HN Leaders

What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

What do doxxing laws look like in your jurisdiction? How publicly you share this is information is a function of your legal framework. Don’t break the law.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104520]

Note it was possible to use a Z80 to function as a display controller, people used to do it back in the day...

https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176205]

> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine

Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.

I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75362]

I'm well older than 30 and couldn't disagree with GP more. I think social media has been an absolute disaster not just for young people, but for society at large.

And, importantly, I don't think it needs to be this way, but is designed to be this way to increase engagement. I remember when I first got on Facebook in the mid 00s and I loved it, and I was able to meaningfully connect with old friends. I also remember when the enshittification began, at least for me, when there was a distinct change in the feed algorithm that made it much more like twitter, designed for right hand thumb scrolling exercises and little actual positive interactions with friends.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176205]

> I'd rather have unabused kids than the technological breakthroughs he has contributed to

I'd rather have both. Hawthorne doesn't get nuked if Elon Musk goes to jail.

> Children were exploited

Abuse. Exploitation. CSAM. We're mushing words.

Child rape. These men raped children. Others not only stayed silent in full knowledge of it, but supported it directly and indirectly. More than that, they arrogantly assumed–and, by remaining in the United States, continue to assume–that they're going to get away with it.

Which category is Elon Musk in? We don't know. Most of the people in the Epstein files are innocent. But almost all of them seem to have been fine with (a) partying with an indicted and unrepentant pedophile [1] and (b) not saying for decades–and again, today–anything to the cops about a hive of child rape.

A lot of them should go to jail. All of them should be investigated. And almost all of them need to be retired from public life.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220224113217/https://www.theda...

minimaxir ranked #47 [karma: 73504]

You’re not Michael Scott, you can’t just declare recession.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185283]

Their newsroom website has nothing more recent than Feb 2... I wonder where this came from.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127152]

No, if it was maximizing suppression bang for the buck it would be the Democratic precincts in swing states, not “swing precincts and states”, because electoral votes (except for 5—out of the 9 in Nebraska and Maine—that are determined by Congressional district) are decided by statewide (not precinct level) outcomes, so you get the maximum effect on the outcome by suppressing the vote in Democratic-leaning areas of swing states, not by targeting precincts that are near parity in the same states.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127152]

> This is different from swagger / OpenAPI how?

Because the descriptions aren't API specs and the things described aren't APIs.

Its more like a structure for human-readable descriptions in an annotated table of contents for a recipe book than it is like OpenAPI.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98698]

Why not? Because nobody is printing guns!

This is demonstrably untrue: https://gnet-research.org/2025/01/08/beyond-the-fgc-9-how-th...

Why would you waste everyone's time posting such nonsense? It's not that I support this legislation, but arguing against with counterfactual statements is unhelpful noise.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416385]

Please don't repost comments that have been flagged.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98698]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

Voters should exercise their second amendment constitutionally protected right when they arrive to vote.

(As of early 2026, 29 states allow permitless (constitutional) concealed carry of firearms in most public spaces, while 21 states still generally require a permit. Major permitless carry states include Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and Arizona. While 47 states allow some form of open carry, California, Illinois, and New York prohibit it)

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]
Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 159571]

> Starting with this release, pandoc can be compiled to WASM, making it possible to use pandoc in the browser. A full-featured GUI interface is provided at https://pandoc.org/app.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416385]

This wouldn't be on-topic for HN even if it wasn't running in "Newsweek" --- even if a sitting senator had said it, mere proposals are explicitly off-topic --- but I always feel like it's useful to call out the fact that "Newsweek" is a grift publication. The Newsweek your parents read went out of business a decade and a half ago, and was purchased by a cult and run as an SEO farm.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Not sure about that, however agents in low code tools are certainly taking over old school integrations.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416385]

You don't believe in social science. Sorry, I mean social "science". It feels like it'd be rude to quote you on that point, but it's one of your most consistent arguments and it's not reasonable to expect people not to notice the special pleading you're doing around it. It'd be like me suddenly talking about the virtues of DNSSEC.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416385]

Not if you're using Signal for life-and-death secure messaging; in that scenario it's table stakes.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

Your point with regards to criteria has merit, but this is unlikely to move the needle as Rural America continues to hollow out, so it's their funds to run the experiment. West Virginia has one of the oldest populations in the country (3rd [1]) while having the lowest birth rate (~16k/year and falling), for example (one of their pilots was in Mercer County, WV). Similar for Mississippi (highest out migration in the US [2] [3]).

