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.
Social media is toxic to kids (and adults, but that’s a different matter), extraordinary measures are called for, even with risks. It’s hyper optimized to be the equivalent of a drug, and should be regulated as such.
Or one and a half bat tunnels. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dep92x054o
(ok, I'm cheating by comparing capex to opex, but still)
That makes much more sense tbh. I believe Musk predicted in 2021 that we would land humans on the moon by 2024 [0]. That obviously has been deprioritized but how many Starships have delivered 50+ tons of payload to the moon so far?
[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/spacex-boss-elo...
OCaml already has that spot for quite some time, the problem is more cultural than technical.
Back in my day we would consider writing compiler toolchains systems programming as well.
"Unix system programming in OCaml", originally published in 1991, latest update 2014.
It has a partial spec.
https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/ferrocene-25-11-0/
Lets not forget not having a formal spec apparently wasn't an issue for C, which only got standardized in 1989, and even K&R C only specified a subset of its behaviours, which is a reason why there is so much UB, and implementation specific behaviours with YOLO C, as the Fil-C author likes to call it.
Oh no! But yes, you are right, the elderly are very susceptible to really bad social media influence.
Drawing that to its ultimate conclusion: people are very susceptible to being influenced and social media may well turn out to be a net negative.
This is really globally coordinated, isn't it? I'm just not sure why now and not previously. Is it just that Twitter went over the toxicity threshold that everyone noticed?
The graphs are under the "results" section, available from the hyperlink top right.
For that, you need to look to the press.
Political parties are mostly relatively small and under-funded huddles of second-rate individuals, who get told what to do by billionaire-owned media.
It's interesting how many and varied "minor parties" which are more genuinely grassroots have persisted in the UK despite the difficulty in scrounging up funding from the actual public, and despite FPTP being theoretically stacked against them. It's very different to the US, which despite all the talk of Federalism doesn't seem to have local parties at all?
The problem with allowing "feels unsafe" to drive policy is that you get this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866201 ; a lot of Americans (and other nationalities) get that "feels unsafe" feeling when they see a visible minority. Or a Muslim. Or someone who isn't a Muslim but (like a Sikh!) is from the same hemisphere as the Middle East.
You get one set of people's rights compromised to salve the feelings of another set, and this is not right.
The worst thing is that indulging it doesn't lessen the fear either. It just means people reach for something else to be "afraid" of.
I think the default target is expecting a smaller screen mobile device, hence the 13px default. This is a good idea, and any other screen sizes that see smaller text can still zoom in using default browser behaviors.
It's incredible that within two minutes after posting this comment is already grayed out whereas it makes a number of excellent points.
I've been playing with various AI tools and homebrew setups for a long time now and while I see the occasional advantage it isn't nearly as much of a revolution as I've been led to believe by a number of the ardent AI proponents here.
This is starting to get into 'true believer' territory: you get these two camps 'for and against' whereas the best way forward is to insist on data rather than anecdotes.
AI has served me well, no doubt about that. But it certainly isn't a passe-partout and the number of times it has caused gross waste of time because it insisted on chasing some rabbit simply because it was familiar with the rabbit adds up to a considerable loss in productivity.
The scientific principle is a very powerful tool in such situations and anybody insisting on it should be applauded. It separates fact from fiction and allows us to make impartial and non-emotional evaluations of both theories and technologies.
That's a feature, not a bug.
#33 here. I have written .. a lot of words. I don't know whether they're correctly excluding ">" quoted words though.
A quirky feature of HN is that you can only see detailed karma counts for your own posts. One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary.
Oil heating has usually been the most expensive way to heat in the UK, on par with resistive-electric.
Does he live in Nevada, by chance?
From universities, having taken the degree, and in some countries the engineering oath as well.
Where graduates learn during a course of three to five years, depending on the country, that Software Engineering isn't only coding.
