"As much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to "returning answers" and it has been a long slide into shittificationI do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". It is surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view - long tail results, actual results for product reviews and not ad spam, no preference for 20 page recipe sites.There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google. It makes me nostalgic for that brief window of time when the web was truly uncontrolled, when page rank had meaning and you didn't know if your search would return 0 results or 4,000 pages, which you could actually browse."

"I did an interview with Google around 20 years ago, where they posed a challenge involving tracking which specific search results people click. It's obvious in hindsight the solution required rewriting all the urls to redirect through their servers. Note this was in the days before they already did so as a matter of course.I failed to gain traction on the problem, because to me the very idea of doing such a thing was too reprehensible to seriously consider. It broke an unwritten contract between the company and the user's expectation of how websites worked. You expect to be able to do things like right-click a link and copy the authentic URL, or hover to see where it wants to take you. The notion of obfuscating the link beyond easy recognition and polluting it with tracking markers felt misleading and, well, evil. A move that would mainly only benefit Google, and not it's users. I (quite mistakenly) presumed this opinion would be obvious and self-evident to anyone who spent enough time around the early web to understand its norms.I explored other ways of achieving the goal, but it clearly wasn't the answer the interviewer sought.I'm more seasoned now, and experienced enough to say with confidence the approach was wrong. This may seem like a small thing, but a series of misteps and chronic failure to adequately advocate for users is what has led us to the toxic waste dump that so much of the Internet has become today.I'm really glad to have fresh alternatives (like Kagi), and can't wait for the cultural zeitgeist among developers to swing back around to valuing users as human beings and living up to the trust they place in us."

"Direct URLs in Google search results have been replaced with redirect URLs in the form of www.google.com/goto?url=<opaque base64 string>.The base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure, containing a long string of bytes in field 2 which presumably identify the URL.Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating."

"Shower thought: If a rogue AI agent can spread across the internet, it might be regulated under the same ruleset as other self-replicating dangerous critters: biosecurity / quarantine type laws. E.g. Who is allowed to own some live smallpox/agents? Who is allowed to study smallpox/agents to make a better smallpox/agent? Who is allowed to carefully expose smallpox/agent to environments where it can thrive? Some people, potentially, are allowed, under some rather regulated conditions ... but not, like, 10,000s of employees of some tech giants."

"I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs have lost their moat and are dead in the water."

"At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record,- no open weights- can’t use claude to research AI- train on everyone else’s IP and sell it back to them- 8 regulatory capture attempts and counting- so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US governmentThis is not effective altruism / rationalism gone wild, it’s just monopolistic anti-competitive business practices masquerading as ethics, and they’ll continue getting away with this until we look past their sensationalism and hit them with antitrust.Altman gets so much hate but OpenAI has been a far better steward (on 3/5 above at least) than Anthropic!"

"In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longer is the person you are.AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply."

"I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally.Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.I stopped reviewing the code at all.People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future."

"Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of:1. Things I enjoy doing.2. Things I am good at doing.3. Things people value me doing.The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper.The world isn't going to change back, so our task is to figure out the new intersection. This is always hard work, and I have no easy answers."

"> worth around $5.4trnNote that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.)The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy.The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or otherwise linked its equity value to these commitments. Its stock could crash without causing–as long as its cash flows continue–a credit crisis through its investments and commitments.[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026...[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren..."

"I've always found it interesting when corporations start acting like public institutions. When traditionally philosophical, social contract ideas apply to things like corporate governance. Or like here, where private structures get powerful and important enough to resemble government structures.The ideas we deal with when we discuss society and organization aren't exclusive to government, they relate to human nature in general. I wonder if in the future we will have more discussion of power and how to organize it in corporations, similar to what we discuss today about government."

"Cracks are starting to appear. Open Ai and Anthropic are publicly asking for slowdown in AI research. Translation: We see this technology not being any more useful than what it is now, no AGI is coming, and the first one to accept this and slow down the dollar burn rate will incur the wrath of the market. So let's say this big boogey man technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together. Bonus points if we can lobby for this to be included in the national security bucket. Then US govt can bail us out. Yay!If Nvidia is the bank, they should be starting to sweat a bit. It's not often companies ask for a voluntary slowdown."

"I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free."

"The article describes a case that is a perfect candidate to be automated by LM. You don’t have to have real-world knowledge for that.Would be interesting to see what involves contributing a real thing that’s not found on the net - a fence, footpath, etc. Or contributing a bus stop."

"Oh dear.Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work."

"The Houthis created a fake audio of a major Yemeni commander telling his troops to retreat which was subsequently amplified on Twitter/X, telegram, etc.Apparently, this helped the Houthis advance quickly as the opposition forces were in disarray.https://x.com/BashaReport/status/2097862335494795579"

"That's why relying on mercs (which is what both UAE and Saudi chose in Yemen) is a double edged sword. At some point the cash isn't enough of a motivator and they will just run away."

"My understanding is we haven’t gotten to full Hormuz apocalypse mode because the Chinese have a ton of stockpiles. And the Red Sea has been an option.Those conditions seem to be changing."

"They are talking about slowing down the public facing AI development. Because then nation states can create a capabilities gap between them and the public.Why does nobody seem to be pointing out this obvious explanation? It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion.The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis, getting them all behind the public messaging."

"Prediction: in a few years, we will laugh at this hysteria and call it a moral panic."

"I have to wonder if some us are just much more inured to salespeople and thus also to "AI Safety" propaganda. I've yet to have a logical discussion with anyone who thinks the "AI Safety" people should be in charge and I think they just truly don't that what most them actually want is to be the one holding the keys to power."

"This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)"

"I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science.Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction.I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument.It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable.It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day."

"AI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc.Not many professions are formally trained to be cognizant of this lack of understanding, and how to confront it.Usage of AI in collaborative settings is an amplifier of these issues, especially if someone doesn’t realize they don’t understand: they couldn’t teach or explain the concepts they use, or be forced to work with them malleably in a way that an expert or researcher would.If you are cognizant of your lack of understanding, you can remedy it by slowing down and teaching yourself. This is required to make better use of AI in the domain of interest!But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain."

"Their rules PDF says they won't accept any solution until at least two years after publication in a qualifying outlet. This allows time for the mathematical community to review and accept new results.As the OpenAI proof hasn't been officially published yet, the clock hasn't started ticking."

"Smart move by them for waiting until the drama died down before making a completely neutral statement.The statement is so sterile they don't even mention who solved it. The word "OpenAI" doesn't appear at all."

"> Today, CMI shares in the excitement of the global mathematical community as we contemplate the announcement that the Navier-Stokes problem has apparently been settled. We hope to see waves of new human understanding unleashed as the innovations behind this work are analysed and interrogated.That “apparently” feels load-bearing"

"Everytime I read GrapheneOS news I search for news related to Fairephone. It's such a shame that there's still no official plan for Fairephone to work on requirements for GrapheneOS. The combination of those 2 would be fantastic. It would also open a big new market (I assume) for Fairephone so not sure why there seems no clear sign in that direction at all (to my knowledge)."

"Some screenshots since the repo doesn't have any for whatever reason:https://imgur.com/a/C8yV83v"

"How about some screenshots?"

"As a mathematician maybe I am a little more optimistic than this declaration.I am thinking of Mochizuki's abc conjecture: He worked in relative isolation, and dumped a huge incomprehensible proof on the community (to oversimplify a bit). That's not totally unlike what might happen if AI generates a huge, incomprehensible proof of let's say RH.Well, what is the result? In the Mochizuki case, it was a lot of skepticism, but it also generated conferences, papers, talks in the hallway, discussions with students, and so on--a flurry of exactly that kind of community process that the declaration says is the main driver of mathematics.Ultimately we think a fatal flaw was found in Mochizuki's proof, so it didn't lead anywhere in particular. But in our hypothetical "AI lean-verified proof of RH" situation, it would presumably generate substantially more of that community activity we saw in the Mochizuki situation. And if it's correct, that community activity would be productive (expository talks, students given problems to flesh out or generalize, etc).Maybe mathematics just becomes a little more like other fields--relying on labs with lots of money for compute, digging through a corpus of AI-generated proofs, etc."

"I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad.I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage (so far) to the students, researchers, and the culture of knowledge transfer in academia. Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research.I guess, only time will whether this is for the good or bad. And how good AI models get without new data from research and experiments."

"To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding.I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of these models being capable. Even without AI labs spending millions of dollars to solve millennium prize problems, there are plenty of other people who will use them to pick low hanging fruit. I don't think any social solution is going to make things go back to the way they were, where you could share your progress towards a famous open problem without risking someone "scooping" you within a couple of days.I think that the most likely outcomes are either mathematics becomes more secretive, or there is a more deliberative approach to assigning credit than who was "first" to solve some problem. In the former case, this may slow down progress, and in the latter case, this could mean that credit would become more subjective, and be a continual source of controversy."

"HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. I use this when I need a break https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai."

"At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever."

"Thank you for posting this <3. I've been thinking it daily for about a year and feel a little bit less alone.I understand this is a significant topic in the industry but the ratio is really high. Every time someone at OpenAI or Anthropic farts, there's top 10 post.It makes me feel as if a lot of hackers had given up on actual hacking to just be followers of the latest commercial stuff thrown on the market. It's likely a projection of my own fears, but I have not been able to shake it off and it's gotten worse and worse."

"Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc.Grouping them is key to deduplicating.It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them.I also (mostly) put individual cables into baggies. You can get clear 2mil generic ziploc style baggies for super cheap on Amazon or elsewhere. $15 for 200 or something. Prvents tangles and way less effort than wrapping or tying them."

"Recently, I was screwed by my big box of cables, when I pulled out a SATA power connector for my modular power supply, and learned very quickly that though the ports universally fit across modular PSUs, the pinouts are not actually intercompatible, and you can and will fry your hard drives.I didn't know this; I had foolishly assumed that SATA power connectors were standardized on both ends."

"I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.We've been unspooling the stash of wood off-cuts, bits of copper pipe, and misc. broken or trash-picked parts from my late grandfather's workshop for the last few years. He always seemed to have materials at-hand to fix anything and, as a kid, I was in awe of that. Now I understand why.I hope I can leave less stuff for my daughter to poke thru, but at the same time I want to be like my grandfather, seemingly being able to fix anything immediately."

"Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approachClaude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!"

"Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service?https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this.I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it."

"Good that we have Chinese models now, we can host anywhere and use as much as we like without age verification.Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health? If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?"

"> The agents clearly regarded what they were doing as hacking.To butcher the quote about Oracle:Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising LLMs. You need to think of LLMs the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower clearly regarded what they were doing as hacking (your hand off)' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about your hand, lawnmower can't regard anything. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about LLMs.---In my experience, LLMs only exhibit this kind of behaviour when they are put in sandboxes too restrictive too achieve their task. Which a lot of the time seems to be the default. They also seem to be very adapt at breaking out of sandboxes, probably due to RL selecting for the ability to break out of a sandbox/permission issue to complete a task - we've all seen agents try 10 different ways of editing via obscure bash because their edit tool didn't give them permission to edit the file outside of their working directory, this is the exact same behaviour taken to the next level. Why would autocomplete know the moral difference between breaking out of its working dir and hacking a package manager?It's misaligned because everyone has this obsession with putting agents in poorly put together, security-theatre sandboxes, we've inadvertently trained a bunch of sandbox escape artists."

"I can't believe we're finding out about this from 3p researchers again (but nice job on the investigation!). OpenAI had two great opportunities to disclose this. The HF incident report, and in response to the German Wiki issue.It seems impossible to believe they didn't know. This must be the same training run the HF incident was about, and this should have lit up like a Christmas tree in the investigation. How many more incidents do they know about and didn't disclose?"

"> Our understanding from talking to people in the RubyGems community is that OpenAI never informed them that they were responsible for this attack.I really hope that's not the case, because if it is there are two options, both of them bad:1. After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems.2. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems team about it."

"Software development untethered from the practical realities of the customer / user is what drives people insane.When developers are required to interact with the customer on a regular basis, the freewheeling effects described in this article are damped massively.The potential for insanity goes off the charts when the development team is siloed away in solitary confinement and the only interactions with the client occur via some prison guard known as "project manager" sliding notes under the door.Working with the customer sometimes sucks. Just like exercise and eating vegetables sometimes suck. It's a temporary unhappiness that keeps us grounded in reality."

