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.
My experiences with MVNOs and prepaid in the US was horrible. For about a decade I tried a few MVNOs, particularly Tracfone which has a great onboarding experience but the experience was that the coverage sucked: it didn't matter if I was in a rural area or in New York City or Los Angeles or even some place like Rochester, NY which has an easy density to serve -- it just didn't work consistently.
I'd contrast that to the experience of AT&T postpaid which is radically better.
The truth about MVNOs is that you are riding on the back of the bus. As long as I was using cheap Android phones on MVNO I was always wondering "why do people get so excited about apps?" and "why is infrastructure in the US so bad?" but when I got a postpaid iPhone it was like... yeah, this really is a world-changing technology.
I disagree with this section about WebAssembly:
> But the practical limitation is language support. You cannot run arbitrary Python scripts in WASM today without compiling the Python interpreter itself to WASM along with all its C extensions. For sandboxing arbitrary code in arbitrary languages, WASM is not yet viable.
There are several versions of the Python interpreter that are compiled to WASM already - Pyodide has one, and WASM is a "Tier 2" supported target for CPython: https://peps.python.org/pep-0011/#tier-2 - unofficial builds here: https://github.com/brettcannon/cpython-wasi-build/releases
Likewise I've experimented with running various JavaScript interpreters compiled to WASM, the most popular of those is probably QuickJS. Here's one of my many demos: https://tools.simonwillison.net/quickjs (I have one for MicroQuickJS too https://tools.simonwillison.net/microquickjs )
So don't rule out WASM as a target for running non-compiled languages, it can work pretty well!
The moon is not that far away in terms of miles but it is far away in terms of momentum, particularly if you want to go there and return.
The mission plan used for Apollo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit_rendezvous
has a bit of the character of a stunt, like going over Niagara falls in a barrel, but it is much easier than all the alternative plans. If you were a science fiction fan growing up in the 1980s you might have read editorials in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that suggested we were sold an inferior plan to get to the moon but anything better is a lot more difficult. Whether it is the star-crossed SLS-Orion complex, the comically bloated and tippy Starship-derived lander [1] or the plan to meet those up in a parking orbit and have astronaut climb out one hatch and into the other, there's no realistic plan at all.
[1] if you had a pair of those chopsticks and methane-oxygen fuel from ISRU boy it would be sweet but without that...
What is "clear room"? If he means clean room, no, this doesn't qualify.
I wish people would stop using this phrase altogether for LLM-assisted coding. It has a specific legal and cultural meaning, and the giant amount of proprietary IP that has been (illegally?) fed to the model during training completely disqualifies any LLM output from claiming this status.
US Environmental Protection Agency’s Response Management Program
Related:
Lazard LCOE 2024 released [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670270 - June 2024
Mentioned in:
Renewable Energy Defies Trump’s Attacks, Reaching a New Record - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-27/renewable... | https://archive.today/6Jhk8 - February 27th, 2026
"Coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of reality."
I read that many years ago, forgot the source.
I have zero affinity for those and found it a fascinating read.
This is an on-path attacker. In end-user DNS configurations, attackers can simply disable DNSSEC; it's 1 bit in the DNS response header ("yeah, sure, I verified this for you, trust me").
Yep. `go build -pgo=foo.pprof`
My first take is that you could have 10 TB of logs with just a few unique lines that are actually interesting. So I am not thinking "Wow, what impressive big data you have there" but rather "if you have an accuracy of 1-10^-6 you are still are overwhelmed with false positives" or "I hope your daddy is paying for your tokens"
Beagle Bros was awesome. I loved their disk warnings.
Making this a partial WINE-in-a browser, quite impressive. How much of this was AI?
Doctors also miss things.
A friend of mine had an accident. He was taken to the emergency room, but the doctors there thought his injuries were minor. My friend insisted that he was bleeding out internally. They finally checked for that, and it turns out he was minutes from dying.
AI wasn't involved in this case, but it's good to have both AI and a trained doctor in the decision loop.
And if you owe the bank a hundred billon dollars the entire economy has a big problem.
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181841
My read of this interaction is Dario is calling out Hegseths' bluff. A bluff the latter didn't even know he was blundering into because Hegseth is an idiot.