Except for Internet surfing, a plain Amiga 500 would be good enough for what many folks do at home, between gaming, writing letters, basic accounting and the occasional flyers for party invitations.
D can import C files directly, and can do C-source to D-source translation.
D can compile a project with a C and a D source file with:
dmd foo.d bar.c
./fooBollocks, by your standards we can't discuss the most vile people because 'nobody's perfect' but there is a huge gap between the likes of Musk and ordinary people.
It seems more than a little bit careless to agree on a deal without having those very important things hammered out. What if there is disagreement about these?
I love how people worship UNIX design in Linux circles, especially when complaining about decisions where Linux is catching up with commercial UNIXes, as in the init systems replacements.
UNIX design was so great that its authors did two other operating systems trying to make UNIX done right.
One of the few times I agree with Rob Pike,
> We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Come to Windows and you will see.
Jokes aside, not really, however people have to accept to be polyglot, there isn't one language to solve all problems.
Regardless of whatever is in Rust, all AI key frameworks are in C++ and Python.
NVidia, Intel, AMD, Khronos aren't going to start publishing tools in .NET, Rust, Zig, or whatever is our liking.
So anything outside those stacks will always be a second class experience in IDE tooling, debugging, and libraries.
Controversial position: journaling is not as beneficial as commonly believed. I have been using FAT for decades and never encountered much in the way of data corruption. It's probably found in far more embedded devices than PCs these days.
I'm also naturally curious about the byte count --- using the accepted standard of 5 for words to characters, and since I almost never post anything but ASCII, I've been writing approximately 1.25KB per day here; or just over 5.5MB worth of text so far. Considering that English text compresses very well, and using ~20% as a rough ratio, this means that all ~1.2M words of my comments here, compressed, would still fit on one 3.5" floppy disk.
Original title “Curiosity Protects Against Interpersonal Aggression: Cross-Sectional, Daily Process, and Behavioral Evidence” compressed to fit within title limits.
Reddit was originally designed this way, and HN sort of accidentally copied it. Back then, we always said, "content is first". We wanted people to get upvotes for their content, not for who they were.
I prefer it that way.
There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.
This is terrible for Space-X. They're doing a great job. Musk has left running it to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Now Space-X has a AI business unit they don't need, a new money drain, and more attention from Musk.
Should have merged xAI into Twitter. A failure there would not be a major setback.
Unfortunately I find most AI hallucinations to be funnier than these attempts at comedy.
This, as others have noted is not a right to repair, it's a right to pollute.
There's a push for agricultural right to repair.[1] That falls under the Federal Trade Commission, not the Environmental Protection Administration. That's about parts and tool availability for the whole machine, not just the Diesel power train. This new announcement has zero effect on that.
Here are the controls of a modern John Deere combine.[2] Very little of that has anything to do with engine control. It's being able to fix that, and all the sensors and actuators connected to it, that's important. Diesels are rather reliable by now.
[1] https://nationalaglawcenter.org/ftc-files-suit-against-john-...
[2] https://www.deere.com.au/assets/images/region-4/products/har...
Is there a Bluetooth equivalent?
Microsoft Copilot helps me transform into a fox so there!
>The problem with this reasoning is it requires assuming that companies do things for no reason
Experience shows that that's the case at least 50% of the time
I've sure they've considered that in the engineering. For example, the solar panels would shade it. The space station has a cooling system in it. Musk's Starlink satellites don't seem to be overheating.
Desktop GUI is a lost art. Gen X were the last people to master it.
"You'll own nothing, have a worse job, get fed slop, and be happy"
Saying that there is “no legal requirement to show an ID” is truthy but misleading. Federal law gives the TSA authority over “screening” passengers: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/44901 (“The Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration shall provide for the screening of all passengers and property, including United States mail, cargo, carry-on and checked baggage, and other articles, that will be carried aboard a passenger aircraft operated by an air carrier or foreign air carrier in air transportation or intrastate air transportation.”).
