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There are more conspiracies. Here are some well-verified ones:
- Epstein and way too many important people.
- The big one from the 1970s onward to increase the return on capital by lowering living standards, the "Powell memorandum".[1] That's the founding document of the modern conservative movement.
- Facebook/Meta being behind schemes for age verification.[2]
[1] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
[2] https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
We're still in the midst of what was to come in many ways.
“JD Vance has said the US version of TikTok is valued at about $14bn, meaning the fee taken by the government is closer to 70% of the deal.”
Given that a large portion of the population has a HD or higher quality camera in their pocket most of the time these days, most cryptid style conspiracies seem pretty well debunked at this point.
> too much money on the other side to let this gain traction
This view is unfortunately common among regular privacy advocates. That makes them politically useless.
To have a hope, this bill needs to target support outside tech, where civic laziness and nihilism are normalized. I’m not seeing any indication of that strategy here.
Thanks for the reminder, I should add a note about vibe coding to this piece.
> I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior
I ignore it. But if that isn’t an option, this sort of writing can help you convince someone in power around you it’s okay to ignore it.
“Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.”
It's crazy that this is such a delicate process, and yet someone discovered that it works. Amazing.
It depends on how you use them. In my workflow, I work with the LLM to get the desired result, and I'm familiar with the system architecture without writing any of the code.
I've written it up here, including the transcript of an actual real session:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
> Previously (oh you're part of that crew)
You just turned 'net negative'.
> He said his recruiter promised him citizenship if he served and was discharged honorably.
Military recruiters lie and say whatever they need to meet their enlistment quotas. Unfortunate for this person.
Attacking IQ is nothing whatsoever like vaccine denialism. The valid/meaningful uses of IQ are widely debated in several hard science fields. That's not true of vaccines.
The claim is that Nasdaq is going to artificially admit SpaceX to the Nasdaq-100, an index they control, in order to win their business away from NYSE. If the index you invest in is derived from the Nasdaq-100, that's problematic.
It seems kind of likely that SpaceX would make it into most of the major indices on the merits, relatively quickly (the S&P has a 1-year waiting period), just based on its likely size and liquidity.
“The subject of the agency’s report of suspected crimes: conversations he allegedly had with Iranian officials and others living in Iran prior to the start of the Trump-Netanyahu war. The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion, or even treason, by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.”
I want to know what Tucker said before I judge. As Greenwald concedes, “he obviously has many within the Trump administration.”
At some point China will print enough EVs at scale that they push legacy auto to failure. China sells >50% EVs and hybrids (NEVs) at current run rates. The last 50% will not take as long as the first 50% (S curve). Volkswagen is laying off 50k workers due to their lack of competitiveness against China EVs.
The path to success is to most rapidly get combustion vehicle manufacturer and the fossil supply chain to their death spirals through demand destruction. How fast we get there is a function of change of rate in velocity of global EV sales.
Adapt to an EV future or die as a going concern. North American sales are lagging because of protectionism and low value for EVs on offer from domestic manufacturers. This will likely change as Congress turns over back to Democrats over the next several years, and clean tech policies are supported again.
Auto groups urge Trump to keep Chinese carmakers out of US- https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/auto-i... - March 13th, 2026
Volkswagen to cut 50,000 jobs as China offers cheaper electric cars - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/03/10/volkswagen-t... - March 10th, 2026
Our World In Data: Tracking global data on electric vehicles - https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
IEA: Global EV Data Explorer - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/global-ev...
There are plenty of unemployed or underemployed domestic US workers. Hire them or go without. This is pleading for wage suppression by appeal to emotion and relying on an unsophisticated audience, plain and simple.
I wonder if it's more or less tiring to work with LLMs in YOLO/--dangerously-skip-permissions mode.
I mostly use YOLO mode which means I'm not constantly watching them and approving things they want to do... but also means I'm much more likely to have 2-3 agent sessions running in parallel, resulting in constant switching which is very mentally taxing.
> I have built features in 2 weeks that would take me a month just because I'd have to learn some nitty technical details that I'd never use again in my life.
