YHK - yet another hacker news clone

the company's brands are toxic and they know it.

That's their whole modus operandi, a privacy nightmare which will feed their infinite money machine.

Reading "Careless People" didn't make me surprised at all on how the company operates, it surprised me with the personal descriptions of how people like Mark Zuckerberg and Sherryl Sandberg actually are as humans. It scared me how most people at that level of wealth and power isn't too different from the accounts in the book, they're all seriously deranged people with a gigantic lever to impose their distorted realities upon the rest of humanity.

It feels and seems too forced.

If Meta/OpenAI/etc would guarantee they’d compensate you in full for anything that wasn’t supposed to happen —and had an established track record of doing so— it would make trusting agents to make financial choices easier

Unless these AI assistants are running on self-managed platforms independent of their developers, all I see is immense counterparty risk.

"Hermes, clone this android app to my computer, add this and this feature and fix this annoyance and then rebuild it and push it to my phone"

"Hermes summarize this YouTube podcast and push the summary and transcript to my Obsidian vault"

"Hermes check mg obsidian notes for when I last wrote a blog article about Neovim's integration with AI agents"

*Hermes, you have an API token that allows read only access to the Zabbix monitoring system, check that and then use the Proxmox API token that only allows you to do limited actions to reboot the VM that is having issues"

Etc, etc,

I have no doubt they would have no problem outsourcing everything to agents.

Last night I had ChatGPT go through an old email account and surface memories that I literally forgot. People who I have fond memories of. Yea I could have spent time querying gmail and digging but the agent did it in a way that really resonated. I don't care if Sama has my emails now. I do care about connecting with my past and enjoying the memories of a time long past.

Paranoid scolds of HN want the average person to be deprived of value like this for some reason.

I find all this is just the next-gen privacy violation, disguised obviously as: "Oh, WOW an agent in the computer is doing all this for me". Bullshit.

It seems that never is enough with these ever thirsty companies, they keep pushing the limits and surprinsingly a lot of people do not care at all nor value the implications of having an arbitrary process running and doing pretty much whatever the agenda of their creators are.

I could see shopping being the same way, let the agent shop for you or identify good deals on things you want but then push them to you to make the actual purchase. Like you, I'm certainly not going to let an agent make a real purchase for me unattended and I doubt any merchant is going to have much sympathy for "my AI bought this by mistake".

Today’s version of the platform targets just the right emotions to keep users “engaged.”

I don't like or trust meta any more than I always did but I don't see how they could have done a "better" job with this. These kinds of agents are inherently pretty risky IMO but I don't see how this one is particularly more than any others.

Playing around with it I really don't get the sense there's any hidden prompt contradicting what's visible. It's nearly gleeful at using the VM in ways that were not intended and likely against meta's interests. I feel like someone must have won a really interesting internal power struggle to get this thing out in this form.

Also Meta is actively encouraging users to grant them full permission, insisting with all their marketing might that it’s safe, which they know is a complete lie. Hard to blame the user when they’re being actively deceived like this. Other agent companies are more reserved and say things like “be careful” but Meta is the opposite.

Typical "leopards ate my face" moment. You give AI (from Meta, nonetheless) full-disk access and then complain that—wow—it really meant FULL.

In a perfect world where you got nothing to hide, where companies don't sell your data and there are no hackers, even I would love to just hand all my data to Muse and have it be my trusted assistant. People who think we live in such a world are already doing that, evidently.

This level of unfettered access to your personality, lifestyle, and secrets allows for an unprecedented kind of manipulation and control. You could see it as a new kind of wealth transfer: not only will They sell you things, They will subtly manipulate behaviors of the masses via trusted agents.