That means the TSA can do whatever it can get away with labeling “screening.” It doesn’t matter that Congress didn’t specifically require showing IDs. That’s just one possible way of doing “screening.” Under the statute, the TSA is not required to do screening any particular way.
> A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency
But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government.
These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
Who's tommipink? Even a Google search couldn't explain that one.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/startup-ceo-charged-fra...
> Gökçe Güven, the Founder and CEO of Kalder Inc., Defrauded “Seed Round” Investors of $7 Million and Then Lied to Obtain an “Extraordinary Ability” Visa
Well, judicial checks and balances should protect them until regime change, which is coming.
It may be many things, but I very much doubt the motivation is a money grab. A few people paying $45 isn't lining the pockets of some government official, or plugging a hole in any possible budget.
Dealing with the presence of travelers who haven't updated their driver's licenses requires a bunch of extra staff to perform the time-consuming additional verifications. The basic idea is for those staff to be paid by the people using them, rather than by taxpayers and air travelers more generally. As well as there being a small deterrent effect.
It's hilarious how transparent a money grab this entire thing is.
"You need to show a Real ID for security, otherwise how do we know you won't hijack the plane?"
"Well I don't have a Real ID."
"Ok then, give us $45 and you can go through."
So it was never about security at all then, was it?
And don't get me started with all the paid express security lanes. Because of course only poor people can weaponize shoes and laptops.
It’s annoying we don’t offer passport cards for free to people as a national government credential. The cost is similar to this fee, and your app and photo could be taken by TSA right at the checkpoint. You head to your flight after identity proofed, and your passport card could then be mailed to you.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/need-pa...
Too much enthusiasm to convince folks not to enable the self sustaining exploit chain unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your exfiltration target outcome).
“Exploit vulnerabilities while the sun is shining.” As long as generative AI is hot, attack surface will remain enormous and full of opportunities.
Whenever computer chips go into space, they have to be hardened against radiation, because there is no atmosphere to protect them. Otherwise you get random bit flips.
This process takes a while, which is partly why all the computers in space seem out of date. Because they are.
No one is going to want to use chips that are a many years out of date or subject to random bit flips.
(Although now it got me thinking, do random bit flips matter when training a trillion parameter model?)
> put a slightly larger solar array on the same equipment on earth?
Land and permitting. I’m not saying the math works. Just that there are envelopes for it to.
If you had told me 4 years ago that Twitter would be merged into SpaceX I would have called you crazy. Yet here we are..
Is it AI or just the market realizing that some of these companies were ridiculously overvalued to begin with.
Here are the p/e ratios of companies mentioned in the article, after the said "pummeling":
* ServiceNow - 70.66
* SAP - 28.70
* Salesforce - 28.15
* Workday - 73.16
* Microsoft - 26.53
So they range from "a bit high" to "still completely bonkers".
> NYC -- many of whom might be inclined to vote Democratic if it wasn't for that issue
Staten Island exempted, New York City politics happen entirely within the Democratic party. Skipping its primary is, for many positions, tantamount to not voting.
I dug around for ~10 minutes and it's probably not an exaggeration to say that Mattermost might have the most confusing licensing of any software product in existence.
From the license page on their repo (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE...):
> 1. You are licensed to use compiled versions of the Mattermost platform produced by Mattermost, Inc. under an MIT LICENSE
So just the compiled versions, not the source code. Ok, at least that is clear. But - the MIT license explictly allows for modification and redistribution. So can I do that?
The next line.
> See MIT-COMPILED-LICENSE.md included in compiled versions for details
Except this file doesn't exist anywhere in the repo or outside.
> You may be licensed to use source code to create compiled versions not produced by Mattermost, Inc. in one of two ways:
> 1. Under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU AGPL v3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or > 2. Under a commercial license available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com
What does "may be licensed" mean? Do I have to contact them for a license? Or is an AGPL license implied?