In the bucket of "really great things I love about AI", that would definitely be at the top. So often in my software engineering career I'd have to spend tons of time learning and understanding some new technology, some new language, some esoteric library, some cobbled-together build harness, etc., and I always found it pretty discouraging when I knew that I'd never have reason to use that tech outside the particular codebase I was working on at that time. And far from being rare, I found that working in a fairly large company that that was a pretty frequent occurrence. E.g. I'd look at a design doc or feature request and think to myself "oh, that's pretty easy and straightforward", only to go into the codebase and see the original developer/team decided on some extremely niche transaction handling library or whatever (or worse, homegrown with no tests...), and trying to figure out that esoteric tech turned into 85% of the actual work. AI doesn't reduce that to 0, but I've found it has been a huge boon to understanding new tech and especially for getting my dev environment and build set up well, much faster than I could do manually.
Of course, AI makes it a lot easier to generate exponentially more poorly architected slop, so not sure if in a year or two from now I'll just be ever more dependent on AI explaining to me the mountains of AI slop created in the first place.
How do I tell my colleagues to stop contributing unverified AI output without creating tension between us?
Make them realise they're replacing themselves if they continue down that path. "What value do you have if you're just acting as a pipe to the AI?"
There's nothing unique to Go about this kind of tooling. It exists in C, Java, Rust, Typescript, and probably dozens of other settings as well. It's the standard way of implementing "after-market" opt-in directives.
I had Claude review one. It was... not complimentary. Seemed to help a bit.
CP437 forever!
The biggest use of Unicode in source repos now might be LLM slop, so I certainly don't miss its absence at all.
Retention issues with completely new Optane is not great compared to SLC NAND, which Optane was supposed to beat. I have USB drives with the latter, probably a few dozen cycles at most, yet they have had no problems keeping data intact for over a decade.
I think having a hook to an LLM endpoint to enable yt-dlp to attempt to self resolve until an official fix is available would be a useful enhancement.
I went with my daughter to see Taylor Swift in Tokyo. It was an amazing experiences. Swift fans prefer recording Tokyo performances because fangs don’t sing along to the music or talk during the performance.
How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders?
Loudly oppose the trendchasing devs who have been brainwashed into the "newer is better" mindset by Big Tech. I'm sure the shareholders would want to reduce the amount they spend on server/bandwidth costs and doing "development and maintenance" too.
Simple HTML forms can already make for a very usable and cheap site, yet a whole generation of developers have been fed propaganda about how they need to use JS for everything.
Characters should not have invisible semantics.
Same for fancy computers. Dev on a fast one if you like, but test things out on a Chromebook.
That's roughly how the original Sidewinder worked. The original concept was to reduce near-misses. If the pilot could get on the target's tail and aim at the engines, it usually got a hit. That was the same task as getting into firing position for guns. Hit rate about 8% in combat.
Later versions allowed launches from longer ranges and from off-angles.
One new problem for theaters is that entertainment now comes in other time formats than the 1-3 hour movie or the hour-long TV show. Netflix is not constrained by the need to push groups of people through a movie theater.
What do you need? What do others need? Make something you or others want.
Ok! I will try that, thank you very much.
The PARC crowd thought displays should have the form factor of a sheet of paper. Hence the Alto display.[1] That never caught on.
[1] https://www.righto.com/2018/01/xerox-alto-zero-day-cracking-...
Hopefully it is whitelabeled Nextcloud, and all the improvements can go back to the Nextcloud core. That would be a great use of my tax money.
The majority of code I've written since November 2025 has been created using agents, as opposed to me typing code into a text editor. More than half of that has been done from my iPhone via Claude Code for web (bad name, great software.)
I'm enjoying myself so much. Projects I've been thinking about for years are now a couple of hours of hacking around. I'm readjusting my mental model of what's possible as a single developer. And I'm finally learning Go!
The biggest challenge right now is keeping up with the review workload. For low stakes projects (small single-purpose HTML+JS tools for example) I'm comfortable not reviewing the code, but if it's software I plan to have other people use I'm not willing to take that risk. I have a stack of neat prototypes and maybe-production-quality features that I can't ship yet because I've not done that review work.
