Unlurker|Replay|About
Pebble, Rebble, and a Path Forward (ericmigi.com)
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Now I am glad I didn't order a new one. Drama everywhere nowadays.
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The difference between this product (and other open source-style projects) and every other product you purchase is all the drama’s happening out in the open. Google, Apple, and Amazon all have the kind of infighting that would embarrass the Sun King’s court, it’s just all kept inside the palace walls.
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This is a pretty predictable response. The problem is, this is a classic "he said, she said" situation. So it's pretty tough to tell whom you should believe, unless you are close enough to the situation to see it first-hand. Clearly someone is not playing nice, but it's not clear which party that is. Sucks for the user community though, either way.
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Eric has been a pretty stand-up guy when it comes to Pebble. He could have been content with an exit (though sad to see it wither in the hands of Fitbit => Google), but instead kept the dream alive. He bought it back and made another refreshed attempt, despite being a YC partner and repeat founder. It’s clear he cares deeply about this product and its potential, far and above what the community could hope for. I think the default trust should be with him, or at least it is for me.
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> It’s clear he cares deeply about this product and its potential, far and above what the community could hope for. I think the default trust should be with him, or at least it is for me. The default trust should be with him instead of _the community_ that built and maintained Rebble for a decade?
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The mentioned blog post ( https://rebble.io/2025/11/17/core-devices-keeps-stealing-our-work.html ) is a pretty great example why using Discord as your main communication tool for an open source project is the wrong choice. The only way to read about the decisions ("Shortly after, Core forked PebbleOS1 away from public maintainership. Back in June, they said that they would merge back periodically2;") is to read the manual transcript they added to the blog post.
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It's a followup on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960893 from a few hours ago
Strix Halo's Memory Subsystem: Tackling iGPU Challenges (chipsandcheese.com)
I was disappointed to see an endless stream of nearly identical mini PCs using it while the options for an actual laptop remained "do you want one of two small touchscreen tablet?". Even Framework only made it available in mini PC form factor! That said it wasn't too hard to grab a HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14, just not the ideal model I had in mind. The hardware is great though!
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I have the Zbook Ultra G1a since it came out. The USB-C PD implementation is very bad, badly broken. I have not been able to get it to charge or even use anything but the HP 140W charger while on. While off, anything works, but once powered on into Ubuntu (from HP!) of Windows... It does not charge or use the power at all. Even with 140W 3rd party chargers from Anker, Ugreen, Insignia, etc. Super limits its usability.
Is HP ok these days? I've been avoiding them because of the atrocious build quality I've experienced in the past. That particular laptop also seems very heavy.
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I had a friend come over with a recent low end HP laptop to print something and I was shocked at the poor build quality.
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Low end everything has poor build quality (they're probably all made by Quanta).
Solving a Million-Step LLM Task with Zero Errors (arxiv.org)
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one issue I see is when steps in a plan depend on one another, when you cannot know all the next steps exactly before seeing the results of the previous ones, when you may have to backtrack sometimes
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On the surface this is an interesting concept... The paper however, meh... No mention of MoE. One would think this is a logical evolution of that but not a mention (that I saw). Its own rubric for the task, Towers of Hanoi, was admittedly weak. LLM papers are starting to look like the last decade of JS frameworks and Tools. Only with less code and more academics, and thats disappointing, because I think a lack of pragmatism and grounding is now holding the field back...
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Nice! Briefly, the idea is recursively to decompose tasks into the simplest possible steps, recursively call (relatively small) LLMs as agents to execute one step at a time, and using a clever voting scheme to choose how to execute each step. The authors use this technique to get a relatively small LLM to solve Towers of Hanoi with 20 rings (1M steps). All of it using natural language. The most obvious question is whether other tasks, more interesting -- less "rote" -- than Towers of Hanoi, can similarly be recursively decomposed into simple steps. I'm not sure that's always possible.
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I dunno, even though the authors address its use, making the task Tower of Hanoi doesn't meet the excitement of the title.
A Day at Hetzner Online in the Falkenstein Data Center (igorslab.de)
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Had a server in that DC for a few years until recently (no knock on Hetzner they where excellent, just didn't need it any more). Robot is a brutally functional tool but it does function (well) and had zero issues.
Do tech companies like Hetzner count as mittelstand s?
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"Mittelstand" in Germany seems to be roughly: below 500 Employees, below 50 Million € turnover. Hetzner makes more like 400 Million € turnover but with 300 Employees. So it's technically above it but they are propably a very tight margin buisness. As such i'd say yes.
Hetzner is awesome. I wish they would go public. Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH. We need more public cloud companies in Europe.
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Damn Americans, can't think of anything other than "I wish I could make a buck off this, idgaf if it gets destroyed in the process".
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The comparison with OVH is a good one. For some reason OVH has much worse PUE, self-reporting 1.24 vs. Hetzner's 1.11. Operating costs are basically just electricity for these places, so their margins are that much worse. For further comparison, Google at a similar latitude in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, claims 1.08.
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Yes I agree, we need more public companies in Europe. Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth. In this sense, they’re selfish. PS: yes I know that there are also downsides to public companies. But looking at the trade-offs I prefer that success can be shared as broadly as possible.
> I wish they would go public. I wish that they'll just keep on running a good profitable business without going public, or getting bought by Amazon, or otherwise shifting focus to providing shareholder value.
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This. I am a happy paying customer. Recommend them to my clients whenever it makes sense (more often than not). And hope they just keep running like they do as profitable business, like you said.
Ah, Igors Lab. Your one stop shop for semi-trustworthy technical insights and misogyny packaged in boomer humor!
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Maybe I will regret this, but... care to elaborate?
5 Things to Try with Gemini 3 Pro in Gemini CLI (developers.googleblog.com)
Wow, so excited to try! > gemini It seems like you don't have access to Gemini 3. Learn more at https://goo.gle/enable-preview-features To disable Gemini 3, disable "Preview features" in /settings. • 1. Switch to gemini-2.5-pro • 2. Stop Note: You can always use /model to select a different option. Google never disappoints with their half-ass-launches.
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I believe this is because you are logged in. You can generate a free API key (with very low limits) through Google AI Studio and use that to test it. In an ideal world, this workaround would not be needed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nice, without this thread I would never have known Gemini 3 released today. Going to download Gemini CLI right now™ and see how it performs™ against Cursor, Claude Code, Aider, OpenCode, Droid, Warp, Devin, and ForgeCode.
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There are currently 6 front page posts about Gemini 3 being released today.
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It's not enough it should be at least 10
Has anyone switched to Gemini CLI? It's so important but also exhausting keeping up with which model is the leading edge. Especially since every model has different idiosyncrasies you have to learn to work with it effectively. Currently my ranking is * Cursor composer: impressively fast and able but not tuned to be that agentic, so it's better for one-shot code changes than long-running tasks. Fantastic UI. * Claude Code: Works great if you can set up a verifiable environment, a clear plan and set it loose to build something for an hour * Grok: Similar to cursor composer but slower and more agentic. Not currently using. * ChatGPT Codex, Gemini: Haven't tried yet.
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Codex with gpt-5-high I trust to get things right without much effort. Claude is the best tool using agent out there. Very good at using the tools to ground whether changes are producing outcomes.
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Maybe these new releases bring some serious enhancements, but my experience with the Gemini cli has been dreadful. It craps out at least half of the time. When it works it is ridiculously fast so I keep trying it. But it has proven very inferior to the Claude code experience in my usage
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I think the TUI agents are pretty similar; I can use CC, Codex, Gemini, and opencode interchangeably.
I haven't tried Gemini CLI with Gemini 3 Pro, but pretty much all the others. I usually run four agents at the same time, for each task, giving them the same prompt and then comparing their responses. Gemini CLI has the lowest rate limits, lowest inability to steer the models (not sure that's a model or tooling thing, but I cannot get any of the Google models to stop outputting code comments constantly and everywhere) and seemingly the API frequently becomes unavailable for some reason. Claude Code is fast, easy to steer, but the quality really degrades really quickly and randomly, seemingly by time of day. I'm not sure if they're running differently quanitized models during different times, but there is a clear quality difference depending on when in the day I use it, strangely. Haven't found a way of verifying this though, ideas welcome. Codex CLI is probably what I use the most, with "gpt-5+high", which is kind of slow, a lot slower than Claude Code, but it almost always gets it right on the first try, and seemingly no other model+tool does instruction following as good, even if your AGENTS.md is almost overflowing with rules and requirements, it seems to nail things anyways.
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Codex has gotten kind of nerfed with their weird choice to limit loc read to 250 and dropping middle of context a lot. None of the CLIs are performing well for me right now. I'm codex and claude max btw. Disappointing.
Google Antigravity, a New Era in AI-Assisted Software Development (antigravity.google)
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reads title Wow was google researching some kind of anti-gravity device behind the curtains for real and then dropped it out of nowhere? Ah damn, yet another ai-assisted-something. Crap.
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I probably wouldn't have been drawn to coding if I was young these days based on the same motivations that led me to venture into it as a teen.
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This whole blog post is seemingly about Google, not about the user. "Why We Built Antigravity" etc. "We want Antigravity to be the home base for software development in the era of agents" - cool, why would I as the user care about that?
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After using Google AI studio, Google Vertex, and Google Gemini Chat I honestly can't wait to use Google Antigravity! snark off: I think the Google PMs should have coffee together and see if all of this sprawl makes any sense.