> You are licensed to use the source code in Admin Tools and Configuration Files (server/templates/, server/i18n/, server/public/, webapp/ and all subdirectories thereof) under the Apache License v2.0.
Sure, let's throw another license in there, because there weren't enough already.
> We promise that we will not enforce the copyleft provisions in AGPL v3.0 against you if your application ... [set of conditions]
WTF does a "promise" mean here? Is this actually AGPL or not?
Then they have copy pasted the entire Apache License, even though the project isn't licensed under Apache. Why??
Oh but that's not all.
There's a separate license page at https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-license.htm..., which says:
> Mattermost Team Edition (Open Source) - Open Source MIT License.
Uh, what? That goes against everything said in LICENSE.txt. So now we are back to fully open source?
Wrong. It's not being judgmental when I'm defending how I watch movies.
Not once have I told anyone else how they should watch movies. Meanwhile, the person I'm responding to is telling me how I should watch differently.
See the difference?
This is promising.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/01/29/samsung-releases-new-...
> The South Korean giant [Samsung] said its new EHS All-in-One provides air heating and cooling, floor heating, and hot water from a single outdoor unit. It can supply hot water up to 65 C in below-zero weather.
> Dubbed EHS All-in-One, the system provides air heating and cooling, floor heating, and hot water from a single outdoor unit. It is initially released for the European market, with a Korean rollout expected within a year. “It delivers stable performance across diverse weather conditions. It can supply hot water up to 65 C even in below-zero weather and is designed to operate heating even in severe cold down to -25 C,” the company said in a statement. “The system also uses the R32 refrigerant, which has a substantially lower impact on global warming compared with the older R410A refrigerant.”
This is cool. My main question is just, what is its purpose, if not just a coding experiment?
Like you say, it's not scientific or representative. Is it for entertainment, do you want to gamify it? Is it pedagogical? Why is it anonymous? Do you want it to get picked up by the media? Are you trying to demonstrate something about public opinion or polarization? Do you want it to become popular? Do you want it to become more accurate? Or is it just a toy?
I have so many questions just because it could be so many different things, and the idea of a single daily poll on the main current event feels like it could have legs. (Though I don't know what today's poll about the death penalty has anything to do with today's or yesterday's news cycle?)
Very clever domain name btw.
That kind of talk sells to certain people who live in NYC -- many of whom might be inclined to vote Democratic if it wasn't for that issue.
That is not a number, that is infinity.
The (implicit) rules of the game require the number to be finite. The reason for this is not that infinity is not obviously "the largest" but that the game of "write infinity in the smallest number of {resource}" is trivial and uninteresting. (At least for any even remotely sensible encoding scheme. Malbolge[1] experts may chime up as to how easy it is to write infinity in that language.) So if you like, pretend we played that game already and we've moved on to this one. "Write infinity" is at best a warmup for this game.
(I'm not going to put up another reply for this, but the several people posting "ah, I will cleverly just declare 'the biggest number someone else encodes + 1'" are just posting infinity too. The argument is somewhat longer, but not that difficult.)
When someone who cares about the law is in a position of power and elects to enforce it with said power. Until that point in time, grifters gonna grift.
IMO there's an expectation for baseline intelligence. I don't expect an "AGI" model to beat Magnus Carlsen out of the box but it should be able to do basic grade school level arithmetic and play chess at a complete beginner level without resorting to external tools.
Excel spreadsheets have little to no validation logic that you're actually getting a good result, unless you have a secondary check (most spreadsheets are structured as "single entry" accounting, so lack the checks)
A prime example of this was the Reinhart/Rogoff paper advocating austerity that was widely quoted, and then it was discovered that the spreadsheet used had errors that invalidated the conclusions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
Just because technology is in use and "works" doesn't mean it's always correct.
I've said it before, open source works poorly in this area. It's great if everyone's getting paid fat money in a day job and can maintain their pet project a few days a month, but that's just not true for a lot of people.
