@ApacheIggy Core Team | Low latency message streaming @laserdata | OSS | 🎓 @iitmadras '17
Bengaluru
Joined November 2014
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Krishna Vishal retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Krishna Vishal retweeted
Spend two weeks writing down every piece of friction you run into or watch someone else run into. Don't fix anything yet. Just log it.
At the end of the two weeks, look for repeats. Pick the one that happens most often and affects the most people. Estimate, roughly, how much time it costs per month. Being off by half is fine. You only need to know whether it's 2 hours or 200.
Fix that one thing, properly, at the layer where it keeps happening. Then tell people it's fixed, and tell them roughly how much time it gives back. That last step matters more than it should. Invisible work stays invisible unless someone makes it visible, and you're the only one who knows it happened.
Repeat.
Keep a friction log. It doesn't need to be a formal one and you can just write a note on your phone or a text file. Now, every time something wastes your time or someone else's, write it down. After a few weeks, patterns show up. The things that recur are the things worth fixing. One-offs usually aren't.
Krishna Vishal retweeted
Increasing carb intake for 60 g/day to 200 g/day was enough to raise T3 by 43%.
low carbing nukes one of the most important hormones we humans have.
Krishna Vishal retweeted
i regret to inform you that personal growth rarely comes from acquiring new knowledge and almost always from:
-getting humiliated
-showing up terrified and doing it anyway
-admitting you might be the problem
Krishna Vishal retweeted
I found a way to speed up Rust builds by 10x...
the project isn't ready just yet but I have some early numbers to share
some details:
- dissolve crates as the compile unit (@charliermarsh)
- aggressively cache codegen on a per function basis
- fine-grained span invalidation
Krishna Vishal retweeted
Jordan Epstein: Ouch, you didn’t like my name? 🥲
I thought I had a pretty cool one!
Iggy = Italian Greyhound. One of the fastest dogs in the world. 🐕⚡
Fast dog. Fast streaming engine. Now does the name make a little more sense? 😄
lnkd.in/p/gWw8x8Rc
Krishna Vishal retweeted
Look at him, thats my Qual.
Your what?
My Qualitative! My vibe specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face.
I'll give you a hint, his name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in bushwick! Yeah I'm sure of the vibe.
Quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants
I've been skeptical about the whole - software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument
But I've seen first hand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists
I predict the trend accelerates
Letter from @AQRCapital below
Krishna Vishal retweeted
"What could possibly go wrong?" Exploring the ruliology of the unexpected ... to develop a theory of bugs ...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/…
Krishna Vishal retweeted
it's crazy that Goethe was dropping these bangers in his private journals 200 years before the internet
Krishna Vishal retweeted
One more stream is here. 💚
Today marks the beginning of a new chapter for @laserdatainc
We’re bringing together three worlds that have largely evolved independently:
1. Real-time message streaming.
2. Agent Data Fabric.
3. Real-time applications.
One infrastructure. One durable foundation.
Today we’re announcing major new capabilities across the stack, from VSR-based clustering in @ApacheIggy and Agent Data Exchange (AGDX) Protocol for agent-agent-system data exchange, to new LaserData Cloud plans (launch, scale, performance, and enterprise) and deployment options across AWS and GCP.
All these capabilities are in PRIVATE BETA, will be GA on September 18, 2026.
And we’re just getting started.
We’ll continue shipping throughout the year. But once in a while, we’ll take a moment to bring together the biggest ideas we’ve been working on and share where we’re taking real-time and agent data infrastructure next.
Welcome to the next chapter of LaserData. 🚀
Krishna Vishal retweeted
Friends, I finished writing a 2-part blog about our #iouring work at @conviva ... this is what i'll be speaking about at @P99CONF . Please read and share widely! bit.ly/io_uring-1
Krishna Vishal retweeted
There's no reason for software to be slow anymore:
danluu.com/perf-opt/
ALT The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly, but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about testing, you can choose how many bugs you want now, which I less eloquently noted here, is becoming more true for performance. In response to a comment in my last post that the cost of formerly specialized performance work has dropped by many orders of magnitude and performance work that used to require a person or team that had a rare set of skills can be done by anyone who can type a few sentences1, which means that you can do all sorts of optimizations that used to be too expensive to be worthwhile for all but the largest scale or most lucrative projects, Marc Brooker responded with Completely agree with your closing point. Dynamic custom software, fitted to a part...
Krishna Vishal retweeted
we hosted an AI salon with @amuldotexe and @lossfunk built around a single question.:
what did you believe about AI a year ago that you don't believe anymore?
over 400 people applied to working theories.
we split the carefully curated teams into five-person pods to go deeper. then everyone came back together and shared what their group had landed on. we closed with an open floor. people brought a problem they were actually stuck on, and the room worked through it together.
a few things came up again and again through the afternoon. whether verification matters more than generation now that code writes itself. whether agent evals are quietly becoming the new unit tests. whether judgement has overtaken output as the scarce skill.
thank you to lossfunk for the space and to amul, who steered the room.
stay tuned for the next one.
Krishna Vishal retweeted
This is like the subprime of databases…
But most (still) don’t recover the WAL correctly in at least two ways cf.:
1. “Can Applications Recover from fsync Failures?”
2. “Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage”
Single node DBs like SQLite can lose committed transactions on storage faults.
And distributed protocols (and DBs built on them) like Paxos and Raft can enter split brain and lose the cluster.
The papers are worth a slow and careful read.
Yes, that was the fix that most DBMSes applied for fsyncgate
But most still don’t use Direct I/O when they replay the WAL on reboot.
So they risk externalizing non-durable data as durable (because they still read from the incoherent kernel page cache).
cf. “Can Applications Recover from fsync Failure?” which looked into this in 2020, two years after these fixes, and found that PG, SQLite et al were still vulnerable.
Krishna Vishal retweeted
This is exceptional feat for an Indian team at a global level - the difference between the first & the second place is significant
@frameo_ai just ranked #1 in Physion Labs’ independent benchmark of AI filmmaking agents.
88.7 overall - 20 points ahead of the runner-up.
The result that interested me most isn’t the ranking. It’s why the gap exists. 🧵