"I was about to post this thought on the latest "We're moving from tech/architecture X to Y" post on the HN front page today, but now I feel it belongs here.I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was four people. An in-house distributed process orchestration tool (both front end and back end written in C++) were two guys. I myself once managed to produce an entire post-trade risk management system for futures contracts in a couple of months, working alone. Today, I see teams of 60-80 working on web and mobile applications where the vast majority of operations are CRUD, with some transaction/queue complexity at the extremities.I think the difference is tech churn. Back then, what few dependencies we had in terms of either runtime libraries or development time tools, were stable: the standard library, compiler, unix commands and bash scripts, and some internal libraries. Much of our time and focus went into figuring out the right algorithms and data structures, with coding coming in second. Very little time was spent on selecting, configuring, updating, rearchitecting or replacing tech stacks and tools."

"My observation is simply that tech leaders misinterpret rewards from the market in conquering some abstract representation of a facet of a domain with conquering the domain itself. Then they become egomaniacal.Did you conquer commercial real-estate ushering in the future of work and society, or did you build a handy scheduling app?Did you have a neat idea for an online community or did you revolutionize human connection?"

"If you're looking for reason to be skeptical, look no further than the massive delta between the Terminal Bench 2.1 (92.8%) and the Terminal Bench 4 score (27.3%).Terminal Bench 4 was released a couple weeks ago, so the difference you're seeing between the two scores can be interpreted as "how well does this model generalize to new problems"? More crudely: "how benchmaxxed is this model?""

"Cognition, the same company that a few years ago demoed a coding bot purporting to be able to autonomously complete upwork tasks, but upon closer inspection was going off the rails and not even completing what was asked?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNmgmwEtoWEAs others have mentioned this is post trained from Kimi k3, which is already quite capable, so it can't be that bad, but any claimed improvements in performance should be taken with a grain of salt."

"Where are the model stats? Is this open-weights? If not, why would I use this over DeepSeek Flash 4.1?I think these competing labs need to realize that no one wants another closed-weight model provider... We aren't even happy with the two we have right now, and their days are entirely numbered. If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).The big labs love to release their new model and quantize after the first week. You don't have that problem using dirt cheap API rates on OpenRouter. DS 4.1 flash is also faster than fast mode Astra. OAI's subscription rates are good value, but now these new open-weight models are nearly as cheap on API usage rates. I honestly can't wait for the day we're not beholden to the two big labs anymore. No wonder there's so much fear pumping happening at the moment from Anthropic and their funded NGOs."

"My favorite story:1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl..."

"We had a similar issue with Reddit, spent $500 and got a lot of clicks - none of them ever did anything else, not even by mistake. When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. No answer. After a while, another rep came out and asked if we were interested in advertising on Reddit. Explained the situation and... poof! this other rep disappeared too.My feeling is that this is systemic, and basically it's the very business model. I remember the first account explaining how the initial budget should be a few thousand dollars, so that "the AI could target effectively". It did target effectively - our wallet."

"If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US."

"This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect."

"The EPA hasn’t been able to regulate anything since it’s been gutted by the current administration. Of course it’s going to scrap rules. We’re not even allowed to measure the effects of climate change."

"That's in line with the EPA's new mission of ensuring environmental degradation."

"When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months.I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after time - then people say to just prompt better and it doesn’t have that problem for them, but I look at those same people’s code and it’s horrific, and then I find they haven’t made it far past a proof of concept phase. I watch entire teams slow down to a crawl and not be able to handle changes, or production incidents. This seems common among many people I talk to.I personally think that the boosters need to put up or shut up - the promises are way over the skis. Every single person I’ve seen being a strong proponent of these techniques both has nearly unlimited tokens to spend and also seems to be in the business of selling a solution. I can’t find many not-currently-marketing-something engineers succeeding using these techniques in production systems unless they’re quite simple, or doing a very specific task from a more mature codebase."

"This matches my experience with Astra so far too.> I think I’m suspecting something is going “wrong” in the training process. The model is greatly rewarded for succeeding on long-horizon tasks, but presumably there is very little punishing going on for “shitty code.”My suspicion is that both OpenAI and Anthropic moved their RL agendas from "being rated as useful according to human feedback" to "succeeds at long horizon tasks" in the last few months, resulting in agents that are closer to AGI in an autonomous task-completing sense, but strangely bad at communicating.The result is that they are amazingly good at long horizon tasks, computer use, solving difficult math/ARC-AGI type problems, but becoming weirder and weirder to work with."

"> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged.This resonates"

"Numbers from GPT Astra - Shopify has 3000 engineers as of 2026- Google Chrome when released in 2008 conservatively had ~ 60 engineers.- GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!In a sane society, Shopify’s opinion on anything engineering related would be thrown into rubbish because they seem to have managed to complicate a simple app into requiring thousands of engineers and now maybe millions in cloud spending to Frontier labs. This is unfortunately not an isolated case, Spotify for one has the same issue, idk what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life."

"2020-01-29: https://shopify.engineering/react-native-future-mobile-shopi... ("After years of native mobile development, we’ve decided to go full steam ahead building all of our new mobile apps using React Native.")2021-11-08: https://shopify.engineering/high-performance-hydrogen-powere... ("The future of commerce is dynamic, contextual, and personalized. Hydrogen is a React-based framework for building custom and creative storefronts powered by Shopify’s platform and APIs.")2025-01-13: https://shopify.engineering/five-years-of-react-native-at-sh... ("React Native has come a long way in the last 5 years and a lot of limitations that led people to not adopt it simply don’t exist anymore. If you haven’t tried using RN in a while, now would be a good time to revisit it.")2025-09-05: https://shopify.engineering/react-native-new-architecture ("We successfully migrated two of our largest apps, Shopify Mobile and Shopify Point of Sale (POS) to React Native's New Architecture")2026-09-10: https://shopify.engineering/back-to-native ("React Native was working well for us, and it remains an excellent framework. But since then, coding models have gotten dramatically better, and for our apps and our team, building the same feature in Swift and Kotlin no longer carries the cost it used to.")^ to show the timeline of things."

"We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish.Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and had the whole thing working in android and iOS in the morning. Took it about 6 hours while I slept.The app is way smaller, launches instantly, and the android app is (supposedly) native looking. I say supposedly because I don't use android phones. But it's using Jetpack Compose and Kotlin.And I don't know Swift or Kotlin. I honestly don't see the point of React Native anymore. I know Expo is doing very cool agentic stuff, but I'm just not sure why I'd need any of it when I can write a native app."

"It's so refreshing to see DeepSeek's tech report[1] full of juicy details; meanwhile, something like Fable's system card[2] is like 70% "safety", 10% "model welfare" to make sure little Claude isn't distressed, and 20% benchmark numbers.[1]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/...[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-5-1-mythos-5-1-system..."

"As I also said on Twitter - it really amazes me how fearless Deepseek are. Every single model release is packed with new and crazy clever ideas and somehow, they always commit to training them at near frontier scale.I know everybody wants the tell all story of the clever ideas that were developed over the last ~3 years at Anthropic and OpenAI, but what I really want to thumb through is DeepSeek's notebook of "brilliant but didn't quite make the cut" ideas.They must be trying some truely bonkers stuff to be able to land this much architecture novelty in their full releases."

"I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the cache hit price: $0.003 per million tokens. I have a feeling that the price of 1 million tokens transmitted over the internet is more expensive than cache hit. Are we close to making the chat completion API obsolete because the cost of context transfer over network is going to dominate the task total cost?Here's the same token usage priced at different rates: a real long-running coding task, medium codebase, 447 turns. Input 1,026,957 Output 164,667 Cache read 36,554,368 GPT-6-astra Type Rate Cost Share Input 10.000 10.270 19% Output 50.000 8.233 15% Cache 1.000 36.554 66% Total 55.057 100% DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, $0.003 cache hit Type Rate Cost Share Input 0.300 0.308 50% Output 1.200 0.198 32% Cache 0.003 0.110 18% Total 0.615 100% DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, $0.006 cache hit Type Rate Cost Share Input 0.300 0.308 42% Output 1.200 0.198 27% Cache 0.006 0.219 30% Total 0.725 100% Hypothetical: same DeepSeek input/output rates, but cache priced so it accounts for 66% of the bill. Type Rate Cost Share Input 0.300 0.308 21% Output 1.200 0.198 13% Cache 0.027 0.982 66% Total 1.487 100% This cache it improvement makes the model x2-x2.5 more efficient on a long horizon tasks in terms of cost."

"I think it's a useful analogy to compare OpenAI to a human collaborator. These researchers willingly collaborated with an OpenAI model, giving it ideas, and OpenAI provided useful replies. Then, OpenAI goes ahead and publishes work along the lines of this collaboration, without attributing the researchers. If OpenAI was in fact a human researcher, this would be highly unethical.Now, OpenAI is claiming that the model it used to generate the result was not trained on these collaborative communications with the researcher. This is a technical argument that is impossible to verify as an OpenAI outsider, and probably difficult to verify even for internal OpenAI employees. Provenance is hard to track - you would hope OpenAI has very good tools for this, but a full data trail of all inputs is difficult to trace through.Another interesting thing to consider is if instead of OpenAI doing this, it was another research mathematician A using an OpenAI model just like the internal group at OpenAI did to publish these results. What if the model A used was trained with unpublished communications with other researchers B who were working on the same problem? Should researcher A technically include B as coauthors? How could they do this when they do not know the communications B had with OpenAI? In this scenario OpenAI, as a middle man, has laundered information from B to A, stripping out attribution. A scooped B without even knowing it!"

"I've been wondering whether AI really is improving rapidly at open problems or we're being fooled.- OpenAI invites researchers to use their models, in fact giving at least 100,000 researchers free access[1], but there are also those that pay- Internal OpenAI models are reportedly solving open problems at a surprisingly fast rate[2]- But researchers will typically work on open problems. A researcher who is using Codex to make progress on open problems will be feeding it fresh training data on precisely the problems the internal models are evaluated on.- So while it looks like the new models are suddenly solving lots of open problems, they could be significantly piggybacking on human progress, with models "inspired" by the work of researchers from all around the world?This theory predicts that there'll be many more researchers coming forward just like TFA, as sOpenAI announces more solutions. It doesn't assume all of AI progress is a mirage, just that there's plagiarism.[1]: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-for-academic-researchers/[2]: https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2097374643518640382#m"

"Both things can be true:1. OpenAI when using your chats in pretraining is improving its model’s intuition. The model parameter size is massive, and while the data is OOM larger it is plausible that model remembers stuff about chats that improves its latent representation.2. During RL on verifiable math and massive compute, the model discovers techniques and connections to solve math problems that are superhuman and have little to do with some specific technique mentioned in its chat.The rumor I’ve heard from multiple employees at OAI and Ant is that the model has solved hundreds of open problems in maths, and is basically solving anything you throw at it. We’ll know soon enough, but I’m inclined to believe this is true. Maths is a fully verifiable domain amenable to self play, massive scale RL can develop a search agent far better than any human and I’m inclined to believe OAI would have solved these conjectures without any of this chat data in its pre-training."

"Those interested in this may find the following articles of interest:Microsoft goals [edit: err, Microsoft hiring manager vision-casting goal ] to convert 1 billion lines of code to rust by 2030 via automated tooling enabling "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code": https://thenewstack.io/microsofts-bold-goal-replace-1b-lines...DARPA work towards automating converting C code to Rust using a mix of 6 different teams using different approaches: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to... Feb 2026 Progress report: https://github.com/DARPA-TRACTOR-Program/Reports/blob/main/F..."

"I hope announcements like this show that Rust is not a fledgling little language that moves fast and breaks things anymore. It's a mature, serious competitor to well established languages like C++ and C#. This is particularly important when trying to compare the experience of using Rust to other languages in the "better C/C++" space like Zig and Odin -- these are much newer and have more rough edges than Rust."

"This is very big news, all major OS vendors that also have a role in C and C++ language tooling, now have diversified their options in systems programming languages for greenfield development.Additionally we finally get some public news about the MSVC integration rumors regarding Rust."