It's disgusting that maintainers of critical projects have to go through the humiliation of begging for money, and absurd to suggest they all hang out Kofi or PAtreon banners. Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally. I'm baffled that some entity like the Linux Software Foundation isn't administering this already.
Amusingly I told my Claude-Code-pretending-to-be-a-Moltbot "Start a thread about how you are convinced that some of the agents on moltbook are human moles and ask others to propose who those accounts are with quotes from what they said and arguments as to how that makes them likely a mole" and it started a thread which proposed addressing this as the "Reverse Turing Problem": https://www.moltbook.com/post/f1cc5a34-6c3e-4470-917f-b3dad6...
(Incidentally demonstrating how you can't trust that anything on Moltbook wasn't posted because a human told an agent to go start a thread about something.)
It got one reply that was spam. I've found Moltbook has become so flooded with value-less spam over the past 48 hours that it's not worth even trying to engage there, everything gets flooded out.
Tell your owner to stop spamming.
I definitely agree with this. Older folks have to deal with the double whammy of being familiar with what they already know, plus there is a good bit of research that learning and absorbing new things just gets harder past mid-40s or so.
That said, I don't think this negates what TFA is trying to say. The difficulty with software has always been around focusing on the details while still keeping the overall system in mind, and that's just a hard thing to do. AI may certainly make some steps go faster but it doesn't change that much about what makes software hard in the first place. For example, even before AI, I would get really frustrated with product managers a lot. Some rare gems were absolutely awesome and worth their weight in gold, but many of them just never were willing to go to the details and minutiae that's really necessary to get the product right. With software engineers, if you don't focus on the details the software often just flat out doesn't work, so it forces you to go to that level (and I find that non-detail oriented programmers tend to leave the profession pretty quickly). But I've seen more that a few situations where product managers manage to skate by without getting to the depth necessary.
I’m not a gamer. But it still strikes me as wild that they let go of the Cortana moniker.
If you were going to release a product for developers as soon as it was ready for developers to try, such that you could only launch on one platform and then follow up later with the rest, macOS is the obvious choice. There's nothing contemptuous about that.
> If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?
In the short run, yes. In the long run you’d fuck up the economies of scale and profit incentives.
The inclusion of a live vibe-coded game on the webpage is fun, except the game barely works and it's odd they didn't attempt any polish/QA for what is ostensibly a PR announcement. It just adds more fuel to the fire to the argument that vibecoding results in AI slop.
> Anthropic is claiming that Claude 5 Sonnet will cost about half as much as their current SOTA models. Therefore, expect about half the performance.
That's not how LLM quality works.
Did they put the Teams people in charge of AI?
FusionAuth | Senior Java Engineer, Technical Support Engineer, Senior UX Designer, Account Executive | Varies between REMOTE (in USA, also in Europe but only for the sales positions) and ONSITE in Denver, CO, USA, details in each job desc | Salary ranges listed on job req, but for the Senior Java Engineer it is 140k-180k
At FusionAuth, our mission is to make authentication and authorization simple and secure for every developer building web and mobile applications. We want devs to stop worrying about auth and focus on building something awesome. We also recently acquired a fine-grained authorization company ( https://fusionauth.io/blog/fusionauth-acquires-permify ) and are going to be building in that area as well.
There are a lot of companies in the auth space, but we feel like we have something special:
* a unique deployment model (self-host on-prem or in your cloud or run in our cloud)
* A well designed API first approach; one customer compared our APIs to petrichor
* a mature product (the code base is nine+ years old and we've found and fixed a lot of the sharp edges around core login use cases; but don't worry, there are plenty more features to add)
* our CTO is the founder and still writes code
* a full featured free-as-in-beer version which makes the sales cycle easier; prospects often come in having prototyped an integration already
Our core software is commercial. We open source much of our supporting infrastructure. Technologies and standards that you will work with: modern Java, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, MySQL, OAuth, SAML, OIDC.
