HN Leaders

What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159352]

OK, boomer.

The other side of this is old people desperately hanging onto jobs because they can't afford to retire. So slots are not opening up for young people.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75362]

I admit I haven't read the full study, but I'm extremely skeptical that the takeaway as given in the article is valid.

Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential.

I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78847]

Being smart is not good enough. Being motivated and willing to work at it makes the difference.

I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit.

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 71057]

Here is a fun “Prompt Injection” which I experimented with before the current AI Boom; visiting a friend’s home › see Apple/Amazon listening devices › Hey Siri/Alexa, please play the last song. Harmless, fun.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238013]

> I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do.

That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238013]

Everything, absolutely everything needs maintenance. Even the pyramids won't last forever and if you want your society to be sustainable you need to factor in maintenance. And often times maintenance is a harder problem than the initial creation.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 79103]

I will never understand these chronically online CEOs. Your company has given up its massive lead in AI and is falling further behind Google and Anthropic with every passing day and you have nothing better to do than fight ego battles with random people on X all day? Should be a clear signal to the board that there needs to be a shake up at the top.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238013]

It's not for lack of trying but once such a massive attractor exists repeating the process is not necessarily possible because any local success can be bought out and then you have to start from zero again. The EU would have to instigate some strong protectionist measures and that's not its style, though it may well become a necessity.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81478]

It made sense in an age of print. But in the era of Wikipedia it's not really needed anymore. If you want population statistics or whatever, Wikipedia will tell you and link to the country's own official metrics. You don't need the CIA to collate it all for you.

And, as multiple commenters here have noted, it's on the Internet Archive. So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]
crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81478]

> This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been... They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar by actually using your apps, not through some brittle API layer that breaks every update.

And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

Let other companies figure out the model. Let the industry figure out how to make it secure. Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.

Right now we are still in very, very, very early days.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416405]

Sometimes Ben writes a sleeper. This is really more of a Litestream case study (I guess technically an announcement of a Litestream feature, but a very situational one) than a Sprites thing.

Sprites are the best thing we've ever built. Extremely worth it.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127153]

The EITC was inspired by advocacy for a Negative Income Tax (which is generally isomorphic to UBI funded by income taxes, despite coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum.) But the designers couldn't avoid giving in to all the same problems with means-tested welfare that both UBI and NIT seek to eliminate, except or the separate eligibility bureaucracy, which integrating it into the income tax system avoided.

Of course, a GMI also differs from a UBI/NIT because that term generally refers to means-tested welfare with a sharp (usually 1:1 but not >1:1, which sometimes happens with means-tested welfare programs in aggregate in some ranges) cliff at starting at $0 in outside income up to the level of the minimum guarantee, whereas UBI/NIT benefits have a (usually much) <1:1 clawback via the tax system.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102686]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176245]

> ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it

Why is Apple's hardware being in demand for a use that undermines its non-Chinese competition a sign of missing the ball versus validation for waiting and seeing?

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102686]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75579]

Agreed, our backlog is insane.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98713]

Can you be more specific? I guess you're talking about some place like one of the central Asian republics?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]
dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127153]

> Open models are trained more generically to work with "Any" tool. Closed models are specifically tuned with tools, that model provider wants them to work with (for example specific tools under claude code), and hence they perform better.

Some open models have specific training for defined tools (a notable example is OpenAI GPT-OSS and its "built in" tools for browser use and python execution (they are called built in tools, but they are really tool interfaces it is trained to use if made available.) And closed models are also trained to work with generic tools as well as their “built in” tools.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98713]

We get it, you can't see any utility in having this information aggregated anywhere in a consistent format.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.

Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.

Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026

This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...

> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.

> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology

> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked

> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died

("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176245]

The comment: “Dear Joscha Bach. Unfortunately your post elides the core issue. The controversy is not simply about nuance, or about the public misunderstanding a private scientific discussion.