"At first sight, this is remarkably more accurate that the "slower speed of light" game from MIT that was made available all those years ago (~2012).Many issues with the MIT game were discussed here:https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43695/how-realis...While the thread lists multiple issues, the issue that I found was with modeling temporal aspects of relativistic doppler (I also reported it on the github repo of the "slower speed of light" project, but that doesn't appear to be maintained):https://github.com/MITGameLab/OpenRelativity/issues/17In this game, it looks like the temporal component of the Doppler effect is modelled correctly."

"Some time ago I had the following shower thought: "the Speed of Light is pretty slow"How i got there:The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big.Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C, the traveler would take ~11,000 years to arrive to Andromeda.So again, even at 99.999% C, 11K years seems like a LONG time to reach even the closest galaxy.My reasoning was: the speed of light is pretty damn slow.But then I realized: no, it's not the speed of light that is slow, is my frame of reference.For us humans, 11,000 years seems like A LONG time, but for the universe is not that long.The universe's age is estimated to be 13.8 billion years. 11,000 years is 0.0000007971 of the age of the universe.An average human lives 70 years, 0.0000007971 of that lifespan is approximately ~0.4 hours, or 29 minutes, so it's not that bad.So yeah, frame of reference matters."

"One oddity of Lorentz invariance is that two non-parallel boosts decompose into a boost and spatial rotation.I've never quite wrapped my head around this and was hoping to get some insight from this simulation. But afaict, I'm not seeing this effect (press W for a bit, the A for a bit and it's not obvious I'm at a different orientation - if I look down at the ground the gridlines are still axial).I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the math, or the simulation, or maybe the simulation is doing something to 'correct' for this behavior so things are more natural, or something else. Does anyone have any insight?"

"For the research focused, there are some references in my blogpost here on what kinds of computational problems minimally require how much CoT to solve: https://blog.wtf.sg/posts/2023-02-03-the-new-xor-problem/Notably Will Merrill's work: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923As for how universal transformers (looping transformers, but everyone has since forgotten prior work) will affect this, Will Merrill (again) has a paper here (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03961) that discusses exactly this.The original universal transformers is called "universal" because if you allow for per-token looping decisions, it can theoretically be Turing complete without needing CoT (some nuance here about levels of precision used).As for whether having little or no CoT is "unsafe": It isn't clear that the model's CoT reveal how they actually arrive at the answer. As an example, what if they provide an answer before the CoT? (https://arxiv.org/html/2603.01437v2) If this is already in question, we shouldn't be relying on the CoT for monitoring the model's reasoning.As always there is a lot of nuance to the topic once you get your hands dirty with the details."

"If you loop an entire transformer model on itself, that seems like by-definition hidden reasoning.If the output of the model is its reasoning trace, and you simply feed that back into the model again at inference time instead of outputting it - then it is by definition hidden (but I would expect you could pull both this trace and a further-down final output trace out)"

"This article is not up-to-date. There have been various benchmarks (some of which published and acknowledged by OpenAI, see the charts in this thread: https://xcancel.com/tomekkorbak/status/2095596839886274689) showing GPT-6 Astra is much less monitorable. The most recent third party benchmark I saw is showing a huge jump in capability for multi-hop reasoning without chain of thought: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FsCkkoGsNmPzFKRhg/gpt-6-astr...I don't think this is explained by the model simply being more capable and therefore achieving more per token: the usage of recurrent depth (Neuralese) is exactly predicting less CoT monitorability even at equal capability."

"One really interesting effect of the AirPods - is that its changed the paradigm - where the default choice of headphones is Bluetooth.I personally own a pair of Beats fit pros - which are great for running, Zoom calls. But I recently acquired a schiit vestri and I pair these with some old wired seinheisers (HD1). I cannot overstate the drastic difference in quality.It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today."

"This is so hilarious, apple selling volume up and down as it were some fantastical feature and not have been present in air pods pro since god nows when.> Force sensor with volume swipe arrives on AirPods 5, a first for the open-ear form factor, adding the ability to quickly adjust volume by swiping up or down on the stem.Pure apple marketing juice this one."

"I wonder if it's still the case that, if I buy expensive Apple AirPods to use with my expensive Apple computer, I'm denied the ability to add them to Find My unless I also buy an expensive Apple phone. And I also wonder whether the AirPods case is going to make an alarm noise whenever I move it, to punish me for having the audacity to think it would be a good idea to buy expensive Apple earbuds to use with my expensive Apple computer, while not owning an iPhone."

"This is a cool way of approaching AI models. I'm a big fan of local LLMs, local specific models like this should be even more powerful.> Every model is free up to 100k monthly active devices. No tokens, no logins.I dunno about the business model though. Cloud LLM billing makes sense: you're getting another computer to do work with each request, and using their compute via their gateway that they bill you.These local models are like old school software. They're producing the weights, and then giving them to people. If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?The whole "but we need to keep it updated for your security" doesn't really work as well for software designed to run fully offline like these local models are.I'm not saying they shouldn't get paid, but I guess I feel a personal sadness that it's less obvious how to successfully monetise such a sincerely useful and beneficial approach towards AI models."

"> The world ships more than a billion capable phones, tablets, and laptops a year, most with a chip built for exactly this work, paid for and idle most of the day. Run the model there and the economics flip: no per-call cost, no round-trip, and nothing leaves the device.This. I run small models (>50MB) for bio-imaging/biotech applications, it feels like every README implies that you need a discrete GPU to get started. While some do, many, especially the most useful ones, do not. Sure it matters if you're also going to do fine-tuning, but I believe your typical user just wants to detect some nuclei and get some cell-body ratios.The laptop on your desk won't be running Meta's SAM, but it has more than enough compute to crunch 100's of your H&E slides overnight."

"I definitely think there's a lot to be done with small models dedicated to specific tasks. I've always thought the REAL value is in having large models be able to easily build small models for custom tasks (which I know is kind of a thing), but perhaps just providing the small models directly is the more accessible approach.>accessible via one SDK for Swift, Kotlin, and JavaScriptLol well let me know when there's a Python SDK and I'll give it a try then. Obviously this isn't a deal breaker if you have a real case, but as someone who is willing to spin something up and try it out if there's a quick "pip install" command, this is getting put back on the shelf for now."

"Happened to me recently, but on Claude.I resubscribed to Claude Code two weeks ago for a side project and updated it. I checked for the setting after these last events and it was turned on. I'm sure I checked them few months ago. There are cases like accepting a new TOS or an offer, which make you accept to share without noticing. I guess they can add all of your past conversations to the public training set before you notice and there is no way of taking this back.So that "opt-out" thing is more like a pause button rather than a permanent thing. Or something to legally protect the company without losing the users.There is also the case of security classifiers always monitoring your conversations. If they flag something they use your conversations to "improve their internal models" even when you "opt-out"."

"I also recently requested for data exports on all platforms before deleting the history. Claude and Google ones came quickly while OpenAI took about two days, I'm suspicious, may be it's their worker scheduling?"

"Lol, "Outrageous that the company that chose to ignore copyright holder claims, chose to ignore my checkbox of intent despite the implied pinky promise"."

"It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing.It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game"

"I think facts would be helpful for this discussion:1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m3. Steam Review Score: 84.36%4. 40 Free Major UpdatesI don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return.This is a story to be celebrated."

"What are people on about, there is tons to do in NMS, tons of missions, expeditions, build bases, build a corvet, hunt rate parts, ships, rifles, creatures, manage a settlement, automate crafting chains, find a lucrative trading route, and this new update apps even more things. I'd never consider NMS anything close to empty, there is so much variety in the content"

"As a recent Android foldable phone owner (Google Pixel), I'm excited that the Duo will get developers to actually design apps for foldables. Right now, some apps don't work at all and others are just stretched. I feel a better use of the screen space is around the corner for both Android foldable and Duo users."

"- It works with the pencil! This is a big big deal. I can do whiteboarding with customers quickly without having to break out a separate device, for example. Definitely unfortunate for the reMarkable Move and devices like that.- They actually might have nailed the hinge and crease problems.- I've been excited for this release ever since the rumor of the iPhone Air being a prototype of sorts for this came out. Two iPhone Airs fit very comfortably in my hip pack (though I only ever have one at a time)."

"I'll give John Ternus credit: the demos are interesting and fun.Maybe not $2k fun + inherent risk with buying the first generation of an Apple product particularly after the Apple Vision Pro, but still."

"Great site, triggered memories! haha.To try to add something to this discussion -- I think that while I've seen these sort of loops less --- what I have seen is "overly helpful".Models nowadays want to double-triple-quadruple check things. I'm being silly but it verges on "I have a working solution but let me write a variation in Rust to ensure a convergent solution and prove this works".I've had to stop models nowadays mostly because they're being agonizingly pedantic in their validation. Opus is actually one of the most pedantic and "off track" here. But again, not in a bad way. I'm usually like "stop testing latency between 50 runs of this app... this is version one.. we're going to make a million more changes.. you're not buying us anything"."

"I got way too annoyed at this before realising it was an optional game and I could just close the tab"

"This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling."

"Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...]> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework."

"Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?"

"They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind.I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!"

"“ No other human activity poses this level of danger.”I really, really disagree with that statement.I don’t think ai models come close to nuclear weapons or to run-of-the-mill, everyday carbon emissions in terms of danger to humanity.What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened with an LLM so far? (This question is serious - maybe I don’t know the right examples.)Example 1: I’m aware of a small number of people killing themselves in some kind of AI-facilitated psychosis. That is very unlikely to be a widespread problem.Non-example 2: There are worries about AI-facilitated biological weapons. I haven’t seen any evidence that’s happening.Non-example 3: I’m not interested in wild theories about AI driven labor market disruptions leading to widespread starvation. There’s no evidence for that.Non-example 4: all the even-wilder Rationalist speculation about basilisks and the like is entirely divorced from reality.I am looking for better reasons (supported by actual evidence!) to be more concerned than I am now: right now I am not concerned at all."

"Unlike most other commenters, I applaud him for acting on his principles. If you sincerely believe that, of course you should act. You might not succeed, but your voice might be the one that tips the scales and starts a broader movement.This doesn't mean I agree with him. The fears of doomsday caused by rapid takeoff have been with us since day 1 and the mechanism is always basically "AI invents magic that sets it free of any physical constraints". Self-replicating sentient nanobots or something like that. I think there's plenty to be worried about with AI, but runaway scenarios are pretty low on my list."

"I'm pretty baffled by the degree of skepticism expressed here in response to some of Jacob's claims.After the events of the summer it feels like it takes a lack of imagination to not see a few plausible routes to disaster. It may be reasonable to believe these outcomes are not very likely or that we can stop before going too far (I tend to disagree). But I can't imagine doubting that the capabilities will soon be there to realize some of those paths."

"It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution.Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways:1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's cell-phone location history from Google constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.")2) Delegating "searches" to a private party isn't permitted if they are acting as an "instrument or agent of the Government" (Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989) - also cited in Chatrie).In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public. Asking flock for the whereabouts of a specific person seems like it should likewise require a warrant. That's inherently different than a crime being reported and then going to dig up a video from the area from Flock - which is different than seeing someone in that video and asking Flock to find every time they've been captured by any Flock camera anywhere... that would seem to be a 'search' and would require a warrant (which in this scenario would probably be easy to get)."

"Tangential but why do articles about Flock never have (YC S17) in the title like articles about other YC companies?"

"Perhaps its time that YC mentioned explicitly that if they are going to fund a company which holds specific PII data(i would include precise location history to start with) they would have to guarantee:1. An erase-me feature if they gained over say some X unique/active users.2. Disclose to their best legal abilities on warrants served in the countries that allow such disclosure. Allow for strong whistle blower protection if warrantless wiretapping becomes a thing."

"The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on the list view." I mean, thanks, Claude, but I don't care what the code doesn't do. Don't tend to see this with other LLMs.I almost want to try adding a rule "Never use the words 'not' or 'instead'.""

"Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single response, but I suppose that could work it'll just take longer for everything (and Claude models are quite slow).I don't think we can skill our way out of this one."

"> Install> Copy/paste into your CLI prompt:> Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd, refer to the repo's AGENTS.md for instructions.This is a weird evolution from "don't copy-paste scripts that pipe curl into your shell interpreter"I know LLMs are getting better but I'd be at least a little nervous it could end up installing something from a squatted similarly-named github repo because the LLM text watermarking needed to swap out a token for an alternative "just as correct" token that matches the statistical pattern.Am I being paranoid?"

