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Disk drives used to have a write-enable jumper on them. No more.
You wanna hear my evidence-free cosmic structure theory? Of course you do.
If you shine a laser through a mass of soap bubbles it will unsurprisingly split into lots of smaller beams due to a mix of refraction and reflection. I have long held the suspicion that there's an isomorphism between gravitational and surface tension structures, that the multiplicity and distance of galaxies may be somewhat illusory, and that many of them are translated/rotated reflections of nearer ones. Laugh now, perhaps gasp in wonder later.
Can you point to an example?
Silica packets are definitely used in foods that need to be kept super-dry, like seaweed or nuts -- absorbing residual moisture that was in the product during packaging.
I've never heard of an oxygen absorber used in food. A lot of snacks and things (e.g. all potato chips) in airtight containers are packaged in nitrogen so there's no oxygen in the first place.
Are they for small-scale food production that can't use nitrogen? I've never encountered them in my life.
1. For the consumer, paying off the balance due at the last minute gives you an interest-free loan on your spending for an average of 6 weeks. Let's say you spend $1000 per month. At 5% interest, that saves you about $30 a month.
2. It gives you an itemized list of what you spent.
It reminds me of an article long ago that explained how Amazon could make money selling items at cost. a) they get paid by the customer right away b) they don't pay the vendors for 90 days. Thus, Amazon gets paid interest for 90 days on the volume of business they do, which is very large.
Not many people seem to understand the time value of money, certainly it isn't taught in school. It's not just about mortgage interest rates. It's everything that involves money.
Debit transactions don't have that
Why not?
This article is actually really interesting and has non-obvious findings.
The tl;dr is that it's not mostly due to defaults or for rewards programs.
But rather due to very high operating expenses (4-5% of dollar balances!) driven by marketing.
And also because the lending banks can't diversify. The risk of default is essentially magnified because you can't do anything if the economy turns bad and everybody starts defaulting together at the same time.
I wrote a small, client-side-JS-only app that does OCR and TTS on board game cards, so my friends and I can listen to someone read the cards' flavor text. On a few pages of text in total so far, Qwen has made zero mistakes. It's very impressive.
They're pretty handy just as a form of payment. I've never once carried a balance and never paid a cent of interest to a credit card company, but I use credit cards for basically all of my spending. I get back ~$1000/year in rewards, plus all the convenience of having plastic whenever I want to spend, recurring billing, dispute resolution, fraud prevention, etc.
I'd argue that this suggests another hypothesis that the article only partially considered: high interest rates are a cross-subsidy to attract the 40% of credit card users who never carry a balance, and the 40% of credit card users who never carry a balance are a marketing expense to normalize credit card use and make the 60% who do think it's completely acceptable to spend without a thought. I get literally thousands of benefits from the credit card company, and I don't pay a cent. That money has to be coming from somewhere, and I'd bet that it's coming from the 60% of consumers who pay usurious interest rates.
Because wages are insufficient. Credit fills the gap to survive. Half of bankruptcies in the US are from medical debt, for example. In 2023, approximately 36.8 million Americans, or 11.1%, lived below the poverty line. ~50% of Americans carry a balance, and the average U.S. household with credit card debt has a balance of around $6,065.
Credit cards are expensive short term financing.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-burden-of-medi...
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/may/which-us-...
There will be another sale. Probably pretty soon.
Not that it changes your overall point, but they didn't. They sold away the rights before they spent the two and a half years writing their book. If they hadn't gotten the advance and therefore the ~guarantee it would get published, they might not have written it in the first place.
But they can't choose to self-publish after they finish it, because they chose to sign their contract long before that.
Waiting for the inevitable 'security researchers can now spy on your AI sessions' story
Good pitch, good documentation. My first reaction when I opened the page was 'meh, yet another 'agentic' product wrapper' but I changed my mind.
There are an estimated 4 million books published every year. Not all of them are "volunteer work that benefits society". I'm going to go ahead and assume it's a very, very tiny minority of them. Most writers (and certainly every single one I know) have nothing to contribute to society except their own vanity.