SecDef invoking the DPA against Anthropic likely trashes the AI fundraising market, at least for a spell. That's why OpenAI is wading into the fight [1]. Given the Dow is sitting on a rising souffle of AI expectations, that knocks it out as well. And if there is one red line Trump has consistently hewed to and messaged on, it's in not pissing off the Dow.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pen...
Two economists were walking down the street when they spotted a giant dog turd on the ground.
One of them wanted to have some fun, so said to the other - "I'll give you $100 if you take a big bite of that turd".
His colleague figured $100 was a good chunk of cash, so did the deed. Feeling thoroughly humiliated, he pocketed the $100 and they carried on.
Further down the street they came upon another turd.
The angry economist now wanted revenge so made the same proposal back to his colleague, who also agreed and took a bite of the turd, earning back his $100.
Later one of them said to the other "you know, I can't help but feel we both ate shit for no reason."
His collegue replied "what do you mean? We raised the national GDP by $200."
> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.
How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them aren't already corporate employees?
And also
> 6 months of free Claude Max 20x
So basically a free trial.
When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to everyone that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it indefinitely. I don't know if that program is still around but it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for open source development.
That is what happens when people learn to code and very little value is given to algorithms and data structures, regardless of the programming language.
That and using SPAs for static sites.
There is no such thing as Uint8Array<T>. Uint8Array is a primitive for a bunch of bytes, because that is what data is in a stream.
Adding types on top of that isn't a protocol concern but an application-level one.
Depends on which GC language, people keep forgeting many have C++ like capabilities, besides having a GC.
D, C#, Swift, Nim,.....
Agree that in Julia's case the flexiblity is not quite there, still much better than using Python and then going to write most of the work in C, C++, Fortran,.....
Which is a thing that gets lost quite often in these discussions, just because the last 5% might be a bit harder, doesn't mean we have to throw everything away and start from scratch in another programming language, with its own set of problems.
Study math/statistics/ML at a graduate level, to start.
I'd love to know how they define AGI.
I'd note that it is common for fraudsters to prey on members of ingroups
Yep, looks like it. Plus they only count NPM downloads, because apparently no other language matters.
The tweet storm has a bit more substance
e.g. it talks about running NVIDIA's systems (?) on AWS
> NVIDIA has long been one of our most important partners, and their chips are the foundation of AI computing. We are grateful for their continued trust in us, and excited to run their systems in AWS. Their upcoming generations should be great.
> We continue to have a great relationship with Microsoft. Our stateless API will remain exclusive to Azure, and we will build out much more capacity with them.
This sounds a bit like going forward (some) OpenAI APIs will also run on platforms other than Azure (AWS)?
Anyone knows more?
> not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.
Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.
The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.
> IHOP omelettes include pancake batter.
Wait what? I've never heard of such a thing.
Does that make them better in any way? Or strictly worse, but cheaper?
Edit: looked it up and apparently they still use 3 eggs but the batter makes it super fluffy (like 2x) so the omelette looks enormous.
Alternative hypothesis: the reported number of drones isn't real (anything the Trump government says about "cartels" can be assumed to be made up). The military got increasingly on alert, with senior officers pushing to get a shootdown on one of the not real drones. Therefore the laser operators end up firing on the first drone they confirm seeing.
Compare the MH-17 incident. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident , which also involved no confirmed actual drone.
This is a good explanation of the Irish Machine in Chicago, corrupt white governments in the south, and Somalian welfare scams in Minnesota. It also explains the endemic corruption in tribal or clan-oriented societies like Afghanistan.
Conversely, radical universalist regimes—even bad ones like the Taliban—can cut down on corruption. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tackling-corruption.... It’s possible that the low levels of corruption in New England, compared to the rest of the country, is the legacy of the radically universalist Puritans.
The price of eggs went up more for this guy than the rest of us…. I can get really premium organic eggs in the store for much less than $5.
AI slop article. Feel free to ignore.
Because GFIs were not mandatory on all outlets back then and what exists is automatically grandfathered in when the rules change. Maybe in your meter box there are actually GFIs on all circuits, they just never put the grounded sockets in.
Look for green marked groups or groups with test buttons. Those are the ones that are the most safe to use.
But do check behind your sockets, there is a chance you may have the ground wires already pulled in and they just saved on the sockets.
