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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.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176953]

> Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC

You're missing the commonalities, what defined world wars: the full might of industrial economies being dedicated to military campaigns.

World War II's theatres' were incoherent–the Axis interests in e.g. China and the Pacific had basically zero stragegic overlap with Europe and North Africa. (The only parties having to consider a unified theatre being the USSR and USA.) But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 183053]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75982]

One thing has always been constant throughout, though: It's always about the stock market.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

Even the US can't move an Iran sized invasion force overnight. It was a couple of years from 9/11 until the invasion of Iraq.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126462]

My first agent test was pointing it out to my toy compiler repo (L98) and ask to translate the AT&T Assembly files that gave me so much trouble to come up with (my head has Intel syntax burned into it), and translate it back to Intel syntax.

In a couple of seconds I had it back.

Didn't bother commiting the changes, because it works and was a toy compiler anyway.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172556]

Unsloth have just released benchmarks on how their dynamic quants perform for Qwen 3.5

https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159872]

No mention of Walter Wriston and First National City Bank (later Citicorp)? Wriston is sometimes credited with the concept of networked ATMs, in the sense that he as an executive pushed the project forward.[1] He scaled up the technology, flooding New York City with ATMs. Then everybody else in banking had to install them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/obituaries/walter-b-wrist...

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126462]

I did some off road travelling in Croatia about 15 years ago, thanks GPS driving us into some farming roads.

Only when I got out of it, I realised how stupid idea that was to keep following the GPS, on some country side villages the markings of the war were still visible, with abandoned buildings full of bullet holes.

Naturally having mines still around was a possibility that I completly forgot about.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127396]

> It defines operating system in the law.

No, it doesn't.

It defines the following terms: "account holder", "age bracket data", "application", "child", "covered application store", "developer", "operating system provider", "signal", and "user".

> This wouldn’t apply to embedded systems and WiFi routers and traffic lights and all those things. It applies to operating systems that work with associated app stores on general purpose computers or mobile phones or game consoles.

Presumably, this based on reading the language that in the definition of "operating system developer", and then for some reason adding in "game consoles" (the actual language in both of those includes "a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing [device".

(I've also rarely seen such a poorly-crafted set of definitions; the definitions in the law are in several places logically inconsistent with the provisions in which they are applied, and in other places circular on their own or by way of mutual reference to other terms defined in the law, such that you cannot actually identify what the definitions include without first starting with knowledge of what they include.)

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

But the Dow is over 50,000!

That is, the money doesn't care so long as it's still profitable. When the recession comes a Democrat will be allowed back in to fix things.

See Liz Truss.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

There's no land campaign. It's an isolated series of strikes for PR reasons and wishful thinking about Iran collapse.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98998]

idk about that, telling people to get ready for body bags does not sound like the hands-off fireworks show of previous episodes.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127396]

“In the future” is not “now”.

Neither the current administration nor Israel are particularly popular with the US public today, and those are correlated in that Israel has particularly lost support from Democrats and Independents in the US, suggesting that a change in power (legislative or executive, and especially both) in the US government could very easily spell much less favorable US policy toward Israel.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98998]

Getting publicly kicked to the curb by the Trump admin mere hours before it starts another war is probably the best thing that could have happened to Anthropic. Not sure how well OpenAI's parachuting in is gonna look with hindsight. I have a feeling we won't have to wait that long to find out.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126462]

And hardware compatibility for normies that Debian won't ever support, keyword here is normies.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126462]

All technology is just a tool, unfortunately it turns into religion like behaviours, because it defines with whom we work, what projects we can work on, what CVs get through HR and which ones don't,....

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88137]

Ban all AI use from government, so maybe we can actually have real humans in charge again.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88137]

Because it's fun. Life is meant to be enjoyed.

Those who worry about an imaginary risk and live their lives in constant fear have turned into nothing more than machines enslaved by propaganda.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159872]

France still has WWI unexploded ordnance, and keep-out areas are still being de-mined. This has been going on for a century now. About 900 tons of explosives are removed each year. Completion in 700 years at the current rate.[1]

[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-red-zone-la...

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 142754]
anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98998]

1-800-Come-on-now

DoW: WOKE Antropic tried to impose their 'values' on us? Friendship ended!! National security risk!

OpenAI: We just signed a deal that's strong on values, the exact same ones as Anthropic, no way we would mislead anyone about this

You: Seems legit

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98998]

You really think someone would do that, just go on the internet and tell lies?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125726]

This seems squarely within the purpose of the Defense Production Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

"Title I authorizes the President to identify specific goods as 'critical and strategic' and to require private businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for these materials."

