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pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

If you think programming a GPU is hard, try to learn how to do a factorial on one of those quantum emulators.

Here is Microsoft one,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/quantum/qdk-main-ove...

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99362]

Yeah I mean they're only providing the multimillion dollar product people came to the theater to see, who do they think they are wanting to get paid half the ticket price. I bet if movie tickets just cost $10 instead of $20 people would come to the theater and watch ads for 3 hours while gorging overpriced popcorn and sugary snacks.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

When I was in my teens and twenties, 11pm to 2am were my workout hours. Consistently, productively and satisfyingly. I’ve since adapted it to early afternoon or late morning. But the idea of running yourself tired at the end of the day still carries unique appeal for me.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105308]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418488]

The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78525]

I think it's code for "the government will have to bail them out".

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78525]

We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.

I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.

Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102374]

I worry that passkeys are going to confuse the heck out of less technically sophisticated users the moment they hit an edge cases, and I bet they can find edge cases.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126176]

> I don't want to be the asshole who is making a shit experience for all of my neighbors, but at the same time, I pay for unlimited

What is it about the word “unlimited” that turns technology-minded people into lawyers? Anyone on HN knows that network pipes are inherently shared, somewhere. I’ve got a 10 gig Comcast fiber and I can’t download at 10 gig from Google Drive because there’s a maxed out pipe somewhere.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

Not like I need it for coding but technically or graphically I like the idea of fonts that have double with for CJK characters and it all tiles nicely.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90285]

I use opencode with claude models through a GitHub subscription. I've also used claude through Amazon Bedrock.

Both give you optionality because they support N models.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89073]
coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

We're going the other way: now any random vibe coded slop is the norm.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

>Civilization is violent. The Roman Empire maintained it's economy through slavery.

So? Slavery was the baseline back then. The question is whether the Roman Empire was more peaceful/less violent than the alternative, not whether they had slavery or some degree of violence.

>The Catholic Church started the crusades.

After centuries of arab expansion conquering over 6 centuries pre-existing Christian cities and populations in the wider middle east.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82740]

What purge?

I'm searching Google trying to figure out what you're talking about but not getting any meaningful results.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77179]

I think calling them "commits" is doing it a disservice because it's not the same as git commits, and the differences confuse people coming from git. I'd say "jj changes are like git commits, except they're mutable, so you can freely move edits between them. They only become immutable when you push/share them with people"..

It's a mouthful, but it's more accurate and may be less confusing.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102374]

First time I've seen this pattern in the "getting started" guide for a project:

  claude "$(curl -sSf https://plainframework.com/start.md)"
https://plainframework.com/start.md

Looks like that usually runs:

  uvx plain-start .
Which runs this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/zip-wheel-explorer?package=p...

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82740]

Yes they are. I am. Many other people are too.

git was a great step forwards, but its conceptual model just doesn't map well to a lot of workflows, and some very simple things are very difficult or impossible with it. It was designed using a certain set of assumptions and primitives, and other assumptions and primitives turn out to be much more suitable for certain workflows.

I don't know if jj is the perfect answer, but it's a huge step forwards in many ways.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

Beads is needlessly overengineered. Puts me off from checking Gas Town.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82740]

I have the same worry about being locked out.

So I back it up to a NAS. I bought a Synology NAS (back before they turned into an evil company) which includes a Cloud Sync app which will connect to your Google Drive and sync changes every hour. It's technically sync not backup, but because all deleted files go into a "Trash bin" directory that you can set to never empty, it effectively works as backup for deleted files too (though you can't recover older versions of a file that still exists). The really great feature is that it has the option to sync all files that are in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides format as converted to Word/Excel/PPT. And the great thing about the backup running on your NAS is that it doesn't depend on your computer being on or anything.

I know Synology's considered an evil company now because they seem to tie you to their own hard drives now, but I don't know if there's anything else as easy to set up for reliably syncing consumer cloud files to a NAS. Hopefully there is though, if anyone else knows?