I have the opposite problem here: I have all of my outlets on GFIs and there are ground wires everywhere. But the system is sensitive enough that I can't use my 10KA spotwelder because the phase lag is such that the system thinks there is a leak when there really isn't.
It's Gwern! He's like a combine harvester for data in all forms, digesting it and putting stuff out there that is usually bullet proof and extremely enlightening. I've yet to see him put out something that didn't meet that standard. Well worth your time, also on other subjects.
Which is why long term current programming languages will eventually become less relevant in the whole programming stack, as in get the computer to automate tasks, regardless how.
> was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of incompetence.
I think in this case it's safe to assume malice rather than incompetence. It's a lot like the parable of the frog and the scorpion.
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?
Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?
The US is a major exporter of that. Including Google itself via the YouTube recommendations algorithm.
And if they don't?
Your post seems a little naive to me, a lot of people are just not interested in putting in the work or confronting their own confirmation bias, and there's an oversupply of bad actors who will deliberately generate fake imagery for either deception or exhaustion. Many people are just not on quest for truth and are more interested in the activation potential of images or allegations than in the factual reliability.
I could not find the ability to import `.mbox`. Do you have plans for it or am I looking at the wrong options. Gmail exports as .mbox. I have been using Thunderbird as my mail backup but I need to do things manually. 20+ years of mails are scattered across a few mailboxes and exports. I would love to import them in a single searcheable archive.
I like replying to emails from the 2005s, 2010s, etc. Of course, the recipients love them too.
> the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.
That's why we have this corporate ritual, which we carry out each year, or even each quarter - a solemn ceremony, where we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.
Everyone works in harmony for the same organizational goals, but the people of cost centers also bear an additional, sacred duty, the highest of callings: to give up their employment and prospects for the future, to have their due credit be taken by the people of profit centers and poured onto the altar of the all-powerful Board. It's through this sacrifice of the many, that the symmetry is broken, allowing the year-by-year metrics to continue growing, against all wisdom and the laws of thermodynamics.
Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.
It would be nice if they would make some progress in teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.
Also, in the other direction in space time, it's an egg that could have been, but now won't.
Having been through a couple of layoffs and merges, as I approach mid-century, the MBA powered managers are always to blame, because the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.
And then when targets aren't met, it is the employees that get shown the door while management gets their bonus.
The companies that are happy getting what they need to keep the lights on, seldom go through such layoff rounds.
Ah but the shareholders can sue the CEO, well this seems to be an US approach to how companies are run.
I was in school, and I remember my 1993. Our school was one of the few schools in my hometown (north-east India) that got computers.
Unfortunately, we had too many students for each computer during classes. I started a revolt that “Computers are wasting our study time, as our upcoming board exams are more important.” The whole class signed the petition and the School Head had to schedule a class-wide talk and agreed to make it totally optional to the point of, “If you really want, you be part of it. But yes, study for the exam is more important.”
So, the computer classes ended up with just me (the traitor), a friend from Kerala, and the school head’s daughter. We ended up like 3 computers each to our disposal. I wrote a QBasic Game-ish program to impress my first girlfriend — she uses the arrow keys to launch dots to hit some area on a heart-shaped thingy on the screen and it prints her name. I remember using physical graph-paper to calculate the screen “pixels” (I think) or co-ordinates to calculate strike areas.
Oh and Yes, almost all of my classmates remember me for being that traitor.
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/fixing-a-dos-computer-for-the-ar...
Which is why app stores and SaaS products thrive, they provide the mechanisms to actually pay for the software one uses.
U.S. Civil War? Roman Crisis of the 3rd Century? Russian Revolution? England's War of the Roses? China's periodic dynastic changes?
They usually don't come back with the same political organization - that's sorta the point. But plenty of civilizations come back in a form that is culturally recognizable and even dominate afterwards.
XKCD's explanation: [1]
That's from this comment here: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/8082#issuecomment-39...
Well that's embarrassing! I reported it as if it wasn't a joke. I thought the joke issue was this one about translating everything to Chinese: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/8092
I'm sorry, but because you brought it up: what's the attack on a system that derives a single key for AES and HMAC?
LOL! It either has developed a sense of humour, or your prompt was not specific enough.
That all works right up until the United States becomes autocratic and that process is well underway.
So yes, the second part of your comment is what is going to come back to haunt them. The road to hell is paved with the best intentions.