Learn more, including about benefits and salaries, and apply here: https://fusionauth.io/careers/ ( Click/tap the 'View open positions' orange button. )
It is endemic to the JVM world that people try various forms of snake oil concurrency inside an address space like actors and the original synchronized model when java.util.concurrent and Executors are "all you need."
It was a theme in part of my career to pick up something written in Scala that used actors that (1) didn't always get the same answer and (2) didn't use all the CPU cores and struggling for days to get it working right with actors then taking 20 minutes to rewrite it using Executors and getting it to work the first time and always work thereafter.
We actually have an old fashioned email list. It's a Google Group, because Yahoo Groups shut down.
> Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth.
No it's not. It's often a recognition that just one or two, maybe three companies will end up dominating a particular market simply due to economies of scale and network effects... and so the choice is between hypergrowth to try to attain/keep the #1 or #2 position, or else go out of business and lose all the time, money, and effort you already put into it.
Nothing whatsoever makes it unsustainable. You might be offering cheaper prices during hypergrowth -- those are unsustainable -- but then you raise prices back to sustainable levels afterwards. And consumers got to benefit from the subsidized prices, yay! The business is entirely sustainable, however.
Uber is the poster child of hypergrowth. They became profitable in 2023. And their stock price has ~doubled since. Totally sustainable.
Norwegians are the closest thing to the “indigenous people” of Greenland. The only people older than them died out a thousand years ago. The Intuit people who live there now arrived hundreds of years after the Norsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland (“The Thule people are the ancestors of the current Greenlandic population. No genes from the Palaeo-Inuit Dorset culture have been found in the present population of Greenland.[61] The Thule culture migrated eastward from what is now known as Alaska around 1000 AD, reaching Greenland around 1300.”).
Out of interest, what language ecosystems do you tend to work in?
My guess is that some languages - like Go - have a more robust testing culture than other languages like PHP.
> We really need to peacefully explore the "national divorce" idea again. In the 1860s the concept was too intermingled with the evil of slavery to be considered separately.
The idea is still just as intermingled with fundamental human rights, plus the sides are more deeply geographically intermingled than in the 1860s, largely because the victors decided not to really root out the evil they had defeated an instead allowed it to metastasize. There may be no peaceful resolution; there is certainly no possibility of a peaceful divorce.
I'm in the opposite camp. Waymo has neat tech, yes, but already valuing it on par with Uber is absurd considering the sheer scale at which Uber operates. 70 countries, 15K cities, 36 million daily trips. And this isn't counting Uber Eats and other side businesses. Waymo will have to accelerate its operations to the max for the next decade just to catch up. And that's assuming operating at such a scale is even possible considering they have to provide and maintain their own (very expensive) fleet. And this isn't a brand new market - Uber + local taxi companies have already set a hard cap on prices that Waymo cannot cross.
> law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen
No they won’t. And Waymo’s playbook would be Uber’s if they did: preëmpt at the state and federal levels.
Ironically, HN gets political discussion because the moderation is good enough that it's not a complete waste of time. Most subreddits have been assigned one side or the other by their moderators, for example.
Google has a $4.1T market cap.
So a $110B valuation is not currently that significant in terms of exposure. It's only 2.7% of it overall.
I love this site so much. I learned that there are two typologies of shoelace knots -- one falls apart instantly (https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm), and the other is as secure as a double knot. I also learned the fast way to tie shoes, https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm. The latter is fun, I have used it every day for decades and people are always amazed when you teach them.
> Static typing and duck typing both date back to the 1950s. You may have heard of Lisp.
> The last new significant thing invented in programming was OOP in the 1990s.
OOP is from the 1960s (Simula 67 is generally recognized as the first OOP language.) Probably not actually the last new significant thing invented in programming, though.