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It does? Google AI studio is their developer dashboard. Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock. Google Gemini Chat is their ChatGPT app for normies. Google Antigravity is their Cursor equivalent.
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You wouldn’t. It’s made to suck out investor money and show that google does something, not to actually bring value. My crystal ball says it will be shutdown next year.
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I just have zero faith in Google. How long until we hear that someone mysteriously got banned by Google (as we see on HN every few months? it feels like it anyway) and hear about how now they have no AI tooling etc etc etc because its all married to their Google Account. Additionally... Google Code was shut down in 2016? I have zero confidence in such a user hostile company. They gave you a Linux phone, they extended it, and made it proprietary. They gave you a good email account, extended it and made it proprietary. They took away office software from you via Google Docs, so now you don't even own the software they do. No thanks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968731 Why can I not authenticate into Google Antigravity? Google Antigravity is currently available for non-Workspace personal Google accounts in approved geographies. Please try using an @gmail.com email address if having challenges with Workspace Google accounts (even if used for personal purposes). https://antigravity.google/docs/faq
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I love how being a paying Workspace customer for a decade or more has actually locked me out of so many Google products and features. Not that I have any desire to try this at this point, but it's always felt ironic.
""Autonomously, an Antigravity Agent writes code for a new frontend feature, uses the terminal to launch localhost, and actuates the browser to test that the new feature works." very interesting times; i'm glad to see browser automation becoming more mainstream as part of the ai-assisted dev loop for testing. (disclosure: started the selenium project, now working on something similar for a vibe coding context)
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is that "vibium" ? as someone who tried setting up selenium in a workflow im definitely interested.
Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the same integration otherwise.
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*moat
AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents.
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> AI UI 2026: every day ...
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But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE
>vscode fork I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something based on their own GUI stacks like Flutter or Compose Multiplatform. It seems only Zed is truly innovating in this space.
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> I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now
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These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.
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Until someone finally figures out that we need to rethink editors from the ground up to support different sort of operations and editing experience, to better facilitate LLMs doing work as agents. But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs for now.
Zed team is writing their own in-house GUI stack [1] that leverages the computer's GPU with minimal middleware in-between. It's a lot of work short-term but IMO the payoff would be huge if they establish themselves. I imagine they could poke into the user-facing OS sector if their human-agent interaction is smooth. (I have not tried it yet though) [1]: https://www.gpui.rs
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Sublime did that almost 20 years ago.
I have Cursor at work. The only element of the interface I'm using (and know how to use) is the chat window. IMO, it's an absolutely crappy IDE, crappy editor, with absolutely incomprehensible hostile UI. I have almost two decades of experience with Vim, Emacs and IntelliJ. FWIW, I was able to easily find my ways in helix, kakoune and Zed.
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Really? Can you say what you hate it about it pls
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From the top of my head in no specific order - Icons on the toolbar in the left panel have no labels or even tooltips. No way to know what they do without clicking and checking. - Space in the file explorer in the left panel opens a file (haven't noticed such behavior in other editors -- totally unexpected). - Maybe that's the artifact of me installing Vim plugin, but Keyboard shortcuts displayed in the main menu don't do what they say they do. - It often offers installing some plugins, and I've absolutely no idea why, and what will happen if I do or if I don't. I'm talking about Cursor, which I assume is exactly like VS Code. Tried VS Code only once very long ago.
What the hell is going on with scrolling on their website?
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yeah... almost completely broken on my iphone. something tells me they used antigravity to vibe the website. would explain other issues mentioned like vim keybindings being ignored. ..."Youre absolutely right! I did mess up the internals of that feature and incorrectly reported that it works. let me try again..."
Why the need to fork it instead of creating a new extension? (besides marketing)
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Because if they're just an extension they're stuck with whatever rules Microsoft makes up, and Google is no stranger to using this leverage against others.
Thank you for saying what this entire blog post doesn't. It's actually disrespectful of Google to launch this without even a mention of the fact that it is based on VSCode.
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It's Windsurf
There's some irony in that, given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way. The intro checklist for Antigravity includes watching VS Code tutorials!
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VS Code is based on Chromium: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/vscode.md We've come full circle.
Has Google *ever* successfully entered and taken over an existing market?
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You mean like web search, webmail, internet ads, maps, calendars, browsers, smartphone operating systems, online document editing, and translation? I mean, I'm not even including stuff they acquired early like YouTube. Google was the most feared company for a decade or more for a good reason: they absolutely devoured competition in what were thought to be mature markets.
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Chrome?
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Search, browser, Mobile.
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maps as well. email client in the browser.
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Besides search, Android kinda killed Nokia and friends for the consumer phone market.
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To be fair, Microsoft killed Nokia.
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iPhone did it, not Android.
How long can it take to become a US citizen? (usafacts.org)
"Just do it the right way." "Coming here illegally is a crime so everyone who does it is a criminal." The legal moralism people apply to immigration is absurd, especially in the United States. We have purposefully made it impossible to do the right thing, so we can rejoice in punishing those who do it "wrong". It's shameful, in my opinion.
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Also a lot of people applying that legal moralism consider it not just acceptable, but laudable to try to cheat on your taxes, a pretty significant crime.
Citizenship in this country is not a right. Why is it important that we allow more people in from these other nations? Why is that a good thing?
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In the long run it seems likely enough that it will become mainstream that people don't have the right to enforce borders against others. Like the real long run, try to use your imagination.
It’s not an argument, it’s a value.
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It's an argument based on a value. The parent's position is ostensibly that the value does not currently survive contact with concrete reality in the US today.
We get it, you don't like immigrants.
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This sneering oversimplification pushes people away from generosity. It's ok to see and have emotions about the very real negative side of immigration. Lumping all those people in with the theoretical "just racist with no other rationale" crowd is harmful.
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> generosity we tried being nice, reaching across the aisle, etc. and that got us Orange Man 2.0
Why not? Why is a bad thing?
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It isn’t necessarily, but it’s currently used in the US to allow the wealthy to avoid investing in Americans. Instead of investing in Americans by lowering costs of necessities (food, housing, education, children) they chase short term profits for the benefits of shareholders (which is by and large the ultra rich). It’s much cheaper to import labor where the above costs were paid for by somebody else.
What did you do to earn your citizenship?
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This is an impossible standard, and really just a word game. Calling the interaction between the concept of nations, cultures, rights, economies, and practical consequences complicated would be the understatement of the century. Despite that, you will never convince people to give up the larger idea of ownership/responsibility in the context of their "home", for many scales of the word "home".
> “Freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” Unless this quote is directly from the constitution, it's totally worthless to support your argument.
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I'm assuming good faith debate against my own judgment, but in case anyone is confused, here's your sign: 1st Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Read that carefully and note that the word "citizen" is nowhere to be found. Next, some may argue that "the people" inherently represents only citizens. Jurisprudence has generally accepted that phrase to mean everyone, including illegal immigrants, but it depends on the surrounding context[1]. The idea that the Bill of Rights applies only to citizens, though, doesn't match any court interpretation of which I'm aware. 1. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/aliens/
But if you welcome immigrants so as not to run out of labor or stagnate culturally, rather than simply dislike immigrants, you'd want to improve the bureaucracy.
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Implying that homogenous cultures are "stagnant" is a hideous insult to people all around the world.
https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/ice-detention-statistics/ According to the stats on this page, there’s literally not a single white immigrant from Europe who has been detained.
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The page leaves whites out in the table of ethnicities, from which you jump to the conclusion that there are none.
Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities (blog.google)
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Looks like it is already available on VSCode Copilot. Just tried a prompt that was not returning anything good on Sonnet 4.5. (Did not spend much time though, but the prompth was already there on the chat screen so I switched the model and sent it again) Gemini 3 worked much better and I actually committed the changes that it created. I don't mean its revolutionary or anything but it provided a nice summary of my request and created a decent simple solution. Sonnet had created a bunch of overarching changes that I would not even bother reviewing. Seems nice. Will probably use it for 2 weeks until someone else releases a 1.0001x better model.
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I think from last few releases of these models from all companies, I have not observed much improvements in the response of these models. Their claims and launches are a little over hyped.
I was hoping Bash would go away or get replaced at some point. It's starting to look like it's going to be another 20 years of Bash but with AI doodads.
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Nushell scratches the itch for me 95% of the time. I haven't yet convinced anybody else to make the switch, but I'm trying. Haven't yet fixed the most problematic bug for my useage, but I'm trying. What are you doing to help kill bash?
What's the easiest way to set up automatic code review for PRs for my team on GitHub using this model?
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Ask it. If it's good enough to be useful on your code base, it better be good enough to instruct you on how to use it. How easy it is depends on whether or not they've built that kind of thing in
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https://github.com/marketplace/gemini-code-assist
No gemini-3-flash yet, right? Any ETA on that mentioned? 2.5-flash has been amazing in terms of cost/value ratio.