I have nothing against creative expression, but when people start splashing a bucket of paint on a canvas and going "I'm an artist, I deserve to have a comfortable life" I can't help but roll my eyes.
That's fair. Now if we go with this line of thinking, and push a little bit past the obvious, the seeming difference in earning potential between authors and entertainers - whether YouTube influencers, classical athletes or singers, combined with clear winner-take-all dynamics of the latter groups, is how the world tells us...
... we need more human connection.
It's not just whether or not the content is lighter, more engaging, or hyperoptimized. It's not just that. Maybe what's common between all this, and other high-engagement creations like high-outrage news reporting, is the same instinct: seeking out what's important, by proxy of what we expect others will also seek out and talk about. So, in short, seeking connection.
Just random musings, no real conclusion here.
That's a part of it. The other part was the federal government not enforcing anti trust law for decades, enabling consolidation. Matt Stoller writes extensively about this at https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ and in his book "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy." Consolidation and monopolies are good for shareholders and management, competition is good for consumers and labor, broadly speaking.
Business consultants exist for a purpose that can be described as "how can we squeeze this enterprise or deal for as much as we can?" Sometimes that's squeezing your customer base through anti competitive practices. Sometimes thats offshoring (labor arbitrage). Sometimes it is M&A (realizing "efficiencies"). Sometimes it is squeezing your existing labor pool as hard as you can. Or a combination of the above.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...
Related:
Circle S-1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43551153 - April 2025
Doesn't work for that site. Archive/Whatever only works if a site lets Google have free access so Google can index it and that one (like most off-brand news blogs) doesn't.
> That's the thing, she wasn't Queen of England in the same way Trump isn't President of Texas.
The same way in that both are true, but not really the same way beyond that. Texas is separate-but-subordinate sovereignty from the United States, England is not a separate sovereignty from the United Kingdom, it is one of several older sovereignties that was fused to form the UK. To the extent that laws still in force in the country of England refer to the monarch of that kingdom, those references now apply to the monarch of the United Kingdom.
> The Treaty of Waitangi might use that term, but it is simply incorrect, even if they are well educated.
The interesting thing is that the Treaty uses the correct formal title in the introduction, but then uses "the Queen of England" in the individual operative articles. Honestly, looking at other treaties of the Victorian era that are similar in context (dealing with entities that are ceding authority and becoming subject, as distinct from treaties with entities that will continue as independent sovereignties -- there is a pretty big stylistic difference here, if you compare, say, the Treaty of Waitangi or the Stone Fort Treaty with the treaty with the Republic of Texas addressing the African Slave Trade), it looks like possibly a quirk of the drafting of the particular text, using the shorter outdated title where more typically treaties would just use "Her Majesty the Queen" in the interior. OTOH, this is also earlier than the other comparable treaties I can readily find (like the treaties of the 1870s with various Canadian First Nations), so the style may also have shited over time; in either case, the interior references are clearly less-formal references with the formal and correct title at the beginning.
The opening of the Treaty of Waitangi is: "HER MAJESTY VICTORIA Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland regarding with Her Royal Favor the Native Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and anxious to protect their just Rights and Property and to secure to them the enjoyment of Peace and Good Order has deemed it necessary [...]"
That's not strictly correct. All LLMs output logits softmax'd into a probability distribution of the next token, and this distribution is indeed deterministic.
Most generative AI apps set a nonzero temperature which scales the probability. So if you have a distribution with 50%, 30%, 20% for tokens, and a temperature of 1, then you'd up to 3 different outputs sampled at those exact probabilities, which iteratively cascade into completely different texts. The RNG of the probability selections can be controlled by a seed but with distributed systems that is often not the case: I've only seen seeds returned for cases where the entire model is on a single system. Otherwise, just not using a seed is fine for sufficient randomness.
If the temperature is 0, then it instead chooses the token with the highest probability, and done iteratively the final output will be the same. (this is not accounting for distributed system weirdness)
Five ads and seven "subscribe" buttons, for one short article about silica gel.