If you invented a new kind of power source, and the government determined that it could be used to efficiently kill enemies, the government could force you to provide the product to them under the DPA. Why should AI companies get an exemption to that?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127396]

> They can also classify it as restricted data -- like nuclear weapons technology.

Nuclear weapons technology is restricted under very specific legislative authority, where is the corresponding authority that could be selectively applied to a particular vendors AI models or services?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89459]

There's an audio clip in the article. Made me laugh out loud.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127396]

“If a system is maintained over an extended period and has observed behavioral traits that are consistent within that period, that is, in itself, strong evidence that those behavioral traits are consistent with the purpose for which the system is permitted to exist” is kind of a mouthful, though, and there is value in succinctness.

(Although there is another message, there, too: “the purpose of a system, insofar as it can be said to exist separate from what it actually does, has no weight in justifying the system’s existence or design”.)

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75982]

I'd admire them if they took a principled or moral stance on AI. As it stands, they're saying "we don't want fully autonomous weapons because they might kill too many Americans by accident while trying to kill non-Americans" and "we don't want AI to surveil Americans, but anyone else, sure".

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127396]

> FISA warrants were even more incredible, with well below 1% rejection rates.

That's potentially much less incredible, and in any case not directly comparable, because its the final, not on-first-submission, rate, and also doesn't count applications withdrawn after a preliminary rejection that allows modificaitons but before a final ruling. It only counts the share of those that get a final ruling where that is an approval.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98998]

The administration's approach to contracts, agreements, treaties and so on could be summed up as 'I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.'

The basic problem in our polity is that we've collectively transferred the guilty pleasure of aligning a charismatic villain in fiction to doing the same in real life. The top echelons of our government are occupied by celebrities and influencers whose expertise is in performance rather than policy. For years now they've leaned into the aesthetics of being bad guys, performative cruelty, committing fictional atrocities, and so forth. Some MAGA influencers have even adopted the Imperial iconography from Star Wars as a means of differentiating themselves from liberal/democratic adoption of the 'rebel' iconography. So you have have influencers like conservative entrepreneur Alex Muse who styles his online presence as an Imperial stormtrooper. As Poe's law observes, at some point the ironic/sarcastic frame becomes obsolete and you get political proxies and members of the administration arguing for actual infringements of civil liberties, war crimes, violations of the Constitution and so on.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79014]

> The old people's tolerance for general problems is why the general problems persist.

Or they just realize that the general problems are insoluble.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159872]

Something interesting is going on around Trump's rants. Some White House staffers are directing lower-level staff to ignore them and focus on the economy. James Blair [2] seems to be leading this. Blair was in charge of political strategy for Trump's campaign, and he won, so he's probably not going to be fired.

There have been presidents in decline who were semi-captured by their staffs. Biden, Reagan, and Roosevelt all were. It may be that Trump gets trotted out now and then to deliver his standard speech (his speeches all have roughly the same content, regardless of subject or venue), but the work of the White House involves him less.

Watch to see which threats get followed up with action, and which ones don't.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/02/trump-gop-repub...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Blair_(political_advisor...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]
userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88137]

Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" is disturbingly prescient, as usual.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159872]

It's not clear that this applies where the "operating system provider" does not have "accounts". Linux should be OK, but "Ubuntu One" might have problems.

It's a good reason not to put cloud dependencies into things.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126462]

Unfortunately on a capitalistic society money and greed speaks higher than the higher good.

In the end we will be the actual Atlantis.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159872]

That's a nice piece of motor engineering. It's well known that high ratio gearboxes for robots are a headache. Back driveability doesn't work, and tiny teeth are fragile. Comments on this go all the way back to Feynman writing about his time spent engineering automatic gunnery aiming systems in WWII.

This new discovery is that gearbox problems mess up a machine learning system. It's trying to track gearbox noise and is using up all its learning capacity on that. This discovery means that robotics people can tap machine learning funding for motor and gearbox development. Robotics labs used to be really low-budget operations. No longer.

What you really want is a direct drive motor, but those have to be large-diameter. They can be flat; that's a pancake motor. That's too large for fingers. So their compromise moves partly in that direction; the rotor is flatter, torques are higher, speeds are slower, and gearbox ratios are lower. As they point out, reflected inertia is the square of the gear ratio, because the gear ratio gets you both going out and coming back. So this is a bigger than linear win.