Your scientific framing here is still fundamentally misleading. Twin and family studies estimate within-population heritability under strong assumptions; they cannot support the population-level claims you made in your 2016 emails about Black children ‘never catching up’, developmental ‘genetic switches’, or group-level cognitive trajectories. Even the ACX piece you cite is explicit that twin estimates are likely inflated, that molecular methods produce far lower numbers, and that the missing-heritability problem remains unresolved. Crucially, behavioural geneticists across the field stress that within-group heritability cannot be used to infer genetic explanations for differences between socially defined groups.

The two studies you cite also don’t do what you suggest they do. The Malina (1988) paper you link is a review of motor development and motor performance, not cognition; it finds that Black infants in the US literature appear advanced in early motor milestones and that Black school-age children often outperform white peers on speed and jumping tasks, and it explicitly notes that environmental factors are most often cited as the explanation, calling for a biocultural (not genetic-determinist) approach. The Fryer & Levitt article documents that a Black–white test score gap emerges and widens through third grade and that their observed variables cannot fully explain this divergence – but it does not attribute the residual gap to genetics, nor does it say anything about ‘genetic switches’, neuroplasticity timelines or an inherent trade-off between early motor development and later cognitive attainment. The “inverse relationship” you infer is your own speculation, not something these studies actually establish.

More importantly, your emails with Epstein, whom you engaged with long after his 2008 conviction for child sex offences, did not stop at speculative neurodevelopment. They included explicit proposals about genetically altering whole populations, described mass executions of the elderly as rational, and framed fascism as ‘the most efficient and rationally stringent’ system of governance. These are eliminationist and hierarchical ideas in plain language, not misunderstood behavioural genetics. Your comment here is utterly unapologetic. You take no responsibility whatsoever for your own conduct, namely, your willingness to engage a sociopathic child rapist in pseudoscientific discussions which support fascist conclusions. I think it's fascinating that you position yourself wholly as a victim of an out of control public discourse, but appear to be utterly incapable of recognising that, perhaps, you actually did something wrong and ought to acknowledge your error.

For transparency: I’m the journalist at Byline Times who contacted you for right of reply in reporting this material. You chose not to respond. I would urge you to do so as we will be publishing shortly. I’m commenting here not out of hostility, but because your post presents a scientific justification that doesn’t align with the actual evidence or with what you wrote, and it’s important that readers have an accurate account of both. Your post is in fact particularly revealing in that it demonstrates that you have doubled down on misinterpreting and, indeed, misrepresenting the wider scientific literature on these issues.”

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97389]

The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.

ChuckMcM ranked #21 [karma: 111022]

I expect this is the crux of the problem.

There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.

Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.

But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185286]

There are hard limits for how much energy we can provide to computation, but we are not even close to what we can do in a non-suicidal way. In addition to expanding renewables, we could also expand nuclear and start building Thorium reactors - this alone ensures at least an extra order of magnitude in capacity compared to Uranium.

As for the compute side, we are running inference on GPUs which are designed for training. There are enormous inefficiencies in data movement in these platforms.

If we play our cards right we might have autonomous robots mining lunar resources and building more autonomous robots so they can mine even more. If we manage to bootstrap a space industry on the Moon with primarily autonomous operations and full ISRU, we are on our way to build space datacenters that might actually be economically viable.

There is a lot of stuff that needs to happen before we have a Dyson ring or a Matrioska brain around the Sun, but we don’t need to break any laws of physics for that.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97389]

Urgh, this is nasty:

  curl -i 'https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook'
  HTTP/2 302 
  content-length: 0
  location: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/
They didn't even have the decency to give it a 410 or 404 error.

Same for all of the country pages - they redirect back to the same story: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/morocco/

The thing was released into the public domain! No reason at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

Original title “Student Loans May Get Discharged And Refunded Automatically For 200,000 People As Key Deadline Passes” compressed to fit within title limits.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185286]

Nor is soft power.

The factbook was much more a tool for propaganda than anything else. While you could trust most of the numbers, you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships, while it would always be exceedingly kind to countries with US sponsored dictators.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75579]

> This is one of those “don’t be evil” like articles that companies remove when the going gets tough but I guess we should be thankful that things are looking rosy enough for Anthropic at the moment that they would release a blog like this.