Wikipedia has a better article.[1]
> You can just microwave them too, on low power... Oven drying has the advantage that you can set the temperature so there's no risk of overheating anything.
It's hard to hurt silica gel itself with kitchen level heat. Melting point 1200C. The packet it comes in is more of a risk. Although there are forms with other chemicals that change color when humid. Also, heating wet desiccant fast enough to produce steam might crack the material.
Whether or not meritocracy exists, believing that it does is essential for upwards mobility. Studies suggest that having an external locus of control-believing that your fate is determined by factors outside your control—is associated with lower academic achievement: https://ijlter.org/index.php/ijlter/article/viewFile/7094/pd... (pp. 399-400).
A remarkable statistic is that Asian Americans raised in poverty have more than double the upward mobility of white Americans raised in poverty. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of income have a 25% chance of growing up to be in the top 20% versus just 10% for similarly situated white kids.
Folks are resistant to studying why, but I strongly suspect part of the reason is that Asian kids are generally taught that hard work produces results, and are discouraged from thinking about whether things are “fair” or not.
But using "likely" is obviously AI in this context, or at least it's really, really shitty reporting.
This is supposed to be a news article, not someone who's hypothesizing about something that could have been. I mean, it either required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge or it didn't - no guessing should be required. If the author doesn't know, they can do proper research or simply ask the subject.
FWIW this article didn't immediately scream AI to me either, until the commenter pointed out the use of "likely". When you think about it, it absolutely becomes a fingerprint of AI in this context - it's not just that "likely" anywhere means it's AI.
Yes: https://www.chessvariants.com/alphabet.html
My point not being that that is a link straight to the exact thing you've described, but that if you ask that site for all the variants it has with a blank search [1], the first 500 variants on file (give or take some administrative garbage) gets you the variants starting with a number and up to "Avalanche Chess" alphabetically... that is, you can't even get all the way through the As before the search bails out.
You wonder if people who wrote those articles never played a game in their life, like not even Pac-Man or some kinda of gatcha game.
Funny though, my son used to play Krunker, and in Krunker there are exactly 24 NFT artifacts which are purely cosmetic
https://opensea.io/collection/krunker-collection
but one person owns almost all of them. He did see people with them in games from time to time. Krunker actually has pretty good trading mechanics that add fun to the game and you'd think it would be a good case and it works and all but there isn't broad interest in owning these artifacts.
It's all fun and games until one of those thousand batteries decides to go exothermic :-). This is a really amazing story and I'm impressed by the diligence and amount of effort they put into recovering and reusing all of these batteries. A couple of dendrites though, a lightning strike, there are things outside of their control that could turn the building holding this collection of batteries into a very impressive incendiary device. If you've ever seen a fire at a battery factory, it is both fascinating and scary af. People are still trying to assess the long term damage from the Moss Landing grid scale battery fire in California.
So is there a book that I could read that would allow me to write applications with just HTML/CSS some js and rust? I don't want Nue so much as I want "The art of writing lightweight, feature complete, responsive applications on the modern web."
Would love a pointer to THAT.
> I now read that DOGE is interested in the "Sudden Wealth" of so many congresscritters. I'd be interested in that as well.
Of the top 10 wealthiest people in Congress, seven are Republicans. Let me know when DOGE decides to look into them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the...
#2 got some of his wealth from Medicare fraud, even. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott
I suspect the main goal is to avoid a Democratic repeat of the "outright buy votes" approach Musk has taken.
> no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got.
Wouldnt've helped me before late high school, but that "whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got" part cuts both ways. That is, if you put some extra effort into presentation, you can get at least some of authorities to recognize your effort. Or, if you're really good, you can even bullshit wrong results past them, as long as you give a strong impression of competence.
Or at least that's what undergrad studies taught me; for random reason I went into overkill for some assignments, and I quickly discovered this worked regardless of the validity of my results.
