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In this context they're not the whores, they're the johns. Trump / the PAC would be the whores, but what else is new?
>Nothing persuaded me that he had anything interesting to add - neither rationally, nor aesthetically - about a topic which has been covered by philosophers throughout the millennia.
That sounds more like an emotionally charge reaction than some calm assessment on the merits of the book for what it stands.
Especially when the idea here is that he presents his idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth" - not some claim that he solves the problem of truth "which has been covered by philosophers throughout the millennia", and which could very well be inherently unsolvable anyway.
A writer (even more so, an artist with a unique viewpoints) can add lots of very interesting observations and new ways of seeing the concept of truth or our approaches to it, even when they do it "in the small", without taking on or pretending to tackling the philosophical / ontological core issue.
It's even more useful if an author says some things that rub you off the wrong way, or challenge your core tenets. Else, I guess one cal always just resort to some echo bubble friendly comfort reading.
Means writing code (doing) vs writing documentation / plans / project architecture documents and so on.
It’s DoD. It’s still not officially changed. But if you insist on using the nickname it should be DoW.
I consider any claims this fundamentally unreliable because there's too much propaganda value in lying, especially during the opening phases of a war. I also don't consider Khamenei that significant; he's an important theocratic figure obviously but doesn't have the same kind of weight or charisma that his predecessor had.
> I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect.
You can write a lisp in 145 lines of Python: https://norvig.com/lispy.html
That is precisely the key and you can already see many examples of this in the last 12 months. One group after another is stripped of their rights and mistreated and yet nobody actually does anything other than some protests. I wonder how this sort of thing would go down in France or Germany, for Germany of course the track record is sub-optimal but I would hope that they had at least learned their lessons well enough to avoid a repetition of the blackest chapters in our history.
What puzzles me is how for many years it was predicted that this was going to happen and that in spite of the warnings it still did. I just don't get it.
> Six months later, an architectural change required modifying those features. No one on the team could explain why certain components existed or how they interacted. The engineer who built them stared at her own code like a stranger’s.
Genuine question: so what?
First of all, team members leave all the time, and you're stuck staring at code nobody instantly understands.
Second of all, LLM's are a godsend in help you understand how existing code works. Just give it the files and ask it to explain to you what the components do and how they interact. It'll give you a high-level summary and then you can interactively dig in, far faster than has ever been possible before.
Heck, I often don't remember anything about code I wrote six months ago. It might as well have been written by someone else. And that's not an original observation either -- I remember hearing the same thing from other developers decades ago, as justification for writing better code comments.
Modern codebases are often far too large for any one person or even an entire team to fully comprehend at once. The team has cycled through generations of team members, with nobody who can remember the original rationales for design decisions.
LLM's are helping comprehension more than ever. I don't understand why people aren't talking about this more.
What's missing here is the complex network of alliances that led to WWI. The Iranian regime has alienated virtually everyone, including many of its Muslim neighbors. Nor is the regime part of some overarching international movement, like the communist countries were. Who is going to lift a finger to help Iran?
I'm not supportive of these strikes. Iranians created this government, and if they want to topple it they'll have to be the ones to do it, without foreign intervention.
I assume it is mostly or entirely written by AI, so that tracks.
Fair enough. I have a bit of a trigger finger reaction to anything that hints at suggesting that regular people shouldn't be trusted to use this stuff.
Can that account be upgraded to Workspace just to get the support?
There isn't enough work to justify 10,000 employees. There are diminishing returns.
> If openly bribing a crony gov to cancel your competitor is now the de-facto standard of making business in the US
It very clearly is, the present AI instance is far from the only recent case.
> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.
They evaluate the propensity and ability to profitably engage in open corruption the same as they evaluate other capacities of the company. “Secure” isn't a binary category, and the risk here is much like any other risk.
> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.
That is the expected result of increasing perceived risk. yes, probably one of those “slowly and then all at once” things.
> If they're designated a "supply chain risk", then any company that does any business with the military cannot be a customer.
Wrong.
Companies with military contracts cannot rely on Anthropic-supplied products and services for those contracts. (Yes, the cabinet member who misrepresents his own title and name of his department also publicly misrepresented the legal consequences of the designation. It's almost like ignoring the law and just making things up is a pattern with him and his boss.)
That‘s the notetaking app that has several "editors", isn‘t it?
So that if you want to use feature A you need a different view inside the app than if you want to use feature B. And if you use both, you constantly switch?
>I don't want to insult you but your president is a populist and a TV personality. He is not a policy maker, he is more like an actor.
All of them are, even those that haven't had a show on TV.
Why would a government be interested in "privacy preserving"? Their goal is the exact opposite.
Rather it's business as usual.
AIPAC is a thing...