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ive found gemini 2.5-flash works better (for.agentic coding) than pro, too
Google actually changed it somewhat recently (3 months ago, give or take) and you can use Gemini CLI with the "regular" Google AI Pro subscription (~22eur/month). Before that, it required a separate subscription I can't find the announcement anymore, but you can see it under benefits here https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406?hl=en The initial separate subscriptions were confusing at best. Current situation is pretty much same as Anthropic/OpenAI - straightforward Edit: changed ~1 month ago ( https://old.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1npiv2o/google_ai_pro_and_ultra_subscribers_now_have/ )
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how do i actually make it use that though? i got a free year of subscription from buying a phone, but all i get is the free tier in the gemini cli
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I also got 1 year through buying my pixel. If you login with the same account through Gemini CLI, it should work (works for me) However, Gemini CLI is a rather bad product. There is (was?) an issue that makes the CLI fall back to flash very soon in every session. This comment explains it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45681063 I haven't used it in a while, except for really minor things, so I can't tell if this is resolved or not
I see -- but does this allow me to us the models within "Antigravity" with the same subscription? I poked around and couldn't figure this out.
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I don't know either tbh. I wouldn't be surprised it the answer is no (and it will come later or something like that) I also tried to use Gemini 3 in my Gemini CLI and it's not available yet (it's available to all Ultra, but not all Pro subscribers), I needed to sign up to a waitlist All in all, Google is terrible at launching things like that in a concise and understandable way
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Might not be decided yet. The AG pricing page says: "Public preview Individual plan $0/month" "Coming soon Team plan"
I think I am in this AI fatigue phase. I am past all hype with models, tools and agents and back to problem and solution approach, sometimes code gen with AI , sometimes think and ask for a piece of code. But not offloading to AI and buying all the bs, waiting it to do magic with my codebase.
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And by this time next year, this comment is going to look very silly
I agree but if Gemini 3 is as good as people on HN said about the preview, then this is the wrong announcement to sleep on.
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No LLM has ever been as good as people said it was. That doesn't mean this one won't be, but it does make it an unlikely bet based on past trends.
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There are 8 Google news articles in the top 15 articles on the HN front page right now. Google being able to skip ahead of every other AI company is wild. They just sat back and watched, then decided it was time to body the competition. The DOJ really should break up Google [1]. They have too many incumbent advantages that were already abuse of monopoly power. [1] https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/ - call your reps and tell them!
I think it's fun to see what is not even considered magic anymore today.
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Our ability to adapt to new things is both a blessing and a curse.
People would have had a heart attack if they saw this 5 years ago for the first time. Now artificial brains are “meh” :)
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True of almost every new technology.
When I see CAD, I always think of Casting Assistant Device.
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Zero magic in this world, sorry.
Computer aided design. Tree.js can be CAD. But I agree it’s not meant for CAD even though you can do it.
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Three.js is not CAD. It is an API for drawing 3D graphics in a browser. 3D graphics, in general, is not CAD. Blender is not CAD. You cannot do CAD operations in blender. I'm not being nit picky here. I think there are issues beyond terminology that you may not be familiar with, as it is clearly not your field. That's ok. The "design" in computer aided design is engineering design. This is not the same definition of "design" used in, say, graphic design. Something is not called CAD because it helps you create an image that looks like a product on a computer. It is CAD because it creates engineering design files (blueprints) that can be used for the physical manufacture of a device. This places very tight and important constraints on the methods used, and capabilities supported. Blender is a sculpting program. Its job is to create geometry that can be fed into a rendering program to make pretty pictures. Parasolid is a CAD geometry kernel at the core of many CAD programs, which has the job of producing manufacturable blueprints. The operations supported map to physical manufacturing steps - milling, lathe, and drill operations. The modeling steps use constraints in order to make sure, e.g., that screw holes line up. Blender doesn't support any of that. To an engineer, saying that an LLM gave you a blender script for a CAD operation is causing all sorts of alarm klaxons to go off.
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> Blender doesn't support any of that. ... without plugins. https://www.cadsketcher.com/
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The "-like" in CAD-like is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Understanding precisely why Gemini 3 isn't front of the pack on SWE Bench is really what I was hoping to understand here. Especially for a blog post targeted at software developers...
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It doesn't matter, the real benchmark is taking the community temperature on the model after a few weeks of usage.
Does anyone trust benchmarks at this point? Genuine question. Isn't the scientific consensus that they are broken and poor evaluation tools?
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They overly emphasize tasks with small context without noise and red herrings in the context.
Maybe if you confirm to its expectations for how you use it. 4.5 is absolutely terrible for following directions, thinks it knows better than you, and will gaslight you until specifically called out on its mistake. I have scripted prompts for long duration automated coding workflows of the fire and forget, issue description -> pull request variety. Sonnet 4 does better than you’d expect: it generates high quality mergable code about half the time. Sonnet 4.5 fails literally every time.
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I'm very happy with it TBH, it has some things that annoy me a little bit: - slower compared to other models that will also do the job just fine (but excels at more complex tasks), - is very insistent on creating loads of .MD files with overly verbose documentation on what it did (not really what I ask it to do), - it actually deleted a file twice and went "oops, I accidentaly deleted the file, let me see if I can restore it!", I haven't seen this happen with any other agent
SWEBench-Verified is probably benchmaxxed at this stage. Claude isn't even the top performer, that honor goes to Doubao [1]. Also, the confidence interval for a such a small dataset is about 3 percent points, so these differences could just be up to chance. [1] https://www.swebench.com/
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claude 4.5 gets 82% on their own highly customized scaffolding. (parallel compute with a scoring function). That beats Doubao
Gemini 3 (blog.google)
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Sets a new record on the Extended NYT Connections benchmark: 96.8 ( https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections/ ). Grok 4 is at 92.1, GPT-5 Pro at 83.9, Claude Opus 4.1 Thinking 16K at 58.8. Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 57.6, so this is a huge improvement.
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Has anyone who is a regular Opus / GPT5-Codex-High / GPT5 Pro user given this model a workout? Each Google release is accompanied by a lot of devrel marketing that sounds impressive but whenever I put the hours into eval myself it comes up lacking. Would love to hear that it replaces another frontier model for someone who is not already bought into the Gemini ecosystem.
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At this point I'm only using google models via Vertex AI for my apps. They have a weird QoS rate limit but in general Gemini has been consistently top tier for everything I've thrown at it. Anecdotal, but I've also not experienced any regression in Gemini quality where Claude/OpenAI might push iterative updates (or quantized variants for performance) that cause my test bench to fail more often.
Every big new model release we see benchmarks like ARC and Humanity's Last Exam climbing higher and higher. My question is, how do we know that these benchmarks are not a part of the training set used for these models? It could easily have been trained to memorize the answers. Even if the datasets haven't been copy pasted directly, I'm sure it has leaked onto the internet to some extent. But I am looking forward to trying it out. I find Gemini to be great as handling large-context tasks, and Google's inference costs seem to be among the cheapest.
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Even if the benchmark themselves are kept secret, the process to create them is not that difficult and anyone with a small team of engineers could make a replica in their own labs to train their models on. Given the nature of how those models work, you don't need exact replicas.
I am personally impressed by the continued improvement in ARC-AGI-2, where Gemini 3 got 31.1% (vs ChatGPT 5.1's 17.6%). To me this is the kind of problem that does not lend itself well to LLMs - many of the puzzles test the kind of thing that humans intuit because of millions of years of evolution, but these concepts do not necessarily appear in written form (or when they do, it's not clear how they connect to specific ARC puzzles). The fact that these models can keep getting better at this task given the setup of training is mind-boggling to me. The ARC puzzles in question: https://arcprize.org/arc-agi/2/
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What I would do if I was in the position of a large company in this space is to arrange an internal team to create an ARC replica, covering very similar puzzles and use that as part of the training. Ultimately, most benchmarks can be gamed and their real utility is thus short-lived. But I think this is also fair to use any means to beat it.
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Humans study for tests. They just tend to forget.
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I agree that for any given test, you could build a specific pipeline to optimize for that test. I supposed that's why it is helpful to have many tests. However, many people have worked hard to optimize tools specifically for ARC over many years, and it's proven to be a particularly hard test to optimize for. This is why I find it so interesting that LLMs can do it well at all, regardless of whether tests like it are included in training.
A nice Easter egg in the Gemini 3 docs [1]: If you are transferring a conversation trace from another model, ... to bypass strict validation in these specific scenarios, populate the field with this specific dummy string: "thoughtSignature": "context_engineering_is_the_way_to_go" [1] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3?thinking=high#migrating_from_other_models
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It's an artifact of the problem that they don't show you the reasoning output but need it for further messages so they save each api conversation on their side and give you a reference number. It sucks from a GDPR compliance perspective as well as in terms of transparent pricing as you have no way to control reasoning trace length (which is billed at the much higher output rate) other than switching between low/high but if the model decides to think longer "low" could result in more tokens used than "high" for a prompt where the model decides not to think that much. "thinking budgets" are now "legacy" and thus while you can constrain output length you cannot constrain cost. Obviously you also cannot optimize your prompts if some red herring makes the LLM get hung up on something irrelevant only to realize this in later thinking steps. This will happen with EVERY SINGLE prompt if it's caused by something in your system prompt. Finding what makes the model go astray can be rather difficult with 15k token system prompts or a multitude of MCP tools, you're basically blinded while trying to optimize a black box. Obviously you can try different variations of different parts of your system prompt or tool descriptions but just because they result in less thinking tokens does not mean they are better if those reasoning steps where actually beneficial (if only in edge cases) this would be immediately apparent upon inspection but hard/impossible to find out without access to the full Chain of Thought. For the uninitiated, the reasons OpenAI started replacing the CoT with summaries, were A. to prevent rapid distillation as they suspected deepSeek to have used for R1 and B. to prevent embarrassment if App users see the CoT and find parts of it objectionable/irrelevant/absurd (reasoning steps that make sense for an LLM do not necessarily look like human reasoning). That's a tradeoff that is great with end-users but terrible for developers. As Open Weights LLMs necessarily output their full reasoning traces the potential to optimize prompts for specific tasks is much greater and will for certain applications certainly outweigh the performance delta to Google/OpenAI.