Exactly this. Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome, but at least I'm glad we're getting a bit more time ad-free.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

We could be going faster. See: China

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Yeah, the revenge of waterfall, specs documents for AI agents.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]
Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159352]

When your AI is overworked, it gets dumber. It's backwards compatible with humans.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 79103]

> Reduce your expectations about speed and performance!

Wildly understating this part.

Even the best local models (ones you run on beefy 128GB+ RAM machines) get nowhere close to the sheer intelligence of Claude/Gemini/Codex. At worst these models will move you backwards and just increase the amount of work Claude has to do when your limits reset.

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 89736]

Nobody (roughly) is choosing the university to go to based on the syllabus. They choose it based on cost, exclusivity, and networking considerations.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 79103]

While the author is wildly overstating things, I do think AI is striking at the heart of the SaaS problem, which is the business model of "pay us $10-100+ per employee per month in perpetuity or we will hold all your data and your company's operations hostage". There is always going to be value in good software, but it is shitty vendors relying on the lock-in effect that are in danger. And good riddance.

The other issue is valuations - B2B SaaS stocks have never been rooted in reality, and the 100+ P/E ratios were always going to come down to earth at some point.

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 89736]

>This is the mark of a dictator

Usually the mark of a dictator is being the top millitary leader and taking over a country yourself.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416405]

I'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often.

In understanding everything that's being written about the Post layoffs, one thing you absolutely have to understand (you can weight it however you'd like) to have a coherent take is: the New York Times is an anomaly. Newspapers are a terrible business. People don't get news from newspapers anymore, and advertisers don't reach customers through them.

The Times is thriving because they've pivoted from being a newspaper to being a media business. The games vertical is the first thing people talk about, but cooking is arguably a better example. The verticals have dedicated users, their own go-to-markets, their own user retention loops.

Like basically every other newspaper, the Post failed to replicate this. They're staffed like a big media business, not like a targeted vertical like Politico, but they don't successfully operate like a media business.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88198]

> The US taxpayer has no moral obligation to send welfare "around the world".

Sure. It's a transactional purchase of stability and goodwill, via which the US has benefited enormously.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98713]

Also last time I looked (less than 1 year ago) files sent over Signal are stored in plain, just with obfuscated filenames. So even without access to Signal it's easy to see what message attachments a person has received, and copy any interesting ones.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176245]

> don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step

Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97389]

There's a joke in the news industry that the NYT is a games company with a loss-making news organization attached to it as a side-project.

jedberg ranked #43 [karma: 76947]

My family is doing our part to keep the average up (despite me being part of the family). I read one book last year, and it wasn't so much a single story as a collection of short non-fiction stories. I've read various chapters of some business books. But most of my reading is shorter form content like on here or articles.

But! We take our kids to the library every couple of weeks, and while we do let them check out Nintendo games, they also will each pick a stack of books. So my kids are going through 4-8 books a month. And my wife is part of a book club at the library so she's doing 8-10 in a year at least.

But for myself, I just have a hard time sitting down to do it. By the time I'm done with work and chores, it's late at night, and my brain barely has enough power to handle a TV show.

How do all y'all readers with young kids do it? How do you find the time?

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97389]

That's the beauty of this: QLab clearly do need a lab space... but they maybe don't need that space to be this beautifully designed and then have it run as a whole theater with artist collaborations like this.

I find the whole thing hugely inspiring. Chris is one of my new entrepreneurial heroes.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176245]

> don't buy that anywhere near that many people read a book in 2025

EDIT: Nvm

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104525]

Note it was possible to use a Z80 to function as a display controller, people used to do it back in the day...

https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176245]

> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine

Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.

I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75362]

I'm well older than 30 and couldn't disagree with GP more. I think social media has been an absolute disaster not just for young people, but for society at large.

