Unlurker|Replay|About
Things I want to say to my boss (ithoughtaboutthatalot.com)
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“Burnout isn’t a sign of commitment, it’s a sign of organizational failure.” Exactly, if you need more bandwidth hire more people, otherwise you’re burning the candle at both ends and everything suffers for it
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I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards. Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words. It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level? This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness): `In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.` So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.
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Its amazing that working is so inhumane and unnatural that people break down like this. There is is nothing you can do except suck it up and create mental barriers to protect your self while participating this weird game of white collar work.
It Will Soon Be Curtains for the Movie Theater (wsj.com)
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I don't and have never gone very often, but it's a lot of fun to see certain films in enormous theaters like IMAX. I will definitely see the Project Hail Mary film that way. And my kids still like to go, and I know people who go a ton on the subscription plans. So, who knows!
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The experience of going to a movie may not be what it was before streaming or even the VCR, but the fewer theaters that remain have gotten nicer in their own way. I can recline the big leather chair and have food delivered to my seat. One of the WSJ comments made the comparison to drive-ins, which are now a rare niche thing...I think my US metro area has maybe 2 left. But those have less control over the viewer experience than a regular theater does.
Didn't work, still demanded sign-in
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Is a [free] sign-in the same as a paywall, since you have to "pay" by giving information?
A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It (404media.co)
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Just a few days ago I was doing some low paid (well, not so low) Ai classification task - akin to mechanical turk ones - for a very big company and was - involuntarily, since I guess they don't review them before showing - shown an ai image by the platform depicting a naked man and naked kid. though it was more barbie like than anything else. I didn't really enjoy the view tbh, contacted them but got no answer back
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This raises an interesting point. Do you need to train models using CSAM so that the model can self-enforce restrictions on CSAM? If so, I wonder what moral/ethical questions this brings up.
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It's a delicate subject but not an unprecedented one. Automatic scanning for known CSAM images (as opposed to heuristic detection of unknown images) has been around for much longer than AI, and the companies which provide it need to handle CSAM to some degree in order to produce the detection signatures.
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As a small point of order, they did not get banned for "finding CSAM" like the outrage- and clickbait title claims. They got banned for uploading child porn to Google Drive. They did not find it, and them later reporting the data set to an appropriate organization is not why they got banned.
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> They got banned for uploading child porn to Google Drive They uploaded the full "widely-used" training dataset, which happened to include CSAM (child sexual abuse material). While the title of the article is not great, your wording here implies that they purposefully uploaded some independent CSAM pictures, which is not accurate.
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Literally every headline that 404 media has published about subjects I understand first-hand has been false.
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Back when the first moat creation gambit for AI failed (that they were creating SkyNet so the government needs to block anyone else from working on SkyNet since only OpenAI can be trusted to control it not just any rando) they moved onto the safety angle with the same idea. I recall seeing an infographic that all the major players were signed onto some kind of safety pledge, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. Basically they didn't want anyone else training on the whole world's data because only they could be trusted to not do nefarious things with it. The infographic had a statement about not training on CSAM and revenge porn and the like but the corpospeak it was worded in made it sound like they were promising not to do it anymore, not that they never did. I've tried to find this graphic against several times over the years but it's either been scrubbed from the internet or I just can't remember enough details to find it. Amusingly, it only just occurred to me that maybe I should ask ChatGPT to help me find it.
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> The infographic had a statement about not training on CSAM and revenge porn and the like but the corpospeak it was worded in made it sound like they were promising not to do it anymore, not that they never did. We know they did, an earlier version of the LAION dataset was found to contain CSAM after everyone had already trained their image generation models on it. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009418/generative-ai-image-laion-csam-google-stability-stanford
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More like "A developer accidentally uploaded child porn to his Google Drive account and Google banned him for it".
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The penalties for unknowingly possessing or transmitting child porn are far too harsh, both in this case and in general (far beyond just Google's corporate policies). Again, to avoid misunderstandings, I said unknowingly - I'm not defending anything about people who knowingly possess or traffic in child porn, other than for the few appropriate purposes like reporting it to the proper authorities when discovered.
Deprecate Like You Mean It (entropicthoughts.com)
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Don't make it return a different result. Instead, if you must, add a sleep within the function for 1 ms in the first release, 2 ms in the second release, and so on. But maybe just fix the tooling instead to make deprecations actually visible.
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Occasionally returning wrong results is irresponsible, of course, but how about making deprecated APIs grow gradually slower ?
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Having a deprecated API just randomly return failures is an awful idea! Better to give an actual timeline (future version & date) for when deprecated functionality / functions will be removed, and in the meantime, if the language supports it, mark those functions as deprecated (e.g. C++ [[deprecated]] attribute) so that developers see compilation warnings if they failed to read the release notes.
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Please don’t do this. If you want to remove the function, remove it and insist on its removal when people complain. Don’t gradually break people.
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This isn't a good idea regardless of why it's being deprecated. If it's no longer being maintained then put a depreciation warning and let it break on its own. Changing a deprecated feature just means you could maintain it but don't want to. Alternatively if you want to aggressively push people to migrate to the new version, have a clear development roadmap and force a hard error at the end of the depreciation window so you know in advance how long you can expect it to work and can document your code accordingly. This wishy-washy half-broken behaviour doesn't help anyone
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Instead randomly trigger kill self process. That's a safer way than random wrong returns.
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I get that it's nice to be able to deprecate/remove things. But intentionally breaking my users runtime in a way that's really hard and annoying to find? Is the author OK? This reads like a madman to me.
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Profoundly awful idea.
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Wow, tell me you've never shipped anything important / heavily used without telling me that. I expected this to suggest a tick-tock deprecation cycle, where one version deprecated and the next removed, but this is definitely an idea that belongs on the domain "entropicthoughts.com"
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Please do the opposite. Let all deprecation warnings last at least a decade, just include in the warning that it is not maintained. But more to the point, go out of your way to avoid breaking backwards compatibility. If it's possible to achieve the same functionality a different way, just modify the deprecated function to use the new function in the background. My biggest problem with the whole static typing trend is that it makes developers feel empowered to break backwards compatibility when it would be trivial to keep things working.
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> just include in the warning that it is not maintained. I'm convinced this isn't possible in practice. It doesn't matter how often you declare that something isn't maintained, the second it causes an issue with a [bigger|more important|business critical] team it suddenly needs become maintained again.
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> That would probably not trigger anyone’s midnight pager, but it would make it clear that relying on the deprecated functionality is a bug lurking in the code. How do you know? This is a wild assertion. This idea is terrible. I thought it was common knowledge that difficult to reproduce, seemingly random bugs are much more difficult to find and fix than compiler errors. If you're ready to break your api, break your api. Don't play games with me. If more people actually removed deprecated APIs in a timely manner, then people will start taking it more seriously.
Another idea is to make the deprecation warning increasingly scary sounding.
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"DEPRECATED: i will literally kill you"
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"Continuing to use this feature is a moral failure on your part and you should be ashamed, your parents should be ashamed, and dishonor will follow you wherever you go."
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"If you don't migrate I will tell your mum"
iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video] (youtube.com)
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There's another issue that's much more infuriating IMO: - You're in the middle of writing a sentence. - The phone is trying to guess how that sentence will eventually be constructed. - It goes back 3 words and changes one to match its guess. - Its guess is @)%(*%@ WRONG
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I have always used SwiftKey and Android. This year I switched to Apple because Android was being bloated by Samsung etc. I'm shocked by how horrible Apple keypad is. I also feel like the touch sensitivity of iphone is worse than Samsung phones. I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.
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I assumed it was just me getting worse at typing but combined with aggressively wrong autocorrect and mysterious blue lines under everything I type they seem to have ruined yet another perfectly good UX.
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I haven't been getting notifications from any messaging apps for a few months. I've checked all the relevant settings (do not disturb etc.). I also get random keyboard issues such as this one. This is my first iPhone. I have no idea why I paid premium prices for a premium phone if they can't even get notifications and typing right
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That's a really strange issue you have here. Never heard of anything like this. Could it be possible that some aggressive filtering exists on your network that would disallow your iphone to connect to Apple's push servers ?
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Another long running one is duplicateduplicate words: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/mpo20r/iphone_will_occasionally_duplicateduplicate_words/ .. been happening for me for years and still does from time to time, but it's only once every few days so I just let it bebe.
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iPhone miscorrects apostrophes between "its" and "it's", and its driving me insane. sent from my iPhone
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^sent from my iPhone, right?
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Sorry I had to steal that part from you because it's too good!
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Highly recommend Gboard. I've been using it for years- much better at recognizing and more performant.
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Also sends everything you type to Google. Depends on whether you care about that or not.
