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Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard.
Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite.
LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something like Nextcloud to provide your own privately hosted cloud backend. But obviously this is a gigantic effort for the university's IT department to provide and maintain with reliable redundancies and backups.
Also, LibreOffice/Collabora is pretty good if you stick to its native formats, but its interoperability with MS Office files has a lot of bugs.
In the end, it's just cheaper and more reliable to use MS or Google like everyone else. Students, professors and administrators wind up having basically the same needs around office software as businesses do.
In the US, you might wait for criminal action if it was progressing to initiate civil action because (1) a criminal conviction can be used as evidence (and it is asymmetrical, because an actual doesn't have the same weight), and (2) criminal process can result in a restitution order which makes civil action unnecessary (and in some jurisdictions may allow recovery from a dedicated fund for victims of crime even if no recovery is possible from the perpetrator, and in that sense may be better than winning a civil action), and (3) criminal prosecution doesn't cost the victim money, civil prosecution generally does.
> Adoption = number of users
> Adoption rate = first derivative
If you mean with respect to time, wrong. The denonimator in adoption rate that makes it a “rate” is the number of existing businesses, not time. It is adoption scaled to the universe of businesses, not the rate of change of adoption over time.
Apollo published a similar chart in September 2025: https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down... - their headline for that one was "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies".
I had fun with that one getting GPT-5 and ChatGPT Code Interpreter to recreate it from a screenshot of the chart and some uploaded census data: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/
Then I repeated the same experiment with Claude Sonnet 4.5 after Anthropic released their own code interpreter style tool later on that same day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter...
> Not to mention, cold is an infectious disease too (it's literally the same disease, just a weaker variant caused by strains that evolved their potency away)
“The cold” is actually any of a wide variety of different viral diseases (caused by various forms of rhinovirus, coronavirus [0], and, I think, a few other kinds of viruses), none of which are flu (influenza virus). It is not a less potent flu.
[0] so calling COVID-19 “a bad cold” is correct from a certain point of view, despite being substantively misleading.
Nobody has to implement the algorithm only NSA wants! That's not how RFCs work.
We just had a thread about this 4 days ago.
It's been under /lists practically since the site started, when /lists was just a dump of interesting rollups 'pg could think of. There's probably less thought put into its placement than you think.
If all you need is a bag of named blobs and you just want quick reasonable compression supported across all platforms, why not?
If you don't need any table/relational data and are always happy to rewrite the entire file on every save, ZIP is a perfectly fine choice.
It's easier than e.g. a SQLite file with a bunch of individually gzipped blobs.
It works fine with jj. I have a line in my Claude.md to tell it to make sure to close before committing, and I don’t use the hooks that are provided.
Study:
”Giving Up": The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5770722 - November 19, 2025
Stupid question, but:
- If it's safe to "ignore scripts", why does this option exist in the first place?
- Otherwise, what kind of cascade breakage in dependencies you risk by suppressing part of their installation process?
After impact is when any action would occur. Many automakers are using either supercapacitors or some smaller battery and logic to enable doors to function after impact.
My example of seat belt pretensioners wasn’t to demonstrate when the action would be taken, but that pyrotechnics and vehicle dynamics are components of orchestrating a controlled failure mode in the event of a crash.
> General Motors Co. has since made the Corvette door’s emergency release handle more visible, the company said. Graphics on the handle, which lies on the floor next to the door, illustrate its function. GM also has added a “bystander access” feature on its e-doors to unlock them after a crash, so first responders or good Samaritans can free the occupants.
> Stellantis NV engineered a similar system on Jeep and Dodge models with electric doors, where airbag deployment automatically unlocks all doors. Stellantis and Ford also have outfitted their electric doors with supercapacitors that act as a battery backup to keep the power flowing to the latches even when a car’s 12-volt battery has died. And Ford, in response to this year’s recall, updated the software on its Mach-E to keep electricity flowing to door handles for 12 minutes after the small battery that normally supplies them — separate from the electric car’s main battery pack — goes dead.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-electric-car-doors/ | https://archive.today/YETme
It was, back when software development was run by hackers and not suits and security people. Easy access was a feature for users, too; back in those days, software was a tool that worked on data, it didn't try to own the data.
Yeah but that approach using "sweeps" doesn't seem to be working. It's possible it actually requires a camera to do it reliably well.