Microsoft hasn't been very quiet about it, at least in my experience. Every time I boot up Windows I get some kind of blurb about an AI feature.
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Man, remember the days where we'd lose our minds at our operating systems doing stuff like that?
Isn't Gmail covered under the Workspace privacy policy which forbids using that for training data. So I'm guessing that's excluded by the "in accordance" clause.
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The real question is, "For how long?"
I've been so happy to see Google wake up. Many can point to a long history of killed products and soured opinions but you can't deny theyve been the great balancing force (often for good) in the industry. - Gmail vs Outlook - Drive vs Word - Android vs iOS - Worklife balance and high pay vs the low salary grind of before. Theyve done heaps for the industry. Im glad to see signs of life. Particularly in their P/E which was unjustly low for awhile.
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If you consider surveillance capitalism and dark pattern nudges a good thing, then sure. Gemini has the potential to obliterate their current business model completely so I wouldn't consider that "waking up".
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All those examples date back to the 2000s. Android has seen some significant improvements, but everything else has stagnated if not enshittified- remember when google told us not to ever worry about deleting anything?- and then started backing up my photos without me asking and are now constantly nagging me to pay them a monthly fee? They have done a lot, but most of it was in the "don't be evil" days and they are a fading memory.
> Drive vs Word You mean Drive vs OneDrive or, maybe Docs vs Word ?
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Surely they meant Writely vs Word
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Workspace vs Office
Ironically, OpenAI was conceived as a way to balance Google's dominance in AI.
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Pffft. OpenAI was conceived to be Open, too.
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It’s a common pattern for upstarts to embrace openness as a way to differentiate and gain a foothold then become progressively less open once they get bigger. Android is a great example.
Google Antigravity (antigravity.google)
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I've clocked out on agentic AI IDEs. Not installing anymore until I hit an obvious wall with my current ones.
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Another Google product whose launch will be used to justify somebody's promotion, only to be left for dead only a few months later after said promoted person moves on to something else. Why would I even bother getting mildly invested in this when the product launch/promotion incentive structure at Google is so well known?
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A 5 syllable name for a product makes me wonder wtf the marketing team is doing.
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Just from the name, I thought this was going to be Google's official take on the classic "Google Gravity" site from ages ago: https://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-gravity/index.html I used to love leaving that site open on public PCs and watching the reactions that resulted :)
We have a real, serious problem when even Google (presumably with a large share of the world's engineering might) is just forking VSCode.
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Wait till you hear about how much Linux they use.
> Spin up agents to tackle routine tasks that take you out of your flow, such as codebase research, bug fixes, and backlog tasks. The software of the future, where nobody on staff knows how anything is built, no one understands why anything breaks, and cruft multiplies exponentially. But at least we're not taken out of our flow!
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The software of the future, where nobody on staff knows how anything is built Doesn't this apply to people who code in high level languages?
On the pricing page it says that for public preview they are offering a free individual plan with "generous rate limits". I gave it an HTML file and asked it to create Jinja templates from it and 2 minutes later (still planning, no additional prompt) I got this: > Model quota limit exceeded. You have reached the quota limit for this model.
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I had pretty much the same experience.
Quirks? like context window?
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I'm saying it's egregious to expect all users to know the fact that an HTML document, for some reason, uses an enormous amount of context in an LLM designed specifically for working with code .
Honestly, the full page doesn't give you much more. Not a SINGLE product image. All paragraphs about "agentic" blah-blah you have read 100s of times by now - I do not see how this is anything different from all the other AI VS Code forks, besides that it comes with Gemini from the start.
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Seems like they jumped the gun on the website release, the first version I saw was a wall of text, now it has photos and videos. Maybe they have an agentic CICD
Thank you for the demonstrating the reasoning that leads to these decisions.
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This made me laugh, I assume you are calling me an old fogey and I will be glad to take it. This is why they don't let me near the marketing stuff.
- A new "AI" IDE announced - It's VS Code Like clockwork!
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It's also an absolutely basic fork. They haven't even bothered with a custom theme, or custom UI, it's just vscode with an agents window slapped on top. Weirdly, out of all the vscode forks the best UI is probably bytedance's TRAE
This is why I have much respect for the Zed team as they are chasing originality, not just slap something onto VS Code and call it a new IDE.
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I love Zed code. Sad that Sublime Text is not keeping up.
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These are two of the fastest editors, and I use both, but I don't think they're for the same thing: Zed is for multi-file projects with moderate IDE abstractions (Worse than Jetbrains; better than most others); Sublime is for editing one-off files with syntax highlighting.
Gemini 3 Pro Preview Live in AI Studio (aistudio.google.com)
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I just tested the Gemini 3 preview as well, and its capabilities are honestly surprising. As an experiment I asked it to recreate a small slice of Zelda , nothing fancy, just a mock interface and a very rough combat scene. It managed to put together a pretty convincing UI using only SVG, and even wired up some simple interactions. It’s obviously nowhere near a real game, but the fact that it can structure and render something that coherent from a single prompt is kind of wild. Curious to see how far this generation can actually go once the tooling matures.
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It’s over for Anthropic. That’s why Google’s cool with Claude being on Azure. Also probably over for OpenAI
Out of curiosity, I gave it the latest project euler problem published on 11/16/2025, very likely out of the training data Gemini thought for 5m10s before giving me a python snippet that produced the correct answer. The leaderboard says that the 3 fastest human to solve this problem took 14min, 20min and 1h14min respectively Even thought I expect this sort of problem to very much be in the distribution of what the model has been RL-tuned to do, it's wild that frontier model can now solve in minutes what would take me days
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I tried it with gpt-5.1 thinking, and it just searched and found a solution online :p
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To be fair a lot of the impressive Elo scores models get are simply due to the fact that they're faster: many serious competitive coders could get the same or better results given enough time. But seeing these results I'd be surprised if by the end of the decade we don't have something that is to these puzzles what Stockfish is to chess. Effectively ground truth and often coming up with solutions that would be absolutely ridiculous for a human to find within a reasonable time limit.
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Wow. Sounds pretty impressive.
> Eliezer Yudkowsky is a central figure in the article, mentioned multiple times as the intellectual originator of the community from which the "Zizians" splintered. His ideas and organizations are foundational to the entire narrative.
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And yet you could eliminate him entirely and the story is still coherent. The story isn't about Yudkowsky. At each level of summarization you have to make hard decisions about what to keep. Not every story about the United States needs to mention George Washington.
Well, I tried a variation of a prompt I was messing with in Flash 2.5 the other day in a thread about AI-coded analog clock faces. Gemini Pro 3 Preview gave me a result far beyond what I saw with Flash 2.5, and got it right in a single shot.[0] I can't say I'm not impressed, even though it's a pretty constrained example. > Please generate an analog clock widget, synchronized to actual system time, with hands that update in real time and a second hand that ticks at least once per second. Make sure all the hour markings are visible and put some effort into making a modern, stylish clock face. Please pay attention to the correct alignment of the numbers, hour markings, and hands on the face. [0] https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%5B%221W5xcsbljPVcaYTveFTdvOWdiqh_PgOF2%22%5D,%22action%22:%22open%22,%22userId%22:%22105800868059822502362%22,%22resourceKeys%22:%7B%7D%7D&usp=sharing
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This is cool. Gemini 2.5 Pro was also capable of this. Gemini was able to recreate famous piece of clock artwork in July: https://gemini.google.com/app/93087f373bd07ca2 "Against the Run": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xfvPqTDOXo
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It looks quite nice, though to nitpick, it has “quartz” and “design & engineering” for no reason.
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The subtle "wiggle" animation that the second hand makes after moving doesn't fire when it hits 12. Literally unwatchable.
I'm not a mathematician but I think we underestimate how useful pure mathematics can be to tell whether we are approaching AGI. Can the mathematicians here try ask it to invent new novel math related to [Insert your field of specialization] and see if it comes up with something new and useful? Try lowering the temperature, use SymPy etc.
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Terry Tao is writing about this on his blog.
Perception seems to be one of the main constraints on LLMs that not much progress has been made on. Perhaps not surprising, given perception is something evolution has worked on since the inception of life itself. Likely much, much more expensive computationally than it receives credit for.
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Why should it have to be expensive computationally? How do brains do it with such a low amount of energy? I think catching the brain abilities even of a bug might be very hard, but that does not mean that there isn't a way to do it with little computational power. It requires having the correct structures/models/algorithms or whatever is the precise jargon.
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I strongly suspect it's a tokenization problem. Text and symbols fit nicely in tokens, but having something like a single "dog leg" token is a tough problem to solve.
My favorite benchmark is to analyze a very long audio file recording of a management meeting and produce very good notes along with a transcript labeling all the speakers. 2.5 was decently good at generating the summary, but it was terrible at labeling speakers. 3.0 has so far absolutely nailed speaker labeling.
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I'd do the transcript and the summary parts separately. Dedicated audio models from vendors like ElevenLabs or Soniox use speaker detection models to produce an accurate speaker based transcript while I'm not necessarily sure that Google's models do so, maybe they just hallucinate the speakers instead.
