Posted by dr_pardee 7 hours ago
an AI:DR; is enough: the models found unpatched vulnerabilities and managed to create an exploit to root the tablet, chinese models did it while American ones fell back to their safeguards.
The article was fine. And I totally expect the kind of person spending $200 to viberoot a tablet to write their article using AI. It is what it is.
I think those who don't see it as AI just don't read AI text several hours per day, like some of us.
To me this a tell of AI - it should read "cat-and-mouse game."
I think AI sees the cat and mouse as individual objects joined together with a hyphen rather than knowing it's a type of game.
Is anthropomorphizing the tool.
Screwdriver and I spent ...
Straight out of another LLM. Please name some books in this style, since it seems to be on the tip of your tongue.
??? Not a native speaker, turns out short word is hardboiled.
> Please name some books in this style, since it seems to be on the tip of your tongue.
Googled for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=hardboiled+detective+book
I am glad you've lerned something new.
I don't know of any novels, but I do know that Calvin and Hobbes poked fun at this genre in some of the strips.
I suppose the comic books for Watchmen could fall into this same genre somewhat.
AI comments are against the rules and I think the commenter's lack of an explanation for their choice of words sufficiently establishes it wasn't their words to begin with.
Maybe feed the article to another AI to summarize so you'll feel less hoodwinked about someone passing off AI writing as their own?
For those who missed it from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336573
From the article:
> A kiosk that kept dying
> “It’s my device”
> Reality television
> The grind
> The relief pitcher
This is one of the giveaways for me.
2. I've said this multiple times in real life because fuck FAANG
3. that's a new one for me
4. Every colleague I've worked with has used this in real life, for decades
5. Also a new one
So... sorry what were we talking about?
This article isn't particularly egregious but AI does come up with really cringy headings. Most often "the <irrelevant noun>" over and over.
Those are wild headings that read like an op-ed on a site covered in ads. I've said some of those things irl, and "relief pitcher" is a thing, and in solution those phrases are fine. As section headings it's wild imo
Versus some of us look at five tells and say “nah, this is fine in isolation” over and over.
From the article: “It talked itself into helping me by checking whether it should. So it does have some sort of soul. I said that out loud, to an empty room.”
What?!
I enjoyed the content nonetheless.
Especially when you can have someone (AI) summarize it.
Nevertheless, it was interesting experiment, also a bit dangerous reality how people are using LLMs. Just flip the context from user trying to root their own device to some one else's device.
Because it is an entertainment medium, the voice of the messenger is the only thing that matters and every current LLM has a boring, annoying voice. If you aren't telling us something new you better be telling us something in an entertaining fashion.
I often really want to read articles, but the minute is encounter claude-speak, I (a) either leave (90%+ of the time) or (b) ask another AI to rewrite it using simple english or in a style of another writer in that space (yes, I know, it's ironical).
Just hard to read AI-ism.
The load bearing fact is it's not the content, or the originality, or the perceived lack of effort, it's reading the same trope for the 10000th time, and experiencing something akin to ad-blindness.
Nothing wrong with it, as soon as it is not obviously AI-generated looking and has good, high quality content.
I've never had the problems OP describes but my tablets all came with FireOS v7.3.2.1 and I've never let them update. I think Amazon started locking down later firmware versions more but Fire Toolbox can still do quite a bit to tame and decruft later versions. The XDA forum for Fire Toolbox has a lot of posts covering exploits and workarounds for later FireOS versions.
Once the Amazon cruft is tamed, I still haven't found a meaningfully better 10-inch thin/light Android tablet than the 2021 Fire HD 10 Pro. It has wireless charging, weighs 430g and at 247 x 166 x 9.2 mm no one makes a 10" that's much lighter, smaller or thinner. The only slight downside is FireOS 7 is based on Android 9 and new versions of a few apps are starting to require later APIs. I'd gladly pay ~$250 for a 10" Android 16 tablet with wireless charging that was as thin & light but had smaller bezels for overall smaller size.
It is shocking that no mainstream tablet manufacturer will let buyers exercise control over their device. At the very least, this means having root and being able to use it to purge unwanted software. Ideally, it also means being able to fully replace the stock OS with third party/open firmware.
I'm running GrapheneOS on mine, same with my Pixel phone.
The Plus model has more ram (memory) and wireless charging than the base model
It only comes in Slate dark-grey color and is often resold on Amazon's Woot ("used like new")
I have one, bought a year ago anticipating this would eventually happen, exciting times lol
Now we'll get LineageOS on this with newer Android within another year
* https://computers.woot.com/offers/amazon-fire-hd-10-tablet-2...
Yes, you're correct (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08F6FYN6B). Wireless charging and 4gb RAM vs 3gb. I think the 2021 Fire HD 10 Plus may have been the only ~10-inch tablet ever with Qi charging.
For a thin & light e-reader/browser it's really perfect because it sits on the cradle on my nightstand always charged and ready to go. The display size feels like a hardback page. Now that it's been rooted, I'm really hoping for Lineage OS.
it's a pain compared to tap-to-wake but we'll have to wait for that
better than reaching for the power button in the dark, you can put magnet on a string or tape
I think it's meant for cases to turn on the screen when you open their flap
I basically need a 10" tablet as my android "phone" because I'm old/sick and cannot see tiny screens so the FireHD 10 series is perfect
and everything is stupid apps now, even blood pressure meter needs an app
OH I forgot to mention you can run system-user as a pseudo-root too, even before this root method was invented
I would very much like that, but do we have a solution to the locked bootloader? My recollection is that on previous fire tablets, the only way to get a custom rom was to do an ugly hack that still uses the stock kernel because that's the only thing that's signed in a way the bootloader will run. Which is still something but it's a big caveat.
so just guessing give them a year, lol
what will drive it to happen is Amazon is still selling hundreds of this tablet via Woot for $25-$35, they drop it in batches every few months as they refurb them
Mine looks and works like brand new for $25
Just without LineageOS I cannot do tap-to-wake or dual-mode usb-on-the-go while charging like the pre-2019 tablets
Me: what are you doing?
