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.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

Two things are both true: the Soros Open Society foundation and BBC activities were pro-Western propaganda, and that does not make them bad or wrong or false. If they had succeeded in turning Russia into a pluralist liberal democracy, that would have been better for millions of Russians and everyone else. Instead Russia turned into a petro-state oligarchy, sponsored a number of wars, and finally threw hundreds of thousands of young Russians into a meatgrinder war in Ukraine.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

You don't have to pay for dotnet AOT.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

AI has rather superceded intellectual property, since it's apparently fine to distil a derived work of everything on the planet if you have enough investor money.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74085]

What are the benefits of Bazzite over Proton? I'm not sure where I would use this.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 125943]

> Centrism and objectivity aren't reflexively seeking "the middle," just refusing to buy into either tribe's propaganda and FUD.

Centrism and objectivity are entirely unrelated, and, yes, centrism is just reflexively seeking the middle (actually, usually its sitting very firmly on one side, most commonly the Right but occasionally the Left, while obsessively trying to sell oneself as being in the middle, but...)

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

Great overview, with lots of effort place into it.

However, it misses the polyglot part (Fortran, Python GPU JIT, all the backends that support PTX), the library ecosystem (writing CUDA kernels should be the exception not the rule), the graphical debugging tools and IDE integration.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

It is super annoying but you have to be very naive to not understand that anything that can be abused will be abused so you need to bake in countermeasures from day #1 or you might as well not bother with the launch.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

Sure, but that's exactly where it fails: that oversight. So you end up with all of this data in the hands that you least want to have it, and never mind the criminals that gain access to it in the inevitable data leaks and then all of that data gets used against you.

There is zero correlation between these cameras being installed or not and crime incidence rates or the number of cases solved.

Ironically, what did reduce crime - considerably so, even - was COVID. But I don't see anybody arguing for a curfew to reduce crime either.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

Especially not if those kind of contracts don't survive an acquisition because then your acquisition is most likely dead in the water. The acquirer would have to re-negotiate the license and with a little luck they'd be screwed over because they have nowhere else to go.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

The problem is that there are a thousand merchant marine vessels operating right now that are all doing great - until the next loose wire. The problem is that nobody knows about that wire and it worked fine on the last trip. The other systems are all just as marginal as they were on the 'Dali' but that one shitty little wire is masking that.

Running a 'tight ship' is great when you have a budget to burn on excellent quality crew. But shipping is so incredibly cut-throat that the crew members make very little money, are effectively modern slaves and tend to carry responsibilities way above their pay grade. They did what they could, and more than that, and for their efforts they were rewarded with what effectively amounted to house arrest while the authorities did their thing. The NTSB of course will focus on the 'hard' causes. But you can see a lot of frustration shine through towards the owners who even in light of the preliminary findings had changed absolutely nothing on the rest of their fleet.

The recommendation to inspect the whole ship with an IR camera had me laughing out loud. We're talking about a couple of kilometers of poorly accessible duct work and cabinets. You can do that while in port, but while you're in port most systems are idle or near idle and so you won't ever find an issue like this until you are underway, when vibration goes up and power consumption shoots up compared to being in port.

There is no shipping company that is effectively going to do a sea trial after every minor repair, usually there is a technician from some supplier that boards the vessel (often while it is underway), makes some fix and then goes off-board again. Vessels that are not moving are money sinks so the goal is to keep turnaround time in port to an absolute minimum.

What should really amaze you is how few of these incidents there are. In spite of this being a regulated industry it is first and foremost an oversight failure, if the regulators would have more budget and more manpower there maybe would be a stronger drive to get things technically in good order (resist temptation: 'shipshape').

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74085]

"Because one team doesn't know how to use LLMs, I conclude that LLMs are useless."

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

Don't get me started. I tried to use a very simply python program the other day, to talk to a bluetooth module in a device I'm building. In the end I gave up and wrote the whole thing in another language, but that wasn't before fighting the python package system for a couple of hours thinking the solution is right around the corner, if only I can get rid of one more little conflict. Python is funny that way, it infantilized programming but then required you to become an expert at resolving package manager conflicts.

For a while Conda seemed to have cracked this, but there too I now get unresolvable conflicts. It is really boggling the mind how you could get this so incredibly wrong and still have the kind of adoption that python has.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

Because developers don't like to pay for tools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excelsior_JET

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc

https://www.aicas.com/products-services/jamaicavm/

It is now getting adopted because GraalVM and OpenJ9 are available for free.

