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why single meson out ? infinitely better than most alternatives mentioned in the article.
> Strangely it seems to me that a lot of effort is going more into being able to simulate full cells that contain unknown mechanisms, rather than trying to use the capabilities to create hypothesis to uncover the unknown mechanisms. Yes, that probably expedites the path towards simulating much bigger human cells, but ultimately still leaves us in the dark on most fronts.
I imagine it's much easier to create and test hypotheses about the unknown mechanisms, when you can view them in context of a larger system, with reasonable performance, allowing you to metaphorically "grab them in your palm" and tweak on the fly. We work better when we explore things, instead of immediately taking on problems that are at the limit of our computational tools, requiring individual brains (and tons of paperwork) to make up for the difference.
In this sense, researching the nano-scale basics, and aiming to simulate micro-scale cellular systems, are actually aligned - as long as they're not cutting too much corners, the latter is creating space for former work to be done efficiently.
The underappreciated benefit of OSS is that you have an escape hatch from coordination if you disagree enough. You can in theory just fork it and run your own version, even if nobody else agrees. But you have to bear the associated development cost yourself.
Choice looks like fragmentation. But the existence of alternatives is very important.
> Because Google already covered this ground and the doctrine of transformative Fair Use was born.
Fair Use, and the way whether a work is transformative is a factor in it, is much older than Google; I'm not sure what specific Google precedent you think is relevant here.
And Sublime, BBEdit, TextMate, Notepad++, Ultraedit, Slick, vi, vim, XEmacs, Emacs, nano, joe, jEdit,....
> The glass-is-half-full take is that no states have prohibited gender affirming care for adults.
Given that a number have prohibited it from being paid for by the state Medicaid program for adults when it previously was, that is, maybe, a glass quarter full take. (There is also the issue that wrong-gender puberty is a particularly significant suicide risk factor for trans youth, so restricting gender affirming care for youth is a particularly strong assault on trans lives.)
And even then, its not strictly true, as while most states with restrictions that have passed have only restricted care to minors, Nebraska did so for persons under the age of 19, which includes some adults.
> Point being, even the most conservative states haven't (yet) sought to limit treatment for trans adults.
They have not only sought to do so, they have actually done so (as mentioned above). They have not yet implemented broad prohibitions (except Nebraska's for adults under 19), but "limit" and "broad prohibition" are not the same thing, and mere limitations can have the same practical effect as broad prohibitions, as many states demonstrated by making it nearly a practical impossibility to provide (and therefore access) abortion services, even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe; conservative states are following the same playbook with gender-affirming care.
> Not sure about legislation dictating certain aspects, like waiting periods, but those were widespread as a practical matter in even the most liberal states.
No, legally-imposed waiting periods for adult (or even youth) gender affirming care were not present (and still are not present) in the most liberal states. That's a very strange thing to invent to minimize the restrictions being imposed by conservative states.
If you are equating the fact that it can take time, for some services beyond HRT, to save up money and/or jump through whatever hoops are established by your insurance, and find and schedule time with the required provider(s) with legislatively imposed waiting periods and other access restrictions, that's incredibly dishonest (for one thing, the legislative restrictions don't overlap the other ones, they add on top, and, by making it more difficult for providers to operate and thereby reducing the number of providers, make the other issues worse as well.)
Conquering the frontier has always been the future.
It's a RISC, so that's not too surprising. MIPS emulators are also roughly that size.
Endowments for public goods so they don’t have to constantly beg for funds. Propublica, AP News, Sesame Street Workshop, Tampa Bay Times, City Museum, Climate Town are some examples.
> Is there any desktop GUI library that isn't built on subclassing?
There are desktop GUI libraries implemented in C, Go, and other languages that do not have subclassing, so, the answer kind of has to be yes.
Can they generate a list of books for which at least, say, 10% of the text can be recovered from the weights? Is this a generic problem, or is there just so much fan material around the Harry Potter books to exaggerate their importance during training?
