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.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 107196]
coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

>Use a clean microfiber cloth. ANYTHING ELSE will scratch your lenses up.

No, it wont. I'm cleaning mine for decades with anything at hand (cotton shirts, napkins, etc) and not a scratch.

And of course there's the little fact that microfiber cloth is a recent synthetic thing. People used cotton and linen squares, or chamois leather ones if they felt fancy, to clean their glasses.

simonw ranked #25 [karma: 107720]

I wonder how much this thing costs to run.

https://github.com/anthropics/defending-code-reference-harne... says:

> As a rough guideline, expect ~10K uncached input tokens/min and ~2K output tokens/min per agent. You can scale parallelism up to your account's ITPM limit (roughly 10 agents per 100K ITPM).

My guess would be hundreds of dollars with Opus and thousands of dollars with Mythos.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167768]

The article says they looked at CS 10 and 61A, which IIRC are the intro classes at Berkeley. Why do you think that amounts to “cherry picking” versus being a reasonable starting point for analysis (esp if those classes, as they are for one of the quoted professors, aren’t graded on a curve)?

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 126752]

In the absence of firearms, the person who has the next most dangerous weapon can easily dominate everyone else. The country where I'm from was disarmed by the British to keep us from fighting them. But armed gangs still terrorize people with knives and machetes and whatnot.

Some fraction of the population in any society is antisocial. A non-zero rate of firearms ownership allows the people who aren't antisocial to suppress those who are antisocial and maintain peace.

ceejayoz ranked #31 [karma: 93411]

I just bookmarked the apply-code page.

Changes every 6-12 months, but that's easy to update.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 83351]

I hear this argument repeated a lot, and I think it is legit the reason for the 2nd amendment - but it doesn't make sense with modern technology. That authoritarian government is going to come at you with Bearcats, helicopters, and drones. Firing a gun at them is just going to make you cannon fodder. If you want to actually challenge the authoritarian government, you need MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and drones of your own - which is probably why MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and soon drones are heavily regulated, with stiff penalties for just ownership, and guns themselves are free to possess.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92466]

"It's not. It made me feel powerless. It put a sour taste in my mouth. It made them reek of desperation."

Relatedly, I've been answering those dumb-ass "How do you feel about our product?" popups that Microsoft Office is so fond of with some variation on the theme of "Be less needy."

You feel like the stereotypical clingy girlfriend... "Do you love me? Would you recommend me to your friends? Are you interested in the other services I can provide? Would you still love me if a witch turned me into a frog and I could only communicate in croaking sounds? Are you thinking of leaving me? Would you still be thinking of leaving me if I set all your documents on fire and scattered them across the front lawn and then told you my engineers 'accidentally' lost the backups?"

It's not like I have any expectation that anyone, even an AI, is reading these things anyhow.

Your KPIs are not my problem.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 83351]

I'm not quite going back so far - IMHO the pinnacle of technology was around 2011, enough that you had smartphones and could use them as a tool but before engagement-hacking got so good that everything became an addiction.

I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the whims of big Internet companies. Because I think that there's a lot of value in having physical possession of your bits and bytes and control over how you access it, along with nobody else having access to it. My kids are still young enough that they prefer the playground over the computer (and maybe there's a generational thing where at least the 5 year old will actually decline screen time so he can go plant seeds or paint or something), but I want to build actual tech skills and knowledge of how the digital world is put together in them, rather than just having stuff fed to them.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92466]

For anyone thinking of this, I promise to be suitably impressed (defined as "upvoting it when I see it on Hacker News") if anyone does manage to get a true G-code quine in this sense. Go for it.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74791]

I have been doing more experiments with what I have now been calling agentic iterative optimization: telling the LLM to optimize code such that it speeds up all real-world-representative benchmarks by X% without cheating or causing regressions in both tests and performance metrics (e.g. MSE for statistical algorithms or file size in the case of something such as image compression). This is done using Rust where there are more low-level levers to tweak for performance than something like Python.