Also while not being proper Java, Android does AOT since version 5, mixed JIT/AOT since version 7.

EDIT: Fixed the sentence regarding Android versions.

jrockway ranked #48 [karma: 73154]

I knew about this site and knew about the Lucas-Lehmer test, but I never would have made the connection between the two. People are kind of amazing.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 125943]

Somewhat of a nitpick, but Donald Trump is not a convicted rapist. ("Convicted" refers to being found criminally liable, and in any case Donald Trump has not, to date, been found liable, civilly or criminally, for rape as such; Donald Trump was found civilly liable for a sexual abuse but not rape as defined in the NY criminal code, though it was also found to be sufficiently accurately described by "rape" in the common vernacular that it was not defamation for his victim, E. Jeacn Caroll, to have described it as such.)

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

Correct, however those dates are still before 2000, which was my point.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

Except for doing anything actually usefull they end packaged with Chrome.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

Also on this side, on consulting agencies now it seems everyone is getting evaluation KPIs regarding AI use on project work, even when it doesn't make sense for the delivery scenario.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 125943]

> You trust it more than your government. Which stands to reason at the moment if you are in the US.

No, it really doesn't, and not because I have any faith in the current US government, just because I've seen the way Meta relates to it.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157183]

As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine. The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed.

The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenance.

I once had a discussion with the developers of Franz LISP. The way it worked was that it compiled LISP source files and produced .obj files. But instead of linking them into an executable, you had to load them into a run-time environment. So I asked, "could you put the run time environment in another .obj file, so you just link the entire program and get a standalone executable"? "Why would you want to do that?" "So we could ship a product." This was an alien concept to them.

So was managing LISP files with source control, like everything else. LISP gurus were supposed to hack.

And, in the end, 1980s "AI" technology didn't do enough to justify that hardware.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 86963]

I wonder what the reason was for having the kernel handle this, instead of the shell? To allow programs besides the shell to execute interpreted scripts as if they were actual binaries?

This is of course in stark contrast to dynamic linking, which is performed by a userspace program instead of the kernel, and much like the #!, this "interpreter"'s path is also hardcoded in dynamically linked binaries.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

For most devs using GLSL instead of C++20, or Python GPU JIT, is a downgrade in developer experience.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

Gaming on Linux, with games complied on Windows, using Windows APIs, targeting Windows users.

This will be like the netbook wave, or OS/2 Windows compatibility layer, a celebration until Microsoft decides the show has had its time.

Valve really should push for native Steam OS builds.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123028]

The Lisp environments are definitely around, in LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 86963]

MSN Messenger had tons of open-source clients back when it was the popular IM network, and it was a weekend or two of work to write a client for it.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 86963]

How many times do you think ECC RAM has caught an error? Online anecdotes I've found indicate almost no one experiences regularly corrected errors that weren't due to imminently failing hardware.

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 85564]

> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first.

the jury is still out on that...

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 125943]

> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.

Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

I agree with you about the IQ thing but am not seeing how this is a left-wing thing.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94517]

Any favorite movies or TV episodes on the above themes?

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #45 [karma: 74830]

Your linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto.

Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

Matrix and Signal have very different objectives. Matrix wants to be an encrypted IRC or Slack. Signal wants to be a secure messenger you can entrust your life to. They are both worthy projects; there's not as much overlap as people think.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 86963]

The new Microsoft is unfortunately not like the old one.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 86963]

Linux and Mac users would disagree.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

My new thing with articles like these: just search for the word "water".

I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. Datacenters that outburn cities to keep the data churning are big, expensive, and have to be built somewhere. The deals made to develop this kind of property are political — they affect cities and states more than just about any other business run within their borders.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

M. Gessen wrote a much better piece about the accuracy of HBO's Chernobyl:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher...

This piece seems a little confused, since Legasov wasn't the primary source for the show?

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 180321]
hn_throwaway_99 ranked #45 [karma: 74830]

> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.

What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

Am I crazy or was there a strategy reason that inter partes review at USPTO was disfavored over trial? Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 171636]

> we need a separate Internet for kids

Good start. But this still leaves them at the mercy of these tech companies.