I have had this happen too, but a "this seems complex, do we need that complexity? can you justify it? or can we make this simpler?" or similar has them come back with something much better.
I'm hyperfixated on the idea that they're angry at Metz for "outing" Scott Alexander, who published some of his best-known posts under his own name.
EA always rubbed me the wrong way.
(1) The kind of Gatesian solutions they like to fund like mosquito nets are part of the problem, not part of the solution as I see it. If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want. Expecting NGOs to do everything for them is the same kind of neoliberal thinking that has rotted state capacity in the core and set us up for a political crisis.
(2) It is one thing to do something wrong, realize it was a mistake, and then make amends. It's another thing to do plan to do something wrong and to try to offset it somehow. Many of the high paying jobs that EA wants young people to enter are "part of the problem" when it comes to declining stage capacity, legitimation crisis, and not dealing with immediate problems -- like the fact that one of these days there's going to be a heat wave that is a mass causality event.
Furthermore
(3) Time discounting is a central part of economic planning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_discount_rate
It is controversial as hell, but one of the many things the Soviet Union got wrong before the 1980s was planning with a discount rate of zero, which led to many economically and ecologically harmful projects. If you seriously think it should be zero you should also be considering whether anybody should work in the finance industry at all or if we should have dropped a hydrogen bomb on Exxon's headquarters yesterday. At some point speculations about the future are just speculation. When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance, I don't think we have any idea what state people are going to be in 20,000 years. They might be really pissed that buried spent nuclear fuel some place they can't get at it. Even the plan to burn plutonium completely in fast breeder reactors has an air of unreality about it, even though it happens on a relatively short 1000 year timescale we can't be sure at all that anyone will be around to finish the job.
(4) If you are looking for low-probability events to worry about I think you could find a lot of them. If it was really a movement of free thinkers they'd be concerned about 4,000 horsemen of the apocalypse, not the 4 or so that they are allowed to talk about -- but talk about a bunch of people who'll cancel you if you "think different". Somehow climate change and legitimation crisis just get... ignored.
(5) Although it is run by people who say they are militant atheists, the movement has all the trappings of a religion, not least "The Singularity" was talked about by Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin long before sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge used it as the hinge of a mystery novel.
#define duck_season wabbit_season
#include "shoot.hpp"
You know why I'm not coming back at you with links about registrar ATOs? Because they're so common that nobody writes research reports about them. I remember after Laurent Joncheray wrote his paper about off-path TCP hijacking back in 1995; for awhile, you'd have thought the whole Internet was going to fall to off-path TCP hijacking. (It did not.)
I've found LLM's to be extremely helpful in naming and general function/API design, where there a lot of different ways to express combinations of parameters.
I know what seems natural to me but that's because I'm extremely familiar with the internal workings of the project. LLM's seem to be very good at coming with names that are just descriptive enough but not too long, and most importantly follow "general conventions" from similar projects that I may not be aware of. I can't count the number of times an LLM has given me a name for a function that I've thought, oh of course, that's a much clearer name that what I was using. And I thought I was already pretty good at naming things...
Dashboard: https://climatechangetracker.org/igcc
Bashir: Even when they're neither?
Garak: Especially when they're neither.
> Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
> The boosters are in 5 stages of grief coming to terms with what was once AGI and is now a mere co-pilot, while the haters are coming to terms with the fact that LLMs can actually be useful in a variety of usecases.
I couldn't agree with this more. I often get frustrated because I feel like the loudest voices in the room are so laughably extreme. One on side you have the "AGI cultists", and on the other you have the "But the hallucinations!!!" people. I've personally been pretty amazed by the state of AI (nearly all of this stuff was the domain of Star Trek just a few years ago), and I get tons of value out of many of these tools, but at the same time I hit tons of limitations and I worry about the long-term effect on society (basically, I think this "ask AI first" approach, especially among young people, will kinda turn us all into idiots, similar to the way Google Maps made it hard for most of us to remember the simple directions). I also can't help but roll my eyes when I hear all the leaders of these AI companies going on about how AI will make a "white collar bloodbath" - there is some nuggets of truth in that, but these folks are just using scare tactics to hype their oversold products.
