acuteness, or it's only a failure of existing guardrails and we just need to change them.
This is something that genuinely interests me, but from a slightly different perspective. I regularly participate in tech/AI/fraud/security conferences, and I was curious whether people are really listening to and understanding the panelists, or just pretending to.
Last week I was on a privacy panel discussion where one of the speakers had a bad microphone, and honestly no one in the audience could actually hear what he was talking about for five minutes. Afterward, the audience, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps because no one really cared, reacted and applauded as usual.
This post, and especially its reception, feels like a caricature of what's happening in the tech industry right now. Hundreds upvote, very few really try to understand what the context is about, much less have the real experience to judge it, and yet here we are on the front page of HN.
Now the East Coast will wake up, and I'm really curious whether anything will change in this thread.
I was checking the submission on the phone and only peeked at the comments section. While it's not always easy to judge if something is AI-generated or edited, here it was obvious at first glance from the quotes. Assuming that all of the comments were done in good faith, I think that the low AI literacy even here is really concerning.
A cursory glance does make it appear like either a prolific individual, or a bot. The fact that the novel bears little relation to the analytics posts, which seem to bear the style of LLM prose, makes the whole thing fishy. Ironic given the subject matter of TFA
I'd be more surprised to hear that most folks made a habit of investigating the people whose articles we read. To be honest, I usually don't even look at the byline, let alone the rest of the website.
I'm one of the creators of an open-source security framework (1). I've been eating online fraud for breakfast for 8 years. The article is delusional enough that I had to visit the top page of the domain (2).
It's definitely a real post. Yes it's obviously LLM-written, but if the worst thing you can say about an article is that it looks LLM-written, then maybe you don't have any real criticisms.
Whether the contents are made up or not is unclear, but you can criticise the content of the article without needing to speculate on whether it was written by an LLM or whether it is a work of fiction. It has plenty of much more concrete flaws.
The fact that the 'person' behind this post managed to publish a novel, a music album, and a few posts on fraud prevention all within a few days this month is enough for me to redflag it.
> you don't have any real criticisms.
Please check once again, I've already given my opinion on the article itself below. Here it is again for your convenience.
> I question the described approaches. For example, while impossible travel is a legitimate and widely used technique, it's related to online user behaviour based on IP address. Moreover, tirreno, for example, has separate rules for cases where the IP clearly comes from Apple Relay or VPN/Tor — those are separate flags. I assume some or all examples are LLM-generated, as the context is mixed up and no one actually collects GPS location in bulk for card swipes.
I could imagine a person having or doing all of these over time, people do have many interests, but a cursory glance does give an impression of AI. The Instagram account uses a lot of it at least, and the top domain was likely made in conjunction with AI, given the style.
Kind of fascinating, though it could still be a person doing this using AI as opposed to an entirely generated persona. Thanks for bringing it up.
We develop tirreno (1), an open-source security framework.
I question the described approaches. For example, while impossible travel is a legitimate and widely used technique, it's related to online user behaviour based on IP address. Moreover, tirreno, for example, has separate rules for cases where the IP clearly comes from Apple Relay or VPN/Tor — those are separate flags. I assume some or all examples are LLM-generated, as the context is mixed up and no one actually collects GPS location in bulk for card swipes.
Perhaps it would make sense to reverse time from bottom to top. Right now it reflects the standard flow of time, forward, like on a watch. But in reality, our time is only running out.
When you have a timeline going from top to bottom, it feels like it will keep going further, but if you reverse it, you see what's left — without illusion.
BeOS was my dream from childhood. Haiku is amazing, especially because the original BeOS only existed for five years, while Haiku has been going for 24 already. What stamina!
BeOS was way, way snappier to use on the same hardware than Linux (or Windows) no matter how much you trimmed down your (GUI) Linux.
IDK what scheduler voodoo they were doing, but it was awesome.
Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon, and (though with the benefit of way stronger hardware and a ton of "cheating" by suspending applications) some (mostly early) versions of iOS.
I'm not sure I have any use for Haiku today, but I definitely wish for a world in which computer GUIs didn't feel so damn slow and janky and pre-occupied with whatever it's got going on internally rather than what I need it to be doing right now.
Also, I wish some kind of tagging system for filesystems had taken off well enough that I could rely on it, even cross-platform and when copying files between filesystems. Entire programs could just be file tags. Other programs could just be a thin GUI over tagged files. It sucks that didn't end up becoming a standard and reasonably cross-platform-compatible thing.
More generally, I think there’s a good deal of ways of improving user experience with a single purpose dedicated desktop OS like BeOS that is out of reach on general purpose OSes like Linux.
Actually, I think with Linux there may be a bit of a double penalty on desktop use with how much more attention the server use case gets compared to everything else.
Where FUSE is "supported" cross platform, maybe you could store the tags in an SQLite database that gets dragged along for the ride whenever a file gets copied from FUSE to FUSE. Ie, usbdrive to local fuse mouht shadow copies the SQLite db as an extended attribute sort of thing.
linux does at least have extended filesystem attributes. the dolphin filemanager from KDE makes use of them to support tags and comments. it's not ideal (tags are a comma separated string) but it is usable. adding tags is a bit painful though. i resorted to add and them through the commandline.
> What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint?
When things are coded right, Haiku / BeOS is blazing fast (every single thing runs in a separate thread), and resource usage is tiny. I think the OS only uses about half a gig of RAM? When the apps are coded right, there's a feeling that this is how our modern computers could have been, free from bloated software and using the full speed of the machine. And when shutdown only takes a couple of seconds, it makes you wonder what the other OS's are doing.
