Hey buddy,

Man, you gotta hear what was popping on Hacker News today, December 16th. Some wild stuff, as usual.

8M users' AI conversations sold by "privacy" extensions

First up, there's this absolutely bonkers story: apparently, these 'privacy' browser extensions, right? The ones supposed to protect your AI chats? They've been selling off 8 million users' AI conversations for profit! Can you believe the nerve? One dude in the comments was saying it's tough for code reviews to even catch this because the code looks like it's just monitoring your AI stuff, which is what it claims to do, just without the privacy part. So sneaky. Link to the story

alpr.watch – Tracking License Plate Readers

Then, speaking of surveillance, there's this site called alpr.watch. It's basically tracking all those Automatic License Plate Readers out there. You know, the ones that scan every car plate. People in the comments were freaking out about how this is just another layer of 'persistent unique identifiers' and how governments probably have even more intense surveillance going on than we know. Someone even mentioned this old 'Project Argus' with drones tracking everything. Super creepy.

This is not the future (AI's Impact on Creativity)

Next, there was this blog post titled 'This is not the future'. It's a bit of a downer, talking about how AI is eating away at human creativity and how everything's becoming a subscription. The comments were all over it, especially about how AIs are trained on human work without paying anyone, and now they're undercutting those same creators. And yeah, subscription costs for everything are going up, even for AI features you might not even use. One person was like, 'Does taking a stand by not using Amazon ever actually work?' Good question.

Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

Oh, and get this: GitHub's changing its Actions pricing. Sounds like they're making it more complicated or expensive. A lot of folks in the comments were talking about just self-hosting stuff like Jenkins again. One guy summed it up, saying "No one really feels like they are selling a premium "just works" product. Its all jank. So why it the jank I chose at the price...". Pretty much my thoughts too!

AI will make formal verification go mainstream

On the more brainy side, there was a post suggesting that AI will make formal verification mainstream. That's like, proving your software is mathematically correct. The idea is AI could help with that super complex stuff. But some comments debated whether adding more type info to code actually makes it harder to change later. Like, imagine trying to refactor a huge JavaScript codebase without good types – nightmare!

GPT Image 1.5 Released

And speaking of AI, OpenAI dropped GPT Image 1.5. New image capabilities for ChatGPT. People were instantly thinking about how it could automate things like Blender scene previews. There was also a good discussion about needing 'vetters of real human talent' because it's getting harder to tell what's human-made versus AI, and maybe