Cool, but misomechanistic jabs are getting boring at this point.
> The encryption requirement makes sense on paper, but it basically breaks the whole value proposition of SaaS.
Good. It's high time to flip the status quo on its head - instead of data being something we ship to specific cloud services, for them to lock it away and charge for access, it should be code that should be a commodity, shipped to servers of our choosing and granted access to operate on our data without owning it.
Just like regular, old-school desktop software, back in the day before SaaS was a thing. The provider didn't get to "see plaintext", because the software was operating on your hardware and not communicating with the provider. And if it tried to communicate back to the "mothership", we'd rightfully call it spyware, tell people not to use it, and wonder if there's legal action that could be taken.
Anyone can and does say this about their pet favorite bit of legislation. And so journalists are more than happy to pull this shit with every other topic, too.
Unfortunely it was to be expected, the mighty ones would not rest until they managed to make it happen.
User-facing software is full of language like that these days and I find it really frustrating, because it never helps answer the questions attentive people actually have, like will that mean my emails get dumped into the next Gemini training run?
It is a massive assumption that reform will win the elections.
LLMs famously don't have a memory - every time you start a new conversation with the you are effectively resetting them to a blank slate.
Giving them somewhere to jot down notes is a surprisingly effective way of working around this limitation.
The simplest version of this is to let them read and write files. I often tell my coding agents "append things you figure out to notes.md as you are working" - then in future sessions I can tell them to read or search that file.
Beads is a much more structured way of achieving the same thing. I expect it works well partly because LLM training data makes them familiar with the issue/bug tracker style of working already.
I also somehow thought a Google Gemini MCP server.
> Lots of people go overboard with this, though, like taking flu reduction medicine with every single cold or using medication to go to work sick. American media seems especially accepting of people taking "flu medicine" over rest and recovery.
This is not specific to America; it's a thing in the entire Western world, and probably beyond. Because it's not like we have any other choice.
There is no slack in the system. Most people can't afford to have more than a few sick days in a year, and they prefer to save those up for when painkillers and cough medicine don't cut it anymore. Same with children, because a sick child staying home is usually equivalent to the parent taking a sick day themselves - either way, they're not at work.
We can talk about media or people going overboard once it becomes acceptable to skip work for a week because of sick kid, or in order to not get everyone in the office sick too.
Of course, there would exist something like Qualcomm Linux,
Me as well, maybe travel a bit around.
Note the sibling comments asserting the same as I am.
Right, but people tend to be oblivious to anything that's not on their bank accounts.
I don't get the point.
First of all, multiple vendors has always been a thing in Java since the early 2000's.
Second, configuring a couple of environment variables isn't that much of a challenge.
Third, all IDEs have an option to use a bundled JVM, and allow for JVM selection per project.
Finally, for applications the modern way is to build the runtime alongside the application, or AOT compilation.
Ultimately, it is. The post didn't touch on this, but it's exactly why the world looks like it does - it is, and has always been, recursively subdivided. It's why we have districts and towns and counties and states and countries. Hierarchical governance is a result of trying to cooperate in groups larger than the limit of how many direct relationships our brains can support.
The picture of two rows of electric trucks is marked "ChatGPT generated". Note that some of the trucks shown have three front grille slots, while some have two. Also, those trucks appear to have fuel tanks. The author is mostly talking about what someone else saw at the China Commercial Vehicles Show. Low-credibility source.
There's plenty of info about that show, with real pictures.[1] BYD has a full range of electric trucks, but what they're pushing seems to be the T3 and T4 trucks. The new T4 is a straight truck, available as a box truck, flatbed, or open top truck. Or they'll sell the chassis for custom jobs. Claimed range is "up to 250km". It's intended for city use with once daily charging. The T3, which has been out for a few years, is an ordinary electric van, comparable to a Ford Transit or a Mercedes Sprinter. These are high-volume commercial products. Light and medium electric trucks are taking over fleet operations.
BYD has a new line of heavy electric trucks, launched in April.[2] This isn't BYD's first try at heavy electric trucks. They delivered some (at least hundreds, but not tens of thousands) in 2022. The 2025 model is at least their third try. They don't claim to have cracked long-haul trucking. "BYD Tractor Q3: Focusing on Short – Haul Transportation and Breaking Through Medium – and Long – Haul Transportation" is their marketing pitch. There are multiple battery options, and for charging, the Q3 can be plugged into up to four chargers at once. Long-haul operation is possible, but it's not yet the target market.