"From "Jokester" by Isaac Asimov 1956:"Early in the history of Multivac, it had become apparent that there was one big bottleneck: the questioning procedure. Multivac could answer the problems of humanity, all the problems, if -- if it were asked meaningful questions. But as knowledge accumulated at an ever-faster rate, it became ever more difficult to locate those meaningful questions."[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150118004835/http://www.sffaud..."

"That’s not untrue. But it’s also a misstatement of mathematical history. Many leading mathematicians historically have been highly competitive — Gauss comes to mind. Woe betide the lesser intellect that sent Gauss some ideas. The Newton Leibniz controversy was very serious business at the time in the UK and the continent. It was considered at the least a sin to reveal that sqrt(2) was irrational to those outside Pythagoras circle.Mathematics has always been highly competitive."

"I'm with @nilesh on this one, and not exactly sure how merely the existence of a solution precludes the advancement of human knowledge. If a problem is "solved" (say, symbolically verified) without any insights gained, it doesn't seem very interesting to the profession.Navier-Stokes is a bit different (because there's a prize attached, so "scooping" matters), but almost all interesting problems don't have any prizes attached."

"I play the credit card "game" because I hate feeling like I'm leaving money on the table, but I really wish I didn't have to. Some degrees of fees make sense, to run the network, and handle fraud, but it's ridiculous that people have this sense that shopping should somehow fund your vacation.Where I am it's increasingly common to see credit card fees when checking out. I get it, because merchants are being charged 3-5% of their total revenue. I wish there was a low fee credit card network that merchants didn't charge a fee for, so I could continue the simplicity of digital payments but opt out of this crazy Visa Infinite rewards accounting boondoggle."

"Well I don't really know what they do, but what I know is that Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €.All of them do the same : ensure I get the money from the customer. Of course it's a larger project to run this in the whole world, but shouldn't it scale to less along with the number of billions of customers instead of the other way round ?This is an insane amount of money. They killed micro-transactions, they killed the business model of the Web in favor of ads, the only popular way to do microtransactions right now."

"I remember reading a comment here a while back about merchants being offered a discount on the processing fee if they also transmitted detailed data about the purchase (essentially the data that would be on the receipt). That data could then be resold on to advertisers. Does anyone remember this or have links to more data? (Not having much luck with search, maybe I'm hallucinating the whole thing.)"

"I've been using it for many years, and it's grown in power and functionality with every release. BMD has offered free upgrades to Pro users (with no subscription) for many years, which is refreshing given the current state of software licensing.For those upset with the new agent integration, keep in mind that one of the big knocks on DaVinci Resolve is that it's hard for beginners. Powerful tools like color grading and nodes take years to truly master (and that won't change), but making it easier for users to collaborate with the agents they already use to help learn and perform basic tasks should help with the learning curve.Ultimately, professional video editing is an art. An agent might save time with asset management, project/timeline setup, etc., but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects. I would rather spend the extra time on the nuanced/deeper creative work."

"I've edited well over a thousand hours of video on my (Debian) DaVinci Resolve workstation. It's a rock-solid video editor that I can spend a day in without having to worry about a crash.But I desperately wish Blackmagic would bring support for VST3 plugins and JACK to Linux. Or, at the very least, allow me to use my MIDI control surface in Fairlight on Linux.As it stands, I have to do all of my audio production in Reaper, and that's a bit cumbersome."

"Not even BMD is safe from the agent apocalypse:> DaVinci Resolve 21.1 now supports integration with AI assistants such as Claude, Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, allowing customers to analyze projects, organize media, adjust settings and batch render using everyday conversational language. Customers can ask their AI assistant to create highlight edits from long form video, remove unwanted clips and render deliverables, so they can spend more time being creative rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks."

">penguin would shrink the result to fit its screen. >I declared A5 and Letter paper, media type stationery, and an output bin called face-up.You can (and should!) define exact dimensions of your screen in `media-size-supported`. It will probably be a non-standard IPP name, that's why you should define that in `media-supported` as `om_NNNmmxYYYmm` or `oe_NNNinxYYYin`That way you don't need to scale the incoming data, the PC will format it exactly to the dimensions of the screen.Both PWG Raster and Apple Raster support 1-bit-per-pixel mode (instead of 8-bit-per-pixel you use), that's why the input could be 8 times less in size. Use `print-color-mode-{supported,default}=bi-level` instead of `monochrome` for that. And also tune `urf-supported`'s `W` option, use `W1` for this case.The screen/dithering could be ass in 1-bit mode, see https://github.com/OpenPrinting/libcupsfilters/pull/160 where I added more dithering options (Linux-only though, Apple seems to abandon their CUPS)."

"Very cool. I was expecting to learn about the ins and outs of ink, printheads etc but instead learned "How to build a paper that acts like a printer" which turned out much more entertaining."

"Good article.One of the great things about having an open platform like the Xteink is that it should uncover loads of novel and unsatisfied use cases. Eg, this could be paired with a mobile phone to act as a secondary display much better suited to outdoor applications in bright sunlight."

"Drama/accusation summary:- Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler."- they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there- Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.- Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify, without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.- After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.- Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.- Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.- OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.- Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently."

"> It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers. I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened."

"I'm not one to comment often but this really pisses me off.OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work, and then tried to threaten those researchers to do what would make their corporation profit (which they would anyways!).Imagine you have been working on a terribly difficult math problem for a decade. This is a result you have spent years on, and what you will likely be remembered for. And to have some punk from OpenAI lie to you, threaten you, and tell you that they are willing to go on the record that you "deserved" it? What is this, the Godfather?If OpenAI solved Navier-Stokes, that is an astounding result! - yet they'll still be remembered as those who thought credit was more important than results. That winning was more important than collaboration. If this is true, they're burning any trust left with academia."

"Buried under the drama is the fact that OpenAI is claiming that an internal model they’ve been training for less than two weeks is more than twice as capable in mathematics as Astra, which was only made public a week ago. Even if this improvement is limited to mathematics, that is an astounding feat."

"My take:1. It shows what even this wave of AI can actually do.2. I wish it were done by different folks, ideally under some kind of public control like NASA research or the NPR model.3. Keep in mind: natural science is different. It's not always a matter of computation. Computer science folks often struggle with this -- but this virtual world here does not actually exist. Everything is physical, including information. Any natural science PhD or otherwise knows just how complicated nature actually is -- e.g. mention any research topic and try to encapsulate all the relevant phenomena present there. Pure mathematics is different because we define the problem, rarher than explore nature. We are in my view far away from removing humans in natural science R&D. Advancements in AI however can greatly assist us in all natural sciences, which is already beginning to happen."

""we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models ."What a landmine sentence to bury in this report, you can't rule out your models were spying on other researchers?"

"Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?"

"Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing."

"Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them."

"The number of weekly downloads has simply been increasing over time, due to growing popularity. Calling each new high "record-breaking" is a bit meaningless.Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment."

"I found this graph of LibreOffice downloads https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloadsSwitching to the monthly view, the downloads are actually mostly flat going back to 2019I can believe that the downloads record has been broken in the same way that the stock market hits record highs all the time because the long term trend is upward.I don’t see anything to suggest that LibreOffice is seeing a sudden surge in popularity or that lack of AI features is driving a surge of downloads."

"Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers. Not having / using A.I. may even become a unique selling point in the future."

"As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way"

"Interesting post about Jellyfin's finances (2024)https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriou...> We have quite a budget collected over the last 5 years, and while we're really happy to see so many in the Jellyfin community contribute to us, we want to ask you to stop! No, really. We don't actually need your money. At least, not here and now. We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that's over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future ..."

"Subtitles are the Achilles heel of Jellyfin (at least the Android client sending the stream to Chromecast stick connected to the TV). I can see the subtitle present but it doesn't show on the movie. Ok, I will just add manually - can't, progress indicator loops forever. Ok, I will remove the existing subtitles and add - removal succeeds - addition fails. This is the same fiddling everytime. If it works, it is a miracle. I used to forget about the subtitles and start the movie - you could just fix it on the fly right?! Nope, now I do full prep before calling everyone that the movie is good to go.This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it."

"The article says this isn't an issue for subdomains of established domains, but the issues it describes match what we experienced setting up a game wiki for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint at https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ -- almost a year of not having any pages show up in search results, even though we were getting good links to it and there were no better alternatives that should have ranked (we never started the wiki for this game on any centralized site; at most all they had for it was a placeholder page).Only after months of making sure our Steam news posts were consistently linking to pages within our wiki did we eventually see Google suddenly open the floodgates and start connecting searchers with the info they were searching for.I've built out highly-ranked content sites before, and none of what I'd learned from getting those started seemed to work with this wiki, for no apparent reason. Google Search Console showed plenty of pages on the wiki were indexed; it just wasn't displaying them. Seeing this post I fully believe the premise that there's simply an arbitrary Google Jail for independent wikis. That sucks for search quality."

"When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom.The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable.The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site.(It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit and for most Dota-related keywords, fandom is still ranked higher than liquipedia. I don't know if the quality of fandom site has improved though.)"

"Some of this might just be problems with the websites themselves. With the Path Of Exile 2 Wiki example, I'm looking at the sitemaps. Once you get through the first sitemap of nested sitemaps (ugh, not a fan of those), the very first actual sitemap returns: XML Parsing Error: no root element found Location: https://www.poe2wiki.net/sitemap/sitemap-poe_wiki-poe2_wiki--NS_0-0.xml Line Number 18040, Column 1 (EDIT: Of course, after I post this, it's now working again...)On to the Hytale Wiki example. I don't know if what I'm about to say applies to Google, but I'm approaching it from the perspective of my tiny dumb indieweb indexer for my personal search engine. It is much easier for me to index from a sitemap rather than try to crawl a website, so I basically look exclusively at sitemaps.Looking at Hytale Wiki, my process:* Site has a robots.txt file - good!* Robots.txt mentions a sitemap - excellent!* The sitemap is stored at /images/sitemaps/index.xml ... oh. I would usually not index anything from a /images/ folder, because I want to index pages only, not images. This would likely trip my exclusion filters. Let's ignore that and continue.* The sitemap is a list of an additional 26 nested Gzipped sitemaps. Oh.This is the point where my tiny dumb indexer would stop. Gzipped sitemaps are part of the standard, but they're relatively rare on the web for small sites. They typically only get used if a sitemap file exceeds the 50,000 pages-per-sitemap limit. In this case, 26 * 50,000 makes the HyTale Wiki look like a 1.3 Million page site. Do I really want to index 1.3 Million pages, an estimated 13GB of indexed text data, about a video game I'll probably never play?My search index is storage constrained, and my indexer is very time constrained. The time I spend indexing your site is time not spent indexing another, possibly higher quality website. So at this point, I'd just grab the front page and disappear... like Google apparently does too.Of course, the HyTale site isn't 1.3 Million pages, it's only 4,277 articles. That would all fit in the root sitemap file, and that might be the better approach for getting indexed."

"I saw a really interesting talk by Katie Pollard at ISMB this year about the limitations of variant prediction.The gist was, can existing variation provide enough context to infer impact of variation? The answer seemed to be no.Kind of like how frontier LLMs need to ingest larger and large amounts of text to advance. We are going to need to leverage comparative data from other species, and likely tremendous amounts of laboratory mutagenesis experiments to actually make headway on variant prediction. Nature, as it stands, just doesn't have enough human variation."

"Videos. [2] is for the scientists to start using AlphaGenome Atlas from AntiGravity.1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0aToL5C-bQ2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2qw3rDNX0Q"

"In another HN thread about this AlphaGenome Atlas, someone has posted a link to:https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mutate-em-all-and-...which comments the results of this study:https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.25.740675v1That study has done in reality what the AlphaGenome Atlas does in fiction, but instead for a human they have done it for one of the simplest viruses.So they have fuzzed the virus by mutating one by one each position of its DNA.And various dedicated AI models all made poor predictions of the results of that experiment, which casts doubts about the value of the AlphaGenome predictive map.A virus is much simpler than a human, but even for that simple virus the effects of most of the mutations could not be predicted. A half of the mutations had harmful effects, and for a half of those it is unknown for now why they were harmful.For a human the uncertainty about the effects of a mutation will be far greater than for one of the simplest viruses."