Opus 4.6/4.7 was consistently successful at getting 2-3x speed improvement with just one pass. It can also do the inverse: improve the performance metrics for better quality without causing a significant regression in speed. Then GPT-5.5 turned out to be much better at this workflow, often getting a multiplicative 1.5x-2x improvement above what Opus could do.

I now have quite a few GPT-5.5-optimized projects in various domains that are feature complete and are substantially more performant than existing SOTA implementations that I plan to open source as soon as possible: the bottleneck is polish as usual.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421421]

The problem you're going to have in these kinds of analyses is that the New York Times is the most successful news organization basically in all of North America. They're doing these things because they work.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184791]

> makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours

I unsubscribed a couple years ago. It was a click on the website. (Just checked. Cancelling online without talking to anyone is still an option.)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 108062]

If you prefer pull, subscribe to it with https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/

(I subscribe to Bloomberg, and send their emails to feeds which end up in a https://karakeep.app/ instance for consumption)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 108062]

Found via bryanlarsen's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401917 (thanks bryan!) in

In a first, wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399332 - June 2026

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 177961]

ty, I always forget about the codeberg migration

simonw ranked #25 [karma: 107720]

> Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The Amazon hiring story is from 2018: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-...

The "systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients" story seems to be this one from 2019: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/tolan/research/2019/di...

The Apple Card story is also from 2019: https://abcnews.com/US/york-probing-apple-card-alleged-gende...

None of those stories were about LLMs!

The stochastic parrots paper was published in 2021: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

There's definitely a good, well researched article to be written about the how well the stochastic parrots paper stands up five years later. This is not that article.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184791]

There seems to be a difference between the Google memes, which are mocking of the product and leadership, and the Excel memes, which seem closer to the way one teases a friend.

You also get the sense that the Excel memes are made by folks who are proud of their expertise in Excel; I don’t get that pride from the Google memes. Put another way, the folks inside the house are calling out the hype. (That said, I broadly agree with the serious tone of the article being out of step with the evidence they’re sourcing.)

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #45 [karma: 77261]

The first issue I have with the article is the title. I followed this whole saga very closely when it happened, and while I definitely understand the nuance of her separation, I agree with Google that Gebru wasn't fired - she quit.

I do not understand what universe you must live in to think you can come to your employer and make a large list of demands (including demands that can easily be taken as subtle or not so subtle threats to your colleagues), say "if you don't meet these demands then I'm going to quit, and quit loudly", and then when the company accepts your proposal by saying "OK, fine, we don't accept your demands so we're accepting your resignation", and then you try to backtrack with a surprised Pikachu face and then cry loudly about how Google fired you. Seriously, where I come from the response would be "get bent."

I also would highlight that the biggest complaint in the paper was how LLMs amplified bias. Google was laughed at for one of its Gemini releases from just a few years back (can't remember if it was called Gemini then) where one commenter noted "it is extremely difficult to get Google's AI to believe white people exist", as they so obviously overcorrected on the racial bias issue where image generation was creating black Nazis and Asian medieval kings of England.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421421]

This paper has not held up, like, at all. The first half of it recites Woke 1.0 principles, like a concern that LMs will thwart efforts to "decolonialize education by shifting to oral histories" in order to avoid the biases of "text". The second half of it makes predictions from axioms about LMs not truly understanding text that nobody would take seriously today.

There's philosophical grappling to be done, as with the Ted Chiang post on the front page right now, about what it is LLMs are actually doing (I'm mostly with Chiang on those core philosophical issues). But Gebru went way past that, attacking their underlying utility. The coherency of GPT 5.5 responses are not simply tricks of the mind, and frontier models (leaving aside Grok, if you want to call it a frontier model) have not in fact been engines for bias.

simonw ranked #25 [karma: 107720]

404media are great:

> After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92466]

At the moment, combining your statement "I’m not sure that I could distinguish them from a nice ray-traced scene" and adding "your graphics card can move through them in real time so cheaply that it can easily be used as a component in other tech even at high frame rates" covers it pretty nicely. There's some research into how to make them move or do other things they don't do very well, but the fact that you can swoop through them in real time on cell-phone level of power means they fit a lot of niches. Plus the fact you can "record" them from a real-world physical environment without ever having to "model" it opens up a lot of utility too.