And of course, you can similarly run a backup program on your computer to back up your local files to it, as it's just a network mount.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77179]

There's another part that's bullshit: If you've paid for an annual subscription, for a given number of tokens, welp, now you're getting fewer tokens. They've decreased the limits mid-subscription. How is it not bait-and-switch to pay for something for a year only to have something else delivered?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108158]

Quite a lot of stuff is on iPlayer. But as always, licensing is the killer.

(Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105308]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

> moves the scales toward abiogenesis

Or the warm early universe hypothesis. In its early life, the entire universe was at a temperature that could sustain liquid water literally anywhere. The idea being, in this hypothesis, life was literally everywhere and then went dormant.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418488]

The security side of OpenSSL improved significantly since Heartbleed, which was a galvanizing moment for the maintenance practices of the project. It doesn't hurt that OpenSSL is now one of the most actively researched software security targets on the Internet.

The software quality side of OpenSSL paradoxically probably regressed since Heartbleed: there's a rough consensus that the design of OpenSSL 3.0 was a major step backwards, not least for performance, and more than one large project (but most notably pyca/cryptography) is actively considering moving away from OpenSSL entirely as a result. Again: while security concerns might be an ancillary issue in those potential migrations, the core issue is just that OpenSSL sucks to work with now.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418488]

I encourage you to present that analogy to an actual court and see how far it gets you. It's very easy to find the statutory definition of a "data broker" under California law.

This is what I mean by the fruitlessness of these kinds of legal discussions on HN. What do you want me to argue, that you're wrong to want the law to work that way?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

Yes, and?

That was the point, delivering business value within a specific set of KPIs makes more sense than winning benchmarks, if the outcome remains the same.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

It has C style interfaces, meaning structs with function pointers.

Which is basically how most device drivers in OSes that happen to be written in C, including UNIX flavours, work.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

> don't understand how people are compelled to violence by a technology they barely understand

Altman has literally been preaching AI as an agent of impending doom since ChatGPT [1]. If you keep telling folks the thing you’re building might mean “lights out” for humanity, some people will take you seriously.

To be clear, this doesn’t excuse the idiot attempted murderer. But dialing up hysteria to scare up investors doesn’t come for free.

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/06/08/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-wor...

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

Only if you're all playing the same game. Corruption usually happens because some players have higher priorities.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

> The other big thing was making research actually persist across sessions. Most agents treat a single deliverable (a PDF, a spreadsheet) as the end goal. In investing that's day one.

This is a problem with pretty much everything beyond easy single-shot tasks. Even day-to-day stuff, like e.g. I was researching a new laptop to buy for my wife, and am now enlisting AI to help pick a good car. In both cases I run into a mismatch with what the non-coding AI tools offer, vs. what is needed:

I need a persistent Excel sheet to evolve over multiple session of gathering data, cross-referencing with current needs, and updating as decisions are made, and as our own needs get better understood.

All AI tools want to do single session with a deliverable at the end, that they they cannot read, or if they can read it, they cannot work on it, at best they can write a new version from scratch.

I think this may be a symptom of the mobile apps thinking that infects the industry: the best non-coding AI tools offered to people all behave like regular apps, thinking in sessions, prescribing a single workflow, and desperately preventing any form of user-controlled interoperability.

I miss when software philosophy put files ahead of apps, when applications were tools to work on documents, not a tools that contain documents.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126176]

This is stupid thinking indulged in by westerners who were born in the lap of luxury. The market is incredibly moral. When my dad was born in a village in Bangladesh, 1 out of 4 kids didn’t live past age 5. Thanks to market reforms and the resulting economic growth, child mortality in Bangladesh has plummeted. Bangladesh’s under-5 morality rate is better today than America’s was at the same time my dad was born.

If India and Bangladesh hadn’t fucked around with socialism for decades after independence, we could have reached the same point many years ago. Millions of children would have been saved. Talk about immorality.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241736]

Get an old Prusa MKIII and stick a Revo in there, then learn everything there is to know about 3D printing without spending a fortune or getting locked in. Once you have processed a couple of rolls of filament you'll be much wiser about your needs and that would be the moment to pull the trigger on a 'proper' printer.