I guess a big part of it is that most other people a) don't really put in much effort, and b) don't see any importance of the work in larger context. So I found that if I showed (or faked) either, I was set; show both, even better.
(Though it didn't work 100% well. I distinctly remember spending a lot of time figuring out how to simulate lexical scope and lambdas with strings & eval in Lotus notes. My professor was impressed, even suggesting I write the details up, but then she proceeded to fail me on the exercise anyway, because I didn't actually do half of the boring things I was supposed to.)
(It also taught me to recognize when someone else's deploying smokescreens of competence to pass lazy or bad results.)
This is released by the Anthropic engineer who developed Claude Plays Pokemon.
It’s definitely a rookie mistake to post a text comment when you want to explain a link, half because HN is that way and half because views are precious and if somebody visits your site it should ‘click’ with them (e.g. think of how much ads cost!)
Friction is proportional to the normal force, more specifically, it is the normal force times the coefficient of friction.
What you are describing (if the normal force is actually the same) is a contact situation where the coefficient of friction is different in different directions (anisotropic friction.)
Support groups for chronic pain are generally toxic because people learn to find meaning in being pain sufferers.
> That’s to say, it may be a legally permitted form of copyright violation, or it may be a legally prohibited form of copyright violation.
That's arguably not really accurate, since statutory fair use itself (and this is why it is written in a less straightforward fashion than most of the rest of copyright law) is a direct statutory codification of what the Supreme Court found to be a Constitutional limit (based on the First Amendment) on the copyright power.
Fair use is not a “legally permitted form of copyright violation”, it is the space where the federal government has no power under the Constitution to create exclusivity as part of copyright.
> Like, in Ruby, where everything truly is an expression, importing a file and then evaluating it has side effects.
That's not so much “everything is an expression” as “everything is at runtime”.
I don’t think you fully understand what DEI means and what organisations do to improve in that regard. For instance, masking name (sometimes a good proxy for race) and gender in candidate assessments is a DEI measure and increases representation of marginalised groups. Did you know telescope time for minorities improved when reviewers couldn’t see the name of the scientist in the proposal? That’s DEI.
DEI means to work in removing biases that limit access of minorities to opportunities. When it works, being a white male doesn’t get confused with merit, as it usually is. Lots of people think this is discrimination, because their group isn’t being hired as much as before when, in fact, it’s just the removal of discrimination against others.
Truly random shuffling is not very good in practice, really.
Way back in the day, before the current trend towards throwing all your MP3s in a pile and using id3 tags to hopefully sort it out, I had my MP3s in a directory structure by rough genre and album. I wrote myself a shuffler that would honor the directory structure; it would tend to stay in the same directory and use a record of the most recently played songs to avoid repeats, and only jump out if it needed to, or with some relatively smaller probability. Then there was a relatively smaller probability it would continue jumping up through the directories.
The idea is, if you have a multi-genre collection, you may want a "shuffle" but it can be jarring to whiplash between the various genres on every single song as a fully random shuffle would do. So shuffles would tend to honor albums, then honor genre, so that there was a small chance you might flip from techno to classical, and if you did, it would tend to stay in classical for a while, before flipping to pop music or whatever.
I do sort of miss it and sort of simulate it nowadays by just being a bit heavyhandedly intentional about the playlists I make for the day.
> mass simulator
I had to laugh at this. I assume a chunk of concrete was used, but that actually is mass, not a mass "simulator".
I'm rarely intimidated by a textbook but I was intimidated by a set of cardiology books I saw at the vet school. The topological structure of waves in the heart is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_wave
because cardiac cells circle around a loop with phase from 0 to 2π, contrast that the usual oscillator which has position p and momentum q. An oscillation in that space can rotate around the center and look like a phase but it's also possible to go right through the center, whereas for cardiac excitations the p variable is on the unit circle. This astonishing book covers the topology of this kind of thing:
https://archive.org/details/geometryofbiolog0000winf/page/n9...
particularly the cases where you have just one phase (e.g. jet lag or cell division or plant phenology) but it applies as well to those spiral waves where every element in the medium has a phase.