Short Little Difficult Books (countercraft.substack.com)
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Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, Penguin Classics (1981 edition). Extremely tortuous phraseology. But I finished it, with gritted teeth at 15. I have long since abandoned the desire to finish every book I start. Life is too short.
Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend that reading "difficult" books makes you morally-superior to the rest of us. I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.
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There's always that person who needs to make a knee-jerk inferiority feeling into the author's problem. The author never made value judgments about people. In fact, he starts by pointing out that he thinks those kinds of judgments either way are silly.
Same with things like (picking at random) The Great Gatsby and a lot of literature having to do with adult relationships and romance. How on earth is a 16-year-old in 2025 going to understand what's happening in Gatsby? I read it, wrote some papers and got As on them, but didn't really make sense of it at the time.
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The Great Gatsby is an Americanized version of a Greek tragedy, I don't think it's too hard for a 16 year old to understand. It's no "Rabbit, Run", at least.
Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright (bbc.com)
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This is literally the most common complaint to the NTSC in America. For some reasons governments seem powerless in the headlights... like deer.
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Two things I haven’t seen mentioned at a first glance: - headlight covers fogging up/getting cloudy or even yellowing from sun exposure; these will scatter the light so more of what should go onto the street will be visible by oncoming vehicles - 3rd party aftermarket LED replacement bulbs; usually illegal and completely mismatching what the mirrors in the headlights were made for, but that doesn’t keep people from buying and using them
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I drive a little 2002 Mini, those are really low to the ground. The modern hulking trucks and SUVs + with what I call "Bright-Ass Lights" + me getting older with my myopia turned driving at night into constant struggle to not be blind. Sigh. Nothing to be done, it's a tragedy of commons there
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Congressional hearings on headlights seem to focus on lumens, but the bigger issue is misalignment. I worry that setting a lumen cap will undermine LEDs strengths. Adaptive matrix like Tesla Model Y etc , which shade oncoming and leading traffic, allow incredible visibility without the glare. Even with static headlights, the beams need to be realigned every year or two. Vibration puts them out of order. A weak beam pointed at your eye will be more blinding than a much stronger beam aimed properly.
Nearly all UK drivers = "total of 1,850 drivers". Also mind you, in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative. I hold this article somewhat sus. With that said, yeah, headlights are kinda bright these days
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Nearly all UK drivers = a large majority of 1,850 drivers, with enough diversity in the sample set that one can reasonably extrapolate from that to the population as a whole. (Do you throw this criticism at every survey?) > in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative. With the narrative on headlight brightness ?
Also, the plastic headlight “lenses” on many cars tend to get cloudy and develop micro-scratches over time. This reduces the efficiency of the low beams, and instead of fixing the problem, many drivers of older cars simply drive with their high beams on, which creates even more glare for everyone else. Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question — it’s prohibitively expensive for many owners of older cars to replace the whole headlight units, especially since there are no penalties for driving around like this. Polishing the lenses is risky and usually only a short-term solution.
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In the UK, a car with cloudy headlight lenses will fail its annual roadworthiness check, and the owner will have to pay for the lenses to be polished.
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Much alike in Hungary... theoretically. Here, unfortunately, practice is different.
I think most vehicles are operating with their headlamps adjusted too high. I think the majority are now completely out of spec [1]. My normal lights are very respectably adjusted and are the older dimmer type, but my full beams are blinding - I rarely ever use them. A few times a driver comes towards me with full beams on, I flash mine and light up the entire night. The quality of driver is also decreasing. One of our MPs computed the data and discovered "Since 2016, 1,367,942 foreign drivers have been issued a driving licence without taking a UK test". There are apparently 42.1 mn licenses [2], so ~1/30 never took a UK test. It's getting dangerous out there. [1] https://mattersoftesting.blog.gov.uk/the-mot-headlamp-aim-test-is-changing/ [2] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/know-how/population-of-the-uk/
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We could get very far by mandating easier adjustment of headlights, and free adjustment at auto shops. It only takes a couple minutes to adjust the headlights , especially at a shop with a lift and a gauge.
I always wondered if it would be feasible to make the headlights produce polarized light (e.g. vertical), and have windscreens filter out that polarization... I guess it would only work if the scattering of light off of whatever is being illuminated sufficiently depolarizes the light. Anyhow, I thought it was a neat idea when I was a teenager. There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p
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If you polarized the light and windshield to 45° off vertical, opposite direction traffic would have their windshield at 90° to your light…
The curse of modern super bright LEDs. Add to that list; super bright red brake lights, and a new trend for animated turning lights / indicators. Looks like something we'd have installed as teenagers after watching Knight Rider. Really distracting. Some of the towns here also started scattering flashing LEDs over every road sign they can find. Some areas feel like driving through Blackpool Illuminations. The worst offender locally is a roundabout light that flashes blue, which of course you assume to be an emergency vehicle approaching.
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Housings on indicators that reflect so much sunlight you can’t see that they’re on.
I've seen flashing third brake lights too. I don't get adding flashing lights to brake and tail lights. It's actually worse, flashing lights make it harder for us to judge distance as now there's no steady queue needed for depth perception. It's why when cycling I've always opted for a solid taillight instead of the flashing ones.
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I’ve seen a few cars that have strobe-then-solid brake lights from the factory, where the strobe only fires under hard deceleration. That seems like a safety win to me. (Remember it on a high-spec Mercedes SL, and I’m pretty sure it was stock.)
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Flashing third brake light (in the US) is a dealer profit addon. Personally, I think these violate federal vehicle safety law. I'll add a link to a federal letter that I think agrees with me... But no enforcement means dealers alter the wiring harness to add these on to all their inventory and add a line item on the bill. They'll remove it if you complain, but the wiring harness has been altered.
Or don't go above 50mph down country roads at night? If your eyes aren't as good as they used to be, all the more reason to drive slower
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I am pretty sure that is what I wrote
Years ago I read a comment here sharing how they'd taken to wearing amber glasses when walking at night, so they could be protected against the excessively-blue LED streetlights in their neighborhood. I bought amber safety glasses. They magically took the shock out of the bad headlights, but I also noticed that I wasn't seeing pedestrians until it was too late. My local sunglass shop had some yellow fit-over safety glasses. I found they cut out enough of the blue from the bad headlights to take the shock out of the experience of driving at night. https://cocoons.com/shop/safety/lightguard-medium-fitovers-lemon/ Harbor Freight's $2 yellow safety glasses are almost as good. I intend to stock up the next time I notice they're on sale for $1: https://www.harborfreight.com/yellow-lens-safety-glasses-66823.html 4 years ago I asked HN why the automotive industry wasn't using safe LEDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334405 The activists at /r/fuckyourheadlights figured out that the weaponized headlights put a little dim spot at the center of their headlight beams, exactly where the regulators measure the light intensity. 2nd picture clearly shows the dim spot: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1hefn86/holy_shitballs_there_are_deliberate_dark_spots_in/ Summary of research: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/18lrf3d/a_summary_of_activist_research_this_is_where_were/
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I used to wear these amber glasses for my motorcycle rides back when I was still riding. They not only did a great job of improving my visibility (be it subjective or not), but they also seemed to reduce overall fatigue for me. I should pick up another pair for regular driving though, thanks for the reminder.
Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior. As for LEDs, to me, the Tesla Model 3 headlights are the worst offender, but not all of them, just the majority. I can look down a column of oncoming cars and pick out the Model 3s from a few blocks distance. I suspect that the Model 3 headlights are often maladjusted as they have a user/driver-accessible headlight aiming menu and it looks to me like a lot of Tesla owners get in to that menu and do some freelance aiming. Plus, a lot of Model 3 drivers around here—and there are a lot of them here (Seattle area)—seem to turn on everything, brights, DRLs, fog lights, every lamp. Another egregious offender is the Acura Jewel-Eye headlights although I am seeing ever more cars with headlights set to stun. The worst situation is waiting at an intersection where the pavement is crowned to drain the intersection, making the headlights on the cars opposite just miserable to contend with. Sometimes so bad I can’t see the traffic lights. I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.
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> I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly. Maybe Corey Hart had the right idea … sunglasses at night
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> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior. Something has changed in how we use headlights, and not for the better. Historically, drivers behaved very differently. When "brights" were actually rare and reserved for dark stretches of highway, you'd dim them the moment you saw another car approaching. Often that meant switching to low beams when the other vehicle was more than a thousand feet away. Courtesy and safety were the norm. The technology has come a long way. Early headlights in the 1880s burned oil or kerosene. Acetylene gas lamps followed, and electric lighting appeared in the early 1900s. For decades after 1940, U.S. regulations froze headlight design into a two-lamp, 7-inch sealed-beam configuration. That rule unintentionally limited improvements in beam shape and brightness. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did halogens and replaceable-bulb designs become widely permitted, which opened the door to much brighter and more varied systems. Then came the xenon era in the late 1990s and early 2000s. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps felt futuristic at the time, but they were also infamous for their glare, especially when installed into housings not designed for them. This is where "riced-out" aftermarket kits made things worse. People would drop cheap HID or later LED bulbs into reflector housings built for halogen. The result was scattered, unfocused light that looked bright from the driver's seat but created a wall of glare for everyone else. That trend never fully went away. Today, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) governs headlamps. It sets minimum performance requirements and basic definitions for high and low beams, but it does not impose strict limits on maximum brightness or color temperature. The old "300 candlepower requires a dimmer switch" phrasing still floats around, but there is no tight federal cap on lumens or color warmth. States can enforce aiming requirements, but in practice they rarely do. Nobody is pulling cars over with a light meter. Modern LEDs changed the equation again. They're efficient, crisp, and extremely "white" (actually "blue") which makes them appear even brighter to human eyes at night. Complaints about perceived glare have been climbing for years, and there's no shortage of real-world examples of it in the wild. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/ Automakers tried to help with automatic high-beam systems, but these were designed to detect oncoming headlamps, not pedestrians. If you're walking your dogs at night, the system may not dim because it "sees" nothing to react to. Many drivers rely on auto mode and never manually intervene, so they cruise around blasting full brightness without realizing it. My workaround is simple. I carry a high-power flashlight and give a quick shine toward cars running high beams. The auto-dimmer interprets it as another vehicle and drops to low beam. It also alerts the driver that something is off. Plenty of neighbors have told me they had no idea their headlights weren't dimming. (Teslas are by far the worst offenders.) This is the flashlight I use: https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.product.4000368630.html
Back when electronics and servos were unaffordable or unavailable, it made sense to have a low beam height control as the resting pitch of your car could vary by several degrees based on passenger/cargo load, trailer tongue weight, etc. It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.