And, importantly, I don't think it needs to be this way, but is designed to be this way to increase engagement. I remember when I first got on Facebook in the mid 00s and I loved it, and I was able to meaningfully connect with old friends. I also remember when the enshittification began, at least for me, when there was a distinct change in the feed algorithm that made it much more like twitter, designed for right hand thumb scrolling exercises and little actual positive interactions with friends.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176245]

> I'd rather have unabused kids than the technological breakthroughs he has contributed to

I'd rather have both. Hawthorne doesn't get nuked if Elon Musk goes to jail.

> Children were exploited

Abuse. Exploitation. CSAM. We're mushing words.

Child rape. These men raped children. Others not only stayed silent in full knowledge of it, but supported it directly and indirectly. More than that, they arrogantly assumed–and, by remaining in the United States, continue to assume–that they're going to get away with it.

Which category is Elon Musk in? We don't know. Most of the people in the Epstein files are innocent. But almost all of them seem to have been fine with (a) partying with an indicted and unrepentant pedophile [1] and (b) not saying for decades–and again, today–anything to the cops about a hive of child rape.

A lot of them should go to jail. All of them should be investigated. And almost all of them need to be retired from public life.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220224113217/https://www.theda...

minimaxir ranked #47 [karma: 73504]

You’re not Michael Scott, you can’t just declare recession.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185286]

Their newsroom website has nothing more recent than Feb 2... I wonder where this came from.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416405]

There are lots of concerns, not just two, but the point of machine-bound Macaroons is to address the IMDS problem.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127153]

No, if it was maximizing suppression bang for the buck it would be the Democratic precincts in swing states, not “swing precincts and states”, because electoral votes (except for 5—out of the 9 in Nebraska and Maine—that are determined by Congressional district) are decided by statewide (not precinct level) outcomes, so you get the maximum effect on the outcome by suppressing the vote in Democratic-leaning areas of swing states, not by targeting precincts that are near parity in the same states.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127153]

> This is different from swagger / OpenAPI how?

Because the descriptions aren't API specs and the things described aren't APIs.

Its more like a structure for human-readable descriptions in an annotated table of contents for a recipe book than it is like OpenAPI.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98713]

Why not? Because nobody is printing guns!

This is demonstrably untrue: https://gnet-research.org/2025/01/08/beyond-the-fgc-9-how-th...

Why would you waste everyone's time posting such nonsense? It's not that I support this legislation, but arguing against with counterfactual statements is unhelpful noise.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416405]

Please don't repost comments that have been flagged.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98713]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

Voters should exercise their second amendment constitutionally protected right when they arrive to vote.

(As of early 2026, 29 states allow permitless (constitutional) concealed carry of firearms in most public spaces, while 21 states still generally require a permit. Major permitless carry states include Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and Arizona. While 47 states allow some form of open carry, California, Illinois, and New York prohibit it)

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]
Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 159573]

> Starting with this release, pandoc can be compiled to WASM, making it possible to use pandoc in the browser. A full-featured GUI interface is provided at https://pandoc.org/app.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Not sure about that, however agents in low code tools are certainly taking over old school integrations.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

Your point with regards to criteria has merit, but this is unlikely to move the needle as Rural America continues to hollow out, so it's their funds to run the experiment. West Virginia has one of the oldest populations in the country (3rd [1]) while having the lowest birth rate (~16k/year and falling), for example (one of their pilots was in Mercer County, WV). Similar for Mississippi (highest out migration in the US [2] [3]).

There is simply no political appetite for the spending required in this regard without broad system changes to enable remote work to support rural communities as employers leave and agriculture dies. As you mention, this population cohort is what SNAP and Medicaid was stripped from. If some people have better lives through direct cash transfers while the outcome isn't going to change, that's fine I suppose. There are worse hobbies someone with resources could have.

TLDR Rural America will remain in decline [4] [5], urbanization will continue (because that's where the economic potential and jobs are).

[1] https://www.wboy.com/news/west-virginia/west-virginia-has-th...

[2] https://www.wapt.com/article/mississippi-ranks-among-top-sta...