Personally I suspect they are getting a bit more attention then they "deserve"; people aren't talking about their weaknesses very much and I think that's resulting in some overexcitement. Some of the "we can replace everything with splats!" reminds me of the people who still don't understand why "if GPUs are thousands of times faster than CPUs why don't we run everything on GPUs?" is basically not even a sensible question. I don't see them as ever being the foundation of a graphics stack, but they definitely have a place as part of a well-rounded menu of techniques that can be brought to bear on a wide range of problems.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 108062]

The thesis of the article is "Isn't it sad Texas real estate prices are going down because H1B policy, used to exploit temporary immigrant workers, has been impaired?" How do you respond to that?

> Anand was on an H-1B visa, working at Citibank through an IT-staffing firm called Iris Software, often 12 to 15 hours a day. Narayanaswamy was a human resources generalist. In August she came home to find her husband crying. He’d been laid off, which meant he could lose his visa if he couldn’t find another job quickly. About a week later he died by suicide. In his final note he wrote that he feared he couldn’t compete with AI. (Iris Software didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Citigroup declined to comment.)

Who is at fault? The companies and body shops exploiting this labor? Or those collectively who believe these visa programs should be downsized or eliminated entirely? Exceptional? O-1 is your path. If the role does not require exceptional talent, these companies can absolutely find a US worker out of 100 million people, they simply do not want to (to hold labor costs down and to employ folks in precarious employment arrangements that make it more likely they will do whatever you demand).

I argue its a positive real estate prices are going down because of demand destruction for exploited imported temporary immigrant labor, but other mental models may differ.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 126752]

> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. The discipline, its authors believe, is a deeply human endeavor built on creativity, understanding, collaboration

Mathematicians of all people should be free from such emotion-driven thinking. I guess people’s self interest in continuing to make an income trumps all.

simonw ranked #25 [karma: 107720]

SQL and Bash/sh/zsh are the only two languages I learned at the start of my career that have stayed consistently useful ever since.

(I never got very good at Bash but just the REPL terminal basics have served me very well.)

ceejayoz ranked #31 [karma: 93411]

Never underestimate the capacity of shitty people to shoot themselves and others in the foot.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 108062]

Nailed it. Solar, wind, and batteries are going to be the predominant form of generation in a decade, but there is no speculative benefit, so it’ll happen silently.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184791]

That steady hand is applicable to SpaceX per se. The Twitter/xAI/Colossus stuff, on the other hand, is all Musk.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

These little devices are extremely interesting. I have a side project I will one day get started - to place 32 SoCs (or fewer SoCs with more cores), connect them via PCB traces to an ethernet hub (I need to learn how to do that), and leave one or more "upstream" network ports for connecting multiple boards together. Each core would light up a red LED on the front-side of the board via 90-degree LED holders.

Then I'd pack 16 of them, and build a tiny Connection Machine cube.

Not sure what I'd use a cluster of 512 very puny servers for though... I guess it'd be for learning how to manage clusters with unreasonable numbers of nodes.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

Someone should do a follow up episode with a person dressed up as Godzilla.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

I used Cygwin a lot for giving Windows a more refined developer experience.

My life would have been miserable otherwise.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129616]

This makes as much sense as having Australia on Eurovision.

ceejayoz ranked #31 [karma: 93411]

> Your imaginary dog can’t teleport value across the globe instantly, but Bitcoin can.

"Someone can instantly and permanently steal your beloved dog and you'll never see it again" is a downside.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184791]

> I want claude power, in a box, at my house

This is still a six-figure commitment, possibly high five.

PaulHoule ranked #23 [karma: 108492]
pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129616]

So now each major SPA framework belongs to a cloud provider, Vercel, Cloudflare and Google.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92466]

Time to learn about the Principal Agent Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Which predates "agents" from AI, but then we call them that for a reason.