I mainly work as an individual or with one other person - I'm not working as part of a larger team.
For those of you for who it is working: show your code, please.
leftpad.
It's a rich document to read in terms of thinking about those times and how it is like today. For instance when it comes to text parsing people very much use regex or something like lex or yacc and you can count on regex in the standard library.
There is the fact of having a system of distribution like the original CPAN
which is independent of many other technologies such as namespaces and garbage collection that make that kind of thing scalable and practical. There is the Java kind of class-based 'object' but there's also the $-@-# 'holy trinity' of Perl of scalar, list and hashtable. 1960s languages had a 'symbol table' built into the compiler, today's languages put that data structure in the standard library and frequently build the interpreter around it.
In the form of JSON that data structure rules the world, but non-anemic 'objects' are optional in Componentware today, I mean I can write a package of components for React with or without class-based objects and the end user will not particularly care.
In my mind SYSGEN is the old 360's answer to the Spring Framework but less dynamic with a simple form of compile-time metaprogramming, like compiling the Linux Kernel with different options. Thing is, a modern OS for Linux or Windows or current zOS has dynamic device drivers and figures out the machine configuration at runtime, but it used to be that you baked in the configuration data and required modules at compile time.
It's not offensive, it's just having a boring, trivial conversation with someone who isn't present on the thread. Nobody is here to defend the just world fallacy. Have at it, I guess.
That's the real loss.
The original idea behind Stars and Stripes was that it was a general newspaper for US troops. Reading it gave general world awareness. DoD's own output is very narrow. Here are DoD's current press releases.[1] They're written in a very evasive style now. Here's the one on de-emphasizing the Havana Syndrome research office, titled "War Department Announces Realignment of Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team to the Office of Research and Engineering "[2] Unless you know the background, that's totally meaningless. Much DoD PR today seems to be at that level - too defensive and obfuscated. Either that, or it's just administrative announcements. There's almost nothing about the current wars.
DoD used to have something called "The Early Bird", discontinued in 2013. This was a reprint of press clippings for Pentagon-area staff.[4] It was supposedly restricted to DoD personnel to avoid copyright issues. It was politically neutral, but prioritized DoD issues, such as command changes and procurement, that would be very minor stories in the public media.
Worth noting is that this war does not seem to have war correspondents embedded with US troops. There's not much info coming in from ground level on the US side. Al Jazeera has coverage from the Arab world. CNN has some people in Tehran who were based there before the war and are still sending.
[1] https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/
[2] https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4411182/wa...
[3] https://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/Messages-Display/Artic...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Early_Bird_(newsletter)
There you go:
Oh, I totally agree. I always see this as evidence that the terrorism threat is overblown, if it were really as large as we are led to believe the number of successful attacks would be far higher than it is.
If someone would like to and is willing to make the time, that’s fine, but you don’t owe them this if they are not a good person or worth spending time with imho. Connection and community is earned, not a given. My lived experience is there are some good old people you strive to make time with, some who are fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to make time for, and some who are just terrible people who are going to die alone because of who they are. Your life experience and decisioning process about how and with whom to spend precious, non renewable time may differ.
Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.
I regret only having one upvote for this.
I note that games are mostly art assets and things like level design, and players are already happy to instantly consign such products to the slop bin.
The whole thing is "market for lemons": app stores filling with dozens of indistinguishable clones of each product category will simply scare users off all of them.
Why does the agent have your credentials? There's no need for that! I made one that doesn't:
That’s not the operative principle in a democracy where people with many different moral ideologies must cooperate under the banner of a single government.
> The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”.
I’ve literally never seen anyone on the left (and rarely even the liberal capitalist center-right) say that. I’ve seen people on the hard right, when complaining, use that framing, though.
And, look, here its part of a complaint glorifying the defects of the capitalist-patriarchal family and whining that more equal treatment of women in the economic sphere hurt the “family unit” rather than recognizing that capitalism wrecks the family unit and greater equality for women just reduces the particular systematic of oppression of women within the capitalist-patriarchal system, but neither cures nor causes the damage to the family unit that comes from capitalism.