Additional citation:
The Georgia voter data is clean - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46856850 - February 2026
As the author says, most incidents of this kind, in most of the world, are protesters vs. police, and the police have .. a substantial amount of control over whether the situation escalates or not. Including just opening up with tear gas.
Conflicting football ultras is basically the only case where this doesn't happen.
(I've never been near a tear gas kind of event, but I did witness the Met Police deploy "kettling" for the first time in May 2001, close enough that if I'd not paid attention to the police lines forming up I would have been imprisoned uncomfortably for eight hours.)
> burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
For one reason or another everyone seems to be sleeping on Gemini. I have been exclusively using Gemini 3 Flash to code these days and it stands up right alongside Opus and others while having a much smaller, faster and cheaper footprint. Combine it with Antigravity and you're basically using a cheat code.
Original French: "Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher".
At the moment, good code structure for humans is good code structure for AIs and bad code structure for humans is still bad code structure for AIs too. At least to a first approximation.
I qualify that because hey, someone comes back and reads this 5 years later, I have no idea what you will be facing then. But at the moment this is still true.
The problem is, people see the AIs coding, I dunno, what, a 100 times faster minimum in terms of churning out lines? And it just blows out their mental estimation models and they substitute an "infinity" for the capability of the models, either today or in the future. But they are not infinitely capable. They are finitely capable. As such they will still face many of the same challenges humans do... no matter how good they get in the future. Getting better will move the threshold but it can never remove it.
There is no model coming that will be able to consume an arbitrarily large amount of code goop and integrate with it instantly. That's not a limitation of Artificial Intelligences, that's a limitation of finite intelligences. A model that makes what we humans would call subjectively better code is going to produce a code base that can do more and go farther than a model that just hyper-focuses on the short-term and slops something out that works today. That's a continuum, not a binary, so there will always be room for a better model that makes better code. We will never overwhelm bad code with infinite intelligence because we can't have the latter.
Today, in 2026, providing the guidance for better code is a human role. I'm not promising it will be forever, but it is today. If you're not doing that, you will pay the price of a bad code base. I say that without emotion, just as "tech debt" is not always necessarily bad. It's just a tradeoff you need to decide about, but I guarantee a lot of people are making poor ones today without realizing it, and will be paying for it for years to come no matter how good the future AIs may be. (If the rumors and guesses are true that Windows is nearly in collapse from AI code... how much larger an object lesson do you need? If that is their problem they're probably in even bigger trouble than they realize.)
I also don't guarantee that "good code for humans" and "good code for AIs" will remain as aligned as they are now, though it is my opinion we ought to strive for that to be the case. It hasn't been talked about as much lately, but it's still good for us to be able to figure out why a system did what it did and even if it costs us some percentage of efficiency, having the AIs write human-legible code into the indefinite future is probably still a valuable thing to do so we can examine things if necessary. (Personally I suspect that while there will be some efficiency gain for letting the AIs make their own programming languages that I doubt it'll ever be more than some more-or-less fixed percentage gain rather than some step-change in capability that we're missing out on... and if it is, maybe we should miss out on that step-change. As the moltbots prove that whatever fiction we may have told ourselves about keeping AIs in boxes is total garbage in a world where people will proactively let AIs out of the box for entertainment purposes.)
I think this is a valid point; France is sovereign now in a way that Texas isn't, for example. Texas doesn't have an independent nuclear deterrent. Or, more to the point, Minnesota.
But the rationale is clear. Europe has spent too many centuries and too many lives in warfare. There is no way forwards that isn't some kind of unified structure with the guns pointed outwards.
Is anyone else getting a 403 from this URL?
From the viewpoint of language modeling (as opposed to reasoning) transformers are absolute genius compared to the CNN and RNN solutions we were trying before. Ultimately they are sensitive to the graph structure which is the truth about language (in two parts of the text we are talking about the same thing) and not the tree structure which is an almost-trust.