As their prime directive becomes de facto "Do nothing that might get my owner sued" their utility is likely to decrease. Between this and the somewhat young, but interesting, community grumblings that recent AI models may even be a step backwards from the previous ones, well, let's just say the stock market is not priced for "AI capabilities may have peaked for the next few years and may even head down".

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77738]

If I wanted Claude's thoughts, wouldn't I ask it myself, though?

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77738]

"Falling" means that something goes towards the earth. "Soaring" means the opposite. "Grades soar" means that grades went up "Falling grades means that grades are going down". "Falling grades soar" is just meaningless writing.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110589]

> the Telegraph, the Mail, GB News, the Sun, the Times

Indeed. These are pay-to-play propaganda and should not be accorded the dignity of "newspaper". Peter Oborne's resignation from the Telegraph is still worth reading: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31510152

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110589]

The quantity/quality tradeoff is horrific. And I speak as someone who's watched hundreds of low budget "B" movies. AI is going to allow churning out vastly more movies than anyone can ever watch. Even if some might be good, the average quality goes down, and the adverse selection problem of trying to decide if something is going to be worth committing two hours to becomes harder when you have to scroll for longer and longer distances.

There's already a bit of a fatigue with CGI and the "flat lighting" Netflix TV style. AI is just going to make that worse. Mind you, I'm old enough that I would call any movie where more than 50% of the frame for more than 50% of the runtime was never real objects and created entirely on computer "animation". It's a subtly different discipline.

But yes, there's going to be a lot of it, and it's going to rack up a lot of Netflix watch hours, in the same way that "4k crackling fireplace" does.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77738]

It refuses to use an API token? In my experience, it's more than happy to read out my secrets from .envrc files "just to check".

At least it feels a lot of remorse over its mistake until I reset the session.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

I know it’s not simple. This is why it’d need some deliberate imposition of requirements - this would harm the players with most dedicated platforms to benefit everyone (including the people paying to launch their things).

I am not sure why NASA hasn’t imposed the requirement that Dragon, Starliner, and Dream Chaser should all be able to launch from each others booster.

TeMPOraL ranked #19 [karma: 114408]

> Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious, yet when that same machine is running an LLM all of a sudden we’re debating its consciousness?

Difference in size and complexity and nature of calculations being run?

I'd ask the other way - why do you (general you, people who do not have this inkling) have no problem debating consciousness of meat based brains, but it somehow becomes a category error when talking about silicon? Assuming you don't believe in divine magic, and that divine magic is core to consciousness, there's no reason to assume it's impossible a complex enough machine running complex enough software could be intelligent, or conscious - thinking is computation, and computation is made of math - it's independent of substrate that does the computing in the real world.

LLMs are definitely a different beast than regular software - both in their structure and in their generality. They may not be conscious or intelligent, maybe this specific design could never truly be (though I think it could) - but bucketing them with spreadsheets and terminal emulators is a real category error. If you stop fixating on the underlying substrate, then LLMs are already much more similar to biological minds than to any "regular" computer programs.

But that's still somewhat abstract. In immediate practical terms, it's also why I keep saying that anthropomorphising them gives a better high-order intuition: they are, by design, emulating human thinking in full generality, which makes their overall behavior, including their well-known problems like hallucinations or prompt injections (i.e. manipulation/gullibility), match what you'd expect of a people-like component of a system. It's a real, dangerous mistake, to treat LLMs like regular software components when designing systems.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

Which is orthogonal to what I'm responding to, which was that:

"First to market is the winner even with an inferior product. See whatsapp and telegram"

My point is that this not true, and that "first to market" usually losses.

If anything, what you suggest, reinforces it even more, since it implies that not only "first to market" often loses to a superior product, but even to players an inferior one.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110589]

Running into the problem that Americans are very bad at defining "socialism" here, meaning anything from social democrat to full Communism, but: there is a strong utilitarian streak in socialist societies that is also vulnerable to "the pain (for you) will be worth it (for someone else)" reasoning.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

>The UK doesn't have some imperialist policy of land grabs

It has centuries of exactly that at a global scale, and continued post-war neo-colonial land grabbing and pressuring, plus eager participation in all the imperialist games of its larger brother.