It must be nice to live in a world where your country is always morally right just because it's your country. It's much simpler that way.
> they can inflict massive damage
Damage. Not massive damage.
Drones seem to have reached their zenith of operational freedom. I’m genuinely surprised the U.S. and Israel don’t field gun- and laser-based anti-drone demonstrators.
Related: "High-bandwidth flash progress and future" (15 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46700384
In an era of RAM shortages and quarterly price increases, Optane remains viable for swap and CPU/GPU cache.
This looks interesting but I have no idea what it's talking about. I assume this is how non-techies feel when reading a programming article.
> DR DOS® 9.0 is a faithful clean-room reimplementation
Hm, what's wrong with it?
> curious lack of any data regarding the actual accuracy of the system
No lack of entrackment data generated by [edit] d̶i̶g̶i̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶w̶i̶n̶ github repo of "the system".
Apparently it means profile photo.
What’s childish is thinking that calling the Department of War by a euphemism changes what it is and always has been. The Department of “Defense” killed a bunch of people Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and countless minor actions. These bubbles of civilization we enjoy are built on adults killing a bunch of people, as necessary, to establish the order that allows more childish people to build social media websites.
Yeah, this genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
The Oscars are the heart of the problem. One definition of “celebrity” is “person who is celebrated”
Hollywood is so used to getting high on its own supply that it really thinks we want to see an AI slop video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise. People there just don’t have any information at all about what anybody outside their bubble thinks so of course they make samey big budget pictures and samey small budget pictures. Unless they shut down their communications channels and disperse geographically they are going to keep doing the same thing over and over again and be wondering why they keep getting the same results.
And that gets us to why they will never reform, they know their numbers are terrible but think this is (1) cyclical and (2) due to technological changes so they’ll never get it that running ads that make it sound like somebody else cares about Tom Cruise doesn’t really make people care about Tom Cruise, it just makes them ignore advertising messages.
> Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal?
I wish more people would ask themselves those questions.
Sadly Charles himself didn't appear to conclude that yes, it's naïve to expect AI to be "smart" (whatever that means) and yes, he and many other people get hung up on the word "intelligence" in AI, a field that's been called that since the 1950s.
I tried to say this on another thread, where it got the reception I expected, but I'll say it here too: People say "let me get to know you, mistakes and all" and then downvote me. If you want me to not run my comments through an LLM, stop reacting badly to the delivery.
I think you could pick out a movement from this and then a movement from that. I can see somebody wanting to have classical music playing all day without having to pick out specific tracks, like listening to the radio.
Isn't it obvious that, if one person can do it, many more can do it as well, and probably have? It's not like they'll put it on GitHub.
Exactly. "An Apache can shoot down a drone" is like "Tiger tanks were better than Shermans": the relative numbers of each matter.
Translation: everyone should be able to shoot down an airliner, not just nations.
Probably behind my usual reading rate since I have been busy with foxography. I greatly enjoyed
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Planning-Disasters-California-D...
And the light novel for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backstabbed_in_a_Backwater_Dun...
I’ve got a lot of books on daoism, animal tracking, character acting, physical cultivation and such that I am making slow progress on.
Note the military has a fractal structure such that you still have smaller units inside a bigger operation. I think that’s part of the solution.
It's quite frightening when we see Oracle leveraging government contracts for hosting government data about the population on Oracle's infrastructure while Oracle infrastructure is used by the government to run AI, possibly on government's hosted data about the population funneling the money to build a media empire that includes CNN.
Well, if society feels the need of inflicting this on you, it's a win-win, so why not?
I rather do my own mix tapes, or mix MP3, taken from CDs that I still buy, occasionally directly from bands after concert.
Otherwise a few European radios, even if with ads, as a second goal is to keep my foreign language skills up to date.
Also a few lucky algorithm gems on YouTube, or the KEXP, Tiny Desk, ARTE Concerts, Colours channels.