And now of course you're going to label me an AIPAC nutter, but in this particular case I think the evidence is fairly plain given the collaboration between the two countries on this. If Israel had done this by their lonesome or if the US had not involved Israel then you could make the case that they reached this point independently, right now it looks to me as if collusion is a 100% certainty and that the US is executing a foreign policy that will not benefit it but that will benefit Israel. It also makes me wonder whether this will end up as a Venzuela re-run where the top names change but everything else remains the same, just with US companies the beneficiaries of the oil, which is, besides policy the main driver behind these things anyway.
The perfect example is speed limits: everybody thinks they're good and yet they all seem to classify all other drivers into two categories: slowpokes and maniacs.
Nobody seems to be able to agree on what a responsible set of rules is around the speed of vehicles.
Hang in there. And for your sake I hope it does not escalate. I was surprised that it did not escalate with the previous strike but they're using a much larger match this time so there is a fair chance that it will. Be safe!
> on the off chance this defense doesn’t work? No system is perfect
Someone in the Middle East gets hit.
> would the risk calculation for an attack on Iran be as easy as it is right now?
The risk calculation isn't easy today. Nukes would make it harder. But I'm pushing back on the notion that it would make it a non-starter.
(MAD arsenals and long-range ICBMs, on the other hand, make it a non-starter.)
The rumor I heard was that high-level Pentagon generals had subtly suggested that Trump target Iran. The reason was to distract his attention from Greenland. Logic goes that if you have a reality TV star who built his brand on being a tough guy in the White House, it's far better that he attack a theocratic dictatorship that funds a host of terrorist organizations and whose country is already on the verge of collapse than a NATO ally and fellow democracy that didn't do anything to us.
Yup. There are good reasons why it's a problem in financial markets but NOT usually a problem in prediction markets:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/02/18/why-insider-tra...
> In prediction markets, informed trading is not a crime or an injustice—it is a valuable service.
A big exception, however, is using prediction markets to make predictions on events regarding publicly traded companies.
In typical jury trials, the jury is instructed that any terms not defined in the relevant statutes are to have their common-sense, ordinary meanings as understood by the jury. The jury is usually also selected to be full of reasonable, moderate people, and folks who are overly pedantic usually get excused during voir dire.
Do you really think a pool of 12 people off the street is going to consider an embedded system, wi-fi router, or traffic light as an "operating system" under this law? Particularly since they don't even have accounts or users as a common-sense member of the public would understand them?
I can generally re-find my place in books, but years ago I acquired a stack of orange punch cards from a university library that they were giving away as scrap paper. These make great bookmarks and also interesting historical conversation pieces if someone notices/recognizes them.
I think the previous use for the punchards to have one for each book and scan them on checkout/checkin (maybe this predated barcodes?)
"He that seeks peace, speak of war" — Walter Benjamin, on the wall next to the entrance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Tank_Museum
> They haven’t had an election since the war started
Because that’s what their constitution says. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ukraines-presidential...
> routinely force unwilling conscripts into vans
Can you clarify what you understand conscription to be?
This is interesting. I took the opposite path. I used to remember page numbers while reading books, just so I could come back without getting lost. That habit started in the School library. These days, I bought a simple, cheap, paintable bookmark, about 100 of them, which my daughters can paint. I have them lying around in books, as I tend to read multiple books at a time. My daughters keep painting them with whatever they want, from anime to their favorite characters, to just about anything. So, bookmarks for me everywhere. Sometimes, I tend to go back a few pages just to recollect the books I was reading a while ago.
Thank you. Can't believe I had to scroll this far down for context.
I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart
Which includes this excellent line:
> Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future will have to work at least in part without programmers.
One thing has always been constant throughout, though: It's always about the stock market.
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.
Unsloth have just released benchmarks on how their dynamic quants perform for Qwen 3.5
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...
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.
> 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.)
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.
There's no land campaign. It's an isolated series of strikes for PR reasons and wishful thinking about Iran collapse.
“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.
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.
And hardware compatibility for normies that Debian won't ever support, keyword here is normies.
Now we just need the Zig ones acknowledging Object Pascal, Modula-2, Ada,.... as well :)
Ban all AI use from government, so maybe we can actually have real humans in charge again.
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.
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...
Related post: https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/27/xkcd-2347.html
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
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...
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?
> 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?
There's an audio clip in the article. Made me laugh out loud.
“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”.)
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".
> 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.
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.
> The old people's tolerance for general problems is why the general problems persist.
Or they just realize that the general problems are insoluble.
'Capricorn One'
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...
Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" is disturbingly prescient, as usual.
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.
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.
This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and move on.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
US Environmental Protection Agency’s Response Management Program
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
"Coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of reality."
I read that many years ago, forgot the source.
I have zero affinity for those and found it a fascinating read.
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").
Yep. `go build -pgo=foo.pprof`
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"
Beagle Bros was awesome. I loved their disk warnings.
Making this a partial WINE-in-a browser, quite impressive. How much of this was AI?
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.
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181841
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."
> 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.
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.
Study math/statistics/ML at a graduate level, to start.
Don't overlook the media consolidation under Bari Weiss.