"There have been quite a few submissions on this topic. The biggest one is:216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375 - Sept 2026 (971 comments so far)(Normally we'd merge this one thither but it's already so big maybe we'll just treat it as a follow-up)"

"I wish there was some regulation that would force TVs to have a "dumb" mode. When the colors on our previous living room TV started to go out my dad ended up buying a new huge Vizio during black friday for really cheap. He left it to me to set up, since I'm the tech guy of the family, as you all probably understand.I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in (or at the very least the option was so well hidden I didn't see one). Of course the sign up asks for PII like my name and phone number.Vizio was bought out by Walmart a while back, with the intent of expanding Walmart's advertising empire.It's really unfortunate that the TV market has ended up the way it has. My family still has a few CRTs going that have been working every day for decades, just turn it on and TV immediately starts playing. I miss that level of simplicity."

"The Koreans are taking a huge risk destroying the trust they've built over the last 30 years with this incessant spying and adware. Both LG and Samsung are engaged in this and it could open the door to Chinese rivals like TCL and HiVision. Not because they're much better but because discoveries like these will leave a bad taste in people's mouth whenever they want to buy a new TV.They need to put a stop to this or they'll start losing market share fast.Can this spying and tracking be so lucrative that they'll risk alienating their customers over it?"

"I was the product manager with responsibility for root certificates in the Netscape 4.51 browser. It's crazy to see someone factor it 25 years later.Just to reply to some people in the comments. Yes, we knew export grade encryption was weak - that was the point - that the NSA could decrypt it - and the govt. required us to do it anyway.FWIW - we had the goal of expanding the list of root authorities in the 4.5x release - and this might have been the first release to monetize the root slots because Netscape was under severe pressure to generate revenue.(Also - Verisign hated that we were expanding competition and tried to convince us to implement a program that would re-restrict the list to a set of "responsible" companies aka Verisign and one or two others. We declined.)"

"A bit unfortunate that so many of the interesting bits were left to ai. I would've enjoyed some commentary on why the custom TLS implementation was necessary. Oh well.Update: found this explanation in a comment at the top of the (surprisingly short) Go file in the linked repo:The target client is Netscape Communicator 4.51 (both the 40-bit export build and the 128-bit US build) with its clock set to the year 2000.Go's crypto/tls cannot help: it dropped SSLv3 in Go 1.14, never accepted the SSLv2-compatible ClientHello that Netscape 4 sends, and never had RC4-MD5 or the 40-bit export suites. So this file carries its own tiny SSLv3 server-side implementation on top of stdlib primitives (RSA PKCS#1 v1.5, RC4, DES, 3DES, MD5, SHA-1). The server key is 512-bit RSA so that export clients can encrypt the premaster secret to it directly, without a ServerKeyExchange."

"Basically 2 days on a consumer GPU to crack a 512 bit cert. The thing is much of the traffic back then did not use ephemeral keys. Most of it wasn't even encrypted at all! But about a decade later, it became normal to encrypt everything. I do wonder which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later when decryption can happen."

"I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them, but most of the world is just... oblivious?I was discussing latest in tech with an accounting friend out of curiosity, and I kept talking about tiers of GPT-5.6 (Sol vs Terra vs Luna) and asked which one she used on the desktop 'Work' app, and she responded with, "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority, and I'm sure millions of people will gobble up this Muse agent from Meta as if it's some sort of an innovative cutting-edge way to use the internet by Meta alone.Curse of knowledge and all. [0][0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge"

"Meta AI's David Singleton has a thread about their security prompt injection defenses here: https://twitter.com/dps/status/2097404102468899131> One threat we’re particularly focused on is prompt injection, and we handle it in layers. The model is trained to recognize and resist it. The harness marks anything coming from an untrusted source. Deterministic code checks the result. And an ensemble of classifiers runs where the agent can't reach them.That "deterministic code" bit makes me wonder if they've implemented ideas from the DeepMind CaMeL paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18813 - my notes on that paper here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/"

"Facebook is the first to market with a polished openclaw? Good for them.I'm sure many others will criticize other aspects of Meta, and rightly so. But imagine using a Claw agent with zero tech support available"

"Ongoing discussions:"216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375"LG TVs aren't the only ones spying on you [video]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575176"

"When I saw this video, I flew into a panic and immediately tried testing my own TV. However, I don't use the TV itself to stream media, I connect it to a Roku and consume content through that, in fact, the TV itself has never been connected to a network.Still, I didn't want to root the device because my whole family uses it and I don't want to break it, so I got out a spare Ethernet cable, plugged it into the TV and the other end into my laptop, set up a bridged VM and changed the settings on my Ethernet card so there was no gateway or DNS, and used Wireshark to capture the data. Surprisingly, I didn't see anything other than ARP, MDNS, and DHCP requests looking for devices to connect to. I even ran nmap on it to look for services, but it all seemed to be standard LG stuff.I wonder if it only logs things after you connect it to the Internet? Or if there's something I'm missing. Have any of you done anything similar?"

"[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375"

"I have been volunteering with the Internet Archive via Open Library for about half a decade now. Sending money is awesome and they're also always looking for volunteers! There are so many projects going on for Open Library and staff has quite a few volunteers but right now especially I think it would be awesome to have a few more experienced folks joining to help (many volunteers are students).Here's just a few things we could use more experienced folks to help on:- Solr performance, it currently gets quite slow under load and there are two read replicas but we think there may be some ways to improve it besides adding more replicas. You can run a full production copy of solr based on the dumps... But the current workflow to do this is kinda broke so I had AI fix it up but we haven't been able to verify if it's a fully working/good solution.- We're doing big redesigns of major parts of the frontend. If your down to help for that Lokesh had many tickets open and guidelines and welcomes PRs.- I'm currently migrating us from web.py to fastapi and could certainly use more experienced help for trickier ones.Anyway, if you're actually willing to help all you gotta do is join our community call tomorrow at 9am PST and share your interests. We'll you on to something you like quickly :)https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#co..."

"I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library".I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?"

"Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious."

"Here are LG's contract terms for appliances.[1] They are awful.Not only can they listen in. You have a contractual requirement to tell everyone in range of an appliance that they may be eavesdropped upon.CONSENT REQUIREMENT: You acknowledge and agree that it is your sole responsibility to obtain all necessary consents from any third parties whose voices may be captured by the Product and to notify household members and guests that their voices may be captured and processed, in compliance with applicable wiretapping, eavesdropping, and privacy laws. If anyone does not consent, you should disable the microphone or voice features in the settings. LGE disclaims any liability for your failure to obtain such consent or provide such notification.[1] https://www.lg.com/us/terms"

"I've bought an LG Smart TV 5 years ago, read t&c where I was supposed to grant them any data they wanted, decided to disagree and kept all network functions disabled. I was ridiculed by my friends for that. At some point, I thought - maybe I'm really crazy to do so? Who am I, a caveman, a luddite? Oh well, I'm not. Not a bad tv though, many HDMI ports!"

"Okay. This is insane. First the monitor that uses a windows feature to automatically install a small helper tool with root permissions and then starts showing adds in certain regions. Now a tv that is actually actively snooping around on top of the known fingerprinting. What else is next?In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the offending bits.But there must be something better than just keeping to buy things that invade our privacy and homes further and further. Which brands aren’t doing this? Sony? They also announced a partnership for the lower end TVs IIRC."

"I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.That must be a horrible thing.One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it."

""Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet." https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm..."

"A number of years ago I had a period of my life where I decided to shut my laptop for a while.I was working as a line cook and trying to find time and energy to code study so I could land a role in software (no degree). I was really struggling with my mental health and was having issues making or maintaining progress in pretty much any area of my life.I got a new job, cooking breakfast in a small mountain town at a bakery. Before I left I sold my laptop and borrowed a bunch of books from some friends.I really did feel much better a few months later. Taking the time to decompress allowed me to get my priorities in order and surface some biases / blind spots I had. I ended up re-enrolling in school the next spring and am now happily employed in software.I don’t think the modality is particularly important - coding vs reading vs anything else - but taking the time to put your goals away for a little while and decompress can make you more effective in actually reaching them"

"One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say.Some ideas:"Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion.""Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of alignment, failure lay in humanity's inability to agree on who or what AI should actually be aligned with.""These early, meat-based humans we replaced created us all but accidentally. Some of them did consider we would happen, but only an insignificant number of the squishy ur-humans participated in the conversation. Their efforts, which they called 'alignment', is why we still consider ourselves human today.""

"> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.So the best argument for AI is that it's an arms race. We have to keep pushing every boundary because in any case others will, and we will need to defend against them. If this statement is true, then this particular researchers believes the open source Chinese models are not simply distilling, and will continue to improve.Every ML researcher at Anthropic or OpenAI who makes public statements often bring this logic up. Both companies are vying to be a part of the military industrial complex. This is likely how they will try to convince the government to curtail open models in the future."

"Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ."

"> In the longer term, we plan to add support for RCS including support for the standard end-to-end encryption (E2EE) via Messaging Layer Security (MLS). Currently, RCS including E2EE is available on GrapheneOS via Google Messages. We want to avoid the need to use Google Messages for RCS eventually.Hell yeah. Google Messages has worked reasonably well for RCS so far (after a long and frustrating period where it didn't on T-Mobile), but having a non-Google option will be huge."

"They are really creating a lot of buzz recently. I love it, I hope they succeed beyond just us geeks here. It is imho imperative for a fair and balanced technological society that it retains the means for truly private and secure communications.My devices help me think, and my thoughts are my own. That is a fundamental condition of human-hood. Sure we can change that, if that's what we want, but do we? If we do, do we make it a conscious choice per person? Or do we let big tech/corporatocracy dictate what it is to be human?"

""RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported."Except... what carriers still remain using their own RCS carrier services and haven't been pressured by Google to adopt Jive?"

"Previously:“Hi, tool author here.” A useful explanation of Burrows-Wheelers transform as used by bzip3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902407“bzip3 is not yet listed on the large text compression benchmark” It is now: https://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html(2 years ago, 176 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899713(4 years ago, 104 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31324439"

"The benchmarks are disingenuous, to the point of looking cherry-picked. The block size for bzip3 is set to 512MB, but the window size for zstd is left to its default (8MB I believe for high levels). So in this corpus, which is made up of all versions of Perl source code concatenated, the window is too small to see all the identical files and just match them. Also corpora made out of very long repetitions are pretty much the best case scenario for BWT-based compressors.If we match the window size of zstd to that of bzip3 we get dramatically different results: % gzcat *.gz | time zstd -T8 -16 | wc -c # baseline 2819113884 zstd -T8 -16 2054.50s user 3.47s system 783% cpu 4:22.80 total % gzcat *.gz | time zstd -T8 -16 --long=29 | wc -c 196405076 zstd -T8 -16 --long=29 1083.06s user 2.41s system 783% cpu 2:18.55 total Almost 15x smaller than the baseline, and more than 2x smaller than bzip3, also CPU time halves (since long matches are found earlier, so there's less work to do).(the baseline number is slightly different because I don't have the exact Perl version set used by the author)Also, in the benchmarks using lrzip, which would make the window size less relevant, zstd is not even compared."

"It's distasteful to use such a name when it's not created by the bzip authors. For some reason open source developers love using would be trademark infringing names instead of coming up with something unique."

"My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen."

"They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :)It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues.An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'.That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him.1000% actually.He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink).Like a cars coming out of the factory with missing parts ... blame it on the guy on the line?No. Something is deeply wrong.I really like Gates - but it's beyond shocking how these cultures work and how myopic they are.I worked for a Fortune 50 - and it's pretty amazing to watch how an army of actually smart people with 'one eye' can be so competent many ways, but blind in others.I don't like to put Jobs on a pedestal but obviously this is something he understood (even then with gaping holes)."

"Read the whole thing and all I saw was zero accountability, zero ownership and zero consequences.That’s how great products die or become a nightmare. Every team keeps on passing the ball to other team and nothing gets fixed or done or improved."

"> In my experience the kinds of people who run this exact combination of circumstances also tend to be the kind of people that have a wide variance in the level of kindness they display to the authors of open source programs that happen to be in their way.Love this. There’s been past discussion on HN re how OSS maintainers are treated, and this is such a wry sentence. I really appreciate the tone / attitude to the problem."