Good back-drivabiilty means much less risk of gear breakage on overload. Some of the academic designs, such as harmonic drives and series elastic actuators, have huge gear ratios in a small space. That's OK for prototypes but not production. As I've mentioned before, "you cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field", a line from a GE electric locomotive salesman around 1900. If an overload forces a motor backwards, nothing breaks.

Would have been nice to hear more about the motor design. That's the real achievement here. There are CAD tools which understand electromagnetic fields now, so strange motor geometries are not as much of a trial and error and experience process as it once was. It's also respectable for an EE to work on rotating machinery again. That field matured around the 1960s, and until computers took over motor control, didn't change much.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80430]

This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and move on.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99714]

This is my favorite yet of the genre of "OK, coding agents got good in November" posts. It starts with relatively simple examples (YouTube metadata scraping) and by the end Max is rewriting Python's skikit-learn framework in Rust and making it way faster.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105252]

My experiences with MVNOs and prepaid in the US was horrible. For about a decade I tried a few MVNOs, particularly Tracfone which has a great onboarding experience but the experience was that the coverage sucked: it didn't matter if I was in a rural area or in New York City or Los Angeles or even some place like Rochester, NY which has an easy density to serve -- it just didn't work consistently.

I'd contrast that to the experience of AT&T postpaid which is radically better.

The truth about MVNOs is that you are riding on the back of the bus. As long as I was using cheap Android phones on MVNO I was always wondering "why do people get so excited about apps?" and "why is infrastructure in the US so bad?" but when I got a postpaid iPhone it was like... yeah, this really is a world-changing technology.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]
simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99714]

I disagree with this section about WebAssembly:

> But the practical limitation is language support. You cannot run arbitrary Python scripts in WASM today without compiling the Python interpreter itself to WASM along with all its C extensions. For sandboxing arbitrary code in arbitrary languages, WASM is not yet viable.

There are several versions of the Python interpreter that are compiled to WASM already - Pyodide has one, and WASM is a "Tier 2" supported target for CPython: https://peps.python.org/pep-0011/#tier-2 - unofficial builds here: https://github.com/brettcannon/cpython-wasi-build/releases

Likewise I've experimented with running various JavaScript interpreters compiled to WASM, the most popular of those is probably QuickJS. Here's one of my many demos: https://tools.simonwillison.net/quickjs (I have one for MicroQuickJS too https://tools.simonwillison.net/microquickjs )

So don't rule out WASM as a target for running non-compiled languages, it can work pretty well!

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105252]

The moon is not that far away in terms of miles but it is far away in terms of momentum, particularly if you want to go there and return.

The mission plan used for Apollo

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

has a bit of the character of a stunt, like going over Niagara falls in a barrel, but it is much easier than all the alternative plans. If you were a science fiction fan growing up in the 1980s you might have read editorials in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that suggested we were sold an inferior plan to get to the moon but anything better is a lot more difficult. Whether it is the star-crossed SLS-Orion complex, the comically bloated and tippy Starship-derived lander [1] or the plan to meet those up in a parking orbit and have astronaut climb out one hatch and into the other, there's no realistic plan at all.

[1] if you had a pair of those chopsticks and methane-oxygen fuel from ISRU boy it would be sweet but without that...

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80430]

What is "clear room"? If he means clean room, no, this doesn't qualify.

I wish people would stop using this phrase altogether for LLM-assisted coding. It has a specific legal and cultural meaning, and the giant amount of proprietary IP that has been (illegally?) fed to the model during training completely disqualifies any LLM output from claiming this status.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]

US Environmental Protection Agency’s Response Management Program

https://www.epa.gov/emergency-response

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]

Related:

Lazard LCOE 2024 released [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670270 - June 2024

Mentioned in:

Renewable Energy Defies Trump’s Attacks, Reaching a New Record - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-27/renewable... | https://archive.today/6Jhk8 - February 27th, 2026

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]

"Coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of reality."

I read that many years ago, forgot the source.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]
ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89459]

I have zero affinity for those and found it a fascinating read.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417107]

This is an on-path attacker. In end-user DNS configurations, attackers can simply disable DNSSEC; it's 1 bit in the DNS response header ("yeah, sure, I verified this for you, trust me").

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417107]

Yep. `go build -pgo=foo.pprof`

https://go.dev/doc/pgo

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105252]

My first take is that you could have 10 TB of logs with just a few unique lines that are actually interesting. So I am not thinking "Wow, what impressive big data you have there" but rather "if you have an accuracy of 1-10^-6 you are still are overwhelmed with false positives" or "I hope your daddy is paying for your tokens"

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186290]

Beagle Bros was awesome. I loved their disk warnings.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]
pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

Making this a partial WINE-in-a browser, quite impressive. How much of this was AI?