There is simply no political appetite for the spending required in this regard without broad system changes to enable remote work to support rural communities as employers leave and agriculture dies. As you mention, this population cohort is what SNAP and Medicaid was stripped from. If some people have better lives through direct cash transfers while the outcome isn't going to change, that's fine I suppose. There are worse hobbies someone with resources could have.

TLDR Rural America will remain in decline [4] [5], urbanization will continue (because that's where the economic potential and jobs are).

[1] https://www.wboy.com/news/west-virginia/west-virginia-has-th...

[2] https://www.wapt.com/article/mississippi-ranks-among-top-sta...

[3] https://mississippitoday.org/2025/07/15/faq-mississippi-brai...

[4] ‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583495 - June 2024 (81% of rural counties recording more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023)

[5] Map Shows 21 States Where Deaths Now Outnumber Births - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889024 - February 2026

(I track the decline of Rural America broadly to reach out to institutions to ingest their data and collections for long term archival before they evaporate)

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.

PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.

There certainly other examples that I failed to address.

This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185283]

> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan

I see a lot of posturing and sabre rattling, but I don't think Xi would make this mistake - there is too much interest from the West in an independent Taiwan and, as it is now, it's not really an urgent matter to settle it.

China always plays the long game. They are not in this for any quick wins, because there is no political benefit from it - their political system ensures popular and populist measures never prevail over long-term strategy.

That's quite an advantage over most Western democracies, where politicians always prioritise what will give them more votes in the next election over anything that will benefit the country a couple terms down the road.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104520]

I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.

When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.

For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.

I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

As a Fastmail customer, I appreciate these sorts of efforts. Thanks Fastmail!

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

Democrats have learned to get the messaging right lately, focusing on affordability instead of climate change. Hopefully they can stick to it while driving back the folks pushing fossil interests. Just keep hammering home that renewables and batteries will get you cheaper generation costs, ignore that it helps solve climate change too.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88188]

> Consider what you might choose to do…

Emphasis on might.

Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88188]

> But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned.

Mmkay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Child_...

"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."

"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."

jedberg ranked #43 [karma: 76947]

Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they clearly violated policies.

On the other hand, it really sucks to be at a company that has a large layoff and not get a list, only to find out that they person you were waiting on for a key item was laid off the week before and that's why they didn't finish it (ask me how I know!).

jedberg ranked #43 [karma: 76947]

My assumption was that it's a way to convey it was written by a human because it would be hard to get an AI to write in all lowercase (which it actually isn't).

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75573]

The discourse on here would be much better if commenters at least glanced at the article.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97278]

If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about.

I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97278]

This demo is really impressive: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtim...

Don't be confused if it says "no microphone", the moment you click the record button it will request browser permission and then start working.

I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right - I said this and it transcribed it exactly right, WebAssembly spelling included:

> Can you tell me about RSS and Atom and the role of CSP headers in browser security, especially if you're using WebAssembly?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88188]

It allows note taking and corrections on drafts.

Same deal with things like SCOTUS opinions. (Random example: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-624_b07d.pdf)

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238009]

Four pounds of hardware ingested by a jet engine is going to do a shitload of damage.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127152]

X is most definitely not a dumb pipe, you also have humans beside the sender and receiver choosing what content (whether directly or indirectly) is promoted for wide dissemination, relatively suppressed, or outright blocked.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

https://www.governance.fyi/p/yes-i-am-a-pro-natalist

> Q12: Conservatives have more children than liberals. Doesn’t that mean conservative values produce higher fertility?

> At the individual level, yes. At the system level, the opposite is true.

> Individual conservatives have more children than individual liberals. But countries with conservative policy regimes have lower fertility than liberal ones. The Nordics and France outperform Southern Europe. Catholic Italy and Spain have Europe’s lowest fertility despite cultural emphasis on family. So we have a situation where social conservatives thrive and live their best lives under generous welfare states.

> POSIWID resolves the paradox. What matters isn’t what a system values. It’s what it produces.

> Conservative values say family is important. Liberal systems remove barriers to family formation. Traditional societies say “have children” while their systems say “good luck.” People respond to the system.