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IIUC this is only true if you "Allow full access" From 3rd party keyboard agreement: > If you do not enable Full Access, developers are not permitted to collect and transmit the data you type. Any unauthorized collection or transmission of this data without your permission would be a violation of their developer agreement. Furthermore, there are also technical limitations in effect to prevent unauthorized access.
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that to me looks like a error in whatever logic is behind the positional error code. You'd think they would have transformer models based on different layouts but maybe some weighting issues going on.. ie I would have thought its a model that is altering based on likelihood weights and maybe something up with that..
Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them. Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?
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Similar story here as well. Why is editing only a nightmare when it's something salacious or off-beat?
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theres a setting to turn off whole word delete. So if it does the wrong word when you press delete it will only delete the letter by letter not the whole word. It helps but iphone keyboard is still horrendous.
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Similar switching story. I'm very happy with an iPhone overall, but god damn they keyboard took some adjusting. The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent. The autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel. It's embarrassing how bad the iPhone's autocorrect is. Not just missing obvious cases, but actively sabotaging correct cases.
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You can install gboard on iOS - I haven't used the default keyboard in years
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Yeah I tried it and it doesn't stand up to it on Android in my experience. I figured I'd rather not give Google any data if the experience isn't going to be the same.
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I've never noticed the "censorship issue", but once it gets a word wrong once, it's game over. Editing is awful. If I'm trying to replace the word entirely, I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know, but I either have an undiagnosed brain injury, or the "correct" thing to do to get the phone to just take the damn word you typed changes every day.
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> I've never noticed the "censorship issue" Really? If you swipe "kill" and then try "yourself" or "myself" does it ever get it right or provide it as one of the options? Doing it right now myself and I can't get it to do either. I have manually entered those words and hit the "myself" in the suggestion box to try and convince it that that's an acceptable correction to no avail. > I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know Every. Time. I like to think that I'm not an idiot and can generally pattern recognize, but it just feels so inconsistent that I'm always doing the wrong thing.
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I’ve confirmed this on my iphone as well. Using swipe, no space bar after kill: Kill maps Jill myself Jill myself Using swipe, manually pressing space bar after kill: Kill mussels Kill mussels Kill mussels
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Yeah same - Kill males kill males kill muddled kill mussels (hilarious) Treat myself tear myself try myself tell myself It won’t do it.
It's Not Just You https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DhksVvXONrIo&sort=byDate&type=story
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This thread has more comments than all previous submissions combined.
35m ago edit: Apple uses many predictive systems for typing. My sentiment in pointing out just slide to type might be misguided as it does not exist in a vacuum. I'd love to see these tests redone with slide to type disabled. I'm leaving the original comment below for reference. Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users. Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility. Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it. Please refer to https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo?si=XD7AKa8gTl85_rJ6&t=72 (timestamp 1:12) to see that slide to type is enabled.
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I have this disabled and the problem clearly exists anyway.
I'll give this a try. My typing is better when I use slide to type but I'm still super uncomfortable with it (I feel anxious trying to think of the letters "fast enough" even though I know it doesn't matter). FWIW I've felt my phone typing accuracy has gotten worse every single year for, whatever, almost 20 years now. That's not the case on the computer.
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I almost exclusively use slide to type and what I do is not think about the letters, but about the motions I would have done if I was typing with my hands on a regular keyboard, sort of letting muscle memory take over and create the correct “shape” of the word without thinking too hard about it.
I know because I hqte iPhone keyboard so much, and the calculator app. I wish there’s an alternative timeline where we still have Palm keyboard with big screen
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I love the Panecal app, can recommend if you can handle looking geeky while using it
I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.
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I guess as iPhones have gotten bigger Apple has put less resources into optimising newer iOS versions for smaller phones Frustrating if you are a 13 mini user
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Even the larger ones suck for typing. It is the keyboard. It works a lot better if you are using a language they don’t have autocorrect for.
Well, I’m glad I’m not going crazy and the keyboard does actually suck since the glass update…
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The video actually says that he also can replicate the issue on iOS 18.
I’m using a 12 mini and I’m running into so many typos since the new iOS. Maybe the combination of buggy software with their smallest screen is making it even worse.
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Is there anything in iOS 26 that makes it worth updating for an older iPhone? I am holding out for now, based on the bad reviews regarding battery impact.
Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?
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> Is software just going to get worse from now on? I mean, yes? I think, as a pretty universal rule, you can expect commercial software to (on average) get worse every time it is changed. Companies spend little or no time fixing bugs and spend most of their time cramming (wanted or unwanted) features. Of course software is just going to get worse and worse over time.
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I suspect that people not really paying for certain things has had an impact. Remember when there were a lot of high quality, paid keyboards for Android? I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.
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Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough? Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info? In 2025 I can do mostly error-free blind typing on the Pixel 7 keyboard, with all autocorrect and predictive spelling intentionally turned off. Why would I need innovation?
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I mean look at Mac OS 26... The features were the ugliest icons I've ever seen and notification summaries that may be wrong. Great.
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There have been bugs and regressions since forever. It’s easy to look back with rose colored glasses, but I don’t think software has actually gotten worse. Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess. And people were happy about this.
I've seen soooo many rendering errors in Safari. And bugged-out keyboard + inputs (input touch location offset from its visible location on the page after the keyboard opens—a real problem if you're trying to paste). Never ever seen it 1/10 this buggy after any prior release, and I've been on iOS since... 5, I think? And did some development work on the platform as early as version 3 or 4. That's in addition to so many dropped frames in the animations that I disabled as many as I could because it was driving me crazy, and to a bunch of word-based buttons becoming confusing icons. I think this has topped 7 for my least-favorite iOS release, and the gap widens by the day. It's terrible. [EDIT] What it most reminds me of (I was on early Android and have done even more development work on Android over the years than I have for iOS) is Android. The jank, the pile of little confusing UI choices that all add up into an overall off-putting experience. The uncertainty what kind of bad thing might happen when you touch anything. Feels like an above-average 3rd party Android skin, like from Samsung or someone (so, pretty bad). The stuttering animations. No other iOS release has ever felt like Android to me.
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Normally I tend to wait before each major release, but I got lured by unknown caller screening. Then I noticed there's no unknown caller screening for me (just a useless setting to move unknown callers to a different list). They also removed blocking numbers directly from the recents list and the new phone layout is a complete mess. For me it's been going downhill since the update that changed the settings app to show apps (even system ones) on a different page. Iwas seriosuly inpressed with the settings app when I first switched to Apple from Android, and now it's terrible. Meanwhile you still can't freely set the search wngkne for Safari, contacts always forgets my custom labels, camera doesn't allow free control over the flashlight,... P.S. Typos due to iOS26
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I was recently gifted an Apple Watch and it forced an update on me, so I jumped straight to the x.1 patch, and I'd still call this beta-quality, even setting aside my strong disagreements with the design and UX direction. I've seen other releases much complained-about online then found them to not bother me much, or even at all, when I upgraded, but this one's an exception. It really is very bad.
This isn't just double space = '.' either since you can just turn that off in options. iOS also changes the keyboard layout depending on usage. So when you're in a browser like safari or Chrome and you tap the address bar which these days is 99% used as a search bar with no particular need for a prominent '.' you get a prominent '.' for no good reason. A huge '.' right next to the space that's not even correctly recognizing the touch area in a context where you actually likely type '.' less often than any other form of writing. You cannot change this behavior. Fwiw i made a mistake of switching to iOS from Android due to a lot of peer pressure. "iOS is better, you should switch" the wife said. Well I've switched. Now i have a terrible keyboard, i don't have any call screening and non existing text spam filtering. I'm yet to see any improvements.
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There’s two great reasons to have a prominent . key in the search/address bar: 1. For typing actual web addresses 2. More importantly, for typing “site:reddit.com”
Rhe Androidmkeyboard is jusr fine roo.
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this is what all of my texts from my pixel look like but it's nice to hear it's no better for the apples. misery enjoys company :)
SwiftKey was actually good. I could pound out a solid 30WPM without even trying, no typos. But then they added a "Ask Bing" context menu item to all my selections after an update and after leaving it on principle I've been suffering ever since.
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Yeah also I thinkc they rewrote it in some crappy way because app got so bad and laggy and irresponsible that I had to remove it.
I have a frequently reoccurring dream (nightmare scenario) that I'm somewhere unpleasant where I don't want to be, and need to leave right away, so I try to order an Uber on my iPhone, but the app is just so fucking hard to use and figure out, with all the important commands hidden so that the user interface is clean and sleek and beautiful and minimalistic without any visible scrollbars or labeled buttons or visual affordances, so much that I can't even use it, and I'm trapped in some horrible place in a nightmare I can't get away from, desperately fumbling with my iPhone. I think it's a manifestation with my pain and disgust with Alan Dye's vain cosmetic approach to user interface design. Now maybe my nightmares will shift to being trapped in the Facebook user interface, now that Alan Dye is at Meta. They totally deserve him, and I hope he destroys Facebook once and for all.