Kids—especially pre-teens—should not have social media. There is just way too much evidence that this has harmed and is harming an increasingly class-segregated generation.

Gas stations are careful about selling cigarettes to kids. We need these developers to have even a shadow of that concern.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86610]

I mean, he’s still teaching. For now.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]

For me the three sigils of Perl $, @, % are the “holy trinity” of scalars, lists, and dicts that are foundational to dynamic languages like Python and Javascript and are used all the time in static languages like Java or Rust when your data is dynamic.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74085]

No it won't, it'll spend ten minutes and come back with "OK I've implemented a solution". I really wish it had a plan mode.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77096]

As the article mentions this tech has been in widespread use for over two decades now. You have likely used it on your phone today without knowing it. GPS is accurate but also very fickle (takes time to get a lock, battery hog, doesn't work great when surrounded by buildings, doesn't work great when inside a building, doesn't work in bad weather). Wifi data is plentiful today in every urban setting, and you can get an exact location in under a second.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]

Sometimes I think Android is just a zombie operating system that exists to keep Apple out of antitrust court. Like there is some kind if quid pro quo that Google is doing Apple is a favor which Apple returns somehow.

With a couple of different carriers and phones I was never able to get voicemail working with an Android phone, maybe I could do what they say to activate my mailbox but next week I’d hear from people that they’re hearing a message about how “their voice mail hasn’t been set up yet” which is the same message I hear every time any friend of mine with Android doesn’t pick up. When I got an iPhone it was the first cell I had where voicemail worked at all.

doener ranked #46 [karma: 74447]

"At least 30 individuals or companies that have collectively donated more than $116mn to Donald Trump’s causes have received benefits or advantages from White House moves."

https://x.com/FT/status/1979087508903186573

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79244]

Let's not deceive ourselves -- first-party analytics are much, much harder to set up, and a lot less people are trained on other analytics platforms.

They're also inherently less trustworthy when it comes to valuations and due diligence, since you could falsify historical data yourself, which you can't do with Google.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76536]

Yes! I'd say probably more than 1/2 my tokens are unrelated to code.

My favorite is I had (and still do have) a whole conversion about the water in my pool. I send it pictures of my water and test strips and it suggests how much of which chemical to add.

I asked about a recipe.

I used it to translate handwritten German from my grandmother.

I brainstorm business process ideas with it.

I ask it for medical advice (like, what should I google to find out what this bump is)

I brainstorm product ideas with it, like a PM.

And that's all just in the last three weeks.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86610]

There are loads of echo chamber subreddits.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

The things you do to safeguard the rollout of a configuration file change are not the same as the things you do to reliably propagate changes that might happen many times per second.

What's irritating to me are the claims that there's nothing distinguishing real time control plane state changes and config files. Most of us have an intuition for how they'd do a careful rollout of a config file change. That intuition doesn't hold for control plane state; it's like saying, for instance, that OSPF should have canaries and staged rollouts every time a link state changes.

I'm not saying there aren't things you to do make real-time control plane state propagation safer, or that Cloudflare did all those things (I have no idea, I'm not familiar with their system at all, which is another thing irritating me about this thread --- the confident diagnostics and recommendations). I'm saying that people trying to do the "this is just like CrowdStrike" thing are telling on themselves.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]

I was working on one of the biggest open access publishing platforms and the world and under pressure I rolled up an upgrade that wasn't properly tested and then spent about a month trying to make it work before the team gave up, rolled back to an earlier version. I got sidelined and worked on other systems, my contract wasn't renewed and I was looking for a job 8 months later with a really bad attitude.

There was a lot of crazy politics but it turned out that the team was completely reorganized and a lot of people left that year, including my boss and her boss and the head of the organization. It led that platform to confront the sustainability, funding and management issues that had been neglected up until then.

I'm certainly not 100% responsible for what happened but I was probably the only person who could have stopped the disaster but had I done so I probably would have lost my job anyway.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77874]

Also the compiler/linker used to build it.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157183]

It's very impressive. Do they let you export a 3D mesh, though? I was only able to export a video. Do you have to buy tokens or something to export?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

I keep having to say this because people keep bringing this canard to HN: it it not in fact unlawful to use intelligence tests in hiring processes, some of the largest companies in the US do so for some roles (though, tellingly, not for elite roles), the companies that administer general cognitive tests (advertised as such!) have logo crawls on their front page of companies your mom would know, they have deep pockets and would make rich targets for contingency employment discrimination lawyers if this legal claim was true --- but it simply is not.