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[delayed]
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior. This is one of my pet peeves. I've categorized it into what I believe are the main causes: 1. People just don't know as well today that the blue indicator means you're blinding people 2. People with newer cars which will automatically turn off the headlights, including the brights, when you turn off and leave the car. 3. People with older cars where the low-beams are burned out or broken I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone". And/or, get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver. Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!
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My other pet peeve is the opposite - they've got LED daytime running lights, and use those instead of headlights. They're driving around at 11pm with no taillights and abysmal forward lighting, but there's enough of a glow from the DRLs that they assume their lights are on. Or worse, they're accustomed to "automatic" lights and don't even know where the switch is, so they're driving around at dusk or in fog, rain, or snow in a white, gray, or black vehicle without their lights on. I have also been tempted to purchase digital billboard space, but not on the side of the road. I want LED signs on my roof rack (one forward, one back) with column or two of buttons on the dash to call up a slate of messages: 1. TURN YOUR BRIGHTS OFF! BLUE MEANS BLINDING. 1b. OW! YOUR HEADLIGHTS ARE MISALIGNED. 2. TURN YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON! THOSE ARE DRLs. 3. TURN LIGHTS ON TO BE SEEN EVEN IF IT'S NOT DARK. 4. MY SAFE FOLLOWING DISTANCE IS NOT A SPOT FOR YOU. 5. YOU ARE TAILGATING. I WILL NOT SPEED FOR YOU. 6. YIELD DOES NOT MEAN STOP. 7. I AM ZIPPER MERGING, NOT CUTTING THE LINE. 8. DRIVE CAREFULLY! I JUST SAW A DEER. 9. GO AHEAD, I SEE YOU. 10. YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR VEHICLE, PULL OVER. 11. THANK YOU! Plus a few spare slots to be implemented as needs arise. I've been unimpressed with the automatic high-beams on my wife's newer Toyota and on other rentals I've driven, they usually depend on a direct line-of-sight to the other car's headlights, which means they stay on just long enough to hit the windshield of another car cresting a hill and blind them. Then they courteously turn off a few camera frames and vision analyses after the low beams become visible. If a __competent__ driver is controlling the high/low beams manually, they'll see the headlights of the other car illuminating the trees and such and turn off the high beams a couple critical seconds earlier. But I admit that the automatic systems are miles better at managing it than the __incompetent__ drivers who are all too common.
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I have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns). For those behind me, I've discovered that my side mirror has an angle where it reliably bounces the beams back. I've gotten more than a couple of drivers to turn their beams down with this method (but they have to be tailgating for it to work, which usually means we're already in an adversarial situation).
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Haha I've also angled my side mirror out of my eyes, which incidentally is back towards the car behind me. I of course angle it back if I need to change lanes, but it's such an annoying thing I have to do just to see the road ahead of me. At this point I put full blame on car manufacturers and lack of government regulation and enforcement. Lights will keep getting brighter because lights are getting brighter. It's a death spiral.
>This is a change in behavior. >I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly. The solution is legislation and enforcement. Driving at night now makes me afraid for my safety because I'm literally blinded by oncoming traffic, and I'm sure that many other people share the same sentiment. I would happily argue that driving with lights bright enough to impair other drivers counts as wreckless driving and ought to be treated as such, but as far as I can tell, there are no legislative limits on directional lumen output or directional calibration for front-facing lights on cars, which leaves "wreckless" open to interpretation. This issue requires legislation that affects car manufacturers to prevent them from putting dangerous lights in their cars, and legislation that requires regular inspection of cars regarding their lumen output and headlight calibration. Most US states already require yearly inspections for emissions for most cars in order to re-register them; there are already means and methods in place for this to happen, it just needs to be done. I'm sick of feeling like im going to die every time I drive home because some asshole wants to see everything a mile in front of him.
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It's "reckless", not "wreckless". Recklessness is often correlated with wreck-fullness.
Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes. CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adaptable-high-beams-cars
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It's solving the wrong problem, and doesn't help the typical situation of being on hills, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc. Just turn the damn maximum output down.
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The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.
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It's not a bug, it's a feature? US manufacturers are not widely known for technological innovations. Deviating standards are a way to keep them competitive in their domestic market.
Can confirm, my Model 3 had its lights angled too high from the factory. Only realized after a few people flashed their high beams at me during my first week driving. Thankfully it was easy to adjust.
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Thank you for your service
I usually drive with only the DRLs even at night. My vision is good enough that there's no reason to blind other drivers. I only use the beams at all when there's bad weather that fucks with visibility, or when the road has no retroreflectors. Also ever since a collision repair the headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway.
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Username checks.
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On many cars, the beam of the DRLs are more offensive to oncoming drivers when used at night. Properly repairing your car might make it less distracting/infuriating.
At least in NA, if you only have the DRLs on, it means your rear lights aren't on.
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Anecdata around SV: I've seen an uptick in urban night drivers with only their DRLs and no tail lights.
Yeah. When I ride my bike in the sticks and pass walkers in the dark, I try to disable my headlight a few seconds before I pass them. Otherwise all they see is a bright light approaching. Disabling the lights for a moment seems better than one party not seeing anything. (Or both parties, e.g. two bikes, or runners with forehead LED light.) After all, even in the countryside the darkness usually is far from complete. You still see quite a few meters without any headlights. Though the tradeoff would be different for cars with their much higher speed.
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[delayed]
What part of my comments tells you my lights are not proper?
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The lights of that Honda: > When I got my Honda van with stock LED headlights about a year ago, people started flashing me that my brights were on.
Desperately we need to reign in car "style" choices like this. Beyond headlights being too bright, lift kits should be banned and tint regulations should be enforced. Same with sound regulations. Public roads are not race tracks; they are for people.
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Pfft, ok Karen. Can I still put a red nose on my grill for Christmas season or is that gonna be banned too? If we weren't discussing lights that are too bright I get the feeling you'd have put smoked lights on your "things I don't like and want to ban" list. All the things on your list are things that are fine if you're not stupid about them. In what world is a minivan with tinted windows not ok but the panel van variant of the same car is? What does it even matter with how useless 2nd and 3rd row windows on a lot of crossovers are? What makes plus or minus a few inches of vehicle height a big deal? OEMs routinely make variations like that among their different trims of the same crossover? Obnoxious exhausts are obnoxious, but you literally can't tell how many good ones are running around out there because they're closed to the same under normal driving conditions. God forbid people engage in a little self expression with the first or second most expensive thing they own.
> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them. I don't know about the UK, but out here in France, this is wrong on most counts. Many country roads have no lines, reflective or otherwise. There will be pedestrians walking around. Also, roads are not always in tip-top shape nor clean, so you need light to be able to see. However, I do agree that maybe extremely bright lights mounted high are a nuisance.
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[delayed]
> Smart / adaptive lighting is another option These may actually be part of the problem. My dad's 2022 Toyota has "smart" high-beams. That means that when it detects a car in front, it'll switch off the high-beams (as opposed to adapt their pattern). This is supposed to work with cars going both ways. In my experience, it will detect cars going the same way about half the time, and incoming cars about 3/4 of the time. Now, since it's not completely broken, I suspect many people who only pay the minimum attention to their driving, and the rest to their phone, will simply leave the high-beams on and figure the car will deal with traffic. So, when the car fails to detect the oncoming car, its pretty bright lights will completely blind the driver.
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My 2020 Lexus has the same system. I’m amazed at how well it works for same-direction traffic and how terrible it is for opposite direction traffic (which seems like it should be a vastly easier problem to solve). I wish it was usable, but I think it’s not.
Sure but you should be able to safely drive the speed limit under normal (Ie not pouring rain, snow, etc) conditions. Night is a normal condition.
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Where I live there are speed limits but rarely minimum speeds, only on divided highways as far as I know. Everyone is different, some people just aren't comfortable driving the speed limit at a given moment. We should literally back off those folks, they're not what's making traffic horrible in my experience.
Driving too fast for the conditions (but within the limit) would usually be considered Driving without Due Care and Attention even if you don't crash (although the likelihood of anyone being around to enforce it on a deserted country road is pretty low).