Bambu AI is a very good printer (we have 10's of them, and 10's of Prusas as well), but the Bambu eco-system is not ideal and they push really hard to get you to use their cloud connect, the printers have cameras and send footage to servers in China if you get them connected to the point that they are usable. In contrast, there are many open source solutions that will connect a Prusa to your LAN and allow various degrees of remote management (Octoprint, for instance).

Prusa's are extremely hackable, I've adapted them to do all kinds of stuff they were never meant for (1x1x.25 meter for instance, or standard width and height but 65 cm tall). Bambu's are quite closed, though in theory you could hack on their slicer but it's infuriatingly bad compared to the alternatives.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

To go further there is a difference between “Zionism” and the way they go about it. I have no problem with the state of Israel per se, and I even think they have the right to defend themselves, but I think the way they treat the Palestinians is terrible.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91284]

Sure. Lots of things governments need to do are unprofitable, like delivering the mail or repairing the roads.

I can go to my local public library, borrow the free books, use the free computers, sit in the free chairs, ask the librarian for free guidance, enjoy the free air conditioning, and even book a free meeting room to meet up with some friends to work on a project.

Profitable? Fuck no. Great to have in my city? Fuck yes.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76042]

"Hey, let's try something new!" without a plan for success is just a recipe for failure.

I honestly don't understand the desire for municipal grocery stores at all. Grocery stores famously operate on super slim margins, so it's not like they're raking in the dough. Many of them are often run extremely well. In Texas, HEB is so beloved that a lot of people consider it far better at disaster recovery operations than the actual government.

I'm not against plans to better help people afford groceries, but somebody needs to at least explain how the plan is economically rationally viable, not just "let's try something new!"

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91888]

In a nutshell, nodes enable arbitrary programming. This is one of the big success stories for visual programming. Nothing would stop you from doing all that in a text programming language but there's definitely an appeal to the graphical layout when you have modules getting input from half-a-dozen different sources and then outputting to just as many.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79418]

In Seattle, the proposal for a government grocery store included exemption from paying property taxes and rent.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

Similar molecules have been found in meteors for a long time so it is not a surprise. There is no proof life started off planet but it is also possible.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91888]

In a roundabout way this article captures well why I don't really like thinking in terms of "normal forms", especially as a numbered list like that. The key insights are really 1. Avoid redundancy and 2. This may involve synthesizing relationships that don't immediately obviously exist from a human perspective. Both of those can be expanded on at quite some length, but I never found much value in the supposedly-blessed intermediate points represented by the nominally numbered "forms". I don't find them useful either for thinking about the problem or for communicating about it.

Someone, somewhere writing down a list and that list being blessed with the imprimatur of Academic Approval (TM) doesn't mean it is actually useful... sometimes it just means that it made it easy to write multiple choice test questions. (e.g., "What does Layer 2 of the OSI network model represent? A: ... B: ... C: ... D: ..." to which the most appropriate real-world answer is "Who cares?")

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

Yet, it is still faster than not doing nothing, or calling into the GPU, on workloads where the bus traffic takes the majority of execution time.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

Now they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 127774]

Smoking (even of tobacco) can generally be banned in the CC&Rs of properties (multifamily complexes is the case where this makes the most sense) and by the landlord in any rented property, multifamily or subject to CC&Rs or not.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74181]

Given the alleged recent extreme reduction in Claude Code usage limits (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739260), how do these more autonomous tools work within that constraint? Are they effectively only usable with a 20x Max plan?

EDIT: This comment is apparently [dead] and idk why.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77179]

Customer/fan/concertgoer.

steveklabnik ranked #30 [karma: 97381]

You're welcome! It is one of those "do fish realize they're wet" kind of things, tools can shape our perception so strongly that you don't even realize that they're doing it!