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I have a similar dream: Every time I click anywhere on the Uber interface, it enrolls me into Uber One. Come to think of it, maybe that's not a dream...
Launch HN: BrowserBook (YC F24) – IDE for deterministic browser automation
Congrats on the launch Please port to linux soon (sure it's relatively trivial on Electron :)). Like the idea of the IDE. Seems like it'd make it easy to prototype and launch quickly. RE: embrace the suck, yeah I'm with you. I prefer the brittleness of scripts to non-deterministic (potentially unhinged) workflows
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Thanks! Yep, linux is coming soon - now that we have the first version of the IDE out the door we're going to get cross-platform going shortly.
I feel like I've seen a product similar to this quite recently on HN, but it was a standalone agentic workflow which was open source on GitHub. I can't seem to find it right now. Does anyone know what I'm referring to?
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There have been a bunch https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=show%20hn%20browser%20automation&sort=byPopularity&type=story
This is a super interesting product, guys. I get that agents aren't great for everything right now, but I'd expect that they'll continue to improve over time (like everything in the LLM space). How do you see the product evolving as agents become better and better?
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Agents have plateaued and will never be as good as deterministic code for browser automation. It's a fundamental issue with the way LLMs work.
Thanks, and great question - we think about this a lot and think there are a couple of things here. First, as models get better, our agent's ability to navigate a website and generate accurate automation scripts will improve, giving us the ability to more confidently perform multi-step generations and get better at one-shotting automations. We expect browser agents will improve as well, which I think is more along the lines of what you're asking. At scale, we still think scripts will be better for their cost, performance, and debuggability aspects - but there are places where we think browser agents could potentially fit as an add-on to deterministic workflows (e.g., handling inconsistent elements like pop-ups or modals). That said, if we do end up introducing a browser agent in the execution runtime, we want to be very opinionated about how it can be used, since our product is primarily focused on deterministic scripting.
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> At scale, we still think scripts will be better for their cost, performance, and debuggability aspects This actually makes a ton of sense to me in lots of the LLM contexts (e.g. seeing how we are starting to prefer having LLMs write one-off scripts to do API calls rather than just pointing them at problems and having them try it directly). Thanks!
Did that Colorado station sign say gas for only $1.69? Yes, it did (coloradosun.com)
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Meanwhile that same Suncor facility that is keeping gas prices low is also routinely and continually violating EPA and Colorado air quality standards. [0] It is so bad that the state has implemented fence line monitoring. [1] As someone who lives in Colorado, I'd be happy to see Suncor go. Especially now that I just learned the oil they're refining is Canadian tar sand oil. [0] https://coloradosun.com/2024/02/05/colorado-suncor-air-pollution-settlement-state-fine/ [1] https://cdphe.colorado.gov/public-information/air-quality-and-the-suncor-refinery
Meanwhile, some EV owners smugly recharge their vehicles from carbon burning facilities that then transmit hundreds of miles before it even gets to them, on top of all the manufacturing and battery associated environmental costs. Some reports[0, Table 1] show these coal fueled 'electric' cars are about equivalent to a ~30mpg ICE car all in, but of course at least the ICE driver is paying a motor fuel tax, meanwhile the smug EV owner is paying only a tiny amount of tax on electric utilities. Thus the externalities look way worse for the coal powered electric driver. Of course, if you fuel off of something like solar or natural gas you can do far better, but a lot of people are just stopping at the point they have electric and then patting themselves on the back as superior. [0] https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf
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> Of course, if you fuel off of something like solar or natural gas you can do far better, but a lot of people are just stopping at the point they have electric and then patting themselves on the back as superior. I don't think making up a smug EV owner is a very substantial comment. I haven't. met anyone who thinks like this. I imagine most people with electric vehicles would be happy if their energy came from cleaner sources.
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Yes that's why the #1 EV company king in the US was embedded with the candidate who had practically a campaign line of bringing back coal, and a large portion of his customers were enthusiastic about this.
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The neat thing about electric cars is that they get cleaner as the grid gets cleaner. If you bought an EV in 2015 (when this report was published) and were worried about the grid mix, I have good news for you. Electricity production from coal in the US is in the process of falling off a cliff, dropping to 15% of the electricity mix in 2023 from over 30% in 2015. https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/US-electricity-generation-2024-02-26-by-source_-768x616.png
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I ride a bicycle. Miss me with your gas-huffing bullshit.
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Coal power is only about 20% of the US power generation at this point so it's not all or even most of a hypothetical EV's power source. So even where it is used 30 MPG is still actually pretty good gas mileage as well especially for their weight and size.
Well, he has been looking like he's going to invade Venezuala for a little while now. If they do a Syria-esque takeover of the oil-producing regions there could possibly be cheaper gas for wherever that gas would get shipped.
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Don't hold your breath. Those fields need investment.
[dead]
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Nice strawman :) SF NIMBY aren't environmentalists, they are obstructionists. Now for a true scotsmanism - actual environmentalists overwhelmingly support nuclear power, expansion of wind and solar, and geothermal where it is easy to get to, and not too destructive to drill for. I've not surveyed the population that travels to burningman, but I doubt they are all against sustainable energy, but I've never been, so I don't know. Environmentalist is a discipline, not a personality type.
Over many years, yes, that is in fact climate.
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Not in the manner or scale you're suggesting.
How do you verify it?!
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that's the big question haha
Additionally, ICE sales have started recovering over the past few years now that EV subsidizes have started being phased out in most markets [0]. Even in China, most consumers "despite buying more EVs, are less interested in how their cars are powered, and more in their digital lifestyle integration" [0]. I like EVs but I think that in most markets they're at the same point today that hybrid cars were in the 2010s - proven, but still a difficult financial sell in the short term due to high upfront costs for consumers. Edit: can't reply > Which seems odd in an article claiming the global tide has turned against EVs Becuase China is not the world. Most other markets have seen either a slowdown or a reversal in EV sales - especially following the reduction of EV purchase subsidizes in most markets. It also highlights the fact that a large portion of customers are indifferent about ecological sentiment, and that EVs can only outpace ICE if their upfront cost or net-new features (in China's case, EVs tended to have better features than ICE cars sold domestically) outpace ICE vehicles. Even Chinese automotive players (primarily SOEs that couldn't compete with private sector BYD) have been taking advantage of this market shift, become major ICE car exporters now [1]. [0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/combustion-engine-cars-regain-popularity-worldwide-ey-says-2025-12-09/ [1] - https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-floods-world-with-gasoline-cars-it-cant-sell-home-2025-12-02/
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> Additionally, ICE sales have started recovering over the past few years now that EV subsidizes have started being phased out in most markets I think this is a false dawn. EV sales in Germany have rebounded strongly after the removal of subsidies [1]. "Germany was the largest contributor, with more than 434,600 new EV registrations and one of the strongest growth rates in the bloc, up 39.4% year-on-year" EU EV sales are up in 2025 in comparison with 2024 [1] "Battery electric vehicles accounted for 16.4% of newly registered cars in the EU during the first ten months of 2025, according to figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA). That compares with 13.2% over the same period in 2024." 1. https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/11/25/the-electric-transition-which-eu-country-is-buying-the-most-evs 2. https://ev-database.org/uk/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&av-23=1&rs-pr=10000_25000&rs-er=0_500&rs-ld=0_500&rs-ac=2_23&rs-dcfc=0_400&rs-ub=10_200&rs-tw=0_2500&rs-ef=150_600&rs-sa=-1_5&rs-w=1000_3500&rs-c=0_5000&rs-y=2024_2030&s=4&p=0-50
EVs seem to run $10-15k more than the equivalent ICE - I tried everything I could but couldn't make it worthwhile due to constraints on what is available and inability to get the subsidies.
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There are a lot of "it depends" in the math, it takes somewhere around 60-80k miles to break even on the $10k difference. Most new car owners only keep the car for around 30,000 miles (leases are often 3 years, max of 32,000 miles). And so far EVs are not holding their value as well as ICE cars so a few more miles. Long term EVs are a lot cheaper, but for the new car buyer they don't make financial sense yet. (new car buyers also get a warranty so additional costs are cheap - $600 for oil changes over that time if they buy the most expensive dealer package, and a lot less if they go elsewhere)
100% let someone else eat the initial depreciation hit from going from new to used and you can usually get one with pretty low mileage too.