[3] https://mississippitoday.org/2025/07/15/faq-mississippi-brai...

[4] ‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583495 - June 2024 (81% of rural counties recording more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023)

[5] Map Shows 21 States Where Deaths Now Outnumber Births - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889024 - February 2026

(I track the decline of Rural America broadly to reach out to institutions to ingest their data and collections for long term archival before they evaporate)

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.

PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.

There certainly other examples that I failed to address.

This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185286]

> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan

I see a lot of posturing and sabre rattling, but I don't think Xi would make this mistake - there is too much interest from the West in an independent Taiwan and, as it is now, it's not really an urgent matter to settle it.

China always plays the long game. They are not in this for any quick wins, because there is no political benefit from it - their political system ensures popular and populist measures never prevail over long-term strategy.

That's quite an advantage over most Western democracies, where politicians always prioritise what will give them more votes in the next election over anything that will benefit the country a couple terms down the road.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104525]

I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.

When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.

For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.

I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

As a Fastmail customer, I appreciate these sorts of efforts. Thanks Fastmail!

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

Democrats have learned to get the messaging right lately, focusing on affordability instead of climate change. Hopefully they can stick to it while driving back the folks pushing fossil interests. Just keep hammering home that renewables and batteries will get you cheaper generation costs, ignore that it helps solve climate change too.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88198]

> Consider what you might choose to do…

Emphasis on might.

Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88198]

> But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned.

Mmkay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Child_...

"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."

"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."

jedberg ranked #43 [karma: 76947]

Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they clearly violated policies.

On the other hand, it really sucks to be at a company that has a large layoff and not get a list, only to find out that they person you were waiting on for a key item was laid off the week before and that's why they didn't finish it (ask me how I know!).

jedberg ranked #43 [karma: 76947]

My assumption was that it's a way to convey it was written by a human because it would be hard to get an AI to write in all lowercase (which it actually isn't).

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75579]

The discourse on here would be much better if commenters at least glanced at the article.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97389]

If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about.

I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97389]

This demo is really impressive: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtim...

Don't be confused if it says "no microphone", the moment you click the record button it will request browser permission and then start working.

I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right - I said this and it transcribed it exactly right, WebAssembly spelling included:

> Can you tell me about RSS and Atom and the role of CSP headers in browser security, especially if you're using WebAssembly?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88198]

It allows note taking and corrections on drafts.

Same deal with things like SCOTUS opinions. (Random example: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-624_b07d.pdf)

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238013]

Four pounds of hardware ingested by a jet engine is going to do a shitload of damage.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127153]

X is most definitely not a dumb pipe, you also have humans beside the sender and receiver choosing what content (whether directly or indirectly) is promoted for wide dissemination, relatively suppressed, or outright blocked.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105652]

https://www.governance.fyi/p/yes-i-am-a-pro-natalist

> Q12: Conservatives have more children than liberals. Doesn’t that mean conservative values produce higher fertility?

> At the individual level, yes. At the system level, the opposite is true.

> Individual conservatives have more children than individual liberals. But countries with conservative policy regimes have lower fertility than liberal ones. The Nordics and France outperform Southern Europe. Catholic Italy and Spain have Europe’s lowest fertility despite cultural emphasis on family. So we have a situation where social conservatives thrive and live their best lives under generous welfare states.

> POSIWID resolves the paradox. What matters isn’t what a system values. It’s what it produces.

> Conservative values say family is important. Liberal systems remove barriers to family formation. Traditional societies say “have children” while their systems say “good luck.” People respond to the system.

> France and northern Western European countries have high fertility because their systems.

> That said, Western European governments are now dismantling these decades-old systems since the Great Recession, with lots of academic research confirming the results. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, right-wing parties sometimes advocate for family spending, as Stone would gladly attest. In Poland, Slavoj Žižek notes it was the right-wing PiS who implemented universal healthcare, not the left.

> The question isn’t whether you value family. It’s whether your system removes barriers and risk that prevents family formation.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81478]

It bounces off the ceiling and so is massively diffused.