I mean, just mentioning "Tony Blair" is enough...

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129616]

Well, if this helps back to native, less Electron bloat, great.

TeMPOraL ranked #19 [karma: 114408]

The data is the code is the data. Reality has no distinction between "data" and "code". These terms are categories we impose on systems we design, to make it easier for us to build and reason about them, but they're nothing but mere opinions, and depend less on the system structure, and more on the perspective of the person asking which is which.

This is related to, and possibly equivalent with, the core point of both this story and the original one: computation is independent from substrate.

You can build a computer out of anything, whether it's semiconductors or lasers or meat or magnetic fields or water flowing downhill or abstract thought, and that computer will happily perform the same computation as every other equivalent construct from whatever substrate. That's because computers are ultimately made of math, and we design "real ones" by finding ways to approximate the mathematical constraints with physical systems. But the choice of how to map the math to physical systems is completely arbitrary, and any such mappings are equivalent from POV of information processing ability.

(Of course substrate is not arbitrary from economic POV, which is why we build most of our computers out of silicon and plastic, and make it work with electric current and lasers.)

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

For the core "cat" uses, how it's better than bat?

Things like "Archives: Explores zip, tar, tar.gz, 7z, and rar as interactive directory trees showing uncompressed stats" I'm pretty sure bat doesn't do.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

>By that definition nothing should ever be automated.

Many things shouldn't. Understanding is one of them.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

>I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise. Aside from the animal world (also on Earth too, anyway) which is a cruder version of humanity, much more violent as well, the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases.

>It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special as they thought they were And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

A "really long time" is the few years we've built LLMs? Which we have to take for granted (on your word?) they're already "conscious", and chastice ourselves for not already "accepting it"?

>So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

"If we had a parrot demonstrating symptoms of discussing with us, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?"

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

>I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se

The funny thing is, maybe not noticing one can be the actual sign of it :)

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129616]

I would like to know how well it is selling worldwide, on PC markets where Apple hardly has a presence.

As most of these selling well news are from markets where Apple has anyway already a big presence and living standards can afford Apple prices.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91547]

Not having yet read the original story, this reads fine on its own.

And I didn't see it as much as a literary attempt for art's sake, but more of a dialogue-based technical parable trying to convey a real-world insight. Kind of like the ones in Godel Escher Bach.

>You could perform exactly the same rhetorical trick with a toaster or anything else.

Not sure which rhetorical trick is that. The point of the story, as I read it, is the technical insight (and some social implications of it).

P.S. Read the original too. Seems like the exact same could have been written about us instead of the original, if the focus wasn't on our substrate, but on our brain processing. Which, after all, is also about weights.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129616]

Additionally learn stored procedures.

Helps simplify complex SQL queries and no need to waste network traffic on data that client side is never going to use, and waste CPU cycles processing it.

Yes, what about database portability?

I am on my 50s and it only mattered on a single project, which was anyway a middleware for application servers.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

> It will be shot down from far away.

By what exactly?

The military don’t exist in a vacuum - and the equipment they need varies with mission requirements. That’s why the A-10s had its life extended: because it is a better fit than the F-35 for ground support missions. Same applies to the B-52 and the B-2.

The operational cost of the F-22 and F-35 alone make them a poor fit unless you are engaging highly sophisticated air defenses, something the US haven’t done since WWII.

The requirement to be able to neutralise American aircraft is a new one for European (and Canadian) air forces, but one that’ll be tackled.

WalterBright ranked #42 [karma: 79856]

You're right.

But I like to add artwork to my presentations. My artistic skills have not advanced beyond 2nd grade. So I'll make a line sketch, and give to AI to "fix" it.

The results are nice and I use them.

I have no interest in learning how to do art well myself, so using AI for it is appropriate.