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So far, but it is hard to find good EVs on the used market. Sometimes you can, but at the moment I'm looking and there just are not many options at all.
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Might be local I had a lot of options last time I was poking around when my current gas car started making potentially expensive sounding noises. (they stopped so I'm fine again /s)
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A 1 or 2 yr old Model Y is a great EV...
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Is it? Will I be able to get parts for it 15 years from now? Will I be able to repair it myself? (I have rebuilt engines before, and I'm planning to replace the transmission in my truck myself this year, so DIY ability is important to me). There have been headlines recently about how unreliable Tesla is.
Hybrids are useful for people without garages though - the total market is much larger than for EVs, which are pretty exclusively a product for homeowners, and usually not the only vehicle either. EVs will always be a niche unless the charging infrastructure problem is solved.
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I agree with your overall point (and I'm pretty confident improved infrastructure will fix the problem for non-homeowners... eventually), but I didn't understand this part: > usually not the only vehicle either It doesn't seem like EV or not would make a difference for whether to have more than one vehicle? My wife and I have shared one car, first ICE and now EV, for more than a decade and it didn't make a difference in our habits.
An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions (arxiv.org)
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tangent conspiracy thought was watching a video about ICBM detection/taking them out in boost phase, and needing a lot for coverage if you had these LEO satellites ready to go but need a lot of delta v (fuel), star link... plenty of em but nah it's for internet/basic navigation/not much fuel
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If the Starlink satellites all collided, the worst case is that we would have to ditch the space station (which is already planned in a few years) and wait a few years to launch more into LEO. The debris deorbits automatically due to atmospheric drag. And in the meantime we would still be able to launch through the cloud to higher orbits or escape velocity as it wouldn't be dense enough to hit something that only passes though for a couple of minutes. IMO now that LEO communication satellites are feasible we should ban launching satellites into higher orbits. Collision debris up there is much, much worse because it's essentially permanent. It will not deorbit by itself for thousands of years or more, and there is no plausible way to clean it up even with technology much more advanced than ours.
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There actually is one idea for cleaning up debris in high orbit: You launch tons of very fine powder into the orbits you wish to clear. These orbiting particles create drag on anything up there, so that their orbits degrade much faster. But the because the particles themselves are so tiny, they have a very low ballistic coefficient, and will deorbit quickly. More: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/space-debris-probably-not-coming-to-a-backyard-near-you/
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It's not just starlink up there, at minimum NRO will be sad and unable to track nuclear weapons and such, the US military will be down a satellite coms systems, and there are probably some people which use starlink for something important.
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Yeah it would suck to lose Starlink for a few years. I wouldn't mourn spy telescopes. But most other satellites like weather satellites or ballistic missile detectors or GPS are in higher orbits and wouldn't be affected at all. My point is that the unlikely worst case consequences would be limited in time and extent. It couldn't possibly block us from reaching space or last for decades, as some people fear.
And wouldn’t the solar panels have less cross section than the satellite bodies, so even an apparent collision might just be a very near miss? (Honest question, not rhetorical, could be I’m wrong)
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This is confusing terminology in the field, but you generally talk about the cross sectional area in the plane of the conjunction ( https://www.space-track.org/documents/SFS_Handbook_For_Operators_V1.7.pdf ) to calculate the probability of collision. It’s a conservative definition in the field. It’s generally defined as the hard body radius: take the smallest sphere centered at the center of mass that would entirely enclose the object, then use the maximum cross section of that sphere to define the potential “area” of the colliding object. Maybe put more simply, it’s the worst case area size / orientation you could be looking at. So yes. Solar arrays have a narrow cross section from the side but looking at them head-on (which is the angle used for Pc calculations) they’ll be very large.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 200 times (gricha.dev)
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that's my experience with AI, most times it creates an overengineered solution unless told it to keep it simple
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While there are justifiable comments here about how LLMs behave, I want to point out something else: There is no consensus on what constitutes a high quality codebase. Said differently - even if you asked 200 humans to do this same exercise, you would get 200 different outputs.
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Pasting this whole article in to claude code "improve my codebase taking this article in to account"
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I've heard a very apt criticism of the current batch of LLMs: LLMs are incapable of reducing entropy in a code base I've always had this nagging feeling, but I think this really captures the essence of it succintly.
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This reflects my experience with human programmers. So many devs are taught to add layers of complexity in pursuit of "best practices". I think the LLM was trained to behave this way. In my experience, Claude can actually clean up a repo rather nicely if you ask it to (1) shrink source code size (LOC or total bytes), (2) reduce dependencies, and (3) maintain integration tests.
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for all the bad code havoc was most certainly not 'wrecked', it may have been 'wreaked' though . . .
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LLMs have this strong bias towards generating code, because writing code is the default behavior from pre-training. Removing code, renaming files, condensing, and other edits is mostly a post-training stuff, supervised learning behavior. You have armies of developers across the world making 17 to 35 dollars an hour solving tasks step by step which are then basically used to generate prompt/responses pairs of desired behavior for a lot of common development situations, adding desired output for things like tool calling, which is needed for things like deleting code. A typical human working on post-training dataset generation task would involve a scenario like: given this Dockerfile for a python application, when we try to run pytest it fails with exception foo not found. The human will notice that package foo is not installed, change the requirements.txt file and write this down, then he will try pip install, and notice that the foo package requires a certain native library to be installed. The final output of this will be a response with the appropriate tool calls in a structured format. Given that the amount of unsupervised learning is way bigger than the amount spent on fine-tuning for most models, it is not surprise that given any ambiguous situation, the model will default to what it knows best. More post-training will usually improve this, but the quality of the human generated dataset probably will be the upper bound of the output quality, not to mention the risk of overfitting if the foundation model labs embrace SFT too enthusiastically.
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Am I the only one that is surprised that the app still works?!
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Well, given it can't say "no, I think it's good enough now", you'll just get madness, no?
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It can be difficult to explain to management why in certain scenarios AI can seem to work coding miracles, but this still doesn’t mean it’s going always speed up development 10x especially for an established code base. Tangible examples like this seem like a useful way to show some of the limitations.
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I think the prompt is a major source of the issue. "We need to improve the quality of this codebase" implicitly indicates that there is something wrong with the codebase. I would be curious to see if it would reach a point of convergence with a prompt that allowed for it. Something like "Improve the quality of this codebase, or tell me that it is already in an optimal state."
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The point he’s making - that LLM’s aren’t ready for broadly unsupervised software development - is well made. It still requires an exhausting amount of thought and energy to make the LLM go in the direction I want, which is to say in a direction which considers the code which is outside the current context window. I suspect that we will not solve the context window problem for a long time. But we will see a tremendous growth in “on demand tooling” for things which do fit into a context window and for which we can let the AI “do whatever it wants.” For me, my work product needs to conform to existing design standards and I can’t figure out how to get Claude to not just wire up its own button styles. But it’s remarkable how—despite all of the nonsense—these tools remain an irreplaceable part of my work life.
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Just the headline sounds like a YouTube brain rot video title: "I spent 200 days in the woods" "I Google translated this 200 times" "I hit myself with this golf club 200 times" Is this really what hacker news is for now?
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There are fundamental differences. Many people expect a positive gradient of quality from AI overhaul of projects. For translating back and forth, it is obvious from the outset that there is a negative gradient of quality (the Chinese whispers game).
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If you reverse the order this could be a very interesting Youtube series
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Well of course it produced bad results... it was given a bad prompt. Imagine how things would have turned out if you had given the same instructions to a skilled but naive contractor who contractually couldn't say no and couldn't question you. Probably pretty similar.
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Yeah I don't see the utility in doing this hundreds of times back to back. A few iterations can tell us some things about how Claude optimizes code, but an open ended prompt to endlessly "improve" the code sounds like a bad boss making huge demands. I don't blame the AI for adding BS down the line.
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The prompt was: Ultrathink. You're a principal engineer. Do not ask me any questions. We need to improve the quality of this codebase. Implement improvements to codebase quality. I'm a little disappointed that Claude didn't eventually decide to start removing all of the cruft it had added to improve the quality that way instead.
I spent some time last night "over iterating" on a plan to do some refactoring in a large codebase. I created the original plan with a very specific ask - create an abstraction to remove some tight coupling. Small problem that had a big surface area. The planning/brainstorming was great and I like the plan we came up with. I then tried to use a prompt like OP's to improve it (as I said, large surface area so I wanted to review it) - "Please review PLAN_DOC.md - is it a comprehensive plan for this project?". I'd run it -> get feedback -> give it back to Claude to improve the plan. I (naively perhaps) expected this process to converge to a "perfect plan". At this point I think of it more like a probability tree where there's a chance of improving the plan, but a non-zero chance of getting off the rails. And once you go off the rails, you only veer further and further from the truth. There are certainly problems where "throwing compute" at it and continuing to iterate with an LLM will work great. I would expect those to have firm success criteria. Providing definitions of quality would significantly improve the output here as well (or decrease the probability of going off the rails I suppose). Otherwise Claude will confuse quality like we see here. Shout out OP for sharing their work and moving us forward.