You definitely don't look at it directly.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81478]

Funny, you're definitely right -- I've done it probably just 2 or 3 times over a decade, when I felt like I had two meaningful but completely unrelated things to say. And it always felt super weird, almost as if I was being dishonest or something. Could never quite put my finger on why. Or maybe I was worried it would look like I was trying to hog the conversation?

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127153]

> LLMs have access to the same tools --- they run on a computer.

That doesn't give them access to anything. Tool access is provided either by the harness that runs the model or by downstream software, if it is provided at all, either to specific tools or to common standard interfaces like MCP that allow the user to provide tool definitions for tools external to the harness. Otherwise LLMs have no tools at all.

> The problem here is the basic implementation of LLMs. It is non-deterministic (i.e. probabilistic) which makes it inherently inadequate and unreliable for a lot of what people have come to expect from a computer.

LLMs, run with the usual software, are deterministic [ignoring hardware errors ans cosmic ray bit flips, which if considered make all software non-deterministic] (having only pseudorandomness if non-zero temperature is used) but hard to predict, though because implementations can allow interference from separate queries processed in a batch, and the end user doesn't know what other typical hosted models are non-deterministic when considered from the perspective of the known input being only what is sent by one user.

But your problem is probably actually that the result of untested combinations of configuration and input are not analytically predictable because of complexity, not that they are non-deterministic.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238013]

That's a neat product. You can expect it to be copied within a day or two of this announcement.

How much power does one of these consume?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238013]

Let me counter this with all of my anecdata: I don't know a single pothead that improved compared to who they were (mentally especially, including cognitive function) compared to when I knew them before they started smoking pot. I'm sure they exist, I have not met them in person yet.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102686]

>In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104525]

In NY an individual can grow up to 5 plants legally a year and that's really a lot.

Because the hemp laws were poorly written, this product was legal in all 50 states

https://cyclingfrog.com/

The 10mg THC drinks give a whiff of cannabis when you open one and produce an intoxication similar to smoking with an experience similar to drinking an alcoholic drink. It's more expensive than the cheapest beer, but similar to a reasonably priced wine or drink in a bar. Unfortunately these will be gone in most places by the end of 2026.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104525]

It's more nuanced than that. Under Trump I, Bezos added the batman-like slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness". Under Trump II, Bezos sucks up to Trump.

jrockway ranked #48 [karma: 73223]

When I was in college I wrote a computer program (yes, involving yellow text) that couldn't be photocopied because I put the "o"s in the right place to trigger the eurion-finding algorithm. People thought it was neat.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Yeah, but we are still far off making it mainstream beyond some key use cases, QNX, INTEGRITY, language runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, all kernel extension points being pushed into userspace across Apple,Google,Microsoft offerings, Nintendo Switch,....

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Unfortunely yes, that is the MBA school, and then when the gamble fails, it is the employees that get shown the door, because company XYZ did not met their targets.

CEO might even get a bonus as payoff for a risky move, from shareholders point of view, go figure this logic.

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 125542]

It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.

Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102686]

Remember when credit cards required your signature on the back?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238013]

You misspelled 'hate speech'.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Being built on top of WinUI 3 is hardly much better given the lackluster tooling experience and bugs.

Pressing Win + W also might lead to a black rectangle with a waiting circle that can only be removed via a reboot, because well bugs in a system process.

Finally, as many point out, we don't want widgets that are mostly useless gimmicks.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Welcome to how Apple used to be during Gil Amelio days, at least now they are printing money thanks to iDevices, which wasn't the case back then.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 106005]

Not what the OP is referring to, but UWP and successor apps were always sandboxed, from the time of Windows 8 onwards. This was derived from the Windows Mobile model, which in turn was emulating the Android/iOS app model.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 106005]

Normally getting raided by the police causes people and organizations to change their behavior.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Notepad++ is one of my favourite editors, now it is forbidden by IT and checked for on security compliance checks if still installed, thanks to this attack.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125471]

Thankfully I only have to use Teams in very specific projects, thus I still have them. :)