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76042]

> Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done

Literally who wondered that? Drives me nuts when people start off an argument with an obvious strawman. I remember the time period of 2005-2007 very well, and I don't remember a single person, at least in tech, thinking the Internet was done. I don't know, maybe some ragebait articles were written about it, but being knee-deep in web tech at that time, I remember the general feeling is that it was pretty obvious there was tons to do. E.g. we didn't necessarily know what form mobile would take, but it was obvious to most folks that the tech was extremely immature and that it would have a huge impact on the Internet as it progressed. That's just one example - social media was still in its nascent stages then so it was obvious there would be a ton of work around that as well.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82688]

Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done, PG was fond of saying "It has decades to run. Social changes take longer than technical changes."

I think we're at a similar point with LLMs. The technical stuff is largely "done" - LLMs have closer to 10% than 10x headroom in how much they will technologically improve, we'll find ways to make them more efficient and burn fewer GPU cycles, the cost will come down as more entrants mature.

But the social changes are going to be vast. Expect huge amounts of AI slop and propaganda. Expect white-collar unemployment as execs realize that all their expensive employees can be replaced by an LLM, followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off. Expect the Internet as we loved it to disappear, if it hasn't already. Expect new products or networks to arise that are less open and so less vulnerable to the propagation of AI slop. Expect changes in the structure of governments. Mass media was a key element in the formation of the modern nation state, mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit. Probably expect war as people compete to own the discourse.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82688]

The GPC spec does not say "no cookies will be set" [1], and does not mention cookies at all. It merely provides a way for the user to indicate their preference that their information not be shared or tracked. The spec even says:

> In the absence of regulatory, legal, or other requirements, websites can interpret an expressed Global Privacy Control preference as they find most appropriate for the given person, particularly as considered in light of the person's privacy expectations, context, and cultural circumstances.

The CCPA [2] also never explicitly mentions cookies or forbids them from being set. The relevant passages about opting out on the sale of personal information are:

> a) A business shall provide two or more designated methods for submitting requests to opt-out, including an interactive form accessible via a clear and conspicuous link titled “Do Not Sell My Personal Information,” on the business’s website or mobile application. Other acceptable methods for submitting these requests include, but are not limited to, a toll-free phone number, a designated email address, a form submitted in person, a form submitted through the mail, and user-enabled global privacy controls, such as a browser plug-in or privacy setting, device setting, or other mechanism, that communicate or signal the consumer’s choice to opt-out of the sale of their personal information

How would you respond to their claim that you are fundamentally misunderstanding GPC, and that the spec and the law do not mean you never set cookies, they mean that you must honor the preferences expressed by the header in backend processes that involve tracking or sale of personal information?

[1] https://w3c.github.io/gpc/

[2] https://www.oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/privacy/oa...?

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79418]

Many software companies in the 80s were quiet about their software being bootlegged because it turned out to be great for building a critical mass of users of their software.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91888]

The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on the table.

If we're nearing the top of a sigmoid curve and are given 10-ish years at least to adapt, we probably can. Advancements in applying the AI will continue but we'll also grow a clearer understanding of what current AI can't do.

If we're still at the bottom of the curve and it doesn't slow down, then we're looking at the singularity. Which I would remind people in its original, and generally better, formulation is simply an observation that there comes a point where you can't predict past it at all. ("Rapture of the Nerds" is a very particular possible instance of the unpredictable future, it is not the concept of the "singularity" itself.) Who knows what will happen.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

It is another niche language looking for a project to kick off adoption.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

Kind of hilarious that our Treasury will be better defended against cyber threats than our DoD.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

Dropping them like I accidentally picked up shit...

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

>The short of it is that there’s no money in photography, compared to videography.Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent.

Movies are not where BlackMagic makes their money. It's from the millions and millions of small videographers, news teams, ad teams, and content creators.

Same for photos.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

>Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.

Mainly because "CEOs and billionaires" have fucked us over time and again, with their with their lobbying and bribing, with their power grabs, with their consolidation of news, entertainment, streaming, and social media properties, with their participation in the millitary industrial complex, with their censorship and partisanship, and with their rent seeking and worsening of their products...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

Probably not. The military is allowed to do lots of things civilians aren’t, in part because of the assurance of training.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108158]

People get what they pay for.