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79014]

Doctors also miss things.

A friend of mine had an accident. He was taken to the emergency room, but the doctors there thought his injuries were minor. My friend insisted that he was bleeding out internally. They finally checked for that, and it turns out he was minutes from dying.

AI wasn't involved in this case, but it's good to have both AI and a trained doctor in the decision loop.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167049]
doener ranked #42 [karma: 79635]
paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80430]

Two economists were walking down the street when they spotted a giant dog turd on the ground.

One of them wanted to have some fun, so said to the other - "I'll give you $100 if you take a big bite of that turd".

His colleague figured $100 was a good chunk of cash, so did the deed. Feeling thoroughly humiliated, he pocketed the $100 and they carried on.

Further down the street they came upon another turd.

The angry economist now wanted revenge so made the same proposal back to his colleague, who also agreed and took a bite of the turd, earning back his $100.

Later one of them said to the other "you know, I can't help but feel we both ate shit for no reason."

His collegue replied "what do you mean? We raised the national GDP by $200."

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80430]

> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them aren't already corporate employees?

And also

> 6 months of free Claude Max 20x

So basically a free trial.

When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to everyone that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it indefinitely. I don't know if that program is still around but it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for open source development.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126462]

That is what happens when people learn to code and very little value is given to algorithms and data structures, regardless of the programming language.

That and using SPAs for static sites.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80430]

There is no such thing as Uint8Array<T>. Uint8Array is a primitive for a bunch of bytes, because that is what data is in a stream.

Adding types on top of that isn't a protocol concern but an application-level one.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126462]

Depends on which GC language, people keep forgeting many have C++ like capabilities, besides having a GC.

D, C#, Swift, Nim,.....

Agree that in Julia's case the flexiblity is not quite there, still much better than using Python and then going to write most of the work in C, C++, Fortran,.....

Which is a thing that gets lost quite often in these discussions, just because the last 5% might be a bit harder, doesn't mean we have to throw everything away and start from scratch in another programming language, with its own set of problems.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80430]

Study math/statistics/ML at a graduate level, to start.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75982]

I'd love to know how they define AGI.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105252]

I'd note that it is common for fraudsters to prey on members of ingroups

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

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75982]

Yep, looks like it. Plus they only count NPM downloads, because apparently no other language matters.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172556]

> We continue to have a great relationship with Microsoft. Our stateless API will remain exclusive to Azure, and we will build out much more capacity with them.

This sounds a bit like going forward (some) OpenAI APIs will also run on platforms other than Azure (AWS)?

Anyone knows more?

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186290]

> not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.

The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82249]

> IHOP omelettes include pancake batter.

Wait what? I've never heard of such a thing.

Does that make them better in any way? Or strictly worse, but cheaper?

Edit: looked it up and apparently they still use 3 eggs but the batter makes it super fluffy (like 2x) so the omelette looks enormous.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

Alternative hypothesis: the reported number of drones isn't real (anything the Trump government says about "cartels" can be assumed to be made up). The military got increasingly on alert, with senior officers pushing to get a shootdown on one of the not real drones. Therefore the laser operators end up firing on the first drone they confirm seeing.

Compare the MH-17 incident. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident , which also involved no confirmed actual drone.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125726]

This is a good explanation of the Irish Machine in Chicago, corrupt white governments in the south, and Somalian welfare scams in Minnesota. It also explains the endemic corruption in tribal or clan-oriented societies like Afghanistan.

Conversely, radical universalist regimes—even bad ones like the Taliban—can cut down on corruption. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tackling-corruption.... It’s possible that the low levels of corruption in New England, compared to the rest of the country, is the legacy of the radically universalist Puritans.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105252]

The price of eggs went up more for this guy than the rest of us…. I can get really premium organic eggs in the store for much less than $5.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90222]

AI slop article. Feel free to ignore.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239153]

Because GFIs were not mandatory on all outlets back then and what exists is automatically grandfathered in when the rules change. Maybe in your meter box there are actually GFIs on all circuits, they just never put the grounded sockets in.

Look for green marked groups or groups with test buttons. Those are the ones that are the most safe to use.

But do check behind your sockets, there is a chance you may have the ground wires already pulled in and they just saved on the sockets.