The reason more companies don't IQ test applicants is that it doesn't work. It's a revealed preference. People here would make fun of a tech company that relied on IQ tests to qualify employees. (Braintree apparently used to!)

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]

It's like Verizon buying Tumblr and suddenly realizing they bought a porno site.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79244]

> There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post deconstructing from my, albeit limited, perspective. But they — the people who commit billions toward AI — are sold something entirely different. They are sold AGI, the idea of a transformative artificial intelligence, an idea so big that it can accommodate any hope or fear a billionaire might have.

> Again, I think that AI is probably just a normal technology, riding a normal hype wave. And here’s where I nurse a particular conspiracy theory: I think the makers of AI know that.

I think those committing billions towards AI know it too. It's not a conspiracy theory. All the talk about AGI is marketing fluff that makes for good quotes. All the investment in data centers and GPU's is for regular AI. It doesn't need AGI to justify it.

I don't know if there's a bubble. Nobody knows. But what if it turns out that normal AI (not AGI) will ultimately provide so much value over the next couple decades that all the data centers being built will be used to max capacity and we need to build even more? A lot of people think the current level of investment is entirely economically rational, without any requirement for AGI at all. Maybe it's overshooting, maybe it's undershooting, but that's just regular resource usage modeling. It's not dependent on "coding consciousness" as the author describes.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157183]

It's pretty clear that the financialization aspect of AI is a bubble. There's way too much market cap created by trading debt back and forth. How well AI will work remains an open question at this point.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86610]

> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing.

I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.

doener ranked #46 [karma: 74447]
ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86610]

Who do you imagine writes laws?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

Long before the AI/data science breakout, we were noticing in our consulting practice (2016-2020) a sharp dropoff in Ruby at startups, and Python as the modal language (by the time I left in 2020, it would have gone Python -> Node -> Ruby).

So no, I don't think AI saved Python; it was fine before then.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76536]

> I don't see anything about GDPR that would harm innovation or long-term success for europe.

It's the same thing as any other regulation -- regulatory burden. Laws aren't code, they need interpretation. That means you need your own lawyer to tell you an interpretation that they feel they can defend in front of a judge.

There is a cost to that. In both time and money. I am the CEO of a startup who is subject to GDPR. The amount of time and money we've spent just making sure we are in compliance is quite high, and we barely operate in Europe and don't collect PII.

You can wing it and say "this looks easy, I can do this on my own!" and maybe you can. For a while. But no serious business is going to try to DIY any regulations.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413742]

Is "compaction" a trained-in feature of the model, or just tooling around the model calls? Agents already do compaction.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 87658]
jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90566]

As someone who played these back in the day and enjoyed them, I don't think I could even recommend them to myself today. Ultima VII is everything the other comments say it is... but it's also one staggeringly large nested fetch quest, with nothing much breaking it up.

I'd recommend some combination of the Bethesda open world games and the JRPG genre today. They're not the same, nothing really quite fills the Ultima gap that I know of, but between those two I'd call it close enough.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]

Fourth life.

   68k -> PPC -> Intel -> M1
Other computing ecosystems that still exist since 1984 (x86, zArchitecture) maintained binary compatibly. Apple's the only company that has survived more than one ISA change.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74085]

When updating devices that old almost certainly means that they become unusable, I can't fault the person for not updating. I've learned not to apply updates any more, in the spirit of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it".

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77874]

Illustrating another facet of problems with emojis and icons. For example, an image of a duck. Is it meant to be a duck, a goose, a pigeon, or a bird? Don't you love that ancient oil lamp icon that is supposed to mean "oil pressure"? Unlike words, you cannot even look up the definition of an emoji or icon.

Icon based written languages have been replaced over time with phonetic ones. There's a good reason for that. Icons and emoji don't work.

Constantly inventing new ones and adding them to Unicode is simply retarded.

There, I said it!!

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]
tosh ranked #8 [karma: 167573]

Codex CLI 0.59 got released (but has no changelog text)

https://github.com/openai/codex/releases/tag/rust-v0.59.0

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 96022]

I have two programming language tattoos: A Perl camel, and a Ruby ruby.