But I still write my code myself.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

Cats and dogs were recently recognised as sentient in Brazil.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129616]

Fair enough, however given past experiences, there is probably value designing dynamic languages with optional typing from day one.

In any case, most of these questions are starting to become less relevant as we switch to having robots doing the programming instead.

Now the question is how to typecheck natural languages.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 163348]

The Mauna Loa CO2 data is still up.[1] Trump tried to kill off the CO2 measuring, but that doesn't seem to have happened. The Mauna Loa data goes back to 1958, measured at the same point, far from any CO2 sources. 315ppm in 1958, 441ppm today, and almost a noise free curve with mild seasonal variations. Clearest trend in global warming.

[1] https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/01/climate/trump-cuts-mauna-loa-...

WalterBright ranked #42 [karma: 79856]

> just distributing it lopsidedly

Wealth is not being distributed. A laborer gets paid for the value he creates. There's no "distribution" going on (except by the government).

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 99923]

Oh fuck off. Everything you're posting in this thread consists of rhetorical fallacies. This time, well-poisoning.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 163348]

I really wonder if it's important to learn all that low-level stuff at this point. Most programmers today will never write a binary tree or a hash table. Modern high-performance ones are generic components you get from libraries. Even MIT gave up on teaching from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

I got all that stuff. I've wired up a 4-bit adder on a solderless breadboard for an architecture class. I used to have a well-thumbed copy of Knuth handy. I've designed and built a switching power supply. But I'm not up to date on using Claude Code, and should be.

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89737]

Early Macs used the upper byte of 32-bit pointers for other data:

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

...and resulted in some models having a backwards-compatibility mode not too dissimilar to the PC's A20 gate, although for only a short period of time.

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89737]

It takes time for students to work their way through the system.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127905]

> Kurtzman Star Trek is not really Star Trek in any spiritual sense, it’s a vessel for political messaging (they’ve pretty much said as much)

So was most of Roddenberry, Piller, et al., Star Trek. At its low ebb in Braga Star Trek, but even then...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 107196]
stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77738]

If you don't want the car to be sending data, you can remove the SIM from under the armrest.

TeMPOraL ranked #19 [karma: 114408]

> making everything 'language based' prevents true multi-modality. Thinking isn't done in language. Thinking outputs language

Your problem isn't with tokens, but with "language". Tokens have little to do with language, other than usually being consumed in sequence, but that's true of anything that has to span over time. Thinking of tokens as letters or subwords is mistaking the general with the specific. We may have started with letters and words and subwords (trying to find the best balance for training), but then people figured why not add pixel patches to the dictionary, and then sounds, and then other signals, and after iterating on it a bit, we now have image and sound and symbol sequence data all being part of the same token space.

LLMs stopped being about "language" - in the sense of English, or C++ - long, long time ago. We're still using tokens, but they're more like quanta of sensory input now.

You can take it in two directions, I guess - either consider "Large Language Model" to be an anachronym, a name that couldn't keep up with times, but we got used to it back when it made sense, or alternatively, just broaden your understanding of "language" to encompass any pattern of quantized sensory inputs, regardless of modality :).

(Given how we know humans can communicate with pictures, gestures, body language, noises, movement, actions, or even gaze, and that when it becomes common enough, such systems develop their own pattern structure - dare I say vocabulary and grammar - and that none of it requires or usually involves going through a "normal language" intermediary - I'd lean towards the second direction :)).

--

ETA: also wrt. "thinking with tokens", LLMs don't really think in tokens. You may have heard that phrase, that may have been coined by Karpathy, that "for LLMs, tokens are units of thinking". It's a useful shorthand to remind people that prompting models to be terse and skip prose is effectively dumbing them down, but it's also a bit misleading.