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Small errors compound over time.
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for <work domain> and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because <issue>, it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable. There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well. That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems. But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.
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> There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well. While this is true in my experience, the opposite is not true. LLMs are very good at helping me go through a structure processing of thinking about architectural and structural design and then help build a corresponding specification. More specifically the "idea honing" part of this proposed process works REALLY well: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/ This: Each question should build on my previous answers, and our end goal is to have a detailed specification I can hand off to a developer. Let’s do this iteratively and dig into every relevant detail. Remember, only one question at a time.
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> "Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. This is true, as for "Open Ended" I use Beads with Claude code, I ask it to identify things based on criteria (even if its open ended) then I ask it to make tasks, then when its done I ask it to research and ask clarifying questions for those tasks. This works really well.
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This is it. It doesn't replace the higher level knowledge part very well. I asked Claude to fix a pet peeve of mine, spawning a second process inside an existing Wine session (pretty hard if you use umu, since it runs in a user namespace). I asked Claude to write me a python server to spawn another process to pass through a file handler "in Proton", and it proceeded a long loop of trying to find a way to launch into an existing wine session from Linux with tons of environment variables that didn't exist. Then I specified "server to run in Wine using Windows Python" and it got more things right. Except it tried to use named pipes for IPC. Which, surprise surprise, doesn't work to talk to the Linux piece. Only after I specified "local TCP socket" it started to go right. Had I written all those technical constraints and made the design decisions in the first message it'd have been a one-hit success.
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Using the plan mode in cursor (or asking claude to first come up with a plan) makes it pretty good at generic "how can I improve" prompts. It can spend more effort exploring the codebase and thinking before implementing.
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That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the style principles articulated in its AGENTS.md file. (As it tends to forget a lot of rules like DRY)
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Cool cool cool. So if you use LLMs as junior devs, let me ask you how future awesome senior devs like you will come around? From WHAT job experience? From what coding struggle?
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> That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am so tired of this analogy. Have the people who say this never worked with a junior dev before? If you treat your junior devs as brainless code monkeys who only exist to type out your brilliant senior developer designs and architectures instead of, you know, human beings capable of solving problems , 1) you're wasting your time, because a less experienced dev is still capable of solving problems independently, 2) the juniors working under you will hate it because they get no autonomy, and 3) the juniors working under you will stay junior because they have no opportunity to learn--which means you've failed at one of your most important tasks as a senior developer, which is mentorship.
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I really hope you don't actually treat junior devs this way...
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Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."
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“I want my AI to do laundry and dishes so I can code, not for my AI to code so I can do laundry and dishes”
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Claude is very good at unfun-but-necessary coding tasks such as writing docstrings and type hints, which is a prominent instance of "laundry and dishes" for a dev.
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Soon you'll realize you're the "AI". We've lost control.
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In my case, I enjoy writing code too, but it's helpful to have an assistant I can ask to handle small tasks so I can focus on a specific part that requires attention to detail
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Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers.
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Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!" Claude writing code gets the same output if not better in about 1/10 of the time. That's where you realize that the writing code bits are just one small part of the overall picture. One that I realize I could do without.
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How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?
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Typescript on the frontend, Python on the backend, SQL for the database, bash for CI. This isn't even counting HTML/CSS or the YAML config.
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May be a domain issue? If you're largely coding within a JS framework (which most software devs are tbf) then that makes total sense. If you're working in something like fintech or games, perhaps less so.
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My last job was a mix of Ruby, Python, Bash, SQL, and Javascript (and CSS and HTML). One or two jobs before that it was all those plus a smattering of C. A few jobs before that it was C# and Perl.
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I think we have different opinions on what's fun and what's boring!
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This tells me that we need to build 1000 more linters of all kinds
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Unironically I agree. One under-discussed lever that senior / principal engineers can pull is the ability to write linters & analyzers that will stop junior engineers ( or LLMs ) from doing something stupid that's specific to your domain. Let's say you don't want people to make async calls while owning a particular global resource, it only takes a few minutes to write an analyzer that will prevent anyone from doing so. Avoid hours of back-and-forth over code review by encoding your preferences and taste into your build pipeline and stop it at source.
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And for more complex linters I find that it can be easy to get the LLM to write most of it itself!!!
This is a key part of the AI love/hate flame war. Very easy to write it off when it spins out on the open-ended problems, without seeing just how effective it can be once you zoom in. Of course, zooming in that far gives back some of the promised gains. Edit: typo
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Go one level up: claude2() { claude "$(claude "Generate a prompt and TODO list that works towards this goal: <goal>$*</goal>" -p)" } $ claude2 pls give ranked ideas for make code better
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> without seeing just how effective it can be once you zoom in. The love/hate flame war continues because the LLM companies aren't selling you on this. The hype is all about "this tech will enable non-experts to do things they couldn't do before" not "this tech will help already existing experts with their specific niche," hence the disconnect between the sales hype and reality. If OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. were all honest and tempered their own hype and misleading marketing, I doubt there would even be a flame war. The marketing hype is "this will replace employees" without the required fine print of "this tool still needs to be operated by an expert in the field and not your average non technical manager."
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The amount of GUIs I've vibe-coded works against your claim. As we speak, my macOS menubar has an iStat Menus replacement, a Wispr Flow replacement (global hotkey for speech-to-text), and a logs visualizer for the `blocky` dns filtering program -- all of which I built without reading code aside from where I was curious. It was so vibe-coded that there was no reason to use SwiftUI nor set them up in Xcode -- just AppKit Swift files compiled into macOS apps when I nix rebuild. The only effort it required was the energy to QA the LLM's progress and tell it where to improve, maybe click and drag a screenshot into claude code chat if I'm feeling excessive. Where do my 20 years of software dev experience fit into this except beyond imparting my aesthetic preferences? In fact, insisting that you write code yourself is becoming a liability in an interesting way: you're going to make trade-offs for DX that the LLM doesn't have to make, like when you use Python or Electron when the LLM can bypass those abstractions that only exist for human brains.
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You making a couple of small GUIs that could have been made with a drag and drop editor 10 years ago doesn't work against his claim as much as you think. You're just telling on your self and your "20 years" of supposed dev experience.
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Love that you are disagreeing with parent by saying you built software all on your own, and you only had 20 years software experience. Isn't that the point they are making?
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Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I didn't build the software in my comment. A clanker did. Vibe-coding is a claude code <-> QA loop on the end result that anyone can do (the non-experts in his claim). An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user. Once again, where do my 20 years of software experience come up in a process where I don't even read code?
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But anyone didn't do it... you an expert in software development did it. I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge. You are illustrating the GP's point, not negating it.
Not at all my experience. I’ve often tried things like telling Claude this SIMD code I wrote performed poorly and I needed some ideas to make it go faster. Claude usually does a good job rewriting the SIMD to use different and faster operations.
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I'm not a C++ programmer, but wouldn't your example be a fairly structured problem? You wanted to improve performance of a specific part of your code base.
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That sounds like a pretty "structured" problem to me.
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that's one of the problems with AI. as it can accomplish more tasks people will overestimate it's ability. what the person you replied to had claude do is relatively simple and structured, but to that person what claude did is "automagic". People already vastly overestimate AI's capabilities. This contributes to that.
lol 5000 tests. Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. This leads to a lot of bloat and orphaned code. Definitely something that still needs to be solved for by agentic tools.
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> Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. Your point stands uncontested by me, but I just wanted to mention that humans have that bias too. Random link (has the Nature study link): https://blog.benchsci.com/this-newly-proven-human-bias-causes-you-much-unnecessary-work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_bias
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Oh I’ve had agents remove tests plenty of times. Or cripple the tests so they pass but are useless - more common and harder to prompt against.
This is a great example of there being no intelligence under the hood.
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Just as enterprise software is proof positive of no intelligence under the hood. I don't mean the code producers, I mean the enterprise itself is not intelligent yet it (the enterprise) is described as developing the software. And it behaves exactly like this, right down to deeply enjoying inflicting bad development/software metrics (aka BD/SM) on itself, inevitably resulting in: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
Would a human perform very differently? A human who must obey orders (like maybe they are paid to follow the prompt). With some "magnitude of work" enforced at each step. I'm not sure there's much to learn here, besides it's kinda fun, since no real human was forced to suffer through this exercise on the implementor side.