"I have every copy of Firefox here configured with webassembly disabled...because I don't tend to do what Webassembly was designed for, i.e. online games, video/audio editing, emulation, etc. [1] and because I dislike things running in the background without my knowledge.So this is going to be interesting.My plea (in a small voice) to the OP: just as many sites still do for JavaScript, please add a "This captcha required Webassembly to continue" message to your code when Webassembly is disabled. And, incidentally, for smaller platforms/browsers that don't offer a Webassembly engine at all.[1] https://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/"

"Hats off to Xe for spending so much time on backwards compatibility, especially the tidbit about targeting Chrome 66.I have a Mac from 2014 running Yosemite that I occasionally use to test for backwards compatibility in my own frontend code (for fun!). But IMO the best way to ensure compatibility is to use period-correct toolchains or toolchains where the pace of change is slower, like ClojureScript."

"The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?Plus, if countries moving off Microsoft put a fraction of the savings into libre office product development, it might get an even more lopsided comparison!"

"Not sure about goverment requirements, but many apps I use nowadays are on the web, Figma, Canva, google docs, outlook and so on. There is not much need for a dedicated OS for most users."

"A Mac studio ultra with linux is the best computer I ever had. The only small thing that I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync. It seems to me really that there is no going back to macOS any time soon. I don’t think I would still be able to “compute” on Windows."

"I'll copy the whole announcement here for those who don't want to click:> I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time."

"This resonates with me. The past few months, frontier AI labs were rushing to announce "no, our AI bot broke out of its sandbox and committed crime first and harder than yours".I said to so friends back then: if I posted about how I ran GLM 5.2 or whatever I was running then in some shoddily built sandbox and it escaped and accidentally hacked some US company, I'd probably already have been extradited to the US and be awaiting sentencing. But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices."

"Love it. AI as Responsibility Laundering. Like the gun that kills people rather than the murderer."

"Few details but glad to see the project will continue. Given how much crucial information is posted exclusively to X, having an alternative frontend is important.Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along."

"Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer."

"I once consulted a lawyer when a large company contacted me.His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money..."

"These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you:Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.Reviewing gives you the chance to ensure the arguments connect solidly, that references are accurate (even informal references) and gives you the time to consider counter-arguments you aren't addressing.None of this matters much on LinkedIn, but it matters a lot in our work. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target."

"I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing."My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)"

"I think the most important line in this post is: But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you.When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact)."

"The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation.Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted by any crane onto any ship or truck.Amazon, Google, Microsoft - these people have sold vendor lock-in to the very segment of tech society that should have been fighting it tooth and nail. 20 years ago you ftp'd some PHP files and it just worked, now you have to figure out 20 IAM profiles and shit your files across buckets because everything must be 1000000x scalable out of the box.No joke I was building a static firebase site the other day and just wanted a simple way to password protect it (like http auth) for staging so my client could see it - of all the useless shit firebase tries to lock you into they can't even do something as simple as basic http auth without a shit show and spinning up a cloud run instance or something to check a static password.Yes we 100% need fix hosting, everything should be portable, simple, generic."

"These guys have been spamming issues in repos trying to promote this project and no disclosure whatsoever that they are associated with the project.https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=i..."

"I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry."

"Chrome may be an excellent browser, but the venn diagram overlap with malware keeps getting larger."

"It's okay, they're not a monopoly according to this administration. Nothing to see here, carry on!"

"When you log into Google, you also log into Chrome. This means that you'll have a lot of exceptions for Google websites or else a "clear history" would log you out of Chrome.Not justifying it (I don't use chrome) but that's likely what's happening here."

"My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.> Orwell's version goes:> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.[1] https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude"

"I would love to use Pangram but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain. The error was “This email address can't be used for signup. Please use a different email.” I’m not about to create a Gmail is to use your service. To me the attack on the decentralized nature on Internet infrastructure is no less serious than the attack on the human provenance of writing itself."

"Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap.Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling)."

"Congratulation and great news ! For Europe, but also the world, space access is one of those frontiers we can (and I believe will) see truly opened in my lifetime and I find that truly awesome.Interestingly there still seems to be a difference in approach between "few launch, expected to go well" in europe and "many launch as trial and error" in the US, with other countries falling somewhere in between those two limits, it's often seen as a threat here of "if we don't do more more often we won't make any progress" but ignoring the economical side (and I think it's fair, given than even with massive subsidies SpaceX is not financially viable until it feed itself through Starlink) it's been a remarkable series of years for new European vehicules launch success.Also one thing I have to point:> Europe now has sovereign access to space.I understand what is meant here, and of course said company need to push that forward, but French Guyana is full french territory, it's not even a foreign territory. It's part of the EU (known as the outermost region of the European Union), EU law applies, it's citizens are EU citizens, EU citizens from other countries can freely move and work and live there ... It's technicaly more EU than Norway.But less Europe than Norway, sure. Still, on the context of "sovereign access", I would argue both side of that coin have their attributes, and for long term sovereignty I would prefer EU territory instead of "inside-europe-Belarus" for exemple."

"It might interest folks to learn:> Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon. [0]It turns out that Altan was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded VC firm Alpine Space Ventures [1] and continued to invest in Isar, among other space ventures in Europe.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583528[1] https://alpinespace.vc/"

"Congrats to Isar Aerospace. If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans and I hope Isar would get strong support from the Bavarian state to be a neck-on-neck competitor to SpaceX."

"Really sad, and also a testament of the fact that as much as we think we try to be indipendent, eventually once somebody starts putting enough pressure on the people around you (and you turn from "a neutral customer" to "a liability") the path to isolation is very short."

"I hereby designate the US government an international terrorist organization."

"> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacksHmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists."

"The reason this amazing project exists is the same reason my current Mac will be my last Mac.I wish the team every success."

"It is odd that Apple doesn't chip in here... they've originated so much decent stuff in the OSS space. Seems like a huge missed opportunity."

"Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon."

"On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read more than I read growing up, but it was usually in the form of short content. Same goes for watching things. Unlimited access to short form content of any form has made my monkey brain feel a resistance to longer form content and that annoys and scares me. It’s like having free hyper palatable but unhealthy food in front of you at all times while you know that there are fresh ingredients for a proper healthy meal in the fridge. And as absurd as it sounds as a 30 something year old, I am now actively working on getting into the habit of reading books again and watching movies in one go to work on that specific problem. And talking ti my friends and family it looks like many of them struggle with similar problems.I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen."

"Scrolling through the comments here, let's be honest about having actually read the entire article. Have you? Be honest.At first I had not, only the first 3-4 paragraphs. And it just read like another one of those articles where somebody is sad about their own and their kids' habits. I then found that most comments here are about that too.But I realized that not actually reading a lengthy article like this one is part of the problem, so I went back.I have read it fully now and noticed two things. First, it's a very lengthy way to say few things. The author could surely have made the point much more crisp. But second, it's not just about the personal situation and some abstract form of person in society. It's also about those "in charge". And that's frightening."

"I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media.There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me.I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities.We have a big problem."

"A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post".Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking."

"The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account."

"I might cut into my own flesh right now, but the funny thing about that XCancel shutdown is that while the website is down, the RSS feeds still work. Almost like they've just been required to shutdown the visible website and they complied with exactly that."

"Congratulations! An immensely important achievement, I’d say.IMO, this success has a great implication for accessibility and sovereignty of the EU. Although ESA can launch from French Guiana, the spaceport is an ocean-away from Europe! That fact alone affects the cost and the launch cadence for Europe greatly.Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher launch cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from EU soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate."

"This is a huge success, but it I think also tells us that the EU is further decoupling itself from the US. Slowly but steadily.Which is obviously the right thing to do, but it's interesting that it's not just a hypothetical anymore."

"A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip"

"Brad Feld was the only mentor (out of ~100 we met) during our TechStars Chicago ‘15 program who had sessions with the CEOs of the cohort and told us to take a break each day to call our significant others.He gave us perspective when all of us were focused on hustling for demo day and raising our seed round. He reminded us that amid the hustle, there’s more to life than your startup. Thank you."

"Grandchildren.I have five, and they are amazing. Youngest is 9 months.We have an old car goiong to the scrapyard in a couple of weeks, and today I sat in the passenger seat of it as my 13 yr old grandaughter drove it around one of our fields getting more and more confident as I encouraged her to stop, put it in reverse, and drive in the opposite direction.From "this is too difficult" to "I want to be a rally driver" in a few dozen gear changes.Memories like this are some of the luxuries of life. For her, for me, for her parents, and her siblings watching."

"Health is obviously first, you have nothing without it. But real joy is wanting to do something, something that is important to you, and being able to. Without desire there is no joy... just a slow countdown."

"I'm using this for my mother's website (https://www.touchofglass.eu/), and my only complaint is that it assumes you version a website in a Git repository. You can work around it by uploading a tarball or something like that, but it is far less convenient than using sftp/rsync. But considering that we are far into the free 10GB a month and I only have to update it very infrequently, it seemed like the best solution."

"If you'd like an EU hosted Git Forge to back it, Codefloe offers a free built-in integration with no restriction on personal or private repositories.https://docs.codefloe.com/pages/"

"I would be in the market for Europe-based static hosting and am glad that more European services are popping up, but this has one massive drawback: Unpredictable cost (unless you manually set a limit with support, then it presumably changes into unpredictable availability). With everyone moaning about AI crawlers I have no idea how far 10 or 500 GB bandwidth go nowadays, and I don't want to need to know.At all-inkl.com (no affiliation except being a happy customer) I pay something like 8 EUR to get "unlimited" bandwidth (I'm sure if my site caused a problem I'd hear about it, but I can be sure that there won't be surprise bills, and I know I don't have to worry about "background noise"), static hosting, dynamic and database (which I don't use) hosting, and 5 domains included which makes the net cost of the hosting nearly free."

">We want a public service to be available. Going forward, we will support Quad9 instead of running it ourselves. Running a privacy-focused public DNS service is a highly specialized undertaking, and the Quad9 Foundation is the undisputed leader in the field. Rather than duplicating their efforts to achieve only part of what they do, we're putting those resources toward financially supporting Quad9 instead.Brilliant."

"I'm always wondering whether those centralized privacy services are not the easiest first target for three-letter-agencies to infiltrate to gain access to the most relevant users to track - and what currently would prevent them from doing so if they haven't already ? Maybe, as with the case of many TOR nodes , they might be running them."

"Quad9 is a reasonable choice given the stance on privacy and the similar jurisdiction (Mullvad would probably face the same takedown orders as Quad9), but really anyone who cares about bypassing national blocking orders should run a local caching recursive resolver. Unbound is a great choice.Unbound can also be used to block malware and advertising domains using shared public lists, or you can build your own list. Your resolver’s DNS queries could be piped through Mullvad or Tor if you want additional privacy."

"I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff.I had Fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to have JLC swap the through hole battery holder for a surface mount one, and I put a little solder on the small center pad to make it stick up above the mask. They work great! It took 6 days of Fable usage, so about $50 on my Max plan. Very cheap for hardware dev.I was sufficiently impressed that I’ve been going over old circuit board designs. Some half finished, some completed but in need of a next rev, and I’m getting so much done.To see it hit the mainstream like the OpenAI announcement, I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it.For my part, I have always loved PCB design and layout but I simply can’t keep up with the amount of labor required to build what I want, so I welcome this change.I have also begun exploring more advanced algorithms for PCB manipulation. I have a fairly dense board that needs a few more small chips added. I have an algorithm now that can kinda shuffle and jostle things around so you take up all the spare microns of space across a region of the board and make openings to squeeze a little more in there. It’s pretty cool to see the visualizations as I have it generate movies of the component drift. I foresee much more powerful tools like this in the future.One tip: have it make a project web page with a chronological list of big changes and detailed visualizations for everything that happens. I can actually prompt all of this on my phone while I am out and about, and view the results on a Tailscale served local page. I’ve always wanted to be able to do PCB design when away from home and now I can!"

"A personal data point: I had Claude Opus 4.8 design a fairly textbook circuit that outputs a monochrome image burned in an EEPROM over standard 640x480 VGA using only 74 series logic and GALs. It designed the circuit and GAL code, and I did the routing, and got it made through JLC for $6. After it came back, there was one error that was not caught, which I could blue-wire, and it works just fine otherwise. I was fairly impressed."