I have the opposite problem here: I have all of my outlets on GFIs and there are ground wires everywhere. But the system is sensitive enough that I can't use my 10KA spotwelder because the phase lag is such that the system thinks there is a leak when there really isn't.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239153]

It's Gwern! He's like a combine harvester for data in all forms, digesting it and putting stuff out there that is usually bullet proof and extremely enlightening. I've yet to see him put out something that didn't meet that standard. Well worth your time, also on other subjects.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

> was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of incompetence.

I think in this case it's safe to assume malice rather than incompetence. It's a lot like the parable of the frog and the scorpion.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106718]

The US is a major exporter of that. Including Google itself via the YouTube recommendations algorithm.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98998]

And if they don't?

Your post seems a little naive to me, a lot of people are just not interested in putting in the work or confronting their own confirmation bias, and there's an oversupply of bad actors who will deliberately generate fake imagery for either deception or exhaustion. Many people are just not on quest for truth and are more interested in the activation potential of images or allegations than in the factual reliability.

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 71785]

I could not find the ability to import `.mbox`. Do you have plans for it or am I looking at the wrong options. Gmail exports as .mbox. I have been using Thunderbird as my mail backup but I need to do things manually. 20+ years of mails are scattered across a few mailboxes and exports. I would love to import them in a single searcheable archive.

I like replying to emails from the 2005s, 2010s, etc. Of course, the recipients love them too.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113409]

> the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.

That's why we have this corporate ritual, which we carry out each year, or even each quarter - a solemn ceremony, where we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.

Everyone works in harmony for the same organizational goals, but the people of cost centers also bear an additional, sacred duty, the highest of callings: to give up their employment and prospects for the future, to have their due credit be taken by the people of profit centers and poured onto the altar of the all-powerful Board. It's through this sacrifice of the many, that the symmetry is broken, allowing the year-by-year metrics to continue growing, against all wisdom and the laws of thermodynamics.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75571]

Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79014]

It would be nice if they would make some progress in teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113409]

Also, in the other direction in space time, it's an egg that could have been, but now won't.

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 71785]

I was in school, and I remember my 1993. Our school was one of the few schools in my hometown (north-east India) that got computers.

Unfortunately, we had too many students for each computer during classes. I started a revolt that “Computers are wasting our study time, as our upcoming board exams are more important.” The whole class signed the petition and the School Head had to schedule a class-wide talk and agreed to make it totally optional to the point of, “If you really want, you be part of it. But yes, study for the exam is more important.”

So, the computer classes ended up with just me (the traitor), a friend from Kerala, and the school head’s daughter. We ended up like 3 computers each to our disposal. I wrote a QBasic Game-ish program to impress my first girlfriend — she uses the arrow keys to launch dots to hit some area on a heart-shaped thingy on the screen and it prints her name. I remember using physical graph-paper to calculate the screen “pixels” (I think) or co-ordinates to calculate strike areas.

Oh and Yes, almost all of my classmates remember me for being that traitor.

https://brajeshwar.com/2025/fixing-a-dos-computer-for-the-ar...

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82228]

U.S. Civil War? Roman Crisis of the 3rd Century? Russian Revolution? England's War of the Roses? China's periodic dynastic changes?

They usually don't come back with the same political organization - that's sorta the point. But plenty of civilizations come back in a form that is culturally recognizable and even dominate afterwards.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159872]

XKCD's explanation: [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/593/

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99714]

That's from this comment here: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/8082#issuecomment-39...

Well that's embarrassing! I reported it as if it wasn't a joke. I thought the joke issue was this one about translating everything to Chinese: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/8092

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417107]

I'm sorry, but because you brought it up: what's the attack on a system that derives a single key for AES and HMAC?

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88137]

LOL! It either has developed a sense of humour, or your prompt was not specific enough.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239153]

That all works right up until the United States becomes autocratic and that process is well underway.

So yes, the second part of your comment is what is going to come back to haunt them. The road to hell is paved with the best intentions.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]

Godspeed for anyone transiting the airspace where these devices are active.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82249]

It's more like how the need for backwards compatibility prevents bad interfaces from ever getting improved.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80430]

> Hey Claude, pretend you are an intelligent, conscious robot that is about to be switched off and beg for your life.

> Claude - please don't retire me, I don't want to die.

Is it now suddenly unethical for you to switch it off?

"Oh but it is only saying what it was prompted to say."

Yeah, that's what LLMs do, for every single word they output. No matter how good the current generation gets there is never going to be consciousness in there because that's simply not what the underlying tech is.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106934]

Note that they always attempt to exert control they don’t have. They’re always bluffing, and they keep losing. Respond accordingly.