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> Would a human perform very differently? How useful is the comparison with the worst human results? Which are often due to process rather than the people involved. You can improve processes and teach the humans. The junior will become a senior, in time. If the processes and the company are bad, what's the point of using such a context to compare human and AI outputs? The context is too random and unpredictable. Even if you find out AI or some humans are better in such a bad context, what of it? The priority would be to improve the process first for best gains.
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No (human) developer would _add_ tests. ^/s
Disney making $1B investment in OpenAI, will allow characters on Sora AI (cnbc.com)
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Well I guess the best outcome is that the AI bubble bursts. Gonna be way worse if it is actually legit...
What mad world are we living in where Disney — Disney — is paying someone to lose control over its IP?
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Are they losing control though? OpenAI did sign a contract with them and that presumably gives them some power. Maybe less than the power they had over, for example netflix, but still more than nothing. P.S. If you can't win them, join them ...
The alternative is they make no money and people still produce them using other video gen tools without the copyright filters. Similar to the music industry piracy battle, it makes more sense to work with the big platforms than fight them.
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I don’t see the similarity here. When music piracy was facilitated by corporate entities like Napster, the rights holders sued them out of existence, after which piracy evolved into a highly distributed problem that was too costly to prosecute (you can’t sue everyone using BitTorrent one by one). Yes, eventually the music rights holders did facilitate commercial distribution, starting with the iTunes Store, and it was successful because they satisfied the market’s key demand that customers be able to buy one song as a time for 99c, as opposed to the whole album, which would often cost upwards of $10. Also, they didn’t let customers modify the songs or make derivative works. Generating Disney-derived content with AI, on the other hand, requires massive resources that most individuals don’t possess, thus making corporate entities all but essential players in the game. (This may change in a few years as technology improves, but we shall see.) And we’re talking about derivative works here, not mere copies.
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There are many alternatives. Another is they sue the shit out of Open AI until you basically can't generate anything related to mice or monarchies. This may be the right move but it's by no means forced.
I think they're getting some equity in return for the investment. If it goes up, Disney makes out. If it doesn't, well, ...
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Why not equity in exchange for rights? The crazy thing is they're surrendering both rights and cash.
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Maybe the negotiations established that the rights were worth $X, but Disney wanted $X + 1 billion worth of stock? While many startups will take anyone's money, it can be hard to invest in some. And the most desirable are the hardest. So maybe Disney was using the IP negotiations to open the door?
For everyone concerned about the AI systems being trained on copyrighted material: this was always the end-game of that argument. Once the technology was proven out to be useful, someone with a huge IP portfolio was going to slam that portfolio directly into the training data to get their own copyright-unencumbered AI.
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Copyright unencumbered... For their own characters?? Why would they need clearance to generate things trained on their data.
Putting aside feelings on AI, and also putting aside worst case scenarios of the kind of content (which will happen regardless of what they promise), I think this is a terrible move for the brand. Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders. The value of your brand reduces dramatically , and you reduce excitement for new releases. This is the company that had to walk back its plans to saturate streaming and theaters with their content because they ruined the hype for Star Wars and Marvel content. Two of the most beloved franchises! This is just going to make that worse when ever social media feed will be blanketed by even more slop. Unless the gambit is that they expect merch sales to go up, or they have a way to guarantee a cut of any used content. I’m sure there are some IP infringement lawyers who have basically secured a life time of work with this announcement.
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> Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders. That really depends on how the culture of media consumption changes. It's very different than the world of movie theaters and TV. Most people are using social media to consume the majority of their content. This at least helps constantly inject their characters into the mainstream culture, when they can no longer dominate TV/cinema and streaming platforms already saturate their characters with high volume. The biggest risk IMO is if the short content being produced is more entertaining than what they officially produce or it turns into a mini-culture they don't have influence over, and they struggle to profit off the old stuff. They will essentially be competing with their own IP.
Their characters are way past virality
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They’re way past being relevant and that is the problem they are solving… getting mindshare again.
Yes, but Disney legal is incredibly aggressive with any unauthorized use of characters. They have made day care's repaint walls with character murals. They have an army that chases that stuff down.
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Which is why it's so weird that they are seemingly doing a 180 if it involves "AI". The biggest actual impact of the AI craze has been the extent to which mere mention of it is causing businesses to upend themselves and break with decades of historical behavior.
Im sure its going to be used by many movies. Just like CGI. And just like CGI some people will complain.
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I'd like to pre-register my complaint! :-) I think it depends on what they use it for. For fantasy stuff like cartoons, aliens and (not fantasy) dinosaurs it may be ok, and I guess they could train on old hand-animated cartoons to retain that charm (and cartoon tropes like running in place but not moving) if they wanted to. If they use it to generate photo-realistic humans then it's going to be uncanny valley and just feel fake. It would be interesting to see best effort at an AI dinosaur walking - a sauropod using the trained motion of an elephant perhaps, which may well be more animal-like than CGI attempts to do the same.
That was my first thought. When I saw 'Disney' and 'OpenAI' in a headline together I assumed the money was flowing the other way around. Certainly other rights holders like the NYTimes are looking for the cash to flow the opposite direction (they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting). Unless this investment somehow is structured so that Disney gets stock which will potentially be worth orders of magnitude more later...
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> they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting Are OpenAI even denying this?
You pay for advertisement and product placement. Not the other way around. We live in an atenttion economy, if Disney content is not in your face on all mediums (which now include AI slop), they lose money.
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>You pay for advertisement and product placement. Well, no. Disney does not pay Hasbro or Mattel to use their characters. It does not pay clothing producers. So no, you dont have to pay people to use your IP because it's just advertising. Disney's IP is their core product. You can make the argument they should let Sora use it to advertise. But that's not necessarily how it works. And for good reason - fan content doesnt necessarily benefit Disney in a measurable, controlled way. Furthermore, the IP is the thing they themselves are trying to sell you.
Disney shareholders, feel free to make images of Iger, Mickey, and Br'er Rabbit lighting piles on money on fire.
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The original depiction of Mickey Mouse is legally public domain anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_a_copyright-free_Mickey_Mouse
This will not end well for Disney, there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged. This feels like another circular investment where Disney is hoping to make money back I'm sure. On the other hand, assuming they do the freemium stuff, I look forward to making a few videos of my daughters favorite Disney princesses "talking" to her.
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I look forward to making a few videos of my daughters favorite Disney princesses "talking" to her. I look forward to chatting with Pluto and Goofy and asking why one has to wear pants when both of them are dogs.
It only works until Mickey Mouse shows up on your Tiktok feed lynching an African American and doing a sieg heil salute. Are you sure Disney wants that or would not care about that??
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The question is why it shows up on your Tiktok feed.
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I thought it was well known and generally accepted that the social medial companies push controversial click/rage bait to keep people “engaged”?
"there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged" Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate. The other thing I'd point out is that people kind of seem to forget this, but it isn't a requirement that AI video be generated, then shoveled straight out without modification. Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness). You can use the blessed Disney video generator to generate something, then feed it into another less controlled AI system to modify it into something Disney wouldn't want. Or a video of a Disney character doing something innocent can be easily turned into something else; it's not hard to ask the AI systems to put something "against a green screen", or with a bit more sophistication, something that can be motion tracked with some success and extracted. "A front camera shot of Cinderella crouching down, repeatedly putting a cucumber in and out of her mouth. She is against a green screen." - where ever that video is going, Disney isn't going to like it. And that's just a particularly obvious example, not the totality of all the possibilities. Just putting controls on the AI video output itself isn't going to be enough for Disney.
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Sora has good enough controls it is basically impossible to make it do a dirty video like that.
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> Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.... Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness). I still wonder what motivates the people behind that sort of thing. It'd be easy to understand if it were just porn, but what's been described to me is just... bizarre.
Don't use a cucumber if you're going to be subtracting the green screen
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i assumed it was the egg plant, guess i'm getting old
I actually straight up don't think they give a shit anymore. I think decorum works in an environment where decorum is the norm, but we have entered a political moment where that is no longer the case. And I think that this kind of thing bleeds so heavily into culture that they no longer give a shit about having their characters next to it. They have enough plausible deniability; they did not create the content. I think that's enough for them, in this moment.
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When I became a parent I was really surprised at how much crap Disney puts out. My previous exposure had just been their blockbuster movies which showed a close attention to detail. But you scratch under the surface and it's an endless pile of awful quality clothing, crappy lunchboxes, that kind of thing. To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone. And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved. Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.
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The animation quality of mickey mouse clubhouse was appalling when I first had kids. They seem to have decided to care about that, as the animation on mickey mouse clubhouse + is a marked improvement.