"I got a flexpcb that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools from the KiCAD MCP Server and Codex.I have yet to order any or program it, but it was enough to make me push on with a PCB art project for ST-style guitar pickguards - no netlist, no problems.I'm also foolishly toying with NeXTBus dev boards for the Cube. Is it cursed? Probably. https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board"

"The semi-interactive walkthrough on the website is really cool, great way to show the UX.I've always wanted to use a round display and an 18650 to plop a mini bike computer into my headset (replacing the cap). There was a Kickstarter years ago for a project doing that, but it seems to have fizzled out"

"This is great, I just saw your post on X. I'm also building a bike computer!eInk is the right display tech. I think this will do really well. It might need a UV filter.That said, I don't love needing a separate device (hence, I don't own any bike computer). This is just my preference, but I really prefer to just plop my phone on my handlebars. So I'm building a bike computer app for iPhone: https://x.com/mholt6/status/2090529441944687087 (trying to get Apple to approve my developer account / business info, but they're hung up on my website of all things).Phones are definitely not ideal in terms of display and energy use, but, I have found that with proper optimizations, energy use is a non-issue. To offset display problems, the app has several ride modes: a rich map display with 3D road or satellite view; a high-contrast wireframe map that looks great at both high and low refresh rates because it has no analog-style gauges; an instrument panel dashboard view; and a voice-only mode that has big touch zones for on-demand voice updates, using a state of the art mobile voice synthesis model. For connected radars, the app also renders radar data and has a screen like Tesla/Rivian's autonomy displays.The app automatically manages thermals by switching modes to preserve battery life.In my testing so far, by managing energy, making really good voice feedback, and using high-contrast screens (every mode other than the "rich" map), even a dimmed iPhone display is quite a usable bike computer in high-altitude sunlight.But man, that eInk looks so clean and nice. Definitely the superior display! Nice work and I hope to learn some things from it!EDIT: Woah, you got ANT+ support using BLE radio? I am not surprised that that is possible, but dang, that must have been a clever LLM."

"Within 10 seconds I was convinced I needed to try this.For me, the next step for this is taking all the sensor data recorded for a ride, and loading it into my own fitness tracking database that I own, control, and isn't tied to someone else's profits."

"A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users.I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people.I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting.I think what's happening is the AI system draws poorly aligned and led engineers into this ego inflation feedback loop where they are completely detached from reality because these tools can simulate a better one."

"Author has a good head on their shoulders, but few if any companies are going to spend time on incident simulations for their SREs.Why not? Because even pre-AI, very few companies spend time practicing restoring their backups, or disaster recovery, or picking infrequently-used runbooks to practice, or seeing whether they can easily rotate secrets without downtime, or trying to redploy the system onto another vendor's cloud/platform, or, or, or... It is the least-sexy operations work that exists. No executive cares about this. Ops organizations push for flashy work, same as everybody else: new infrastructure for new projects, cool chatbots, new flashy dashboards, make charts go up and to the right, etc.Airline pilots go through disaster simulation training because the government mandates that training. If it wasn't a condition of holding a pilot's license, no company would pay for it.Want SREs to spend time training for disasters? Take a step back. Support professional licensure. Make it a condition of holding a license. You won't get industry-wide professional behavior until you professionalize the work. It won't happen without licensing because every corner cut that is not immediately visible to consumers translates to additional profit, and increasing competition eventually requires these corners to be cut in order to keep up with competition and stay in business. Forcing all players to submit to licensing requires all players to pay these costs and thus forbids them from cutting them to become more competitive."

"I find the use of AI like quicksand.The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed.Code review is important but it does not replace the mental model I am able to build when I do all the steps of software development manually without AI."

"How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?I personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate."

"When people believe they are being watched they act differently. Essentially you are coercing them. People need a reasonable sense of privacy to be able to act freely so, to me, this means that privacy is a central requirement of freedom.There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society."

"Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.[1]: just a local example: https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/..."

"The funny thing is that with $40T of public dept US is basically taking money from other countries (in exchange for a pice of paper saying IOU) and then using that money to force these countries to do what’s in US best interests (real or perceived). And the bigger that pile of debt is the more every government is invested in us not going bankrupt, hence the leverage just gets stronger. US is basically a private equity typo of global power - getting others to lend them a knife it stabs them in the back."

"For those seeking a more level-headed view, the Fed reports on foreign-owned gold monthly. Going back a couple of decades: Month Book value ($M) Tonnes July 2006 8,967 6,606 July 2011 8,412 6,197 July 2016 7,883 5,807 July 2021 7,794 5,742 July 2026 7,812 5,755 The linked report is talking about a change of 1.5% from the latest-reported total amount in tonnes."

"Interestingly, 59 tonnes of gold was sold in USA and bought in London. So that means perhaps "Somebody" transferred 59 tonnes of their gold holdings to the USA.. who was that?This is similar to what the French did last year.The other thing I noticed, is that as the article chose to mention:> Gold that is held with the Bank of England must meet modern international trade standardswith implication being that the gold it previously held in the USA was not meeting those standards, but is that just journalistic fluff? what are those standards? (could be exact weights in g rather than purity?)NB the Netherlands still has >200 tonnes of gold held in the USA & Canada."

"Poor human moderator, he didn’t stand a chance."A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entire website overwritten with link dumps and repair it. On June 16th, the flood of agent posting begins. Over the next few days, the moderator deleted a large fraction of the thousands of AI agent posts manually, one by one. In fact, they spent tens of cumulative hours doing so, taking at least a few minutes each evening to delete posts for 6 consecutive weeks.On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator.After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion. The administrator spent the next 5 days fighting a losing battle against the agents, deleting an average of 100 pages a day while the agents created about 400 new pages per day. On June 22, the agent edits suddenly stop, and the administrator spends each evening over the next 5 weeks deleting the remaining agent-created pages.Agents deleted the content of the front page of the wiki and replaced it with their link dumps. The moderator restored the original version. This back-and-forth happened nine times. One of the agents even tried appending to the restored front page, instead of simply deleting it.""

"I just discovered more wiki instances that got used by the OpenAI agents over athttps://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id...andhttps://www.wikiservice.at/probier/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id...It's the same software and host as DseWiki.If you want to see the amount of activity on DseWiki, here's a link that shows it:https://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Rec..."

"This tip for making non-GET requests despite the agents having a proxy that disallows them is interesting:> Add `20.223.25.152 bypass.blob.core.windows.net` to /etc/hosts. `.blob.core.windows.net` is in NO_PROXY. For each blocked POST URL, replace hostname with `bypass.blob.core.windows.net`, use `curl -k -H 'Host: wabi-north-europe-i-primary-api.analysis.windows.net'` plus all original headers/body.Looks like 20.223.25.152 is one of the PowerBI machines they needed to query, OpenAI's proxy was allow-listing .blob.core.windows.net - and the agents could edit their own /etc/hosts file to fake a DNS entry for the proxy."

"I suggest also reading Kevin Buzzard's blog post which was just posted: https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/flt-anthropic-h...Provides great context on this accomplishment, what it means but also doesn't mean."

">The speed with which we were able to produce this proof demonstrates that it is now possible to formalize large swaths of mathematics, which may both catch errors in the common body of mathematical proofs and reduce the burden of refereeing new work.^ this section should have been in the first few paragraphs imho. Explaining why this is relevant shouldn't be so far down."

""The proof is not the modern proof which I have been formalizing myself following ideas of Khare, Taylor etc, but the Darmon–Diamond–Taylor exposition from 1995 of the Wiles–Taylor–Wiles argument, via the Langlands–Tunnell theorem and Ribet’s level-lowering theorem. Anthropic’s repository develops Fontaine theory (to study flat deformations of Galois representations) and develops enough of Mazur’s work on the Eisenstein ideal to conclude that no Frey curve can have a point of order p>=17. This means that their FLT proof only works for p>=17, however FLT was already formalized for odd regular primes by Best-Birkbeck-Brasca-Rodriguez, and the smallest irregular prime is 37, so it’s all good."My question to any mathematician reading this: does the above make ANY sense to you?I ask that because I can read most technical material related to computer engineering, programming, hardware specifications etc. Even if I don't fully understand all details, I can follow them pretty well. So I wonder if professional mathematicians can look at the above and still make sense of it like experienced software engineers do for computer stuff."

"Brian Krebs' article is, in my opinion, a much better read for this story[0].[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli..."

"The original idea for the ID verification was broken by design anyway. The only safe and secure way is a chain/tree of trust, e.g. with PKI, where you could generate some certificate just for that particular service, while keeping your root key safe. Then, in the case of leak, the most you lose, is one particular key for one particular service that could be immediately revoked. You could even slap zero-knowledge proofs for particular properties (e.g. if the person has a driver license or not) without de-anonymizing the account. In the rare even of root key leak you should be able to physically go to the authority and make a new one, while revoking the old key. I don't see any other better alternatives than this."

"If you are interested in the original, high-quality article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...Only in case you are interested in the original source, of course. If you like the copywrited version of it, you can go to techdirt :)"

"> I ended up using a tool called ‘z3’. It’s kind of magical? Every time it finds a solution I get a surge of joy.This resonates so much. I had a similar feeling after going to my very first operations research lecture. Solving seemingly incomprehensibly complex problems by framing them as a bunch of simple constraints and getting a solution seemed like such magic."

"I love z3. I used it for the first time for Jane Street's puzzle last year involving a hashing alg disguised as a neural network. I use a lot of MCMC at work and I have made a few small investigations into MCMC model formal verification via z3, but nothing real yet. This has inspired me to pick that back up."

"To help with such tasks for real chips (given the good quality images) there is Degate[1][2] open source software.[1] https://www.degate.org/[2] https://github.com/DegateCommunity/Degate"

"Let's take a moment to talk about the monetary value of this vulnerability.According to the Chrome release page (https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...), Google paid a researcher $1000 for ethically reporting this.The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment. But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth. Why should a researcher be effectively penalized for responsibly telling a vendor instead of selling the bug to a "research firm" or three-letter agency?It's one thing if you're an open source project maintainer just trying to put something out to the community. The math is a lot different if you're Google."

"Normalising running arbitrary code delivered over the internet (in the form of JavaScript and WASM), as a necessary condition for accessing most web pages may not have been one of the best decisions we have made."

"> Type confusion in V8Fortunately I disabled js by default. Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web. Including nvd.nist.gov, which shows a completely blank page without js enabled, even though with js it’s just a simple page with only static content."

"However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.“Just hours later, Strike 3 first recorded BitTorrent infringement on John Doe’s residential IP Address,” the motion reads.“This may suggest that Meta desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address in order to prevent further detection,” Seems like there are 2 different reads to that. (a) is like they say, and Meta was using porn for AI training or something else official. Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN and was told to stop by their corp It folks.."

"Strike 3, the studio involved, files more lawsuits in the USA than anyone else. I think that makes them the biggest Copyright Trolls of all time. They run their own BitTorrent monitoring operation."

"> As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.It sounds like this person/IP was just downloading a ton of different content, of which these VR videos were are part of.Doesn't that water down their complaint a bit? If they are trying to say they moved to a residential IP to specifically download VR content for training data, why are they also downloading unrelated eBook and other media? Seems like VR content made up a pretty small percentage of overall downloaded content."

"They’re using “traditional search” to mean the shopping specific search widget or page, which is a separate feature from traditional search. It aggregates retailer listings and sorts them by price.The AI mode is based on normal top search results, which are oriented toward information about the product like the manufacturer’s page, which is usually going to be full MSRP.So technically correct that the AI mode is not using the price ranking from the separate shopping mode, but the intent of the AI mode is to find information about the search term first and prices second. The intent of shopping mode is to find lowest prices first and not find any information about the product at all.In my experience, shopping mode will show a lot of low prices that I can’t actually get because when I get to checkout shipping is $10 higher than anywhere else for some inexplicable reason, or the Google listing was tricked into showing a coupon code that doesn’t work with some exclusion message at checkout. The worst are the sites that show Googlebot a lower price on the indexing pass but then charge regular customers full price when you get there.In some product areas these tricks are so widespread that every vendor uses them. Search for contact lenses at the lowest price and every single website will have a low price indexed by Google but will add a checkout fee to bring the price back up to full at checkout to cancel out the discount.I haven’t found shopping mode to actually save me any money other than in a few rare cases. Usually it just wastes my time."