> France and northern Western European countries have high fertility because their systems.

> That said, Western European governments are now dismantling these decades-old systems since the Great Recession, with lots of academic research confirming the results. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, right-wing parties sometimes advocate for family spending, as Stone would gladly attest. In Poland, Slavoj Žižek notes it was the right-wing PiS who implemented universal healthcare, not the left.

> The question isn’t whether you value family. It’s whether your system removes barriers and risk that prevents family formation.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81405]

It bounces off the ceiling and so is massively diffused.

You definitely don't look at it directly.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81405]

Funny, you're definitely right -- I've done it probably just 2 or 3 times over a decade, when I felt like I had two meaningful but completely unrelated things to say. And it always felt super weird, almost as if I was being dishonest or something. Could never quite put my finger on why. Or maybe I was worried it would look like I was trying to hog the conversation?

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 127152]

> LLMs have access to the same tools --- they run on a computer.

That doesn't give them access to anything. Tool access is provided either by the harness that runs the model or by downstream software, if it is provided at all, either to specific tools or to common standard interfaces like MCP that allow the user to provide tool definitions for tools external to the harness. Otherwise LLMs have no tools at all.

> The problem here is the basic implementation of LLMs. It is non-deterministic (i.e. probabilistic) which makes it inherently inadequate and unreliable for a lot of what people have come to expect from a computer.

LLMs, run with the usual software, are deterministic [ignoring hardware errors ans cosmic ray bit flips, which if considered make all software non-deterministic] (having only pseudorandomness if non-zero temperature is used) but hard to predict, though because implementations can allow interference from separate queries processed in a batch, and the end user doesn't know what other typical hosted models are non-deterministic when considered from the perspective of the known input being only what is sent by one user.

But your problem is probably actually that the result of untested combinations of configuration and input are not analytically predictable because of complexity, not that they are non-deterministic.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238009]

That's a neat product. You can expect it to be copied within a day or two of this announcement.

How much power does one of these consume?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238009]

Let me counter this with all of my anecdata: I don't know a single pothead that improved compared to who they were (mentally especially, including cognitive function) compared to when I knew them before they started smoking pot. I'm sure they exist, I have not met them in person yet.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102629]

>In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104520]

In NY an individual can grow up to 5 plants legally a year and that's really a lot.

Because the hemp laws were poorly written, this product was legal in all 50 states

https://cyclingfrog.com/

The 10mg THC drinks give a whiff of cannabis when you open one and produce an intoxication similar to smoking with an experience similar to drinking an alcoholic drink. It's more expensive than the cheapest beer, but similar to a reasonably priced wine or drink in a bar. Unfortunately these will be gone in most places by the end of 2026.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

https://archive.today/q6Giu

Original title "US Senator says AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon security assessment reports" compressed to fit within title limits.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104520]

It's more nuanced than that. Under Trump I, Bezos added the batman-like slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness". Under Trump II, Bezos sucks up to Trump.

jrockway ranked #48 [karma: 73221]

When I was in college I wrote a computer program (yes, involving yellow text) that couldn't be photocopied because I put the "o"s in the right place to trigger the eurion-finding algorithm. People thought it was neat.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Yeah, but we are still far off making it mainstream beyond some key use cases, QNX, INTEGRITY, language runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, all kernel extension points being pushed into userspace across Apple,Google,Microsoft offerings, Nintendo Switch,....

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Unfortunely yes, that is the MBA school, and then when the gamble fails, it is the employees that get shown the door, because company XYZ did not met their targets.

CEO might even get a bonus as payoff for a risky move, from shareholders point of view, go figure this logic.

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 125542]

It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.

Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102629]

Remember when credit cards required your signature on the back?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238009]

You misspelled 'hate speech'.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Being built on top of WinUI 3 is hardly much better given the lackluster tooling experience and bugs.

Pressing Win + W also might lead to a black rectangle with a waiting circle that can only be removed via a reboot, because well bugs in a system process.