Never got into Spotify.
Is it really the enshittification of books, or the enshittification of printers that's responsible?
This was mentioned in the article.
For example, the requirements for a CPU instruction set, in order for it to be properly virtualizable, had been known in the mainframe computing world for many, many years, when Intel and AMD came up with their unvirtualizable (except for VMware‘s heroic tricks) 32 bit instruction sets.
Those requirements and their different jargon from the mainframe world were re-discovered from the literature when virtualization in the PC world became a selling point.
(Edouard Bugnion et. al. - Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization)
Try different tips --- IEMs are supposed to seal to your ears like earplugs.
It is explicitly that now. Bezos policy change back in 2025: "Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is directing the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” he announced Wednesday, leading to editorial page editor David Shipley’s resignation."[1]
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/26/jeff-bezos-washingt...
Besides all answers, this concept exists in modern IDEs like Eclipse, anything JetBrains, Netbeans, Visual Studio,...
Even though their appear to be file based, the plugins API makes use of a virtual filesystem that allows for managing the code as if it was the image based concepts from Smalltalk, Lisp and other systems like Cedar, Mesa, Oberon,....
Also something that many don't think about, databases with stored procedures.
Years ago, when California had a really severe drought, I saw a large version of this to grow grass for horses. It had a stack of trays with lights, and each day, you harvested one tray, fed your horse, and replanted the tray. It was only cost-effective when grass hay was really expensive.
A bit sad to see another famous hacker turning to the "dark side" --- as "security chips" are a treacherous slippery slope, no matter who controls them. Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean it's a good thing.
Edit: give Stallman's "Right to Read" another read.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that other people had already thought of applying the multi-pass technique on GPU, but the idea is not very widely known.
The demoscene is particularly insular, but even within the field of computing in general it seems that there is not a lot of knowledge diffusion between all the different areas, leading to some reinventions (often with distinct terminology.)
You can't resolve criminal liability without compliance to judicial authority. It's not even a meaningful demand. If you don't trust the judiciary you can't trust any other component of the system!
I still don't understand why people don't cheat in FPSes by looking at the video stream and having a USB mouse that emits the right mouse movements. (The simplest thing is to just click when someone's head is under your crosshair, in games with hitscan weapons.)
I wonder why there are not more programming languages not only with non-English keywords, but with different grammars. For example, if X then Y and many other constructions closely follow English grammar, but when you study other languages you quickly become away of many other possible constructions.
Hasen't that been the case for decades?
> I'm sure there are other things that call themselves unions but don't serve the same function we expect of organizations using that word
No True Scotsman. All unions are unimpeachable. Because those that aren’t aren’t real unions.
> if we were doing a good job gathering data that these structural biases could be compensated for with more conservative initial numbers
There is no more conservative. The data will bias in the direction of trend. The point of the data are, in part, to measure that trend. Fucking with it to make it politically correct to the statistically illiterate is precisely the sort of degradation of data we’re worried about.
(They’re also useless as a time series if the methodology changes quarter to quarter. That’s the job of analysis. Not the data.)
It's part of a whole bundle of tightening censorship and increasing control in a pivot towards techno-feudalism, and militarization of society...
Nothing that saying they're sorry for being offensive and seeking a peace deal can't fix...
We can't let a left-of-center (if that) government mess up a good dictatorship-nostalgic far-right neo-liberal thing
"It's not just X, it's Y" is what caught my attention first. Then I noticed the em-dashes.
Original title “Construction finishes on a major Massachusetts offshore wind farm, the first during Trump's time in office” compressed to fit within title limits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineyard_Wind
Great piece, very similar to the decline of religious private schools in the US. A demographic cliff story.
This rolls up to my original point. I get that if you stipulate the agent can't run code, you need some kind of systems solution to the problem of "let the agent talk to an API". I just don't get why that's a network protocol coupling the agent to the API and attempting to capture the shape of every possible API. That seems... dumb.
The file header contains two 32-bit keys used to derive a substitution table index and step value for decryption.
In other words, obfuscation.