Coincidentally, Charity Majors wrote one of my favorite essays about that too: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-pa...
> Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers.
> Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).
> Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.
There are plenty of good "normal" engineers whose abilities top out at following direction from management, implementing a spec (albeit really well), adding to an existing architecture etc. I'd wager the vast majority of the industry falls into this category. Yes, it's very important for an org to ensure that these kinds of engineers are successful, because they are the workhorses of your company and without them nothing will get done.
Ultimately though you can't have a workforce just of these engineers. Someone has to lead. Someone has to tell management what to build. Someone has to invent new tech from scratch.
"10x engineer" is a bullshit LinkedIn thoughtfluencer term that has unfortunately caught on, but everyone who has worked in the industry for more than a day knows that there is a hierarchy in the tech org, and the ones on top are more valuable than the rest.
It’s the only way for workers to legally and without violence fight the never ending labor squeeze, which will only worsen as structural demographics slowly compress the prime working age cohort (which pushes up labor costs and will make companies struggle to achieve past and targeted profits) creating a long duration inflationary macro.
It may be easier to imagine someone trying to derive mathematics all by themselves, since it's less abstract. It's not that they won't come up with anything, it's that everything that even a genius can come up with in their lifetime will be something that the whole of humanity has long since come up with, chewed over, simplified, had a rebellion against, had a counter-rebellion against the rebellion, and ultimately packaged it up in a highly efficient manner into a textbook with cross-references to all sorts of angles on it and dozens of elaborations. You can't possible get through all this stuff all on your own.
The problem is less clear in philosophy than mathematics, but it's still there. It's really easy on your own terms to come up with some idea that the collective intelligence has already revealed to be fatally flawed in some undeniable manner, or at the very least, has very powerful arguments against it that an individual may never consider. The ideas that have survived decades, centuries, and even millenia against the collective weight of humanity assaulting them are going to have a certain character that "something someone came up with last week" will lack.
(That said I am quite heterodox in one way, which is that I'm not a big believer in reading primary sources, at least routinely. Personally I think that a lot of the primary sources noticeably lack the refinement and polish added as humanity chews it over and processes it and I prefer mostly pulling from the result of the process, and not from the one person who happened to introduce a particular idea. Such a source may be interesting for other reasons, but not in my opinion for philosophy.)
> Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself
There's an -ism for that.
Actually, a few different ones depending on the exact angle you look at the it from: solipsism, narcissism,...
This is such an excellent example of a responsible and thorough application of vision LLMs to a gnarly data entry problem.
The official report on the blackout in Spain and Portugal was just released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44300906 - June 2025
Well, no shit.
Remember when OpenAI's CTO was asked to confirm that they don't use YouTube to train Sora and she evaded the question...?
Everyone is training on everything they can get their hands on, period.
And, while its not the case any more, but illustrates how arbitrary the "new letter" vs. "new sound for old letter or combination" is "ll" also was considered its own letter for ~250 years.
How would you compare what your idea is to https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost ?
Applying is free. If you don't ask, the answer is always no. Shoot your shot, lots of folks who have gone on to be successful without YC.
I found this bit delightful:
> Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.
> The phone’s battery health held up reasonably well. After over a year of constant operation, it’s at 76% capacity.
I have an iPhone SE that I've tried keeping plugged in all the time and its battery has turned into a spicy pillow three times, first with Apple replacing the whole device (since they won't touch it with a swollen battery), then using third-party replacement kits.
This isn't going to work for long if the battery is usually at 100%.
My #1 wish for being able to repurpose old phones is to operate without touching the battery, and/or keeping the battery at 50%. Newer Apple phones have an 80% limit option which is an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. And unfortunately the option isn't there on any but the most recent phones, even on up-to-date iOS.