A better analogy is that tokens act like clock signals: each consumed token causes certain amount of computation happen in the network, much like a single clock signal in digital electronics, or turning a crank one revolution in a mechanical contraption. This makes tokens "units of thinking" in the sense that processing N tokens causes M amount of computation to happen. Now, for whatever problem you're solving, there is a minimum amount X of computation that is required to solve in correctly, and it's mathematically impossible to do with less. So if you ask an LLM to solve it, it needs to process at least as many tokens as it takes for M = X. If you force the model to be so terse that it makes M < X, you literally make it impossible to succeed. In practice, you need M >> X.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421421]

I'm not wild about this benchmark. There are well-known firms (definitely not saying that about Trail! no experience at all with the other one here) that issue public-facing audit docs that read the same no matter what the project scope was.

If you're keying off 3rd party assessment, which is sane, you should be evaluating the combination of the testing team (the best firms will publish reports with the names of the consultants on them) and the scope and depth of the results. The company shouldn't matter; the scope should matter a lot.

A meaningful security assessment for an "E2EE mail service" is nosebleed expensive.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421421]

We flirt with the idea of municipal broadband every couple of years (we built dense fiber connectivity throughout the village a decade or so ago for other reasons). But the economics are brutal; to pencil, you need significant uptake, and you're competing with AT&T and Xfinity, both of which (if you're clear-eyed) are better offerings than the muni can compete with, so you're not going to get that uptake.

The buildout issue is real, and is a reason to explore public-owned broadband in underinvested areas. But even if we had only AT&T here, none of the arguments really work. Even the monopolism concern isn't operative (AT&T and Xfinity don't jack their rates up in places they happen to be the monopoly supplier --- they quote nationally visible rates).

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184791]

> US Ai schizophrenia

I bought an Insta360 before the AI mania because the software was simpler, price cheaper and reviews around build quality more positive.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 184997]
rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

Kind of.

I want all 7400s to be four NAND gates, regardless of how they are implemented. As long as the results are correct, you might as well put a little ARM controller pretending to be four NAND gates.

For analog parts, I agree any change to the data sheet should receive at least a different suffix letter.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

This forces me to think on how to build an emulator for the VT-240 terminal. Disassembling the ROM it should be relatively easy to transpile it to C and adapt the keyboard/serial stuff to whatever actual hardware gets put around the controller.

PaulHoule ranked #23 [karma: 108492]

‘Cause Android is a Potemkin village run by a vendor who isn’t interested in winning. I guess you could run Linux on a tablet if you didn’t need any WiFi or user interface of any kind.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190871]

Apart from the GUI environment, the Mac is a Unix and I find it hard to notice much difference between it and a Linux. I use MacPorts on my Macs and there is no drama with command line tools.

On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.

PaulHoule ranked #23 [karma: 108492]

It's the kind of list an LLM might make up.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 163348]

Raise them, more likely. NVidia says that GPU hardware prices won't decrease until at least 2030. The world is out of fab capacity.

ceejayoz ranked #31 [karma: 93411]

Saner companies ask the same question about models from their own country too.

ChuckMcM ranked #21 [karma: 112418]

Matt raises an interesting point that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere, which is while you may be bullish or bearish on the future of AI, the new twist of "forcing" SpaceX into the NASDAQ 100 is not something the market is choosing. So given the new rules, why aren't there funds opening up that exclude the 'unknowns' but keep the other stocks in an index?

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77738]

Fastmail is the best and you cannot change my mind ever. I love it.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77738]

I did one in Thessaloniki, Greece eight years ago. Here's a photo album of me before, during, after, and recently:

https://immich.home.stavros.io/s/transplant

PaulHoule ranked #23 [karma: 108492]

... and a huge amount of help from Dell, Lenovo and the like.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77738]

Let me just turn this hack into a quick Flipper Zero app that makes the speaker play "Fuck Creative" in a loop, let's see whether the vendor is bothered then.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 126752]

Why does the public have a right to expropriate the property if AI companies specifically, as opposed to other types of companies? Just make broad rules that apply to everyone based on abstract principles. I’m fine even with very liberal economic approaches. If we want to raise corporate tax rates to 30%, fine, do that. Want to get creative? Half the equity of every company goes into a public fund. But this case by case, “sure is a nice company you got there” stuff is third-world shit.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 177961]

ty for this writeup Andrew, all the best to you

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 108062]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 107196]
tosh ranked #8 [karma: 177961]

very interesting, do you have a pointer with more info on what kind of SIMD support it has?