It really doesn't sound like ChatGPT’s default voice, though it is pretty good at taking on different voices so in a sense you could say that about almost anything. It does use em-dashes, which people have recently started way over-indexing on as a ChatGPT tell, but lots of posters on HN have been using em-dashes for longer than ChatGPT has existed.
It does read like marketing material, though.
I, too, have a bunch of legally ripped shows, yes.
I think there are two components to this, from a systems perspective. The first is sentiment. Lots of people in positions of authority and power have their identity tied up in their work. They would work 7 days a week if they could. This is the culture they want to push down (think Jamie Dimon [worth ~$2.4B] demanding 5 days a week in office in typical Boomer fashion). Sentiment takes time to change (Overton Window [1]). The second component is worker rights and power to demand reduced hours since we're already so productive in the aggregate [2] [3]; this is inevitable due to structural demographics [4] [5].
(4 day week proponent, almost all 4 day week trial results are very favorable, work to live, don't live to work)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
[3] http://oxfam.org/en/research/multilaterialism-era-global-oli...
[4] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
[5] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6
So .. how's Nvidia dealing with this? Or do they benefit from motherboard manufacturers doing preferential integration testing?
Radar evasion is very useful if you're rescuing someone from enemy/contested territory.
It is incredibly exciting that batteries are lasting so much longer than expected, and that we may be able to squeeze ~500k-1M miles out of packs from a capital and materials efficiency perspective.
... like something that burns a hole in the paper with a spark or marks thermal paper with a burst of heat.
cf. Alexander the Great's destruction of the Greek city-state of Thebes in 335 BCE for its rebellion against Macedonian rule. Later, after defeating Darius III, he sacked and burned the Persian capital city of Persepolis in 330 BCE, as a symbol of revenge against the Persians.
One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits the floor.
Anyone who has ever had a wristwatch of similar tech should know how hard it is to get anything like precision out of those things. It's a millimeter sized button with a millimeter depth of press and could easily need half a second of jabbing at it to get it to trigger. It's for measuring your mile times in minutes, not fractions of a second fall times.
Naturally, our data was total, utter crap. Any sensible analysis would have error bars that, if you treat the problem linearly, would have put 0 and negative numbers within our error bars. I dutifully crunched the numbers and determined that the gravitational constant was something like 6.8m/s^2 and turned it in.
Naturally, I got a failing grade, because that's not particularly close, and no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.
The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science, because it more-or-less always happens. Science proceeds despite this, not because of it.
(But jerf, my teacher... Yes, you had a wonderful teacher who didn't only give you an A for the equivalent but called you out in class for your honesty and I dunno, flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible. There are a few shining lights in the field and I would never dream of denying that. Now tell me how that idealism worked for you going forward the next several years.)
"you still need to decide on heap vs stack"
No, you can't decide on heap vs stack. Go's compiler decides that. You can get feedback about the decision if you pass the right debug flags, and then based on that you may be able to tickle the optimizer into changing its mind based on code changes you make, but it'll always be an optimization decision subject to change without notice in any future versions of Go, just like any other language where you program to the optimizer.
If you need that level of control, Go is generally not the right language. However, I would encourage developers to be sure they need that level of control before taking it, and that's not special pleading for Go but special pleading for the entire class of "languages that are pretty fast but don't offer quite that level of control". There's still a lot of programmers running around with very 200x ideas of performance, even programmers who weren't programmers at the time, who must have picked it up by osmosis.
(My favorite example to show 200x perf ideas is paginated APIs where the "pages" are generally chosen from the set {25, 50, 100} for "performance reasons". In 2025, those are terribly, terribly small numbers. Presenting that many results to humans makes sense, but my default size for paginating API calls nowadays is closer to 1000, and that's the bottom end, for relatively expensive things. If I have no reason to think it's expensive, tack another order of magnitude on to my minimum.)