Tesla is asked to delay Robotaxi launch in Austin by Texas lawmakers - https://electrek.co/2025/06/18/tesla-asked-delay-robotaxi-la... - June 18th, 2025
> A group of seven Austin-based lawmakers in the Texas Senate and House have signed a letter asking Tesla to delay its launch until September:
> As members of the Austin delegation in the Texas Senate and Texas House of Representatives, we are formally requesting that Tesla delay autonomous robotaxi operations until the new law takes effect on September I, 2025. We believe this is in the best interest of both public safety and building public trust in Tesla’s operations. If Tesla opts to proceed with the June 22, 2025, launch date, we request that you respond to this letter with detailed information demonstrating that Tesla will be compliant with the new law upon the launch of driverless operations in Austin.
Related to this, a 2020 take on the topic from the MetalLB dev: https://blog.dave.tf/post/new-kubernetes/
I don't know of any 100% reliable fixes for this, and I've been looking for them for nearly three years: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/
Most promising approach right now is this one: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/
This paper is useful too: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/13/prompt-injection-desig...
unpaywalled link: https://wapo.st/4e9nXzD
Destin’s arguments make sense if we want to redo Apollo. They break down if we’re trying to make repeated missions into deep space more economical.
From the article:
"Yet Musk has clinched his hopes on Starship as the key vehicle for both NASA’s third and fourth Artemis missions ..."
I'm puzzled by the use of "clinched" in this context.
To quote Inigo Montoya: "I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"
… unless you plug it into your mouth
> It normally doesn't explode of course!
Well…
Have you filed a provisional yet?
FWIW, we're barely a two years into useful LLMs, less than half a year into the AI coding frenzy. Stuff takes time, there's organizational inertia.
Karpathy himself gave a perfect example in the talk with that restaurant menu to pictures app - it took few hours of AI-assisted coding to make it, and a week of devops bullshit to publish it. This is the case for everyone, so it slows down the feedback cycles right now.
Give it a couple of months; if we don't have clear evidence of recursive improvements by this time next year, I'll concede something is really off about it all.
>while the well-mannered sites suffer from lack of features due to aversion to any persistent handle on the users they might provide
Yeah, hard pass.
All these stories are just the parents doing these things anyway, the baby is just there for the karma.
He ain't dismissing them. Comparing local/"open" model to Linux (and closed services to Windows and MacOS) is high praise. It's also accurate.
You get the same feeling from here I am located, easy weekend trips between France, Belgium and Netherlands to chose from, a couple of hours away.
Now if the getting all the train connections wasn't like going to the casino playing roulette.
Watching from this side of the Atlantic, and being from a country that was under dictorship, I think anyone hoping they only need to hold on to some future elections, haven't paid that much attention during history classes.
The proper way to reason about performance is to use a profiler, not second guessing what C like code generates.
Two backend microservices that could talk over regular OS IPC, or eventually something like gRPC, while making DevOps life easy, instead it became "how many languages can we place into a single executable" kind of exercise.
> What's a "foundational semiconductor"?
What PA and Fairchild did. We haven’t had a new-entrant opening for fundamental semiconductor design for decades, a fact laid bare in their top engineers’ comp. (No clue if this is what they are actually doing.)
What's a "foundational semiconductor"?
This seems to be a political term, not one the electronics industry uses.[1] "Foundational chips (also called “legacy,” “lagging edge,” and “mature node” semiconductors) are often defined as chips made with a 22nm manufacturing process or above."
Is there actually a lack of 22nm and larger fab capacity in the US? Or is it just that they're not being used much.
[1] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
Is it really worth worrying about traditional "accessibility" features for GUIs in the age of AIs? The future of interfaces looks like Siri and Alexa with the power of a good LLM behind them. Those interfaces can potentially communicate with anybody who can talk, type, or sign. Maybe that's where to put the effort.