Finally, as many point out, we don't want widgets that are mostly useless gimmicks.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Welcome to how Apple used to be during Gil Amelio days, at least now they are printing money thanks to iDevices, which wasn't the case back then.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 105998]

Not what the OP is referring to, but UWP and successor apps were always sandboxed, from the time of Windows 8 onwards. This was derived from the Windows Mobile model, which in turn was emulating the Android/iOS app model.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 105998]

Normally getting raided by the police causes people and organizations to change their behavior.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Notepad++ is one of my favourite editors, now it is forbidden by IT and checked for on security compliance checks if still installed, thanks to this attack.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Thankfully I only have to use Teams in very specific projects, thus I still have them. :)

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159344]

One of the charges is "fraudulent data extraction by an organised group." That's going to affect the entire social media industry if applied broadly.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78839]

> The alternative is a race to bankrupt all competitors at enormous cost in order to jack up prices and recoup the losses as a monopoly

I don't know of an instance of this happening successfully.

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 87880]

In my experience you will need to think even harder with AI if you want a decent result, although the problems you'll be thinking about will be more along the lines of "what the hell did it just write?"

The current major problem with the software industry isn't quantity, it's quality; and AI just increases the former while decreasing the latter. Instead of e.g. finding ways to reduce boilerplate, people are just using AI to generate more of it.

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 87880]

Sadly, nobody has time or budget for beauty any more

It's amazing how ornately decorated early equipment was --- especially 19th century and earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cooke_and_Wheatstone_elec...

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125451]

Not everyone is all the time on the Internet, for some folks their computer needs have stayed the much pretty much the same.

If they want to travel they go to an agency, they still go to the local bank branch to do their stuff, news only what comes up on radio and TV, music is what is on radio, CDs and vinyl, and yet manage to have a good life.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159344]

"Sometimes you have to keep thinking past the point where it starts to hurt." - Fermi

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78839]

> mandate required voting

I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for.

A right to vote includes the right to not vote.

nostrademons ranked #37 [karma: 82045]

Since the GENIUS act [1], stablecoins have been backed by the US military too, as long as the stablecoin issuer itself keeps its reserves in U.S. Treasuries.

It's an interesting point about currencies being backed by military force though. Given the recent technological advancements in drones and robotics, it makes me wonder if someone will launch a non-GENIUS-act-compliant cryptocurrency and then back it simply by military force.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/158...

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]
userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 87880]

Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment.

There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78839]

A long essay, which ignored the elephant in the room.

Prosperity and growth come from free markets. The correlation is very strong. Poor countries are poor because they eschew free markets.

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 87880]

At the TB level, the difference is closer to 10%.

Three binary terabytes i.e. 3 * 2^40 is 3298534883328, or 298534883328 more bytes than 3 decimal terabytes. The latter is 298.5 decimal gigabytes, or 278 binary gigabytes.

Indeed, early hard drives had slightly more than even the binary size --- the famous 10MB IBM disk, for example, had 10653696 bytes, which was 167936 bytes more than 10MB --- more than an entire 160KB floppy's worth of data.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75362]

Is it against the rules to say that most of the comments here (at least right now) are drastically missing the point? "Rich countries exploit poor ones!!" - ok, fine, you could argue that's been happening since the beginning of time, doesn't change anything about the conclusions of the article. "The article obsesses over GDP convergence!!" - you can argue GDP is not the perfect metric but the fact is a lot of these poor countries have not been converging on lots of quality of life metrics that matter.

The fundamental thrust of the article is that poor countries only "converged" for a short while due to the Chinese-driven commodity boom, and I think this argument is very compelling. Worse, as history has shown tons of times, commodity booms often end up being bad for a country in the long term because they don't lead to meaningful investments in other productivity-improving endeavors (e.g. Dutch disease that the article mentions).

And I think a subtext of this article is that the economic profession in general has a ton of soul searching to do. Too often economics has depicted rosy outcomes for a host of activities where it has just been flat out wrong. This article goes into detail about how "convergence" almost never happened except for a short "sugar high" driven my Chinese commodity demand. Similarly, I've seen a few mea culpas over the years arguing that the once orthodox view that globalization would be great for everyone failed to take into account how it could contribute to destabilizing democracies as the "economic losers" in rich countries started to demand more political power, one aspect in the rise of populism and some of its dangerous effects.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102629]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

Low literacy is driven by systemic poverty and, more recently, social media consumption.

Insulting facts are still facts, regardless of feelings about the facts. I am not in politics, being liked is irrelevant to me.

https://youtu.be/ZvCT31BOLDM

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving...

