It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.
But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.
It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.
Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. A few tips:
1. If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. I add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week.
2. Use Plan mode (press shift-tab 2x). Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan before you let Claude execute. This easily 2-3x’s results for harder tasks.
3. Give the model a way to check its work. For svelte, consider using the Puppeteer MCP server and tell Claude to check its work in the browser. This is another 2-3x.
4. Use Opus 4.5. It’s a step change from Sonnet 4.5 and earlier models.
A friend of mine and I (we are both Aussies) had been staying at my Grandma's house in a rural village in UK and were trying to make our way back to London on Boxing Day. The fact that it was Boxing Day meant that no buses were running, so we started sticking our thumbs out to try and hitch a lift to the nearest town's train station. As you would expect, picking up two 19 year old blokes in the middle of nowhere was not an attractive proposition to your average passerby.
Eventually a guy comes along and picks us up. Tells us he hitched all the way across Europe back in the day so he empathized with us. Says he's on the way to pick up his son (our age) from work, a department store that happened to be on the way to the station.
His son gets into the car, understandably pretty bemused as to why his dad has brought two random stragglers with him!
We get to the station only to find that it's closed, because, yes, it's Boxing Day and trains weren't running either (we hadn't really thought this through). Guy says:
"Don't worry lads, all the family are around ours for Christmas dinner. My brother lives in West London so he can give you a ride there at the end of the night."
So we found ourselves, two foreign students, invited to a complete stranger's Christmas dinner party. We all had so much fun and drank so much that we completely abandoned the London idea and went back to my Grandma's at the end of the night.
And the kid who was our age that got picked up from work? He ended up being my Best Man when I got married 15 years later. True story!
I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important
We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works fine until you are locked out .
And using them isn’t fully voluntary. They are necessary for collaboration . You end up using what your team uses .
You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement
Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure
You’re just not imaginative enough if you think you’re safe .
For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc.
Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
This is how much he had to sacrifice. Leaving his only son when he was just five and not being able to watch him grow up like any other normal father. He also sacrificed a father/son relationship that may never be restored. “Out of everyone I knew in this world, I knew my son least of all.” Karl didn’t have any means of communication with his son for years but managed to reach him after contacting one of his friends on Facebook. While he was away, his son was suffering from depression and self abuse and had to use medication and therapy.
That's not sacrifice, that's abandonment. I have a young son not far from that age and trying to imagine how he'd feel if daddy just walked off nearly brings me to tears.
> Once the code for all destinations lived in a single repo, they could be merged into a single service. With every destination living in one service, our developer productivity substantially improved. We no longer had to deploy 140+ services for a change to one of the shared libraries. One engineer can deploy the service in a matter of minutes.
If you must to deploy every service because of a library change, you don't have services, you have a distributed monolith. The entire idea of a "shared library" which must be kept updated across your entire service fleet is antithetical to how you need to treat services.
Where possible, I've stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I. Words virtually always have redundancy (or context in the sentence) and it's fine in 98% of cases, but too often someone sends a token, password, name, or other string where you need to copy it out to another application to see it and just... why? Why bother?
To avoid misunderstandings, this repository is about a project at Cornell University named the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA), not a Red Hat one.
If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified.
1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking.
2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my search page. Basically people were searching for crypto and scammy websites on my blog. Odd, but not like they were finding anything. Turns out, their search query was displayed as an h1 on the page and crawled by google. I was basically displaying spam.
I don't have much control over ai overview because disabling it means I don't appear in search at all. But for the spam, I could do something. I added a robot noindex on the search page. A week later, both impressions and clicks recovered.
In my experience, the best models are already nearly as good as you can be for a large fraction of what I personally use them for, which is basically as a more efficient search engine.
The thing that would now make the biggest difference isn't "more intelligence", whatever that might mean, but better grounding.
It's still a big issue that the models will make up plausible sounding but wrong or misleading explanations for things, and verifying their claims ends up taking time. And if it's a topic you don't care about enough, you might just end up misinformed.
I think Google/Gemini realize this, since their "verify" feature is designed to address exactly this. Unfortunately it hasn't worked very well for me so far.
But to me it's very clear that the product that gets this right will be the one I use.
If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
- Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem it.
- Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.
If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.
I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store currency is too dangerous to use.
It’s impressive how every iteration tries to get further from pretending actual AGI would be anywhere close when we are basically writing library functions with the worst DSL known to man, markdown-with-english.
Is it me or does this seem like naked corruption at its worst? These tech CEOs hang out at the White House and donate to superfluous causes and suddenly the executive is protecting their interests. This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
It’s crazy how Anthropic keeps coming up with sticky “so simple it seems obvious” product innovations and OpenAI plays catch up. MCP is barely a protocol. Skills are just md files. But they seem to have a knack for framing things in a way that just makes sense.
To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.
After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer
I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.
Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things
That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.
I follow the MLX team on Twitter and they sometimes post about using MLX on two or more joined together Macs to run models that need more than 512GB of RAM.
For a bit more context, those posts are using pipeline parallelism. For N machines put the first L/N layers on machine 1, next L/N layers on machine 2, etc. With pipeline parallelism you don't get a speedup over one machine - it just buys you the ability to use larger models than you can fit on a single machine.
The release in Tahoe 26.2 will enable us to do fast tensor parallelism in MLX. Each layer of the model is sharded across all machines. With this type of parallelism you can get close to N-times faster for N machines. The main challenge is latency since you have to do much more frequent communication.
I know multiple people who worked / working at Mullvad and they take their business, security and privacy _very_ seriously. Not surprised to see them shine here.
A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high protein productivity.
The paper notes:
>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).
The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:
There’s a fundamental trade-off between performance and privacy for onion routing. Much of the slowness you’re experiencing is likely network latency, and no software optimization will improve that.
When Karl was preparing to cross the ice from Alaska to Russia, I worked with him a bit on a kite-flown camera system to help him get a Birds Eye view of the flows to chart his course. I engineered a ruggedized wireless camera in an aluminum housing, I don’t remember much about it other than I was doubtful that the resolution would be able to give him the data he needed on on small low resolution screen. (This was before consumer drones were common or affordable). We built some devices, not sure if he ever used them or if they helped. I urged him to do a lot of testing to make sure they would be worth the weight.
We spent a lot of time at college coffee house in Fairbanks Alaska working over the ideas and overall design.
Nice fellow, strange aspirations, indomitable spirit. I’m glad to see his trek is nearing completion, and I wish him well on his further adventures. Good luck and Godspeed, Karl.
The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device.
I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.
I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.
You shouldn't have to hack it, you should have the right to repair the software on your device. Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit will help with that for Linux based devices, signs are looking good though.
Good for them. During economic downturns, when fewer resources are available for redistribution, collective action across population groups can help address worsening power imbalances.
> In my 30’s, I exercised to look good. In my 50’s, to stay fit. In my 70’s, to stay ambulatory. In my 80’s, to avoid assisted living. Now in my 90’s, I’m just doing it out of pure defiance
Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP.
It is totally normal in today’s world to depend on cloud services and reasonably difficult to do without it. In China: no WeChat you are practically dead. Here try to join meetings without account, try to send a message on WhatsApp without account, etc… a lot can go wrong very fast. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to other services ?
But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.
It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.