So the BYD heavy trucks aren't mainstream in China yet, but they're a lot closer than Tesla's Semi (yet another re-announcement: [3]) or the Nikola (only works going downhill and required a Trump pardon for the CEO).
Volvo has a range of electric trucks, mostly sold in Europe.
[1] https://www.chinatrucks.org/news/2025/1110/article_11304.htm...
[2] https://www.ctinsa.com/ccnes/5550
[3] https://elonbuzz.com/the-tesla-semi-2026-update-is-here/
Limit function length: Keep functions concise, ideally under 70 lines. Shorter functions are easier to understand, test, and debug.
The usual BS... yes, shorter functions are easier to understand by themselves but what matters, especially when debugging, is how the whole system works.
Edit: care to refute? Several decades of experience has shown me what happens. I'm surprised this crap is still being peddled.
The text in teeny font under the headline picture is "ChatGPT generated. Chinese electric truck production lines expanding rapidly in 2024 and 2025."
So, in other words, the leading image is a lie. When people say false things that purport to be true in text we call it lying or fraud. I don't understand why when they do it with an image it's not the same thing. Putting teeny, easily missed font that says "ChatGPT generated" doesn't make it OK. I might feel less strongly if the author put a disclaimer, in larger font, that said (more accurately IMO), "The above image is fake."
> I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration.
It's been a hallmark of his Administration, so you not seeing it is...interesting.
> For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to.
In the sense of it not being a mystery because it is more naked in both the direction and the specific approach to partisan political abuse, I guess I could see that, but in terms of not being concerned, the only explanation for that is GP’s “But I guess its fine when your side does it.”
Skittles are bad for reasons having nothing to do with "ultraprocessing". This is just the new incarnation of people believing Mexican Coke is healthier because it's made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.
Because you feel like you have to. You will likely fail, but you are driven to try. Most fail, but sometimes the lottery ticket pays out.
But TFA says that it was people exactly in this situation who were apprehended by ICE and then set for deportation proceedings. According to the current administration you are NOT allowed to stay, and that's where the Catch-22 is.
The whole thing just further exemplifies the "cruelty is the point" ideal.
> Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously
They are literally the ones bringing it up.
"In August she declared in an Irish Times article that she intended to use those royalties 'to go on supporting Palestine Action.'
...
Following that statement, she said she had been advised that any such payment to her for those televised dramatisations could be a breach of terrorism laws."
The author may choose to withdraw her books because her publisher won't pay her as long as she publicly commmits to using the proceeds to fund Palestine Action. The title makes it sound like someone is pulling her books; that does not appear to be the case.
A Christmas Story
> Because your coworkers and management are there
And investors.
> Argentina has defaulted nine times in its history
Argentina doesn’t make a habit of hosting its creditors’ troops [1].
[1] http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/TopStories/16353167.htm...
I can't help but wonder how the efficiency compares to generating electricity, running that over wires, and having that run heat pumps.
The conversion to electricity loses energy, but I assume the loss is negligible in transmission, and then modern heat pumps themselves are much more efficient.
And the average high and low in February in 26°F and 14°F according to Google, while modern heat pumps are more energy-efficient than resistive heating above around 0°F. So even around 14–26°F, the coefficient of performance should still be 2–3.
> if AI generates something that is equal to existing code, then the license of that code applies.
No, it doesn't, if the generation is independent of the existing code. If a person using AI uses existing code and makes a literal copy of it, then, yes, the copyright (and any license offer applicable in the circumstances) of the existing code may apply (it may also not, the same as with copies of portions of code made by other means), and it's less than clear if (especially for small portions of code) that legally such a copy has been made when a work is in the training set.
Copyright protects against copying. It doesn't protect against someone creating the same content by means other than copying.
Thanks Dan, Tom, and the others who keep this a place that still brings joy and satisfies the curiosity brain itch.
What a wonderful comment. Thanks.
Grok still has that annoying tone, it just uses it to say weird things.
Russia's manned space flight program has very likely ended with this failure.
This is a very important point - the market for training chips might be a bubble, but the market for inference is much, much larger. At some point we might have good enough models and the need for new frontier models will cool down. The big power-hungry datacenters we are seeing are mostly geared towards training, while inference-only systems are much simpler and power efficient.