For me, that's the answer to this question: Ruby had all the stuff I liked from Perl, and didn't have the stuff I didn't like. It's just that simple.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 171636]

> Hackers should know the government is never on your side

Never is naive. Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems. Those systems can be influenced and sometimes controlled by various means. And those levers are generally available to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and motivation.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

Do you plan on making it a cycle?

I have been reading old ones (very old, in some cases), they can be quite hard to find and I am absolutely blown away by the quality and the depth of vision in some of those older collections. Stories whose writers never had a second piece in print anywhere.

Short story SF is a very interesting genre to me and I'm super happy to see you make this effort.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

Yes, but who will write the code that trains the AI on future stuff? Someone somewhere will have to write original code, and without writing a lot of code that new original code will be of lesser quality than what went before. Once that cycle starts there will be less money to be made in programming, so fewer high grade programmers (and we already have too little of those as it is).

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]

I don’t understand this ‘prime’ vs ‘performance’ naming —- everything I see is that the ‘performance’ cores are less than the ‘prime’ cores in terms of width, cache, etc. Prove me wrong.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 125943]

> More supply isn't helping much either,

that's because "more supply" hasn't been anywhere close to enough supply, judging by historical housing needs by population age demographics. More supply is absolutely the key thing missing, but it needs to be a lot more supply.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-ex...

mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 85596]

Always always set up budget alarms.

Make sure they go to an list with multiple people on it. Make sure someone pays attention to that email list.

It's free and will save your bacon.

I've also had good luck asking for forgiveness. One time I scaled up some servers for an event and left them running for an extra week. I think the damage was in the 4 figures, so not horrendous, but not nothing.

An email to AWS support led to them forgiving a chunk of that bill. Doesn't hurt to ask.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

> You think that if you took 10,000 people raised by Dutch mothers and had them build a city, it would turn out the same as if you took 10,000 people raised by Bangladeshi mothers. I reject that premise.

Are you trying for some kind of world record in strawmen? If so this one should definitely be nominated.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74085]

Yeah, seconded, and I also live in the EU.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 98620]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 171636]

> why do ports & municipalities allow ships that are too large for them to handle?

Fees and relevance.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

There was the time Apple dropped a U2 album on everyone, to widespread annoyance, but that's not the same thing.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

They let you boot off HTTPS? That explains why corp IT pushed out a Dell BIOS vulnerability update today relating to OpenSSL in my BIOS.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79244]

Minor?

Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.

When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 180321]
simonw ranked #33 [karma: 87658]

The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]

I miss the UI for the Playstation 3 and the Playstation Vita.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

It turns out that the only thing worse than the platform monopolist was the old phone carries monopolies.

> just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.

This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading:

> his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling.

> The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”

> All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows.

> Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client.

> One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down]

> the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece

> What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233743]

I am not afraid of getting lost. I'm annoyed at having to walk more than strictly necessary on account of a less-than-perfect leg.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

This was the correct decision and could have been made a decade ago. An .. institutional deficiency was trying to make the GDPR as completely general as possible rather than doing a technology mandate. But this had two consequences: bad actors could circumvent it, and good actors just trying to comply ended up horribly confused (e.g. is logging an IP address in an Apache log "personal data"?).

DNT header. Legally binding. Out of the way of the end user. Unambiguous for enforcement purposes. Probably the end of targeted advertising, but that was always the logical conclusion of GDPR.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of?

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79244]

Small non-profits and personal blogs encounter the same problem. It has nothing to do with being a multi-billion dollar corp.

If you have a better technological solution, we'd all love to know it. Because right now, site owners are using the best tools available.

Criticizing when there's no other solution isn't very useful, is it?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101256]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 98620]
rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 182063]

I wonder if a Rust backend generating C code wouldn’t be a nice workaround for platforms without first tier Rust support. With all compile time assurances from the Rust front end, it’d be able to produce C at a superhuman level of memory safety.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104055]

Nine cents per gigabyte feels like cellphone-plan level ripoff rather than a normal amount for an internet service.

And people wonder why Cloudflare is so popular, when a random DDoS can decide to start inflicting costs like that on you.

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 89230]

>This is not an incremental advance. It is a step change. This indicates a new discovery, not just more data or more compute.

To succeed this well in math, you can't just do better probabilistic generation, you need verifiable search.

You need to verify what you're doing, detect when you make a mistake, and backtrack to try a different approach.

Loos like AI slop