(There could be a long discussion here about expectations placed on unpaid maintainers, and what the real purpose of Open Source / Free Software is beyond merely being zero cost at the point of use, but those tend to just go round forever. There's even a paid alternative to Jellyfin: Plex.)

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

All of these features sound like the recipe for a confusing nightmare!

"You can switch branches halfway through resolving conflicts and then come back later and pick up where you left off. You can also just ignore the conflicts and continue editing files on the conflicted branch and then resolve the conflicts later."

"Similar to stashes, but each "stash" is just a normal branch that can have multiple commits. If I want to test something but I have current changes, I just `jj new`. And if I want to go back, I just make a new commit off of the previous one. And all these commits stick around, so I can go back to something I tried before."

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

The architect’s role is what is left for us as developers, when putting out lines of code no longer matters.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

And for any ML inspired language, OCaml, Haskell, Grain, Roc.

Especially Grain, as it was also developed as an ML for WebAssembly.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241736]

And just as dangerous: 50 employees. Because quite frequently these 50 employee companies have responsibilities that they can not begin to assume on the budgets that they have. Some business can really only be operated responsibly above a certain scale.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

And actual native games instead of relying on Windows developers.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127935]

> While that kind of flexibility is tempting, it comes with a significant complexity tax as well: it means that reasoning through and implementing classical compiler analyses and transforms is more difficult, at least for existing compiler engineers with their experience, because the IR is so different from the classical data structure (CFG of basic blocks). The V8 team wrote about this difficulty recently as support for their decision to migrate away from a pure Sea-of-Nodes representation.

Note that the Sea of Nodes author, Cliff Click, is the opinion they weren't really using the way they should, and naturally doesn't see a point on their migration decision.

There is a Coffee Compiler Club discussion on the subject.

jrockway ranked #50 [karma: 73258]

jj is great and while it was an adjustment at first, I've never looked back. I feel like when you're working with other people, things never get reviewed and merged as quickly as you'd like. With jj, it's pretty low-cost to have a bunch of PRs open at once, and you can do something like `jj new <pr1> <pr2> <pr3>` to build stuff that requires all 3. This lets me do things like... not do a big refactoring in the same PR as adding a feature. I can have them both self-contained, but still start on the next step before they're all merged. It's easy to add changes on top, switching between the individual PRs as comments come up, etc.

I always liked doing things like this. At Google where we used a custom fork of Perforce, I told myself "NEVER DO STACKED CLs HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED YOUR LESSON YET?" If one CL depended on another... don't do it. With git... I told myself the same thing, as I sat in endless interactive rebases and merge conflict commits ("git rebase abort" might have been my most-used command). With jj, it's not a problem. There are merge conflicts. You can resolve them with the peace of mind as a separate commit to track your resolution. `jj new -d 'resolve merge conflict` -A @` to add a new commit after the conflicted one. Hack on your resolution until you're happy. jj squash --into @-. Merge conflict resolved.

It is truly a beautiful model. Really a big mental health saver. It just makes it so easy to work with other people.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

Disaster response is a lie researchers tell themselves when building military hardware. The purpose of such robots would be to e.g. burrow into the collapsed tunnels at Fordow and confirm the uranium is there. (Or, alternatively, burrow into military tunnels to identify targets.)

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

At risk of being labeled a "blast-haver" I'd say it was always a blast to go to Funspot in the 1980s. It had the latest cabinets, it was the first where I saw Star Wars and Dragon's Lair

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

Unfortunately the actual solution will probably have to mirror real world, which means balkanizing the Internet to clarify legal jurisdiction, maybe some international police task force to aid with cross-border investigation, but ultimately it all hinges on whether and how much the countries with most nuclear aircraft carriers are willing to pressure other countries to take this seriously.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108158]

> We asked AI to find the conflict's biggest boosters in Washington

I suppose it's a substitute for doing your own reading. The answer turns out to be exactly the organizations you'd expect. "Think tank" is an odd euphemism for "private propaganda organization"; they don't do a great deal of thinking, mostly marketing bad ideas to gullible politicians.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

As a semi-pro photographer I look at the $295 pricing and think that is a very reasonable price for something that could help my photos look like my photos. I bought DxO PhotoLab for $235 and color grade with it all the time. Right now I use LUTs that other people made and have been thinking I’d like to learn to be more systematic and make my own.