A real shame, BTW, all that silicon doesn't do FP32 (very well). After training ceases to be that needed, we could use all that number crunching for climate models and weather prediction.
There's an unofficial desktop version.[1] It lags the hosted version quite a bit. Anyone tried it?
[1] https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
Aw, it's just a joke. I thought someone was ready to really try it.
Eventually, there will be AI CEOs, once they start outperforming humans. Capitalism requires it.
It seems to have worked, too.[1]
Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.
Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question. Texas says no.[2] It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-17/califor...
So why isn't the section that needs consistency enclosed in a transaction, with all operations between BEGIN TRANSACTION and COMMIT TRANSACTION? That's the standard way to get strong consistency in SQL. It's fully supported in MySQL, at least for InnoDB. You have to talk to the master, not a read slave, when updating, but that's normal.
Technology in the classroom has completely and utterly failed at improving education.
There's the other side of this issue. The current position of the U.S. Copyright Office is that AI output is not copyrightable, because the Constitution's copyright clause only protects human authors. This is consistent with the US position that databases and lists are not copyrightable.[1]
Trump is trying to fire the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, but they work for the Library of Congress, not the executive branch, so that didn't work.[2]
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-supreme-court-copyright-off...
Right. But my point is, they belong to the bucket labeled "people", not the one labeled "software", for purpose of system design.
No, that's like pretending the weapons weren't already available. Everyone had assault rifles for two decades, giving access to smart rifles isn't really changing anything about the nature of the problem.
I'm trying to imagine what a bunch of teenagers could do today to get a similar sense of accomplishment. Note that they weren't even doing particularly well at grade school.
Reddit may be next. The number of "promoted" items is increasing.
If you care about voice, you still can get a lot of value from LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they generate.
I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing. A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put in, and how far will I need to cut it back?". Then I'll go paragraph by paragraph asking whether it has a clear topic, flows, and then I'll say "I'm not sure this graf earns its keep" or something like that.
GPT5 and Claude will always respond to these kinds of prompts with suggested alternative language. I'm convinced the trick to this is never to use those words, even if they sound like an improvement over my own. At the first point where that happens, I get dial my LLM-wariness up to 11 and take a break. Usually the answer is to restructure paragraphs, not to apply the spot improvement (even in my own words) the LLM is suggesting.
LLMs are quite good at (1) noticing multi-paragraph arcs that go nowhere (2) spotting repetitive word choices (3) keeping things active voice and keeping subject/action clear (4) catching non-sequiturs (a constant problem for me; I have a really bad habit of assuming the reader is already in my head or has been chatting with me on a Slack channel for months).
Another thing I've come to trust LLMs with: writing two versions of a graf and having it select the one that fits the piece better. Both grafs are me. I get that LLMs will have a bias towards some language patterns and I stay alert to that, but there's still not that much opportunity for an LLM to throw me into "LLM-voice".
MS Windows had an exclusive period for X1, but Google will support Android and ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2-based devices in 2026, which would require the pKVM/KVM hypervisor used by Android, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167
> Some people really overdo HTTP verbs /GET, /POST, /PUT, /DELETE and leave much work to frontend. Irks me a lot.
If I understand you correctly, I don't think of it as overdoing HTTP verbs so much as using an excessively naive mapping between HTTP resources and base table entities.
Thank you, this is so much more helpful if you don't want to watch videos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbitol
Study:
Intestine-derived sorbitol drives steatotic liver disease in the absence of gut bacteria - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.adt3549 | https://doi.org/10.1126/scisignal.adt3549
The LLM v human debate here reminds me of the now dormant "Are you living in a simulation?" discussions of previous decades.
It's telling that basically all of Google's successful projects were either acquisitions or were sponsored directly by the founders (or sometimes, were acquisitions that were directly sponsored by the founders). Those are the only situations where you are immune from the performance review & promotion process.
Quite the opposite in fact. Throughout history the most successful artists have been the well funded ones.
Perhaps in New Zealand but VERY unlikely in the U.S. what with current governance.
See "price stickiness" and what is simplified as "menu reprinting costs"; there's usually a cost associated with changing prices, and a cost associated with renegotiating prices for everything that's not being sold on a spot market. People cannot buy housing at spot, and while spot-labour pricing is definitely a thing for some services it's so socially destabilizing for anything skilled that most workforces operate on salary.