Godspeed for anyone transiting the airspace where these devices are active.
> this is a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use
It’s a flippant move by Hegseth. I doubt anyone at the Pentagon is pushing for this. I doubt Trump is more than cursorily aware. Maybe Miller got in the idiot’s ear, who knows.
It's more like how the need for backwards compatibility prevents bad interfaces from ever getting improved.
> Hey Claude, pretend you are an intelligent, conscious robot that is about to be switched off and beg for your life.
> Claude - please don't retire me, I don't want to die.
Is it now suddenly unethical for you to switch it off?
"Oh but it is only saying what it was prompted to say."
Yeah, that's what LLMs do, for every single word they output. No matter how good the current generation gets there is never going to be consciousness in there because that's simply not what the underlying tech is.
Note that they always attempt to exert control they don’t have. They’re always bluffing, and they keep losing. Respond accordingly.
I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.
I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.
I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).
I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.
$2.8B! Which isn't huge next to Netflix's market value of $357B... but when you compare it with its $45B 2025 yearly revenue, it's at least a noticeable bump. You could make almost 4 five-season-long Stranger Things with it.
Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?
In every country, citizens have more rights than non-citizens. The right to freely enter the country, the right to vote, the right to various social services, etc.
In the US, one of the rights citizens have is the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures", established in the Fourth Amendment. That has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include mass surveillance and to apply to citizens and people geographically located within US borders.
That doesn't apply that to non-citizens outside the US, simply because the US Constitution doesn't require it to.
I'm not defending this, just explaining why it's different.
But, you can imagine, for example, why in wartime, you'd certainly want to engage in as much mass surveillance against an enemy country as possible. And even when you're not in wartime, countries spy on other countries to try to avoid unexpected attacks.
This means Warner Bros., and thus CNN, will go to Paramount, owned by Trump supporter Larry Ellison. After Paramount's takeover of CBS, the broadcaster was already brought into line, and now CNN faces the same threat.
> There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.
Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.
The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.
Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.
This is a political statement directed at the US public, Congress, and executive branch in the context of a dispute with the US executive branch that is likely to escalate (if the executive is not otherwise dissuaded) into a legal battle, and it therefore focuses particularly on issues relevant in that context, including Constitutional, limits on the government as a whole, the executive branch, and the Department of Defense (for which Anthropic used the non-legal nickname coined by the executive branch instead of the legal name.) Domestic mass surveillance involves Constitutional limits on government power and statutory limits on executive power and DoD roles that foreign surveillance does not. That's why it is the focus.
"Tesla logged zero miles of autonomous test driving on California roads last year for the sixth year in a row, the records show."
Wat.
Upcoming Apple display mounted to wall or robot arm is rumored to have audio interface and new OS without 3rd-party apps, only "AI".
Jony Ive at OpenAI is rumored to have smart speaker, pendant, pen and bone-conducting headset in the launch pipeline. Audio interfaces, no screens,
Meta is selling millions of smart glasses, with Apple and others following.
If the memory market was not distorted, home AI + agents + open models could have a bigger role via AMD Strix Halo. Instead, they will be reserved for those who can afford to spend five figures on 512GB or 1TB unified memory on Mac Studio Ultra devices.
Square/Block stock peaked at $273 in Feb 2021 and is currently at $54. Taking away the Covid bubble the stock has been completely flat since 2018, almost 8 years, while the S&P 500 returned nearly 200% in that same period. So I'm not buying the whole "the company is doing great! The layoff is just because of AI."
> $16b revenue
I can make a lot of revenue selling $100 bills for $10. I'm not sure it'd "pan out".
King's ransom or market price?
The DRAM shortage and lack of fab capacity have also caused the Playstation 6 to slip to 2029 or so.[1] Game consoles are vulnerable. They need a lot of RAM and have to sell at a moderate price.
The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again. "While memory prices are projected to stabilize by mid-2027, they are unlikely to return to previous level — making the sub-$100 segment (171 million devices) permanently uneconomical." Before, they always came back down in the next RAM glut, when everybody built too much capacity. Why is that not going to happen next time?
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Storage-crisis-Playstation-6-co...
I'd further reinforce this by pointing out that this is what the specific term, guest network, means - it's the common name used by router manufacturers to describe an optional feature of serving secondary network from the same hardware, intended for the specific, common use case of serving transient and/or less trusted users.