I don’t really do video but I have in the past so a video editor coming in a box sweetens the deal in the same sense that Adobe CC comes with, say, Premiere, which I use just occasionally. I can totally shoot video with my Sony and there is definitely a lot of demand for it on the internet these days. I also know Divinchi resolve is a product that many people in film/video are enthusiastic for and that counts too.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

> as a VC you have a deeply emotional attachment to encouraging people not to resort to violence

…why? Most of Silicon Valley’s elites are itching for violence in politics. To the degree they’re putting thumbs on the scale, on the net, it’s for more violence.

> the mob also has access to jets

No. It doesn’t. In zero civil breakdowns in the last half century did the mob get the jets during breakdown. The closest one can get is the Taliban seizing U.S. materiel.

> More than 2/3rds of the French aristocracy was killed in the French Revolution

Source? The majority of those killed were commoners.

> They aren't, unless you're referring to the weapons dealers, warlords, or the complicit

Complicit. A breakdown in violence would give the authoritarians a bona fide Reichstag fire.

> inevitable result though is that when they lose that power, they tend to lose their lives (see e.g., Syria and South Africa)

The former president of Syria is in Russia. Much of the South African elite is complaining about white genocides in the U.S.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

I have my doubts on the story. I consulted on a medtech project in the recent past in similar space, and at various points different individuals vibe-coded[0] not one but three distinct, independent prototypes of a system like the article describes, and neither of them was anywhere near that bad. On the frontend, you'd have to work pretty hard to force SOTA LLMs to give you what is being reported here. Backend-side, there's plenty of proper turn-key systems to get you started, including OSS servers you can just run locally, and even a year ago, SOTA LLMs knew about them and could find them (and would suggest some of them).

I might be biased by my experience, because we actually cared about GDPR and AI act and proper medical data processing, and I've spent my fair share of time investigating the options that exist. Still, I'm struggling to imagine how one could possibly screw it up anywhere near as what the article described. Like, I can't think of a way to do it, to the point I might need to ask an LLM to explain it to me.

--

[0] - Not as a means of developing an actual product, but solely to see if we can, plus it was easier to discuss product ideas while having some prototypes to click around.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

> the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero

Zero is not the desired number, particularly not when discussing "hacks". This may not matter in current situation, but there's a lot of "security maximalism" in the industry conversations today, and people seem to not realize that dragging the "security" slider all the way to the right means not just the costs becoming practically infinite, but also the functionality and utility of the product falling down to 0.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

That's why you should never trust a time traveler. They probably know as much about your time as you about theirs.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

Is there even a working definition of what a "filter" is in Instagram, or mobile photo editors targetting social media users (which is approximately all of the mobile photo editors), beyond "a script that fucks up your photo in some trivial but also undocumented ways"?

I'm yet to see a filter that makes your photo look like taken from a specific camera (old or otherwise). Smearing colors and sticking a frame that imitates camera film border does not count.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

Why would encouraging non-insider training be desirable in the first place, other than to create a more high-status form of gambling, with higher spouse acceptance factor than smoke-filled room poker games? People with no inside knowledge[0] are just trading on vibes, how is that useful for the economy?

--

[0] - Or external knowledge, but actual knowledge - thinking of hedge funds stalking CEOs as they fly in private jets, or counting cars in parking lots from satellite photos, to get some probability estimates on factors actually relevant to the performance of a business and possible future events.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160974]

Japan's railroad system has a big geographic advantage - the country is long and narrow. The railroad system is primarily a long end to end line with short crosswise branches.[1] That's an efficient structure. The branch lines don't have to be fast. Many are still narrow gauge, at 3 ft 6 in.

The US had to fill a huge area in the railroad era. That left a lot of underutilized track once the road network got good.