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 125542]

GDP per capita is highly correlated with metrics like infant mortality.

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98698]

They certainly have such offerings, but I'm perplexed at how you get to 'most of the things on sale'. The most processed things I get from there on a regular basis are bread, cookies, or alcoholic drinks. It's very rare that I find myself looking at the label of anything I can purchase there wondering how it was made.

jedberg ranked #43 [karma: 76947]

Do you, as a (presumably) human, not require documentation to learn new skills?

anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98698]

Not in this case, since the US hasn't sanctioned Denmark. Trump's rage bleating on Truth Social doesn't constitute official policy. Now, if restrictions on doing business with Denmark were published in the Federal Register, it could get complicated.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176205]

> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space

I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.

Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176205]

> "Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept

This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.

The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

Someone will have to file suit, as is tradition under this administration.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176205]

Sorry, you’re correct. You want to avoid supersonic tips as much as possible.

Modern turbofans permit supersonic tips during high-thrust regimes. (Part of the work in these new designs is releasing that constraint since those supersonic tips are a bastard.) It’s something sought to be avoided. But not at all costs at all times.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]
anigbrowl ranked #26 [karma: 98698]

If you're a database administrator or similar working at X in France, are you going to going to go to jail to protect Musk from police with an appropriate warrant for access to company data? I doubt it.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

Improves detection and response around public health concerns. Current hot topics are measles [1] and syphilis [2] outbreaks.

[1] America’s Measles Crisis Is Spiraling - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-03/measle... | https://archive.today/XXYZt - February 3rd, 2026

[2] Syphilis Resurgence: Rising Rates, Public Health Challenges, and Future Strategies - https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/features/syphilis-r... - September 26th, 2025

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159344]

The lack of UL approval is a concern. This thing draws over 500 watts and runs hot.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 104520]

I hit the jackpot with the ultrasound technician who spoke passionately about what she believed about lifestyle risk for cardiovascular conditions and she believed quite strongly that heart disease runs in families more because lifestyle runs in families than because of genetics. She's not at the top of the medical totem pole but I can say she inspired me to take responsibility for my health than the specialist who I talked to about the results.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176205]

> There's only about 20km of depth from the sea

Don’t underestimate the stopping power of water. Taiwan will be China’s first combined-arms assault with a critical amphibious component.

> war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that

Wide-open plains are traditionally easier for large armies to conquer than mountains.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 105636]

Go back to the SVB failure threads here and observe the freak out before the decision was made to reimburse deposits above FDIC limits. Sometimes you’re lucky, but luck is not effective risk management.

ChuckMcM ranked #21 [karma: 110954]

Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue.

The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices.

As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 79039]

What's the use case for this? Trying to get raw API access through a monthly plan? Or something else?

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 102629]
simonw ranked #27 [karma: 97278]

A bit odd that this talks about AutoGPT and declares it a failure. Gary quotes himself describing it like this:

> With direct access to the Internet, the ability to write source code and increased powers of automation, this may well have drastic and difficult to predict security consequences.

AutoGPT was a failure, but Claude Code / Codex CLI / the whole category of coding agents fit the above description almost exactly and are effectively AutoGPT done right, and they've been a huge success over the past 12 months.

AutoGPT was way too early - the models weren't ready for it.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159344]

> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan...

Look at the geography. Taiwan is a long, narrow island. All the important parts are in a narrow plain on the west side, facing China. There's only about 20km of depth from the sea.

The war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 91034]

This, IMHO, puts the "can we keep AIs in a box" argument to rest once and for all.

The answer is, no, because people will take the AIs out the box for a bit of light entertainment.

Let alone any serious promise of gain.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81405]

Not something I've ever experienced. Open As... Always works just fine.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75573]

I don't think you have to, you can run the integrated watcher, no?

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 125542]

Sibling comments are good. I'll add that the biggest concern is PM2.5 (particulates smaller than 2.5 micrometers). They're thought to be responsible for 70,000 excess deaths in the U.S. annually, more than homicides or drug overdoses: https://www.stateofglobalair.org/health/pm

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88188]

You can do this, today, if you want, via an IRA or some 401(k)s.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 81405]

What are you talking about? The article literally fully explains the rationale, as well as the history. It's not "denying" anything. Seems entirely reasonable and balanced to me.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 88188]