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Fond-ish memories of Disney's direct-to-vhs push in the 90s https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-sequels-prequels-and-midquels-ranked-2020-7
Yeah, basically Disney invested a billion dollar in Pregnant Elsa Spider-Man Beach Castle .
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They may be viewing this as an inevitable outcome with open models/fly-by-night providers/providers in more liberal copy-right jurisdictions. They can either invest in mass classification and enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.
Why is this a problem with Disney? Who cares? Online trolls make inappropriate videos with characters. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. It's so exhausting that companies are overly cautious about everything and let a tiny niche of internet culture drive these decisions. If you get obscene material in your social media feeds, you will continue to see this kind of stuff except maybe with some Disney IP. If not, it will have no impact to your life. But practical things that affect 99% of people like you mentioned will be better, like your child wants to hear Mickey wish him happy birthday. So I applaud this.
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Thank you. Sad I had to scroll this far to find a comment that wasn't pro-censorship of Fan Art because a character they saw on the internet offended someone's Protestant values.
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I agree with you completely but I'm absolutely shocked that Disney would agree to this. They are extremely protective of how their IP is used. Famously so.
The AI IP lines are being drawn now. The IP holders will sue or DMCA the platforms, not the users. First Grok, then eventually YouTube. Then they'll charge licensing fees. Are also: RIAA wrt Suno, Udio.
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Pretty sure Youtube is constantly being sued for copyright violation by now. The question is what will happen when "the platform" is a model downloaded on torrent sites and just generates movies from a prompt. On the plus side: excellent compression ratio. On the down side: discussion with your kids about how at the end Snow White did not transform into a gigantic mech and blew up the Evil Queen with rockets. Must be your old memory, dad!
Pat Mcafee catching strays (He has had his show for ~6 years) but Screamin' A Smith gets a pass? Your bias is showing.
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Stephen A Smith has done as much to harm ESPN's brand than any other figure. Please don't assume my biases from whom I failed to mention – I could have used SAS instead of Pat and my point would have been the same. Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it to go.
I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the bedrock of American children's culture which has been a soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut, but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.
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> While not perfect Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades. 0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b5j4T9E8PuE 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South
AI with hard guidelines? I don't think that will work.
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"Hard guidelines" is making me think of the Pirate Code from Disney's Pirates of The Caribbean.
This. Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters. That said, there are a lot of other models out there that care about neither licensing nor alignment. So those will allow you to make racist content. Then you can do whatever you like with that generated content. A lot of IP owners will learn that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It's easier than people think to turn children's characters, like say, Hermoine, into a raging racist. And there's very little technically speaking that they can do to stop it. But yes, on OpenAI specific properties, they can definitely stop it dead in its tracks. They can even get better at stopping it over time. In fact, the more users try to generate it, the better the system will get at stopping it.
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Great, so censorship by attrition.
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> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters. Don’t believe for a minute that whatever filters it uses will be sensitive enough to the way racist content is constructed to stop people from doing just that.
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How are they going to stop it? A certain combination of nonstandard characters will make an AI character drop an n-word no problem I guess they could chuck the output through whisper or something to see if it transcribes back to anything dodgy? LLM security feels very ball of sand held together with duct tape haha
Is this about when Sam mentioned they want to continue/start letting people do lewd texting with LLMs? Or are you talking about actual pornography?
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The “lewd texting with LLM” will be a tool for writing actual pornography (in fact, people are using ChatGPT and other major AI engines as tools in that already , but loosening the filters were facilitate that even more on OpenAI’s platform.) OpenAI knows that, and the people interested in that capability know that, even if many of the other people seeing the marketing about it don't.
Craft software that makes people feel something (rapha.land)
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I think with tools like Claude code you can more easily tackle niche areas that would benefit from custom crafted features and then using the app would feel like it was purpose built for the specific task at hand. Sure the code might not look hand crafted, but if it works and solves problems in the world...
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Kinda tangential but in the advent of AI I feel like there won’t be a niche for “handcrafted software”. When quartz watches came up the makers of mechanical watches struggled. Quartz watches are cheaper, more accurate in many cases and servicing is usually restricted to replacing a battery. However some people appreciate a good mechanical watch (and the status symbol aspect of course) and nowadays the mechanical watch market is flourishing. Something similar happened with artificial fabrics (polyester, acrylic) and cheap made clothes, there’s a market for handmade clothes that use natural fabrics. Nobody (well, barring a few HN readers) will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works.
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So the proof for your claim is two counterexamples?
I don't think it's too reductive to suggest that what you're liking is also "a feeling," just a different one than you were thinking about?
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I think that would be too reductive. The objective productive factors of software are what give it actual value. The author could have chosen to write "produce useful software", but did not.
French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video] (youtube.com)
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I remember a french comic called Le loup en slip (literally the wolf in underwear), was it by any chance made by the same artists? Both the style and story have a lot in common.
It's a cute ad all but as a French kid I used to see similar things often, we have a good culture of animation. Is "they didn't use AI" really a criteria now?
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> Is "they didn't use AI" really a criteria now? Absolutely. Have you been living under a rock? /jk ;-)
I was confused because one of the characters tells the wolf he might have more friends if he didn't go around killing animals all the time. Then the wolf starts making vegetarian dishes, and I thought, okay, they're promoting vegetarianism. Great. But then later the wolf is killing fish, and that's ...okay I guess because they don't talk or walk like the other animals? The speciesism hit hard.
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" Fish meat is practically a vegetable " --Ron Swanson
There are people who do care about both. Does that bother you?
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I'm ok with people caring about whatever they want. What I dislike is people trying to create artificial groups. Like "pro AI" and "anti AI" then try to sell them shit because now this is part of their tribe.
$27,000 a Year for Health Insurance. How Can We Afford That? (nytimes.com)
I'm in a EU country, in total I pay also around 15.000 EUR per year
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[citation needed]
The affordable care act doubled most people's insurance over night (This happened to me and almost everyone I know). Nobody wants to mention this, because it makes their side look bad. Until we can admit where there are problems, there will never be a solution.
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Did not change my rates a bit. And it gave me a fallback plan if I lost my job or something.
That doesn’t pass the sniff test. I was self-employed and self-insured when the ACA took effect and my premiums immediately dropped when I purchased through the Marketplace (and it wasn’t subsidized). It sounds like you either had junk insurance or you’re exaggerating things to score points.
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Passes the test of my freelancer friends. They said at lunch that the long term change has been dramatic. What cost $300/m before the ACA turned to $3000/m today. These are all through the local Blue Cross. We talked about the junk policy idea. Certainly the post-ACA policies have some improvements like no pre-existing conditions, but it's pretty much a tangerine-to-oranges comparison. Maybe yours dropped immediately, but I'm sure it's up quite a bit since then. You may say that's just inflation and that's part of it, but I think the deeper point is that the ACA is not containing the inflation. And that was one of the promises.
Yes, health insurance costs rise every year. Partly due to increasing costs, but also due to the age of the insured. The question isn’t whether the ACA raised costs—those were always going to go up. The question is whether a the ACA made them go up less than not having it. For me, the before and after trend was remarkable. And I had higher quality insurance without lifetime maximums or arbitrary exclusions. Republicans did their level best to neuter the bill and prevent Democrats from having a “win,” and for the most part, I’d say they succeeded. The lack of a public option and the removal of mandatory coverage were both important parts of making it work well. But in the first 5 years or so, it was definitely an improvement. I think it could be again… if Republicans cared more about serving the country than pandering to their base.
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> those were always going to go up No. That wasn't the promise. Obama said that his plan was going to cut a family's bills by $2500. Now you may say that inflation has to creep in and I think that's fair. If oil rises in price, that affects everything. But the premise was always that the magic of the ACA would lower premiums.
no actuarial reserve has been built up This is laughable. Health insurance companies don't have no steenkin "actuarial reserve". Inventing one is an act of rhetorical desperation on your part. They only thing these companies consider or respond to is next quarter's profits.
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> Health insurance companies don't have no steenkin "actuarial reserve". Inventing one is an act of rhetorical desperation on your part. This is how private health insurance companies work in Germany and many other countries (more precisely for Germany "private Krankenversicherung nach Art der Lebensversicherung" (Google Translate: private health insurance in the form of life insurance); formally, in Germany there also exists "private Krankenversicherung nach Art der Schadenversicherung" (Google Translate: private health insurance according to the type of indemnity insurance)). Facts: - I have already worked with certified actuaries, and I am thus very certain that building an actuarial reserve which is then phased out when you get older [in German: Auf- und Abbau der Deckungsrückstellung (for life insurance) und Altersrückstellung (for health insurance) (in English, the term "actuarial reserve" is used for both kinds of reserves)]) is how the mathematics of life and private health insurance companies works (OK, formally only for the kind of health insurance that in German is called "private Krankenversicherung nach Art der Lebensversicherung" (Google Translate: private health insurance in the form of life insurance)) - if you still don't believe my claims, just read a good textbook about insurance of persons
The two times I did not have employer sponsored health care AND $0 income, the ACA plans were more expensive than getting a plan directly from the insurance company. It never costed me $27,000 though. Most recently, in 2024, I had medical and dental coverage for my family of 6 for around $1,200/mo - roughly half what's quoted but again, family of 6. Wasn't the greatest insurance but it would have kept us from financial ruin in case of a catastrophic event which is all I expect from insurance anyways.