[1] https://www.jrailpass.com/pdf/maps/JRP_japan.pdf

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114077]

Old Reddit doesn't do this, it's the "new" one that pretends to be an app, that does it and host of other stupid/user-hostile shit.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89073]

The real question is, can it keep the plane in one piece?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108158]

> "shootings that happen at schools" with "shootings that target a school".

I don't understand this analogy or distinction at all?

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160974]

Now to prevent scroll bar hijacking.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89073]

The tiny MIPS (or compatible) cores in things like cheap router SoCs might still be like that.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160130]

And again Stuttgart City Library. It has almost become the default image of a library.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89073]

I'm not sure if LLMs can be ashamed of themselves.

/s

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89073]

When I last looked a few years ago, there were some efforts and successes in the far East doing "chimera Windows", mostly based on running an older userland (like XP) on a newer kernel (10).

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160974]

Note the mention of "systems of record" being unsuitable for the present level of AI. The real question is whether the costs of AI mistakes and hallucinations can be dumped on some external party who can't impose costs on you. If not, there's a problem.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160974]

Compression/decompression is a good problem for proof of correctness. The specification is very simple (you must get back what you put in), while the implementation is complex.

What seems to have happened here is that the storage allocator underneath is unverified. That, too, has a relatively simple spec - all buffers disjoint, no lost buffers, no crashes.

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 146519]

It would be great to get one of these that supports the OpenSubsonic API, which has become a defacto standard for opensource music servers.

Would be music-only, which is sometimes ideal for older devices.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160974]

This prevents uploading pictures, with chain of custody data attached, of law enforcement misbehaving. Was there pressure from ICE to install this feature?

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76042]

I'm glad this is the top comment. I'm ambivalent about a bunch of writing I've seen from Steve Blank - some of his stuff I've loved and some I thought was awful.

But this I just thought was vacuous. I agree with what you wrote, but more to the point, I didn't find any real advice about how a startup should actually change that passed my sniff test. I left the tech startup world about 2 years ago myself, and I'm glad I did, because I just think there are way fewer differentiable opportunities now. That is, even if I accept what Blank says is true, what are all these 2+ year old startups supposed to do - just create some model wrapper/RAG chatbot product like the million other startups out there?

Even in defense, like the article says, there are now a bajillion drone companies, and it looks like a race to the bottom. The most successful plan at this point just looks like the grifter plan, e.g. getting the current president to tweet out your stock ticker.

I'm honestly curious what folks think are good startup business plans these days. Even startups that looked they were "knock it out of the park" successes like Cursor and Lovable just seem like they have no moat to me - I see very few startups (particularly in the "We're AI for X!" that got a ton of funding in the past two years) with defensible positions.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

... or to believe that you can't be lovable if you aren't perfect.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90796]

>The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world

/proceeds to write 10 steps

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

How easy is it really?

I mean, you might say your wages were stolen and you might be right but to do something about it there has to be some due process to confirm that and isn't that expensive and complicated?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

Today I used AI to help code a feature and it worked pretty well. I am not doing any of this gaslight town stuff, and I went back about 4-5 times with it to make sure we had a mutual understanding -- it's a nice clean patch.

As of the end of the day there was still a bug left, there probably would have been a bug left if I did it myself. Tomorrow i will fix the bug, maybe with some help, and I am on to another ticket.

I treat Junie as a coding buddy (think pair programming) and I don't delude myself that 20 slaves are going to create the Great American Javascript while I sleep. AI coding makes my life better.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105308]

I'd happily provide one but I've had enough of being repeatedly trashed and denigrated here for posting too many archive links.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107622]

I think the AI backlash is strong enough that "AI-Free" might be a powerful marketing tool, whether that is fair or not.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

But in the meantime you prefer privately-controlled monopsony datacenters?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

> the FBI got this man killed with a sloppy indictment

How do we know that’s how they discovered Garrison was cooperating?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

> That's what you voted for, freedumb-loving right-wingers

The right is worse. But policing language has been going on in the far left for about a decade, too. There is an illiberal strain poisoning the population through social media.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181247]

> large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat

I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse.