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We’ve developed a simple video camera app. We focus on parents who are beginners in creating videos like most people. And: we only do vertical videos.

https://www.wunderflix.com/en/

PS: let me know what you think if you give it a try!


I was dumb enough to sign up... The results are not impressive at all.

Now they have my CC number. There is no way to cancel your account. There is just a gmail support email... Let's see if I get my $14.99 back.


I was tempted to check it out so thanks for trying it out.

Is it basically just GPT3?


What else could it be? Almost all these "clever" new "AI" products are just people taking a particular "trick" for interacting with GPT and obscuring it behind a slick interface. Hilariously, AI Dungeon was probably the most impressive, but even that could be entirely recreated by just interacting with GPT in the raw if you knew the right tricks. The interface just made it more convenient and "magic" feeling because you didn't see the moving parts.

None of the "products" that came after have been as impressive, including copilot. Using GPT as a font for new writing ideas is probably the only "practical" thing it's good for, at least until the tech advances significantly, but charging for a service like this that essentially adds 0 value is pure rent-seeking.


copilot has surprised me on multiple occasions. If I code in an unfamiliar language, copilot was super quick at writing the code I needed based on the method name (instead of needing to fallback to stack overflow).


Could someone elaborate on what the worst-case exploit would be for those number that got leaked? How would a scenario look like? Asking for a friend whose number got exposed...


It's still going to be a scam message, but they can use your Facebook ID to see everything public on your profile now, as well as the other fields in the leak like full name, location, bio, birthday. So whatever the most convincing scam message somebody can come up with is combining all of that data. Off the top of my head, "happy birthday here's a gift from us" messages from companies leading to phishing pages and personalised fake register to vote pages relating to upcoming elections in your area.

It's not really new data, it's just scam SMS I've received in the past has never shown any sign of knowing anything other than my phone number. Now you can buy phone numbers and pull personalisation data unrestricted from your copy of Facebook's database for each of them. I'm sure sophisticated scammers already were, but now everyone will.


Birthday is a form of identity verification too, for password reset.


None of the birthdays I enter are real. :P


and no one should put real birthday lol. Birthday is mostly used for targeting ads.

This is why facebook can say to advertisers, "We mostly have young people using our service. So please put your money on our company"

And yes using account of 60-70 year old always receives less ads :D


They have to be consistent, yes? If I enter 6/7/1989 everywhere they just have to get it once.


I use different ones for each account and write them down like passwords if it somehow ends up being a hint for password recovery etc.


My university is known to offer the option payment of tuition through a popular online system. This option is done by sending each student, at the start of the year, an SMS with a link to a payment option.

Suppose you can get a list of people studying there, their names, and their phone-numbers. Faking this SMS and putting a payment that goes to you instead of uni would be a nice way to earn about 2000 euros per student who falls for it.


> My university is known to offer the option payment of tuition through a popular online system. This option is done by sending each student, at the start of the year, an SMS with a link to a payment option.

They don't email this information? They don't put it on an online notification system? I have no idea why SMS seems like the logical option for this.


Kids are more likely to text, less likely to email these days. I can understand why they’d use SMS for their target demographic.

That doesn’t justify the security implications of doing this...


Do kids still text or is that a generation or two removed from the current iMessages/WhatsApp/Signal/WhateverComesAfterSignalBecauseImOldAndDontKnow?


I'm sure they'd prefer to receive notifications from their university on WhateverComesAfterSignalBecauseImOldAndDontKnow, but I imagine that SMS is the 2nd best thing (and probably still generates eye-rolling about the university being old fashioned).


But then you're stuck logging into the payment portal and filling out the form information with your phone, which is my own personal hell.


Oh, I'm with you. I'd much prefer to pull this up on a real computer so I can efficiently fill things in. I've adapted to typing on glass with my thumbs, but I'm not very good at it.


I do not know why they do this. I really wish they would stop.

I have considered faking the SMS message, with the payment link saying "imagine this wasn't a warning message but an actual payment request, please tell the university this is unsafe". But sending that kind of mass SMS is not easy, nor is finding the correct phone numbers.


The email option is arguably an easier (cheaper) attack vector than the SMS messages would be.


Yeah, I thought of that after I wrote it. Send it to all the university accounts you can get your hand on, see who you catch. It's probably just personal preference showing through as well, as I wouldn't be comfortable paying with my phone. I also have no idea how people substitute their PC with an iPad or phone. Much harder to fill out a page of fields and navigate around, and I'm sure that Google Pay won't support $15,000 payments.


If your phone is your 2fa, someone uses this data to target you for a sim-swap to take over your phone, and then uses it to take over high value accounts.


What some spammers do in my country for example, is call old people and pretend their (grand/)children were involved in an accident and ask for money for quick interventions (the hospital is out of funds, bla bla). It's sometimes hit or miss cause the person might be next to them, or they just talked, or sometimes they can't figure out if you have a daughter or a son etc.

With a correlated leak like this, it's super easy for me to find your profile, see who you are, what you look like, even from just your profile picture I could potentially see you have a daughter yourself, so I can target your mother that something happened to her granddaughter and you, which would make her pay up even faster possibly.


I have bought this, too. It's great.

There is also a “free” site, which offers lovely designs: https://tailblocks.cc/


I made a comment above, which got downvoted, but, I'll try to explain a bit more. Looking at tailblocks site ... it's just html/css (verbose tailwind). Having lots of markup for input boxes that don't have any affordance for validation states, aria tags - that's a lot of code in those example blocks that still forces me to have to add lots more stuff to get some basic interaction functionality that's already provided by other toolkits (which, again, all use a common base and therefor all are styled similarly without the need for a lot of boilerplate css).

Someone posted above that tailwindui(?) will be providing react and vue components - that may be worth investigating later. Possibly too late for some current projects, but I'll keep an eye out.


It might not solve your problem. It does solve problems for other people like me though.


> They key to a strong culture is consistency from the top. The CEO's job is to make sure everyone on the management team is on the same page. If a senior leader wants to create their own unique culture for their part of the org, they can't be allowed to stay.

I love this entire thread and it resonates a lot with me. I, too, believe that there is not THE right company culture that will solve everybody’s problems. Many in the agile or “new work” camp seem to believe that their way is the ONLY way, for example.

Consistency is much more important than how the culture actually is.


I think consistency is overrated, and a cause of countless undue issues.

We seem to mostly agree that diversity is important, and having employees from different background help bring different ideas and solutions to the table, react with more agility on unforeseen situations.

On a fundamental level, applying the same vision and forcing the same values and rituals on everyone looks to me at odds with what diversity is supposed to bring.

As an aside, if a company has a credit card processing division and mini-game producing divisions, I'd see a clear case for them to not have the same values nor the same priorities, and in the end the same culture. That's what I also felt reading accounts from UX designers at Google in the early days, when they seemed to be crushed by the 100% data driven culture from which they tried to carve a small niche.


>On a fundamental level, applying the same vision and forcing the same values and rituals on everyone looks to me at odds with what diversity is supposed to bring.

IMO the difference is that consistency brings people together to agree on the same goals but diversity brings different perspectives on how to reach said goals. It's a bit of nuance, like the distinction between strategy and tactics.

Having disjointed strategy wreaks havoc because people can't agree on what's ultimately important in determining success. Differing tactics brings a bit of experimentation to the table where groups may try out different paths but are all honed in on the same end goal.

I've worked in organizations that couldn't align on strategy and it was horrendous. One level wanted the focus to be on creating an organization that is known for high-quality "world-class" work. The other wanted to move fast and bring in as much work as possible, sometimes at the detriment of quality. Leadership couldn't get on the same page and it created a fracturing of the workforce into competing camps, neither of which trusted (and at time worked to undermine) the other.


Personally, I believe consistency is an indicator of defined process.

Consistency can still produce negative results, but, because it is a defined process, it is much easier to ‘pull the levers’, and wrangle the process into an outcome you want.

Serendipity is great, but it really does take a special group of people for that synergy to work, absent a process.

I think of it like a good band.


Yes, I think at an individual level there needs to be clear rules and expectations, and the sense of belonging to a coherent group sharing the same values.

It's more at an organization level where I see the need to have niches accomodating groups that have different dynamics, perhaps goals and working patterns.

Another instance of that could be customer support centers, who work hand in hand with the product and dev centers, while having wildly different composition, processes and targets from the rest of the company.


I guess it depends on how hard it is enforced. In the end, consistency is something gray and not black and white.


> Many in the agile or “new work” camp seem to believe that their way is the ONLY way, for example.

I think many in the Agile camp are fed up with being held back by people who are unwilling to change, and are willing to break the mold (and some eggs) in order to find a new, better way to work.

> Consistency is much more important than how the culture actually is.

This just leads to a consistently toxic culture that nobody wants to work for. I have worked for plenty of places where nobody gives a shit and nobody tries to change anything, and it was terrible. Our working life should mean more than a stock ticker.