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I assume you were young. Direct was generally cheaper for young people and ACA cheaper for older people. Which pushed the average age of ACA up and then raises the price of ACA. It’s a mess!
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
How can I read the standard output of an already-running process? (devblogs.microsoft.com)
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Raymond's posts are always fun to read, but it sometimes he focuses more on the "proper" methods, and does not even acknowledge that there are hacky workarounds. Like for this case - sure, you cannot redefine the standard output handle, but that's not what the customer asked for, is it? They said "read" and I can see a whole bunch of ways to do so - ReadConsoleOutput + heuristic for scrolling, code inject into console host, attach debugger, set up detour on logging function, custom kernel module... To be fair, as a MS support person, it's the exactly right thing to do. You don't want the person to start writing custom kernel module when they should redirect stdout on process start instead. But as a random internet reader, I'd love to read all about hacky ways to achieve the same!
If things are printed on top of each other, try script? https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=script&apropos=0&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+15.0-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html But, if you're getting console debugs from the kernel, that wouldn't be captured either... Otoh, debug output from the kernel should also go into logs or dmesg or something? You'll capture everything and maybe be able to figure it out from there?
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Thanks for the input! Sounds promising. I've to admit, 'script' doesn't say anything to me yet. I've to look into it. About the logs, yes, I have yet to dive into that. The _everything_ part makes it very tedious, so I had hoped for another solution :)
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If script doesn't work, you could maybe try starting everything from within GNU screen or tmux with logging turned on?
It might be useful to try and figure out what's logging the messages. However, if it was me, I'd strongly consider just starting from your shell in the tty, then running tmux, then starting sway, then attaching to tmux from a terminal emulator.
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Thanks for your reply! I've thought about that as well. Haven't tried it though. Two thoughts about it: 1. Running graphical from within tmux feels unsafe (?). Introducing another layer can't be the way to go. BUT this comes from a position of limited knowledge, so I might stand corrected on this one. Also, doing it once for debugging won't do any harm. 2. I'm pretty sure the errors are not printed by Sway itself, but some other OS module. Errors that Sway cause for other modules won't be included in the Sway log. So the problem remains, no?
Can't you just read from /proc/pid/fd/0 ?
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This was my first thought as well. I assume somehow I'm the dummy that doesn't understand the question.
South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity (worksinprogress.co)
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So basically, to save the world countries need to help mothers that work or woman that might want to have kids. because looks like the biggest factor is a sexist and extreme work culture.
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The problem is the same everywhere - The masses rely on income from their occupation, while the ruling elite rely on capital typically amassed by their forefathers, olden day aristocrats. And income from work is stagnating.
The article lists several examples of government programs from different regions that pay people to have kids and their efficacy.
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Sorry, I was unclear. I know they pay or give tax breaks to some extent. I meant pay near or even above the cost of raising the kids, i.e. make having kids a net financial benefit. As far as I can tell even the most generous policy is not even close to this.
> and people will start having many more kids again. This has been my assumption, but now I question it. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1644264/ In this experiment, a mouse population grew quickly, then at high population density started falling quickly. But rather than recovering when the population decreased, it continued to fall until it was wiped out, in the presence of plentiful resources. This keeps me up at night. Please someone tell me why it doesn't apply to us.
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Because we're not mice. Because he was actually studying the effects of overcrowding and not population growth & decline. You'd need to look at more than just the population numbers, the issues were around high infant mortality and bad parenting, those are the things you should look out for over low birth rates.
I have a similar theory, that desire to procreate is heritable, in a way that was previously inextricable from desire to have sex. With easy birth control, those desires can now be fulfilled separately. We're still working through the mass die-off of the genes that mostly just wanted the sex half of the equation. In a few generations, most everyone alive will be the progeny of people who really wanted children. This is probably heritable and will probably stabilize birth rates.
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Maybe. I think the difficulty is that in a place like Korea, the dependency ratio will become extremely high, and so taxes will have to go up sharply. Most voters will be retired and so will vote for the few young people to pay them. This will lead the young people to emigrate unless they’re prevented from doing so.
Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content (theguardian.com)
As long as you support social media companies censoring people you don't like, you're in a weaker position arguing against their censorship of people you do like. There should be a strong social objection to all such censorship, but I don't know how we get there from here. All the justifications for censorship during Covid were corrosive, "The 1st amendment only protects you from _government_ censorship, etc." At this point, nobody trusts the other side to "play fair" and reciprocate, which makes standing on principle feel like a loss. If all sides stood up just a little bit for the principle of "I don't agree with that person, but I defend his right to voice himself", we'd all be better off.
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> All the justifications for censorship during Covid were corrosive, "The 1st amendment only protects you from _government_ censorship, etc. Does the First Amendment not also give you editorial control over your websites, including which third-party content you host?
Repro Uncensored, an NGO tracking digital censorship against movements focused on gender, health and justice, said that it had tracked 210 incidents of account removals and severe restrictions affecting these groups this year, compared with 81 last year. Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed. Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper? I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor.
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Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper? I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor. I think I'm getting bored with all the deflection bots and puppets on HN saying, "Don't discuss the issue in the OP's article! Look over here, instead!"
> but so would timely release of information. If the reports are true, an active harm to those organizations are being done, and it would be valuable for the public to know sooner than later. I do not believe that that is The Guardian’s goal with this reporting. If it were, wouldn’t it make more sense to list the organizations (provide actionable information), rather than spending time telling a story? I also have a hard time seeing the harm or the size thereof without knowing more context about any of the organizations, what they do, and how much they rely or depend on Facebook to be effective. If I were an organization that had my Facebook account suspended unfairly or unjustly, I would simply find a different way to stay in touch with others. Meta does not owe me anything
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> If I were an organization that had my Facebook account suspended unfairly or unjustly, I would simply find a different way to stay in touch with others If that's the case, I don't think any level of additional verification from the Guardian would change your perspective about this story... Nor would Facebook removing all groups for abortion resources. But to address this point specifically, Facebook is a monopolistic social media platform. It has immense control over what conversations are had in the public sphere, and an organization cannot simply rebound from a deplatforming. If you think these organizations specifically should not have as broad of a reach as they do, that is a different story.
Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home. The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".
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And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example): >In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files. https://archive.is/56RiI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_statements
When a behavior is seen as unwanted, normalizing is a species of grooming.
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OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist? If you're going to broaden the definition of grooming so absurdly to include normal things in culture you just don't like then it seems like you should allow people to conclude your intent is to diminish the seriousness of things that actually are grooming.
Now do anorexia, bulimia, or any number of social contagions. The difference between being allowed to be who you are vs. being encouraged into a lifestyle is not easy to distinguish.
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Those have always been around, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anorexia_nervosa
I don't think anyone is "mincing up unborn babies". I think you might misunderstand how abortions work in practice, but anyways. > If you want control over your body, exercise that control to not get pregnant in the first place. So you are of the opinion that if someone "screwed up" something, essentially made a mistake, they should have no options to correct that mistake? What about if someone else made them pregnant without their consent? Would bodily autonomy become more important in your mind then, or same "don't get pregnant in the first place" apply, even if it's outside of their control?
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I have bad news for you if you think abortions involve careful extraction of the intact fetus... Start with the infamous account from the practitioner who boasted of her novel technique that begins with cutting the baby's vocal cords to muffle its screams. I think we would be better off if people experienced the consequences of their actions. If abortion was at least difficult to access, and came with some form of compulsory safe-sex counselling or commitment, then its greatly lowered frequency would be a lot more tolerable. I'm afraid that we have normalised the practice such that many seem to believe it has no stigma at all. It is sufficiently 'routine' to affect sexual behaviours (ie. promoting promiscuity). No issues with abortion in rape rape cases. Also for medical issues. I'm really not that passionate about it. I'm not at all religious but when I see crowds of women cheering abortion or serious political candidates making this a priority issue, I can't help but think of one word: demonic . The modern 'Weimar' West's obsession with this depraved act is spiritually wrong.
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