The reverse of this is that high inflation tends to cause a lot of strikes, because salaries refuse to go up and very high levels of inflation need salary repricing every month or even week.
Are those the only two options? If you think the answer is yes then that suggests a moment of reflection.
Recently, with my mom’s passing, I realised I’m now an orphan.
It really sucks, at any age.
A more widespread piece of hostile hotel shower architecture is unlabelled controls. You need trial and error to work out which way is more water, and more heat.
In some ways, poor project management is like an algal bloom or wildfire: costs expand, feeding on other costs, unless a huge active effort to keep them under control is made.
And it ends up being a disaster for the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sovereign_Individual : 1997, since I had to check.
> Interesting how often you meet the same people if you just start digging a little.
Endemic problem in UK politics, and a lot of other countries.
It's notable that the BBC recent adaptation set in the present day was also able to make Watson an Afghanistan veteran.
I read the stories as an child, and seen various of the film adaptations; Holmes became a meme even within Conan Doyle's lifetime, but I'm sure I'd benefit from going back to the source as an adult.
Too late for anyone to see this comment, and it's just a trivial bugbear of mine, but the article has this:
> "... meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it."
They don't mean "a full light-day" ... they mean "a full day". They're talking about the time it will take, and "light-day" is the distance it's travelling.
A trivial type error that a compiler would barf on, that people will gloss over and not notice, but which niggles at me.
Sorry ... I now return you to your regular programming.
There is definitely a third option of "badly regulated through regulatory capture that favors incumbents, prevents competition and makes things worse for the public, while protecting actual malfesance". The US has a lot of this. The EU version tends just to protect the incumbent too much.
Anything that is a millimeter to the left in US politics, which happens to still be considered right in the rest of the world, gets immediately coined as left wing activists.
Clovelly in Cornwall still uses donkeys and sleighs
I have a postit note idea that says simply "typesafe macro assembler".
I've not fleshed this out yet, but I think a relatively simple system would help deal with all the issues you mention in the first paragraph while allowing escape hatches.
Tbh I do not know but I'm sick and tired of seeing these threads devolve in the most cringe way possible. Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping. And reading some of the comments in this thread that assessment was spot on.
It’s often better to overlay caching and other tricks on top of naive implementations than making the implementation more complicated.
Link (pdf) to the issued patent: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/cb/4f/c5/d10b79e...
It's all second and third order effects. You'd then be less impressed if you found the zoom out toothpick video was itself just made with AI. And even less impressed if you zoom out further, and discover your entire feed is just different AI toothpick sculpture videos, because that's what went viral yesterday so now everybody has prompted one overnight.
There are about 250k games on Steam and over 125M users. What happens when full sloppification means there's 250M games on Steam? You scroll forever without reaching a game that more than a few other humans have played. But you can't distinguish it from the thousands of other similar games. Choice is a fatigue all of its own.
Whole bunch of factors involved in this which HN is ill-equipped to deal with. But I think paranoia about "grooming" should probably be counted as a factor as well. A lot of people are going to be suspicious about an adult man who wants to hang out with children. So everything gets tangled up and shut down in the name of safeguarding.
If you ask the question "what proportion of girls and young women have a male mentor", the problem becomes even more obvious.
the -> to ?
And yes, agreed.
The difference is it's delivered via SMS, and someone wanted to sound cool.
It makes you wonder if Mixpanel would have disclosed this if not for OpenAI more or less forcing them to.
Exactly this. People treat LLMs like they treat machines and then are surprised that "LLMs are bad".
The right mental model for working with LLMs is much closer to "person" than to "machine".
This take has given me second degree burns. I must have never shipped anything then, what with vim being my favorite editor.
The definition of functional in the context of the discussion is that in works in the way the manufacture explicitly designed it work, in a standard industry practice fashion, not as an unforeseen bug or malfunction.
Not some abstract notion.
This is reflexive pessimism with no substance. You're not articulating a set of particular challenges that need to be navigated/overcome, which could provide a roadmap for a productive discussion; it's just doomposting/demoralization that contributes nothing.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/717b3d64d6...
> [THIS IS AI GENERATED, NEED TO EDIT] The manga that asked [...]
They do at least have "NEED TO EDIT" in there, but this prose was openly generated by AI as a starting point.