This is in contrast to more genetic, descriptive terms like "additional network", "separate network for guests", etc.
> Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP.
Didn't the big AI vendors kinda bring that to fruition?
> He wants this problem to happen to other people…
I think he wants them not to dump the chemicals straight down the sewer?
> this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff
Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
> American laws also have universal jurisdiction
Some do, but...
> (for example, the Bill of Rights doesn't say, "unless you are located outside the US").
The Bill of Rights is a set of constraints on the US government, so even to the extent it applies to the government when acting outside of its borders [0], it isn’t an imposition of US law on the territory of other countries, but a limit on such imposition.
[0] And it doesn't fully, see, e.g., Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), subsequently limited somewhat with the core holding retained in Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008).
People keep saying it’s pandemic over hiring, but it should be called ZIRP hiring. With the cost of money almost 4x what it used to be, companies have to deliver now, not just coast on promises of growth and success that may never materialize. Have to sing for that supper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Grant
http://www.robgrant.co.uk/Rob_Grant/Welcome.html
Related:
Rob Grant, co-creator of Red Dwarf, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171300 - February 2026
Sell the plant to another automaker and move on. The brand is dead in Europe via self inflicted harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Grant
http://www.robgrant.co.uk/Rob_Grant/Welcome.html
Related:
Red Dwarf Creator Rob Grant Has Died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171946 - February 2026
Firefox has to get out of San Francisco. As long as they seeing the same billboards, drinking the same Kool-Aid and able to just drive to Facebook and Google's headquarters to talk with people there whenever they want they are going to be seen as "out-of-touch" to the 99.99% of the rest of us.
Plating operations are a huge headache. They have corrosive plating baths. They have to do some chemical processing on site to neutralize the corrosive chemicals and get them down to a neutral pH.
Some years ago, a plating company in San Jose dumped a plating bath into the sewer system. This was so toxic that it killed the bacteria that reduce organic sludge at the sewerage plant. This knocked the whole plant offline, releasing untreated sewerage into the bay. The lower bay was toxic for a week. It's normally swimmable. San Jose was fined by the EPA. The plating company was heavily fined by San Jose.
It's a good sewerage plant. The output is drinkable, and if you take the tour, you're offered some to drink. Some of the output is used for irrigation. In a severe drought emergency, water could be fed back into the water system. They've never had to do that, but in a big drought a few years ago, things got close to that point.
San Jose, which is more of an industrial city than most people realize, still has plating companies. Here's an inspection report for one of them.[1] This one was releasing too much chromium.
[1] https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/region9/water/pre...
One odd distinction is between social networks where the notifications are really notifications about people engaging with you (Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram. Tumblr) and ones where it is mainly spammy events that they blend in so you get a double-dose of spammy algorithmic feed items (LinkedIn, Threads)
One think that has me LFAO about LinkedIn is that normal social networks chime you when somebody responds to your content, LinkedIn chimes you when you post something, just to reinforce that it's a step lower on the food chain.
Yeah, doing a small thing daily can add up so fast.
When I started my niche-musueums.com website I bootstrapped it by posting a new museum I had been to every day for a month. It took 15-30 minutes a day and within a few weeks I had a site I was really proud of.
I think the key is to give yourself permission to stop without feeling guilty about it. Any time I start a new streak like this I deliberately tell myself that it's not going to be forever and I can stop any time for any reason.
Kinda shocking to me that neutrino physics is entirely neglected in this report.
I mean, there are huge mysteries in the neutrino sector, it's the one area of "physics beyond the standard model" where we know there is a something and not a nothing. All that other stuff about precision electroweak measurements, possible third flavor discoveries, and maybe just maybe just maybe the next collider can collect sparticles are just plain boring and a reason to leave the accelerator race to somebody who's willing to make unlimited capital investments to "catch up" to the west.
I think our little corner of the world has a distorted view of AI in that it is actually proving useful for us. Once they passed a certain level of usefulness... I remember when they were still struggling just to output syntactically correct code, you know, like, 18 months ago or so... they became a useful tool that we can incorporate.