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That's not the purpose of that law. That's just the pretext they use to get the useful idiots to endorse it. The purpose of that laws is if you do something stupid but below the speed limit and not violating any other specific laws they've got something to nab you for.
All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s. You could literally walk into the auto parts store and buy a headlight to replace yours, regardless of make and model Somehow we all did ok back then with standard high/low beams from lights which are very dim and warm compared to the harsh white LED lights of today It seems to me that this is just another example of the arms race of modern cars. You need a big SUV to feel safe on a road full of SUVs and trucks. You need an array of dazzling LEDs to compete with every other car out there. And we all lose.
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> All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s. Hey, there were several models. For a long time you had the two filament bulbs vs single filament. And then around the late 70s, you could have circle or rectangle, so there were 4 bulbs to choose from! Tremendous variety.
> And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them. Animals, specifically deer. That said, you can use brights when no other cars are nearby, and when there is a car coming its worth a few seconds of extra risk to not blind the other guy and put him at risk.
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Once we figure our deer wasting disease, we need to start the breeding program for reflectorized deer. It'll solve a lot of problems.
I feel the same way in America, I think there should be stricter regulations on how bright a car's headlights are allowed to be for it to be street legal. Wouldn't mind having a cap on blue-light levels in addition.
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The US has clear regulations on headlights that limit the number of Watts. That worked when everyone had halogen bulbs, but doesn't fit with LEDs.
There are a two things contributing to "headlights too bright" in the US... First, SUVs are really tall... If you're in a sedan (or worse, a Miata) and get close enough to an oncoming SUV, even well-aimed, legal lights are going to feel bright because they're pointed down at you. Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
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I've seen lifted Miatas...
That's not how it works. They can write whatever they want on the packaging. It's the final assembly that's compliant. They're covering their ass in case you put their 5W bulb in some application they've never heard of where it technically fits but a 2.5W bulb was supposed to be used or something. It's like how aftermarket brake hoses all say "off road use only" despite pretty much all of them vastly exceeding the FMVSS for brake hoses.
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The correct bulb will not say that, aftermarket LEDs do. The light reflector housings are designed and tested for specific bulb standards. There are LEDs which try to output light from the same place as the filament in the bulb they are mimicking. But there is no guarantee they function properly, hence the warning and illegality. If you swap one side and walk around your car, you may see that they are significantly dimmer than the stock bulbs from some or all angles. Or it may work fine. Often times the aftermarket LED dual intensity tail/stop lights have barely any difference between the two brightnesses which is egregiously unsafe
Aren't there any checks for that? In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).
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Most US states don't have an inspection regime. Of those that do, it's often just for emissions (and with 2001+ cars, it's increasingly just confirm the check engine light shows up in the light test and turns off when the engine is started, plus check that the emissions computer says ready for test). The driving public does not want to pay for safety inspections. But yes, if there was a safety inspection, it should include verifying that lights function and that headlights are aimed appropriately. A brightness test might be too complex, but safety inspection would be the place to do it.
The only one I've experienced (Massachusetts) wouldn't catch any of what we're discussing in this thread. They put it on the emission testing machine, walked once around the car, maybe checked the brakes, and that was it. It was in no way comparable to the UK's MOT test, which is a proper inspection.
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Headlight function (including aim) is on the MA vehicle inspection: https://www.mavehiclecheck.com/motorists-basicinfo Whether it’s done carefully or not, I doubt, though I did fail one year for headlight lenses too cloudy, requiring a fix and reinspection.
My 2024 outback has no 'high beams'. My low beams are the same brightness as high beams. The only difference is the field of view. I switch on the high beams on and height of the beam increases, but intensity stays the same. I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.
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> The only difference is the field of view. That's normal. Low beams are aimed low, high beams are aimed high. Very often, they're the same intensity.
LEDs are around 10x more efficient than incandescent bulbs. A 100W incandescent equivalent LED bulb typically consumes 10-12W. A 70W LED would put out as much light as 700W of incandescent.
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Given idea just how much more light this is: The designed lighting for a room in my house is 2 x 60-watt incandescent bulbs. The equivalent wattage in 3 x 40-watt led bulbs is equal to 2 or 3 fluorescent light fixtures in an office building.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
I've Wanted to Play That 'Killer Shark' Arcade Game Briefly Seen in 'Jaws' (remindmagazine.com)
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I love electromechanical arcade games. My father mentioned one from his youth that had you manning an anti-aircraft gun and shooting down incoming WWII fighters. This would have been made in the 1950s or maybe even the late 40s, given the time frame at which he played it. I managed to find a game that was conceptually similar, but certainly not the game my father played. It was Sky Hawk by Nintendo, made in 1976: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2GMAWtqJr3w The way it works is there are actually three clips of footage: plane attacking, plane exploding, and a light spot indicating the target area needed to register a hit. The latter two are shown on the bottom half of the film frame at different times. A mirror usually reflects the top half of the film, showing the "attacking" footage, toward the screen where the player can see it. However, the gun is mechanically linked to a light sensor pointed at the bottom half, and if it picks up the light spot in the "light spot" footage, a hit will be registered. When the "plane blowing up" footage starts, the mirror will pivot to reflect that to the screen instead, and you will be awarded a point. It was an ingenious setup that required no computers to operate. It was pure mechanics and optics. Another difference is, Sky Hawk used footage of R/C model planes to simulate the incoming fighters. From my father's description, the game he played used footage of actual fighters taken during actual WWII engagements. But the idea is the same, and it makes me wonder if a similar mirror setup were used in his game as well.
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Not directly linked to "Killer Shark" but for anyone that likes custom mechanical arcade machines I thoroughly recommend Tim Hunkin's two arcade: https://www.underthepier.com/ in Southwold, Suffolk https://www.novelty-automation.com/ in Holborn, London There links pages also cover some other arcades in case there's something closer to you.
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I grew up on Scarborough Beach, in Perth, Western Australia, during the 70's. This was basically peak Australian beach culture - everything you could want in a sunny day at the beach - bikini's, surf, sharks, hamburgers, the lot. Bike gangs and surf nerds, newly returned from Vietnam, beating each other to smithereens in the parking lot while the girls watched on. I can still smell the sun cream lotion, and remember the smell of my Dads hamburger grill, erected in the ruins of the famous 50's "Snake Pit" haunt, replete with ghosts and memories of dances gone by, of rock and roll been and gone, replaced with stoner rock and KISS or Abba, depending on your thing.. I have muscle memory buried deep for the regular cleaning of the onion slicing machine, the giant bottles of mayo I had to refill, every single day. The beetroot stains and the harvesting of the 'crispies' from the competing deep fryer shop, "Peters by the Sea", who sold us kids a pack of the junk for 10c a bag, and which is the only remaining survivor of the era, still slinging buns even today .. The esplanade in those days was basically a sullen row of shops, one after the other offering beach-goers refreshments and entertainment, luring every customer in with the promise of fun and cheer .. and every single one of those 8 or so shops had a small Cold War going on against the other, for entertainment devices. At one end, there was an air-hockey paradise with a side row of electromechanical games, one of which was indeed Killer Shark, along with another airplane bombing game that ran on a big map, rolling underneath the camera through which the player would view and send down their 'light bombs' as we kids referred to them, way back then. My first impression of "Germany", as it were, rolling endlessly in some kind of ethereal, hypnotic landscape. Pinballs and stuff too, almost an overwhelming selection of blinking chaos into which to pour coins. Each shop had its speciality - my Dads' place (MINDERBINDERS, in case there are any sand gropers about) specialised in pinball and stag films in a back room, for those who knew the secret handshake. Killer Shark was great - it was so clearly a mechanical game that you could never beat, but on occasion the odd punter would score a free game or so. Even more of a treat, the proprietors would sometimes start off the games with 20 credits or so, just sitting there, to attract the teens. There was another electro-mechanical, ocean themed game, something like "SPEAR HUNT", which offered players a few snapper and some stingrays upon which to direct their sun-kissed ire, should they have a remaining 20c or two to waste. I loved that era of my life (was just a boy starting school) .. 1976 .. the brand new "Breakout" appears suddenly, and it immediately soaked up all the coins from the neighborhood. I remember seeing the service guy open up Breakout and all the coins just came pouring out .. and then, slowly, the rest of the strip went video and computer, Space Invaders arrived, and the electromechanical games slowly phased out, becoming ever more unpopular and under-used as the year rolled over. My first memory of Killer Shark was fun - my last, sadness, as its faded exterior got loaded onto the truck to be replaced by something brighter, flashier, more challenging. Soon enough there were only 'computer games' and pinballs, and all those delicate machines got replaced, one by one. Eventually, the esplanade itself got replaced with a modern monstrosity, and the era ended with the fervent twang of the 80's arriving, power synth chords and all. But I still remember the squealing joy of a player, spearing themselves a shark, only to be pissing themselves with laughter/fearjoy once the shark 'recovered' and made them face a frontal attack. It was, somehow, cathartic. Until a real shark showed up in the surf and bit a kids leg off, during prime surf hour. That made me the computer kid I still am, today.
Experiment: Making TypeScript Immutable-by-Default (evanhahn.com)
This has really irrationally interested me now, Im sure there is something there with the internal setters on TS but damn I need to test now. My thinking is that overriding the setter to evaluate if its mutable or not, the obvious approach.