Agent: I’m resolving Apple’s private video-resolution lookup table to determine whether iOS 26 supports 320×240 for HomeKit live streaming.
The decompiled source hides the numeric constants, so I:
- Downloaded/extracted the iOS 26.1 arm64e dyld cache to /workspace/tmp/ios26-dyld/.
- Built and installed the read-only apfs-fuse utility needed to mount Apple’s APFS image.
- Planned to extract HomeKitDaemon and decode its resolution table.
Me: Oh, OK. Carry on then
These are weird times.
Binary patches are probably fine to make, but to distribute them for other people's binaries is probably not.
I had it re-written into a nice cups C filter driver, verified against original to produce identical output, easy to install and manage on my Orange Pi boards to serve as a network printer server for this USB only printer, before the printer even arrived.
The same with the scanner driver. Instead of taking a `sane` route, I just had LLM write a small dependency-less Linux C program to get the scans with nice CLI UX on top, fit for my needs.
Everyhting about 10x simpler than the manufacturer code, yet still fully featured.
Had some time so I asked for NEON+AVX2 optimizations. Got them too, so the filter is 5x faster than the original. :D
Good times.
I agree with you in that I now feel like a 100x engineer, but I think it would have taken me a long time to figure that one out pre AI.
AI is the new BASIC.
I’m also amazed at how often I can speed up the process by reviewing progress, inserting my knowledge, stopping it from pursuing dead ends, and redirecting effort. Something that the LLM might have finished in 2 hours can be done in 20 minutes with me paying close attention and intervening.
The GP poster is someone who is familiar with the problems caused by AI writing code. For example: reimplementing major functionality because the AI isn’t aware of it (somehow). There are many tasks that domain-specific knowledge is required to successfully guide the AI.
Apparently this is not one of them, though, so it’s an interesting story.
You do need a baseline of knowledge to be able to prompt the AI in a domain successfully. But beyond that baseline there are rapidly diminishing returns. Someone with skill far beyond a certain line won't get amplified the same way someone who just clears that line will.
In this case he is right : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239999
The Tao reference is someone far ABOVE the line getting excellent results from the LLM.
So in this case the Tao example refutes the GGP claim.
Like, what, we are all supposed to close the book on this abstract, very new question. Something that by any approximation is extremely nuanced and also pretty meaningful? Like, "oh OK, well I guess that's that then!"
A great X will be able to do far more great X stuff (breadth), and perhaps also be a greater X (depth).
But it's most certainly weighted in favor of the former than the latter.
in tangential defense, I can only say that Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite was enough for me to set older Dishonored: DotO builds free of Denuvo yet it had much harder time with DEATHLOOP, so I don't discard this article too easily. (in fact, I alone went much farther than any LLM I threw at it at the time Gemini 2.5 was a hot thing.) still, I have sky-high doubts about it. too hard to falsify
- https://github.com/ericpardee/fire-hd-ownership/blob/main/po... - https://github.com/ericpardee/fire-hd-ownership/blob/main/gr...
Occams Razor still makes it more likely that it's all BS, either psychosis (like the guy who genuinely thought he had invented new math because the LLM told him), bad faith PR (AI companies are squirming to IPO).
There are more than a few smelly elements. There isn't a screenshot of actual root being shown in any terminal. Just the LLM output saying "I totally achieved root, OMG, you're gonna be so famous" (paraphrasing to enhance the intellectual absence).
Not saying this doesn't work as reported. Its just... weird. If it actually achieved root, you can show that much more effectively, by showing that part. It's written like a blog post for a food recipe. I don't care about your trip to Bali that redefined your understanding of understanding.
The section where the LLM claimed to have achieved root, which the author is convinced of, because the tablet was rebooted. "It then cold-rebooted the tablet and re-rooted it in four minutes to prove the win was repeatable. Fair.". You can reboot many Linux systems from userland. It smell like psychosis to me. At least enough so that I'm happy to ignore this until someone actually does a PoC, and shows the results of it. (An LLM output saying it did "trust me", doesn't really cut it).
Wait, Opus 4.8 has a safeguards classifier too? Is this recent? I've never seen them for 4.8, only Opus 5 and of course Fable 5?
I’d like to improve my skills - I am surely in actual prompt kiddie territory.
But I’ve got a personal injury claim coming up that is very complex, with tons of docs, legal speak, laws, etc. I’m hoping to have a set up like OPs that can go deep for a long time. How do I set that up? (Currently looking at Claude projects for context file storage, and just asking gemini for now to convert pdfs to raw text, and summarize them)
I’ve also got a cheap scanner that throws errors no matter what os/hardware I use. Sounds like a fun thing to throw some time at.
I did this for a demand letter for a friend who was fired after reporting a sexual harassment claim in California - which is a legitimate duty to investigate.
Did you try NAPS2 or Vuescan?
Presumably the difficulty level is low and the community/societal justice extremely high.
That’s why I always prompt GLM to explicitly map out and question all of its assumptions. It helps a lot when it gets “stuck” on a wrong line of reasoning.
2. However, there are some very human looking posts (I hope) like this 2023 one:
3. Account is posted admitted ChatGPT summaries in 2023 so… even if it’s sometimes a human speaking, sometimes it’s not.