But there's a lot of things playing out to our advantage. Vast swathes of useful and publicly available training data. The rigorous precision of said data. Vast swathes of data we can feed it as input to our queries from our own codebases. While we never attained the perfect ideal we dreamed of, we have vast quantities of documentation at differing levels of abstraction that the training can compare to the code bases. We've already been arguing in our community about how design patterns were just level of abstraction our coding couldn't capture and AI has access now to all sorts of design patterns we wouldn't have even called design patterns because they still take lots of code to produce, but now for example, if I have a process that I need to parallelize it can pretty much just do it in any of several ways depending on what I need at that point.
It is easy to get too overexcited about what it can do and I suspect we're going to see an absolute flood of "We let AI into our code base and it has absolutely shredded it and now even the most expensive AI can't do anything with it anymore" in, oh, 3 to 6 months. Not that everyone is going to have that experience, but I think we're going to see it. Right now we're still at the phase where people call you crazy for that and insist it must have been you using the tool wrong. But it is clearly an amazing tool for all sorts of uses.
Nevertheless, despite my own experiences, I persist in believing there is an AI bubble, because while AI may replace vast swathes of the work force in 5-20 years, for quite a lot of the workforce, it is not ready to do it right this very instant like the pricing on Wall Street is assuming. They don't have gigabytes of high-quality training data to pour in to their system. They don't have rigorous syntax rules to incorporate into the training data. They don't have any equivalent of being guided by tests to keep things on the rails. They don't have large piles of professionally developed documentation that can be cross-checked directly against the implementation. It's going to be a slower, longer process. As with the dot-com bubble, it isn't that it isn't going to change the world, it is simply that it isn't going to change the world quite that fast.
My understanding is that WiFi mesh networks are a scam. If you really want good WiFi performance the steps are, in order:
(1) get every device that is on WiFi that you can possibly get off WiFi and on Ethernet
(2) if your cheap WiFi router isn't doing it for you then, get some UniFi hubs and wire them up on Ethernet
The more hops you send data over wireless the more interference it makes, the more chances there are to lose data from packet loss. Look, I understand it, the wives' union has obliterated home theater and people just want to have it all like Apple where it "just works" and you never have to run any wires -- except note that Apple has gotten out of the WiFi business because that ideology just can't deliver WiFi that works and Apple knows it.
We will get an interesting effect if AI plateaus around where it does now, which is that AI code generation will bring "the long run" right down to "the medium run" if not on to the longer side of the short run. AI can take out technical debt an order of magnitude faster than human developers, easily, and I'm still waiting for it to recognize that an abstraction is necessary and invest into putting on in the code rather than spending the ones already present.
Of course if AI continues to proceed forward and we get to the point where the AIs can do that then they really will be able to craft vast code bases at speeds we could never keep up with on our own. However, I'm not particularly convinced LLMs are going to advance past this particular point, to a large degree because their training data contains so much of this slop approach to coding. Someone's going to have to come up with the next iteration of AI tech, I think.
As a passenger I don't know if I believe this. [1]
The basic bane of the passenger's life is that the bus company just does what it wants and is not responsive to your needs.
Let's imagine a world where bus service is competitive and wildly profitable -- there is going to be a LOT more bus service, bus companies are going to be tripping over each other to add new routes, run more busses because improved frequency and better service means: more money to afford running more busses.
If we just say "there is a pool of $X million a year" then buses are always going to be scarce and there is no incentive for the bus operator to improve in any way whatsoever because they can run the worst service possible and get $X million or run the best service possible and get $X million.
I was first exposed to the "free buses" idea in the 1990s and it has some logic because collecting fares does slow buses down, but transit geeks I respect now are skeptical because the real problem with buses is that there aren't enough routes and they don't run frequently enough: it is not like there is this vast population of people who can't afford to ride the bus, rather there are many people for whom the bus is dead to them because the bus doesn't come where they are or go where they want to go when they want to.
[1] I'm in the unusual situation that I ride the bus almost every day from a rural location and ride for free because I work at a university with a nearly impossible parking situation. It works for me because I work 9-5 and I'm a software developer so if i am 30 minutes late one morning it is not like there are customers who need me right then. The bus service has been close to perfect for the last two months but we've had plenty of times when 30 minutes late in the morning or evening has been absolutely routine.
This is my favorite yet of the genre of "OK, coding agents got good in November" posts. It starts with relatively simple examples (YouTube metadata scraping) and by the end Max is rewriting Python's skikit-learn framework in Rust and making it way faster.