> USAID was a massive graft machine
Sort of irrelevant, right? Even if it was all grift, nothing is being saved if those resources are just stolen.
> I fear they will not reach the trillion etc they need in savings to stop the US going insolvent
Trump’s draft budget blows the deficit by $4 trillion to fund tax cuts for wealthy people. (I’d see my taxes go down under his plan, for what it’s worth. My mom, a bank teller, would not.)
The US has a surprisingly high tolerance for political violence if and only if it's carried out by gun.
To be pretty fair it is rare for there be a strong primary challenge against an incumbent. Look at Reagan '84 or Clinton '96 or Bush '04 or Obama '12. There was the strange thing that the Democrats changed horses at the last minute -- though I agree if Kamala had won a contested primary she would have been much better defined in the minds of voters and less defined but what her foes said about her.
The funny thing is that you can write very similar code in C#, so maybe you don't need to switch which language you're using as a CLR frontend.
using System.Linq;
using System;
var names = new string[] {"Peter", "Julia", "Xi" };
names.Select(name => $"Hello, {name}").ToList().ForEach(greeting => Console.WriteLine($"{greeting}! Enjoy your C#"));
Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about the audience.
Nobody trusts anybody else. The site wants to over estimate clicks, the advertiser wants to under estimate. Of course the numbers won’t match up because you lose people along the way. If you have 300 trackers they can’t all be lying to you.
Great, another step moving away from kexts into userspace alternatives.
I'd not heard of yunohost, so I went googling and found https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ey9ayp/what_ma...
Seems like Docker has won so comprehensively that even more convenient (But unfamiliar) options are pushed to use it.
It's not truly free though, it's a loss leader for the near-trillion dollar AI industry. If we're asking where the stolen value ends up, I think you can answer "in the NVIDIA share price".
A confidential informant told me that Gasser8 was a member of MS-13.
English (Traditional) vs English (Simplified)
I don't think avoiding politics is much of an option.
Both Brazil and the US are huge and extremely diverse countries. On both you can see extremes of luxury and poverty. On both you will see violence and police corruption. In the case of the US, it's more heartbreaking because it's a rich country, and you shouldn't see people living on the streets of a place like San Francisco.
There are too many things that "shouldn't" in the US that just are and that is what makes me avoid visiting as often as I once did. The current descent into a quasi-fascist state isn't enticing either.
Brazil, on the other hand, is a poor country with rich pockets (chances are we both grew up in one), and poverty is kind of expected and hard to avoid. At least there (I don't live in Brazil anymore) we see a government dedicated to reducing economic inequality. I hope they succeed.
In the meantime, I guess I'll learn some basic Mandarin and spend more time in China. It's an interesting country that's now opening up to the world and with a lot of new things to be discovered by those who grew up elsewhere.
...
Given that the compilers for power64 and itanium are
currently not up to our quality standards in regards to
optimal instruction scheduling, the current distribution
media only includes the binaries that that have passed
our rigorous quality controll process.beautiful !
I still prefer mime, based on the classic 3278 terminals, https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font
Blackberry physical keyboard had many shortcuts, https://defkey.com/blackberry-10-classic-shortcuts
iPad physical keyboards also have shortcuts.
Star Trek continues to be prescient. It not only introduced the conversational interface to the masses, it also nailed its proper uses in ways we're still (re)discovering now.
If you pay attention to how the voice interface is used in Star Trek (TNG and upwards), it's basically exactly what the article is saying - it complements manual inputs and works as a secondary channel. Nobody is trying to manually navigate the ship by voicing out specific control inputs, or in the midst of a battle, call out "computer, fire photon torpedoes" - that's what the consoles are for (and there are consoles everywhere). Voice interface is secondary - used for delegation, queries (that may be faster to say than type), casual location-independent use (lights, music; they didn't think of kitchen timers, though (then again, replicators)), brainstorming, etc.
Yes, this is a fictional show and the real reason for voice interactions was to make it a form of exposition, yadda yadda - but I'd like to think that all those people writing the script, testing it, acting and shooting it, were in perfect position to tell which voice interactions made sense and which didn't: they'd know what feels awkward or nonsensical when acting, or what comes off this way when watching it later.