I have no idea what ads they serve me because I have ad blindness. My brain just refuses to perceive them.
Even when they float over the text I am trying to read, I do not see them.
> why not attempt to meet with NIH leadership
That'll be RFK Jr., as HHS Secretary.
Good luck!
You aren't going to find NKRO on most laptop keyboards, or really any keyboard, unless it's a "gamer"-oriented high-end one.
https://environmentamerica.org/articles/do-wildlife-crossing...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9753749/
In my neighborhood (NY not VA) we had some people make a crossing for these guys this spring
https://www.virginiaherpetologicalsociety.com/amphibians/sal...
I have no social media associated with my real identity.
That should've always been the norm, yet unfortunately it isn't.
Personally I like the older kind of chatbots where I can ask it to write me something little (a function, a SQL query, ...) and I have it in 10-30 seconds and can think about it, try it, look in the manual to confirm it, or give it feedback or ask for something else. This can be a lot more efficient than looking in incomplete or badly organized manuals (MUI, react-router, ...) or filtering out the wrong answers on Stack Overflow that Stack Overflow doesn't filter out.
I can't stand the more complex "agents" like Junie that will go off on a chain of thought and give an update every 30 seconds or so and then 10 minutes later I get something that's occasionally useful but often somewhere between horribly wrong and not even wrong.
I was thinking of entirely removing the screen on my Framework, and using the Xreal Air instead. This is a really cool build, and it's inspired me to give the screenectomy a shot! I just hope I don't break anything.
I have two ADSL lines each of which is slightly below the federal broadband definition.
Most kinds of communication products (Zoom) work OK, except for anything from Google.
> What’s stopping someone from using LLMs to create an alt account?
For the applicant? Visa fraud rules. For people fucking with third parties? Absolutely nothing.
You should be prepared for potential legal action for the unlicensed practice of medicine and mental health services.
https://consumerfed.org/testimonial/complaint-and-request-fo...
State regulation is still a patchwork, but is slowly progressing.
https://www.manatt.com/insights/newsletters/health-highlight... (Scroll to “Key Takeaway #4: Multiple states introduced bills that govern the use of AI-enabled chatbots, with some specifically targeting chatbots used in the provision of mental health services. One targeting mental health services passed (Utah HB 452).”)
Utah HB 452: https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/HB0452.html
(no opinion on the product, just important to know when regulators and legal folks might show up in your inbox)
I’m surprised oblique wings [1] [2] haven’t made it into drones yet.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_wing
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060421190759/http://www.darpa....
I think you just coined "context rot", what an excellent term! Quoted you on my blog https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/18/context-rot/
The form factor may return as $2K iPhone Fold which unfolds into iPad Mini.
> Soft sciences are rife with "yeah I'm aware of the problems with the thing I'm doing, but I'll do it anyway. I've presented a disclaimer, that should be enough to cover my ass"
It's not to cover one's ass but communicate limitations. If you think the hard sciences don't do this, I've got a cosmic distance ladder to sell you.
The social case for heavily subsidising (if not making free) preventative care and treatment for any contagious disease is strong.
> Iran has behaved pretty rationally IMO
Tactically, in this war with Israel, and broadly since October 7th, I agree.
Strategically, by putting themselves in a position where they're sending heavy munitions to e.g. the Houthis so they can take pot shots at U.S. warships, no. That's destabilising in a way that frankly the Kims have never been.
You cannot address climate change as an insurer. You can either price the risk or withdraw from offering policies where the risk exceeds the economics. Insurance is for tail risk events, not chronic payouts.
Anyone at risk of exposure.
https://hivinfo.nih.gov/understanding-hiv/fact-sheets/pre-ex...
You can't upgrade the hard drive or RAM on modern laptops either.
Likewise, you can represent a queue as a priority queue with key = i, where i is an integer monotonically increasing at insertion time. And you can represent a stack as a priority queue where key = -i.