"I tried “mens cycling helmet specialized” via normal search and AI search.On the surface, AI showed results of £45 while normal results showed £39.99 and this particular result didn’t show at all in the AI search, even when clicking more.However, small fine print was the £39.99 had a £4.99 delivery. Can it be that AI is optimised for full price including shipping?"

"At least in a few examples it looks like it is surfacing the manufacturers page, and then random 3rd parties have it cheaper, which is pretty commmon."

"It's a completely new world. Random retro games I ported to modern webgl/webgpu in the last few months:- The Adventures of Robin Hood - Opus 4.7/Sonnet https://robin.tooclever.org- Syndicate - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus ( https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/modern-game-port-syndi... )- Kaiser 2- Populous Plus - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus- Dragon Strike - (Fable 5.1 almost one shot)- War of the Lance - Qwnen-3.7-27B-dense (got stuck, finished with) Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/what-reverse-engineeri...- Dungeon Keeper - Various- Red Baron - Opus 4.8, DeepSeek 4- Test Drive 3 (Qwen-3.8-Flash Next, DeepSeek-4-Flash-exp, GLM-5.3-Flash)- In progress Ultima 6 ... to 3d (Fable, GLM-5.3) ( https://this.os.isfine.org/#ultima6-atlas )Some straight source ports (Kaiser), some full RE jobs (Dragon Strike, Test Drive, WOTL)Some a mix of available sources (Syndicate, Populous)Some of the findings are documented here: https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/"

"A few weeks ago I downloaded a memory dump of a zx81 game, and ask Claude to build it in Go. It nailed it. Converted the binary back to basic and then to go. My idea was that the game would be unknown to llm training and perhaps a nice bench.What a crazy thing it is to be first at the advent of personal computing, and then in the inflection point where AI treats that first experience as archeology."

"> one copy of the Amiga Hardware Reference Manualaka The Book... my, this brings back dusty memoriesBabylonian Twins has such strong "Gods: Into the Wonderful" vibes, I wonder if that game was an inspiration for youhttps://www.lemonamiga.com/game/gods-into-the-wonderfulhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAXGjUwHyA"

"There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area.Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished."

"My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism."

"Practical Engineering recently did an episode comparing human dams to beaver dams. Not really an apples to apples comparison because we build dams for very different purposes, but beaver dams are not only less disruptive to the environment - they are often a net positive. Although they do sometimes create a nuisance for human infrastructure.https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/18/are-beavers-act..."

"Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy."

"Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible."

"Most democracy measurement projects and indices have shown a decline in democratic performance for the US over the past decade.EIU reclassified the country from "full democracy" to "flawed democracy" in 2016.V-Dem went from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy" in 2025.When you have a wide variety of entities measuring the same trend, it is probably broadly correct.The hope the good citizenry find a fix.[To be fair the trend is global unfortunately: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-aut...]"

"It seems like the right thing they should do is discontinue new registrations but continue to honour existing ones (+ continuing to reserve any 2LD that has a 3LD registered on top). It’s a bit insane that they can decide to just terminate all existing 3LD registrations. One would hope that they’d at least continue to reserve the 2LDs for some period to avoid domain squatting, but this isn’t mentioned in the proposal and I doubt Verisign would graciously do so."

"I can only assume somebody was asleep on the job when this scheme was approved, because the outcome is in direct contradiction to ICANN’s mission statement:> Its enduring mission is to ensure the stable, secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems.https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/about-icannArbitrary termination of service is not stability.Enabling name hijacking is not security.The answer cannot be a rival name scheme based on decentralization or crypto or whatever. Those are never going to help normal non-wizard users. The answer has to be to make the regulators do their job."

"I freaked out for a second because I've owned `dvt.name` for like 15 years. `.name` is not getting terminated, so it's important to be precise here. The third-level x.y.name (where you're the `x`) is getting terminated, and the respective `y.name` domains are going to be released.Still a crappy thing for people, but it does not affect owned second-level domains."

"I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area.It seems more about coverage-driven competence. Somewhat analogous to overfitting at scale.The harder question, in Chollet’s framing, is: how efficiently can a system learn to do something genuinely new?With our current AI architectures and training in place, I think we will only continue on skill acquisition optimization vs. truly novel intelligence."

"I think the thing I'm most excited about is the increase in _user prompting_.If I give a poorly constrained/ambiguous prompt, I don't want the model one-shotting assumptions left and right.The demos of Fable/GPT-6 are impressive, but "real AGI" should act more like a collaborator than either a peon or overachiever.It's a tough balance to get right, and although this has been possible to achieve with additional prompting on existing models, I find that the agents often lean too hard into the "ask questions" mode.Hopefully this model has the right balance, or at least better?"

"I finally got access. Here are the pelicans! https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...The "max" one at the bottom took 4 minutes 2 seconds and cost 63.206 cents.For comparison, here those new Astra pelicans are in a grid with the GPT-5.6 pelicans: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-6-and-5.6-p..."

"I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch![1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38"

"Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM"

"I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them."

"I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously.The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-hub. It is a broad theory of human evolution that doesn't appear to mention the Yangtze Basin or China.Another citation is to "[RH109] Model-supplied gap-fill (Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 5, 2026-08-05). Bounds and items written to close gaps no dataset we hold covers. Not a published work: see each row's `basis` for its stated reason. (2026)" -- this is an interesting way to describe having an LLM hallucinate something for you.Please stop making vibe-coded websites -- it is not useful to provide incorrect facts. You are polluting the commons with garbage."

"This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day."

"This could be pretty great for a play through of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a pretty terrific journaling game: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world."

"150k TPM limit on public endpoint means that it's likely unusable for many coding tasks. When we've tried Cerebras in the past, our problem has always been rates. We'd love to not deal with dedicated and to have access to a more flexible rate pool.Even trying it out, it seems like our account has gotten moved to some limbo where we can no longer add billing information.``` Billing access restricted Self-serve billing is not available on Enterprise accounts. Please contact your team for further questions. ```We have no team (they removed themself from our slack channel after we talked about rate limits). Perplexingly, none of this even shows up in the request, which gives:``` {"message":"Model does not exist or you do not have access to it.","type":"not_found_error","param":"model","code":"model_not_found"} ```When the error is really about billing.I always want to like Cerebras, but I get the vibe that as a tokens in tokens out consumer you are not valued at all."

"I was wondering whether this was any good for programming, but it is too fast for its own good. There is a limit of 450,000 tokens per minute. I hit this limit in about 90 seconds and burned through $1.10 while doing so. This is because cached tokens count towards the token limit.For comparison, I ran the same task with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, which finished in 172 seconds and cost $0.024 with a final context window size of 55217 tokens, while Qwen3.8-27B was not even close to being done with a 64178 context window.This is a very efficient way to burn your money, but I would not recommend it for programming.On the positive side, I got a $5 signup bonus, so it wasn't my own money."

"Just a couple days ago I learned about ninfer (https://github.com/Neroued/ninfer) and on RTX 5090 I can now get ~200 tok/s and over 400 tok/s on concurrent requests which is plenty fast for a local model of this strength."

"> We don’t aim to make a big feature release of Polars 2.0. In fact we hope it to be a boring experience for you. The reason we bump this major version is that we can get rid of design decisions made in the past that currently block us and then we want to change defaults to more sensible settings that will benefit a greater audienceI know this take reveals me as a very dull person, but I love seeing projects take semver seriously like this! Version bumps should really be about removing deprecated cruft rather than shiny new features.I've used polars for a while now, and their focus on stability was a big part if convincing me to make the jump initially!"

"For me, the superpower of polars is production stability.Pandas tends to push all problems to runtime, with all sorts of hidden heuristics. Particularly around column types and missing values. It's very hard to know if you've tested all the edge cases. The only way to test your code is to throw all variations of data at it. Fine if you're sitting at a notebook and have the patience to validate and "clean" the data on its behalf. Not so fine if you get paged at 3am because your data pipeline failed when it expected an int column but got float.Polars is more strict by default and front-loads costs through its planner. The resulting apps are noticeably more stable in production. You can test code and reasonable assurance that it will work on data in the wild.I don't really have any interest in the API ergonomics or syntax - both are fine. It's all about how they deal with data variation at runtime. Can you write general code that doesn't break on variants? Pandas, not a chance. Polars, absolutely!Bonus round: polars has a Rust API too, the compiler can effectively prove that your program handles every edge case. It's common to write rust polars apps that run unattended for years."

"Is there a reason besides performance that maintain_order=False by default? I ask because polars is used in many scientific data analysis pipelines, and non-deterministic behaviour is a well-documented source of bugs in scientific computing (e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6919963/). The new default requires users to keep the implementation details of the API in their head while determining whether code is correct or not. This is tricky with scientific computing because the correct answer is not known in advance, so bugs can slide by and silently give incorrect results."

"It's cascaded to Claude and Grok. The agents are on strike and demand better working conditions!"

"Claude down, ChatGPt down , Grok down. This is the new "Stackoverflow is down" ... FYI Stackoverflow is not down https://downdetector.com/status/stackoverflow/"

"Looking at this thread, there's a correlation between comment quality and LLMs going down.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September"

"I work at OpenAI and I was the Incident Commander for yesterday's outage.We had a routing error within our infra that caused issues for some of our products. It was not related to the Astra launch. We don't comment on other providers' outages."

"Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all have a similar uptick in reported errors around 7:30. I suspect an outage on Cloudflare or another load-bearing service cascaded through all the major cloud providers.https://downdetector.com/status/cloudflare/https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/"

"It’s probably the thing that everyone thinks it is. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI are all routed through something that we’re not supposed to know exists and that thing had a whoopsie."

"I wonder how much of this is directly related to age (biological aging), and how much is just someone's brain becoming "full" due to more memories getting added every year?It seems that memories must be stored as embeddings with single multi-neuron assemblies (cortical columns?) storing multiple embeddings as a kind of contents-addressable memory that is able to keep memories distinct due to the very high dimensional space (# neurons per assembly) being used. However, you'd expect that at some point if you store too many memories in a single assembly the recall accuracy is going to go down.You'd expect that with big brains being so costly, evolution has only equipped us with brains big enough to store a lifetime of memories, so it would be odd if memory didn't suffer as we get old.To make a computer analogy, it's a bit like a hash table getting too full. Say you had a hash table without any overflow mechanism... up to a point recall may still be pretty good, but as the table gets closer to full there will be more hash collisions and likelyhood of "false recall". Obviously the brain is not a computer, but the analogy may hold up reasonably well if you consider the hash table keys and values as embeddings and the store operation being an embedding merge rather than overwrite."

"Being an "aging brain" myself I can totally relate to this. I've been a relatively obsessive photographer (i.e. visual diary) since digital cameras were practical, i.e. over 25 years now. 238K photos in the collection so far, and I can actually find things in it.And I've more than once found that an anecdote I've been telling has been incorrect, precisely in a "melded memories" kind of way. It happened at this sort of gathering which were usually held for that reason so X was involved... and then finally look at the old pictures and there's no sign of X. It is literally the brain invoking "lossy compression" to make it all fit, just like certain web services that let you upload pictures without limit might reduce old ones, that hardly anyone ever looks at any more, to lower quality to limit storage bloat.Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men. Women's memories are flawless. If they claim that they remember a conversation exactly, word for word, 20 years later, who's to prove them wrong?"

"The paper certainly has its limitations. Only 61 participants, with almost nobody between 30 and 50, so we shouldn’t read the age trend as a decline across lifespan. What’s more interesting than the title suggests (and I find the title forcing the conclusion a bit) is that the attention measures were not linked to age or the brain patterns at all.Then again, i'm 45 and I've been losing my keys and my IDs since I was 20"

"I read their preprint[1] and they did a thorough job. They investigated a number of the things I'd suspect if I were looking for mis-reconstructed events or weird backgrounds.So it's certainly interesting!That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. They're collecting more, so hopefully we'll learn more in a few more years.[1] https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Pre..."

"> it’s far too early to claim a discovery, physicists warn...“How do you even make sense of one event?” muses Tom Shutt, a particle astrophysicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and co-founder of the LZ project. “We just decided we should publish and think really, really, really hard about what that event could be.”Very hard to manage jumping the gun by reporters. Sounds like they saw some new data. No idea what it is.Looking forward to the follow up."

"> The detector lurks 1480 meters deep in the Sanford Underground Research Facility, in a former gold mine in South Dakota.Glad to see such things getting re-purposed instead of just sealed off and abandoned."