This clearly elucidated a number of things I've tried to explain to people who are so excited about "conversations" with computers. The example I've used (with varying levels of effectiveness) was to get someone to think about driving their car by only talking to it. Not a self driving car that does the driving for you, but telling it things like: turn, accelerate, stop, slow down, speed up, put on the blinker, turn off the blinker, etc. It would be annoying and painful and you couldn't talk to your passenger while you were "driving" because that might make the car do something weird. My point, and I think it was the author's as well, is that you aren't "conversing" with your computer, you are making it do what you want. There are simpler, faster, and more effective ways to do that then to talk at it with natural language.
I guess nowadays we just reach for chainsaws.
“I’m a mathematician and therefore biased, but this result literally blows my mind,” Fry wrote. “Have three months to find somewhere to live? Reject everything in the first month and then pick the next house that comes along that is your favorite so far. Hiring an assistant? Reject the first 37 percent of candidates and then give the job to the next one who you prefer above all others.”
...except that the starting conditions are that you have n candidates/options for a decision, you consider in random order, and then you have o accept or reject each one before examining the next, plus no backtracks.
How often do these conditions obtain in real life? If you're dating, it's unlikely you know what your total number of future partners will be - even if you're religious and just want to be with one person for ever, you necessarily conceive of courting more than one person (since you might be rejected by them). For hiring for a job or purchasing a house, why would you make a final decision on each candidate before looking at any others?
The math is interesting and this is surely a useful heuristic for some situations, but (like much pop-math writing) the effort to make it cool and relevant backfires because the constraints seem arbitrary and divorced from real world experience.
> he would've had a legal basis to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felonies
America is currently ann argument against popular democracy. Before we concede that electoral politics don’t work in a world with social media, maybe we can give increased prosecutorial discretion a chance. The alternative, after all, is just more authoritarian.
“A short 2.5 minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9's first-stage booster shut down its nine Merlin engines, executed stage separation from the rest of the rocket and performed a deceleration burn to put itself on a trajectory to land on SpaceX's Just Read the Instructions droneship in the Atlantic Ocean, which happened on schedule about 5.5 minutes later.”
Super cool!
Dimon and Musk have feuded in the past. This is honestly in her cards.
Note that Texas is currently attempting, through legislation, to disadvantage solar and batteries and attempt to financially support fossil gas [1]. Also note that the US domestic fossil gas market is now exposed to global price movement due to LNG exports, which will cause the cost of producing power from fossil gas to rise [2]. Could Texas use cheap solar to desal? If Texas had different politicians, perhaps.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43501255
[2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/us-lng-exports-raise-electr...
This reads like an ad from the Hass Avacado Board.[1]
Turns out that California is having a good avocado production year. Last year was bad, for usual farming problem reasons.[2] Not really much need for imports for the next few months.
[1] https://hassavocadoboard.com/
[2] https://www.freshfruitportal.com/news/2025/01/30/california-...
You're wrong. It's explicitly against the rules, as Kasey said.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
P.S. My AI improves code generation in production & helps you ship faster. Loved by developers & teams all over the world. Check out Giga AI.
Huh
fuzzy search
I do NOT want search to become any fuzzier than it already is.
See the great decline of Google's search results, which often don't even have all the words you're asking about and likely omits the one that's most important, for a great example.
managed even to remove scrollbars altogether from their website
What's worse are the custom JS ones that only appear on hover, obscuring the contents partially where they happen to be, and then when you try to drag them and accidentally move the pointer just a tiny bit off their skinny width, they disappear and you end up accidentally activating whatever element happens to be underneath.
For that matter even IQ studies themselves are borderline given the US political culture.
This isn't remotely true; it's just something people say on message boards.
Might happen. Or not. Reliable LLM-based systems that interact with a world model are still iffy.