This is the insight behind the decorate-sort-undecorate pattern; it's just heapsort, with a different key function allowing you to represent several different algorithms.
From https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/06/16/foia-records-revea...
Related:
Illinois officials investigate license-plate data shared with police seeking woman who had abortion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262597 - June 2025 (0 comments)
There is that saying that "reality has a left wing bias", otherwise why would the right need "alternative facts?"
This media critic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian
pointed out that newspaper reporters tended to lean left but newspaper reporters tended to lean right and you could tease out both of these influences.
Most of the things described in this document are also good for humans. The justification is different, but the result is the same.
I am with you on this. I'm very much not sure about rewrites, but LLMs do change the cost-benefit balance of refactorings considerably, for me. Both in a "they let me make a more informed decision about proceeding with the refactoring" and "they are faster at doing it than I am".
I remember being shocked to see a Prop 65 warning on a nozzle for a garden hose and then found out that it is routine for brass to have a little bit of lead in it to simplify machining -- energy use in turning leaded brass on a lathe is 3x less than unleaded brass. I remember brass being really easy to work with in shop class, but they didn't tell me why!
The most important characteristic of any internal documentation is trust. People need to trust it. If they trust it, they'll both read it and contribute to it. If they don't trust it they'll ignore it and leave it to rot.
Gaining that trust is really hard. The documentation needs to be safe to read, in that it won't mislead you and feed you stale information - the moment that happens, people lose trust in it.
Because the standard of internal docs at most companies is so low, employees will default to not trusting it. They have to be won over! That takes a lot of dedicated work, both in getting the documentation to a useful state and promoting it so people give it a chance.
It does but the submitted can edit the title to make it right. The same for other obnoxious behaviors such as removing "How".
I've thought about adapting YOShInOn's autoposter so it checks to see if the title of one of my submissions was mutilated and automatically undoes the damage.
My take is that PWM dimmers are dramatically more energy efficient than the old rheostat dimmers people used to use. If you operate a transistor in a digital mode where it is either on or off it is close to 100% efficient, but if you operate it in a 50% power mode you have to send 50% of the power to a load and the other 50% to a resistor. Thus CMOS logic eradicated bipolar, switching power supplies replaced linear power supplies, a Class D amplifier can be a fraction the size of a Class A amplifier, etc.
You could probably still reduce the flicker by either increasing the switching frequency or putting some kind of filter network between the switch and the load.
I'd argue that many eval functions, like
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Simplified_Evaluation_Funct...
especially the piece-square tables aren't so much about putting an accurate value on a position as they are about making sure that the chess engine follows certain heuristics about how to develop your pieces. For instance the pawn-square table will make a chess engine play a conventional opening and then try to advance its pawns, the queen-square table will tend to move the queen towards the center of the board but not very strongly so it will develop other pieces first, etc.
Mastodon lets you set an expiration time for what you post although it boggles my mind that you'd want to do so. (Mastodonsters seem to have weirdly contradictory views of "I want to be visible but I don't want to be visible")
"GEO[0] has entered the chat."
We see a surprising number of folks who discover our product from GenAI solutions (self-reported). I'm not aware of any great tools that help you dissect this, but I'm sure someone is working on them.
0: Generative Engine Optimization
I'm far more likely to buy a RAM stick off the shelf and install it in a Framework than I am to desolder the RAM from a Macbook.
Similarly, if I spill orange juice on a Framework, I can just buy a new keyboard and install it in a minute. If it were a Macbook, I'd probably throw away the whole thing, since I'd have to disassemble all of it to get to the keyboard, and it would take me hours, if I even managed to not break something.
So, "Macbooks are more repairable than Frameworks" is quite the take.
I wouldn't expect ChatGPT to reliably get through a game without making an invalid move, which is the "minimal viable product" for a chess program. The 2600 program does succeed at this because it has correct data structures and algorithms.
https://archive.ph/9sCzC