Of course the reality is not that. Display drivers & video codecs on Haiku often don't have the right hardware acceleration, most of the software you need is now Linux ports rather than BeOS native. But Haiku sometimes feels like a calming OS. Because it's so small and quite modular, it feels like an OS you can still potentially get your head around.
I like how Action Retro has pointed out that installing a fresh Haiku system is often faster than booting a Windows or macOS system.
As I said in another comment, I've only played with Haiku in a VM for not very much time, but I am a huge supporter of operating systems that are willing to break out of the codified mediocrity we've labeled "POSIX"; I suspect that we might be leaving a lot of performance on the table by constantly trying to POSIX compliant all the time.
Resource efficiency is a huge one. If you are familiar with the Via Nano: it's a SLOW x86_64 chip (sometimes used in thin clients) that feels about half as fast as older AMD 64 cpu. Haiku feels great on a Via Nano, and it's really storage-space-efficient. Linux distros are slower, and use more storage space (especially important for using an OS on a thin client PC).
It's one of the last single-user focused operating systems. Its design from kernel to UI is intended to make the system accessible to the user sitting at the desk. It was _extraordinarily_ fast and stable on even modest hardware of the era, and its software toolkit was a delight to use.
Even now, using it feels like the system is bereft of bloat and cruft. It's a system _for the user_ that doesn't assume that the user is technically incapable.
Minimalist and consistent UX, incredibly responsive applications, simple and logical organizational structure, with _excellent_ documentation and developer tools for the era.
You boot straight to a desktop, and there's no ads, alerts, pop-ups, pop-unders, noisy task apps, sidebars, widgets, and other engagement seeking focus destroyers. Every app has a reasonably consistent UX and presents as much necessary and relevant information as it can, without tedious wizards or aggressively hiding information behind folds or submenus.
Linux is just the kernel, the ecosystem is make up of half a dozen desktop managers, windowing systems, API toolkits, sound servers, file systems, package hits etc.
There is an abstraction layer between all these systems. Multiuser, whether you need it or not.
Haiku is a unified system, so native apps have one windowing system, one desktop environment, one API, one media kit, one file system etc. There are less layers for data to travel, hence it will always be faster. Also Haiku targets desktop users (single user system, for better or worse), while Linux in all honesty targets servers and embedded with desktop a distant 3rd use case. Haiku package management is a generation ahead of Linux.
Finally, BeOS/Haiku core architecture is built from modern 90's designs, while Linux started as a clone of Unix (deep in the bowels of Linux there is a TTY terminal block device).
Finally, BeOS had a cool factor (and their fanboys) that Linux never had. Dual CPU from day #1. Blinkenlights. Geek port. Playing videos on a face of a cube. is_computer_on(). Linux is sooo boring in comparison.
It kind of looks nice visually. Other than that I do agree with you. I got tired of waiting. Linux spoiled me. I need things to work these days. Linux works.
Gmail has been evil both for client privacy as they use email scanning for marketing purposes, and for 'spam' filters that reject legitimate emails.
The fact that they're introducing QR/SMS/MMS/whatever they want is actually an interesting signal, because it will harm the customer experience, which might result in the growth of responsible paid email services.
It is good to realize that it has never been "Nice Uncle Google" and always an advertisement moloch offering tools to hook their product. All that trust that was bestowed was never warranted.
This seems pretty optimistic. If you ask 30 random people on the street if they’d rather give Google their phone number and jump through whatever dumb SMS hoops, or switch to a new email address and pay a few bucks a month for it for the rest of their lives, I’m thinking Google is getting all 30 phone numbers. Sadly.
The only “real” competition for Google Workspace is Microsoft if you need a full collaboration solution beyond just email, and 99.999% of customers of such hosted solutions need that full solution. It’s why Dropbox worked even though hacker news users probably roll their own sync solution.
His point was just that many business users can only purchase Google’s solution or Microsoft’s solution, because they’re the only services that will offer interoperability with many other security and compliance services and advanced functionality like SSO, third party email scanning, compliance journaling etc. The email market is essentially a duopoly as soon as you need any functionality beyond basic email.
The simple fact that you believe this is insane to me. Microsoft?Security and compliance? Ahhh, yes the north star of security!
No, you don't need either of these companies if you need a corporate stack for communication and collaboration. And anyone who believes Microsoft or Google is doing anything out of the ordinary to protect their users or data is out of the loop.
It's not about actual security; it's about the appearance of it. It allows CTOs and such to check a box to say "Why yes, our vendor is secure! Look at all their claims! Look at how many other companies use them!" That's it. Safety in numbers for clueless CTOs.
This is just the new "no one gets fired for using IBM".
We need actual liability laws for compute services at this point, and they should pass through every entity between the bits on disk and the end user.
Google disappears someone's realtor's corporate email, and it cost the agent a $100K real estate commission? Google and the employer get to pay $50K, plus damages to the customer.
Or whatever. The point is not that they'd be paying lots of these fines. The point is the cost of non-compliance and insecure setups is 1000x the cost of just doing their jobs. At that point, the bean counters would allocate another 10% to engineering, and all the easily-solved problems would disappear.
That regulatory framework would add a lot of cost to providing online services. There would be far fewer people able to use them because companies would pass that cost to their users/customers.
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