The "Agile" problem is more like a bunch of consultants and managers polarizing the population while the middle waves their hands and goes "uh, guys, you know 'agile' isn't the same as Scrum, and many more implementations exist beyond it, right?". As the consultants and managers keep insisting that if you don't want to participate in "Agile Scrum" (how in the world did we get this abomination of a word anyway?), you "don't understand the values of Scrum and/or Agile". In turn, monopolizing the ideology of iterative, short cycle development.

The last being absolutely insane, since both the values in Scrum and the values in the Agile Manifesto are extremely broad and abstract. Even the guide itself clearly states Scrum only being an implementation for those values, not the definition of those values.


I’ve always found it ironic when coming across discussions of people’s frustration with Agile (uppercase A) only to see the “you’re doing it wrong” comment-which I’ve seen often right Here on HN, among other places.

Mainly because wasn’t one of the foundational elements of agile (lowercase A) “people and tools over processes”?

Lately Agile feels as ritualistic and process-heavy as a checklist for a rocket launch.


Actually, no it wasn't. The one you are referring to is:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Also "Agile" doesn't feel ritualistic and process heavy. I'm probably now doing what you refer to as the "you're doing it wrong".

Agile itself is not ritualistic and process heavy. Specific frameworks and people are. E.g. take a SAFe consultant trying to get a paycheck from a large corporation. Of course that's gonna be ritualistic and process heavy. That's the point of SAFe and even in the name. They're trying to sell a "safe" implementation of agile practices to enterprise organizations. Safe in the sense of not actually having to change all that much. Basically keep what you have but you can call yourself agile now. Comes with a rubber stamp too now!

That's way different than a company trying to actually live agile values as defined in the manifesto. E.g. throw away your issue tracking tool to build your software and put a bunch of post it notes all over the walls at the office. Talk to your peers. Build awesome software together from rough drafts on a post it. Or how a friend of mine describes working at Tesla: "Jira issues? Yeah we write those after implementation is done so that the AC match what we did". Awesome!


QED


Hehehe, self fulfilling prophecy really. And no worries I get it. 'Problem' is, I'm still on the idealistic agile train myself and thus I will predictably (and I told you it was coming) fall into that pattern. Can't do anything about it. On the interwebs it's obviously hard to impossible to distinguish this from other forms of this. E.g. the SAFe consultant who feels dissed ;)

So yeah if you see me in real life, I'm fighting for proper agile value implementation in the organization around me and living and teaching them in my teams.


Maybe. And maybe he’s there because he is a smart lad who knows which products to monitor closely.

After all he bought Instagram and WhatsApp for peanuts, and copied the best features of SnapChat.


He wouldn't need to use his real number/name just to do product research though. It would just needlessly confuse any contacts who have his actual number and use signal.

Signal also has nothing he can emulate. Its most meaningful selling point is that it doesn't have an association or integration with a scummy social media company, and people using it for that reason are already lost to Facebook. This is a feature he cannot ever hope to copy.


> Signal also has nothing he can emulate. Its most meaningful selling point is that it doesn't have an association or integration with a scummy social media company, and people using it for that reason are already lost to Facebook. This is a feature he cannot ever hope to copy.

Even if there is nothing to emulate, downloading the app at least gives him a feel for how close it is to WhatsApp's capabilities and would help him understand if it is a major competitive threat or not.


>Signal also has nothing he can emulate.

Both of them now have some variation on encrypted chats.


To me, this is the obvious answer.


> So, what did we learn?

1. If you are coding or writing, multiply the expected time of any specific task by ∼ 1.5x (the real completion time will now probably still be 1.5x longer than your new expected time, but you tried).

1.5x matches my real-world SW dev experience.


I read somewhere that a rule of thumb is to double the number and then scale it up by one order of magnitude.

Example: 1 day == 2 weeks, 1 week = 2 months, 1 month = 2 years. More than a month = Let’s not even start.


Is there a good page about font sizes, spacings and all that?


Here's a fun tool someone shared with me for experimenting with different font params: https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/readable-text/index.html


Awesome! Thank you


Thanks for the write-up, absolutely fascinating.

Mind-boggling to imagine how all that then led to living objects and finally us exchanging messages on this platform.

Makes you wonder if it all happened by pure chance or if we are all part of an elaborated plan...


There is a doctor on HN who frequently writes about how bad overdosing Vitamin D can be. So I’d be careful on the dosage at least.


I get extreme migraines if I take it every day for more than a week. For me, eating Vitamin D fortified foods and sunlight seems to be more than enough.


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