Waymo is an example of a system which has machine learning, but the machine learning does not directly drive action generation. There's a lot of sensor processing and classifier work that generates a model of the environment, which can be seen on a screen and compared with the real world. Then there's a part which, given the environment model, generates movement commands. Unclear how much of that uses machine learning.
Tesla tries to use end to end machine learning, and the results are disappointing. There's a lot of "why did it do that?". Unclear if even Tesla knows why. Waymo tried end to end machine learning, to see if they were missing something, and it was worse than what they have now.
I dunno. My comment on this for the last year or two has been this: Systems which use LLMs end to end and actually do something seem to be used only in systems where the cost of errors is absorbed by the user or customer, not the service operator. LLM errors are mostly treated as an externality dumped on someone else, like pollution.
Of course, when that problem is solved, they're be ready for management positions.
No we don't. It seems you were only pretending to inquire as a cover for pushing a particular (false) idea.
Having worked on both quality and junk film productions I assure you the editing workflow is not the determinant of artistic quality. No film or TV program has ever been improved by the editor(s) trying to build their own NAS or hack a version control system together.
Have you checked out DBOS Transact[0]? DBOS is designed for high dynamic execution, and doesn't have the overhead or complexity of Temporal [1].
Disclosure, I'm the CEO of DBOS.
[0] https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-py
[1] https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-execution-coding-compariso...
Indeed it's hard to explain how he can be 80 years old and look like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Larry_Ellison_-_American_...
Are you serious? Have you watched Adolescence? It's got more soul and artistic merit than practically anything else I've ever seen. And that was just last week.
Maid? The Queen's Gambit? Baby Reindeer? The Crown? Ripley? BoJack Horseman?
Sure they make a lot of schlock too, because they're a business and that's what most of their audience wants.
But I don't see how you could possibly criticize them for that when they continue to put out some pretty astonishingly artistic and soulful stuff.
If she's smart she salted away a couple million to buy a pardon.
Nah she doesn't have the bribe money
There's an industry consensus to leave it alone in most* cases, since it is considered to expand the total manga market and generate new talent. Micro-publishers are very different from megacorporations, though.
* Unsurprisingly a famous exception involves Nintendo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_inciden...
The problem is that criminal laws can't be applied, even in principle, without the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Criminal laws are written broadly and legislatures trust prosecutors to apply the laws to the subset of conduct that falls within the arguable letter of the law. That makes prosecution of political figures incredibly dangerous, because prosecution is inherently a discretionary act.
Consider 18 USC 1343:
> Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
A politically motivated prosecutor willing to stretch phrases like "property" and "false ... representations" could use 18 USC 1343 to turn minor infractions into federal felonies with the prospect of 20 years in prison. It's entirely up to the prosecutor to ensure that the atomic bomb of 18 USC 1343 is applied only to conduct that actually warrants such extreme charges.
I'd note that, had Jim Comey been willing to push the law as far as the words would allow, he would've had a legal basis to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felonies relating to handling of classified information: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-dir.... Comey's statement in connection with the decision to recommend no charges is instructive:
> Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.
I was skeptical until I saw information confirming it.
It's not obvious that the frequency range used by computers recording on audiocassette would fit into that used by AM or FM radio transmission and reception equipment.
In other words, it's obvious that it would be possible on equipment specifically designed for it.
But I'm quite surprised that it worked without it (presumably) having been designed for. Or maybe they did pick a frequency ceiling compatible with commercial radio intentionally?
Agreed. I've been seeing a lot of these posts lately, about embedding SQLite into web servers.
I think a lot of people just don't realize how few resources Postgres or MySQL use, and how fast they are. You can run Apache and MySQL and a scripting language on a tiny little 512 MB memory instance, and serve some decent traffic. It works great.
Wanting to use SQLite and deal with replication is a nightmare. I don't get it. (And I love using SQLite in apps and scripts. But not websites!)
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Original title "Underlying Labor Market Dynamics Still Tight Despite Highest Gov Layoffs & Discharges since Census Wind-Down of 2020" compressed to fit within title limits.