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92466]

In addition to the other fine answers, I personally find the additional operations that quantum computers enable to be surprisingly inapplicable to a lot of real problems. It's really kind of unimpressive when you dig down into it. It is not a revolution of computing as we know it, it's a very, very expensive accelerator card for a few niche problems. Neat for people who have those problems. But if "cracking cryptography" wasn't one of those problems I'm not sure it would have the popular attention it does.

I think there is a sense in which we have a historical accident that has make quantum computers sound bigger than they are, in that we ended up with "factoring prime numbers" being the first thing we had to make practical encryption out of, and by what is from a human perspective mostly a coincidence, it so happens that quantum computers may be really good at that. But the problem is that quantum computers happen to be good at factorizing that is the problem, not that quantum computers are somehow "good at breaking encryption". It seams to me that in some sense "post-quantum computing" is actually "all practical encryption schemes except those based on factoring large numbers". Breaking large prime number-based schemes is the exception that QC happens to be good at, not the rule.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74791]

The big story here is the encoder-free part, which I still don't fully understand.

> Vision: We replaced Gemma 4’s vision encoder with a lightweight embedding module consisting of a single matrix multiplication, positional embedding and normalizations.

That's technically encoding, just without using a dedicated model for it like SigLIP? The Developer's Guide elaborates, it's still a 35M layer which I am curious is robust enough. https://developers.googleblog.com/gemma-4-12b-the-developer-...

> Small enough to run locally on consumer laptops with 16GB of RAM, it unlocks powerful multimodal and agentic experiences right on your machine.

I am assuming that involves quantization, which due to the quality loss makes that statement somewhat misleading IMO.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 107196]

"Work is what you're doing when you'd rather be doing something else."

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110589]

Supply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it.

It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved in datacenters is going to experience shortages/price rises. A pre-existing problem is power transformers: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-transformer...

The impact on domestic electricity prices in a year just after high oil prices is not going to be popular either.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92466]

It's not too bad. By the time the rest of the band is also not sounding like a sick animal the trombones have figured it out too. I'm not sure if it's something about the brass tone being more forgiving, the volume of audio coming out of the instrument, the fact that the slide is much physically larger than the violin or viola making it easier to make fine adjustments (and now that I think about it, when I think "the middle orchestra sounds pretty bad" it is mostly the violins and violas, so that's plausible), something else, or some combination of all of the above, but it doesn't take too long (relatively speaking) before the trombones are in tune.

(I played trombone throughout middle and high school.)

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127905]

> There's also really clear bias given that the main results only feature Google models.

The main results also don’t seem to know what a “model” is, as the two “models” it refers to are “stock Gemini 2.5 Pro” and “a retrieval-augmented version of NotebookLM”.

One of which is a model, and the other of which is an interface backed by different models depending on exactly when the analysis was performed.

PaulHoule ranked #23 [karma: 108492]

"Going nowhere" or "going somewhere" may have nothing to do with culture or merit. It's certainly true the dynamics of the "going somewhere" company are better, but a place is not "going somewhere" because it is a good place to work, it may be "going somewhere" because it benefits from a monopoly over a two-sided market... which means there are resources which could possibly go to employees.

PaulHoule ranked #23 [karma: 108492]

For a long time I've thought the basic problem of the political system is that rich people can spend $0.05 cents to save $1.00 in taxes; if political donations were more expensive, say it cost $20.00 to save $1.00 in taxes, rich people would just pay taxes.

Various routes:

(1) Much greater spoils to political candidates and their hangers on

(2) Handicap elections, subtract a vote for every $20 in donations

(3) $500 of political donations means a crew goes out to bust up your car window or something of that magnitude

simonw ranked #25 [karma: 107720]

Both the Anthropic and OpenAI "Enterprise" plans include per-developer analytics:

Anthropic: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12883420-view-usage-a...

OpenAI: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10875114-workspace-analy...