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Yeah there's a lot you could do with property setter overrides in conditional types, but the tricky magic trick is somehow getting Typescript to do it by default. I've got a feeling that `object` and `{}` are just too low-level in Typescript's type system today to do those sorts of things. The `Object` in lib.d.ts is mostly for adding new prototype methods, not as much changing underlying property behavior.
> Not a panacea, but calling it "overrated" usually means "I haven't felt its benefits yet" or "I'm optimizing for the wrong thing" I think immutability is good, and should be highly rated. Just not as highly rated as it is. I like immutable structures and use them frequently. However, I sometimes think the best solution is one that involves a mutable data structure, which is heresy in some circles. That's what I mean by over-rated. Also, kind of unrelated, but "state management" is another term popularized by react. Almost all programming is state management. Early on, react had no good answer for making information available across a big component tree. So they came up with this idea called "state management" and said that react was not concerned with it. That's not a limitation of the framework see, it's just not part of the mission statement. That's "state management". Almost every programming language has "state management" as part of its fundamental capabilities. And sometimes I think immutable structures are part of the best solution. Just not all the time.
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I think we're talking past each other. > I like immutable structures and use them frequently. Are you talking about immutable structures in Clojure(script)/Haskell/Elixir, or TS/JS? Because like I said - the difference in experience can be quite drastic. Especially in the context of state management. Mutable state is the source of many different bugs and frustration. Sometimes it feels that I don't even have to think of those in Clojure(script) - it's like the entire class of problems simply is non-existent.
I just want a way of doing immutability until production and let a compiler figure out how to optimize that into potentially mutable efficient code since it can on those guarantees. No runtime cost in production is the goal
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> No runtime cost in production is the goal Clojure's persistent data structures are extremely fast and memory efficient. Yes, it's technically not a complete zero-overhead, pragmatically speaking - the overhead is extremely tiny. Performance usually is not a bottleneck - typically you're I/O bound, algorithm-bound, not immutability-bound. When it truly matters, you can always drop to mutable host language structures - Clojure is a "hosted" language, it sits atop your language stack - JVM/JS/Dart, then it all depends on the runtime - when in javaland, JVM optimizations feel like blackmagicfuckery - there's JIT, escape analysis (it proves objects don't escape and stack-allocates them), dead code elimination, etc. For like 95% of use cases using immutable-first language (in this example Clojure) for perf, is absolutely almost never a problem. Haskell is even more faster because it's pure by default, compiler optimizes aggressively. Elixir is a bit of a different story - it might be slower than Clojure for CPU-bound work, but only because BEAM focuses on consistent (not peak) performance. Pragmatically, for the tasks that are CPU-bound and the requirement is "absolute zero-cost immutability" - Rust is a great choice today. However, the trade off is that development cycle is dramatically slower in Rust, that compared to Clojure. REPL-driven nature of Clojure allows you to prototype and build very fast. From many different utilitarian points, Clojure is enormously practical language, I highly recommend getting some familiarity with it, even if it feels very niche today. I think it was Stu Halloway who said something like: "when Python was the same age of Clojure, it was also a niche language"
This is tangential but one thing that bothers me about C# is that you can declare a `readonly struct` but not a `readonly class`. You can also declare an `in` param to specify a passed-in `struct` can’t be mutated but again there’s nothing for `class`. It may be beside the point. In my experience, the best developers in corporate environments care about things like this but for the masses it’s mutable code and global state all the way down. Delivering features quickly with poor practices is often easier to reward than late but robust projects.
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`readonly class` exists in C# today and is called `record`. `in` already implies the reference cannot be mutated, which is the bit that actually passes to the function. (Also the only reason you would need `in` and not just a normal function parameter for a class.) If you want to assert the function is given only a `record` there's no type constraint for that today, but you'd mostly only need such a type constraint if you are doing Reflection and Reflection would already tell you there are no public setters on any `record` you pass it.
If you need the index, you can use .keys() or .entries() on the iterable, e.g. for (const [index, value] of ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"].entries()) { console.log(index, value); } Or forEach, or map. Basically, use a higher level language. The traditional for loop tells an interpreter "how" to do things, but unless you need the low level performance, it's better to tell it "what", that is, use more functional programming constructs. This is also the way to go for immutable variables, generally speaking.
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There's no difference between for (x of a) stmt; and a.forEach(x => stmt), except for scope, and lack of flow control in forEach. There's no reason to prefer .forEach(). I don't see how it is "more functional."
Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare If You Don't Need To (huijzer.xyz)
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Thanks for all the discussion here. I use cloudflared to proxy a bunch of small sites I serve from home. I will take a look a other solutions mentioned in this thread.
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Amen.
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> Most people use Cloudflare because they have been scared into the idea that you need DDoS protection I don't think that is correct that's why most people use Cloudflare
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If you're hoster doesn't have perfect DDOS protection and bills you for bandwith. Good luck with your bill if you have a DDOS attack. If they don't close your account at least.
“Hundreds of concurrent requests…” Back in 2001/2002 my personal website was “slashdotted” several times… … which I learned about after the fact by seeing myself on slashdot. It was not noticeable as it occurred and my services were not impacted. So perhaps you need a p3-500 with 64 megabytes of ram and Apache 1.x and an old copy of cgi-lib.pl ?
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Concurrent and constant. This is nothing like real traffic, nothing like the good old hug of death. It seems to find the slowest endpoints (well it does like my search and category pages, but sometimes it really hammers a single page for an hour), builds up until your site goes into its knees and instead of going slower it starts to hammer from other IP ranges until you have them all banned. This can go on for hours (or days even) if I don't create new rules to ban it. It reminds me of a slowloris dos but at large scale and concurrency. Sure if my website didn't have any dynamic content, or not millions of database lines it would be less of an issue :)
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Genuinely curious: Do you run this on single tenant hardware that you own ?
Remember if it costs nothing, you’re the product.
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And if you pay for it, you're still the product. This false notion of Paying = Better is driven entirely by profit seeking companies who want you to pay them for access and then they want to get paid for showing you ads as well.
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Oh sure - I mean, bmw heated seats anyone? But even there you’re still not the product, you’re captive audience that might put up with that kind of abuse because of sunken cost fallacy and all that.
What’s the cost of making the internet more centralised because of sheer laziness?
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The famously decentralized internet. AWS, Azure, CloudFlare, or sea cables getting damaged never impact service. Right? /s
If you added up all the outage time caused by DDOS and all the outage time caused by being behind auxiliary services that have their own outages... I wonder which would be larger? I'm not too worried about someone DDOSing my personal site. Yeah, they could do it. And then what? Who cares?
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Then who cares if your site is down for a few hours once in a blue moon because the auxiliary service in front of it is down?
There are two companies on HN which get massive amounts of support from poster fanboys - cloudflare and tailscale. It used to be apple.
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The tides are turning against CF it seems.. they used to have a lot of HN support, but lately every thread about them is just a mess of MITM accusations and "too much of the internet is behind them".
I don't give a penny to CloudFlare to be clear, and I would definitely not pay for those services for my blog. It's not because it's not a criticism that it's a sponsored post. I happen to have multiple sites that use the same technology (WordPress, with the same few plugins and the same theme) running on the same server, with one behind CloudFlare and one not. Left value is with CloudFlare, right is without: - First Contentful Paint: 0.4s - 0.7s - Largest Contentful Paint: 0.8s - 0.9s - Total Blocking Time: 0 ms - 0 ms - Cumulative Layout Shift: 0 - 0 - Speed Index: 0.4s - 8.9s The difference is quite staggering, and I'm located pretty close to my server (a Hetzner VPS), I can't imagine the difference for someone that lives across the world.
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There's no CF magic here. If you're improving from 0.4s to 8.9s that means you're not doing basic caching on your side and you could achieve this in your local nginx/whatever as well. The 0.3s saving on first paint is nice, but could be achieved with putting your assets in any kind of distributed provider, not just CF.
Sure, but your post reads like an infomercial, hence the snark. NARRATOR: - "Has THIS ever happened to you?" CUT TO: Black-and-white. Some guy stares in frustration and confusion at a terminal. Output of 'cat /usr/bin/gcc | xxd' or whatever scroll by. NARRATOR: - "Introducing CloudFlare™!" CUT TO: Full color. Sunlight. The same guy now sprawled on grass at a park. Two dogs tackle him with adoration. His kids hand him ice cream. NARRATOR: - "Stop debugging. Start living."
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That's a lot of projection. They are just sharing their experience. Anecdotes are not ads for something.
My hoster wouldn't take me down though. Instead it will protect me for free: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/ddos-schutz
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this is too naive sorry, Hetzner will disconnect (and ban you if DDoS is too long), same as OVH. It works mostly for brutal UDP flooding but sophisticated attacks such as swarm of Puppeteers hosted on infected machines by the millions will not be protected, those "new DDoS mode" are offered by most DDoS providers.
As long as the hoster doesn’t actively make things worse by disconnecting you, any further help is just a happy accident. The bar is very low.
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Yeah I suppose by "doesn't work" I should clarify that maybe it is doing something and preventing some attacks, and that it doesn't take down my server. With that being said, it has certainly failed to mitigate attacks on numerous occasions that cf would've.
Hey, s1mplicissimus, hope you are well! Dud(ett)e, it's a message board comment, not a scientific study. But do you really doubt that most ISPs will gladly disable your 1Gb/s home-slash-SMB connection for the rest of the month in face of an incoming 1Tb/s DDOS? Sure, they'll refund your €29,95, but... that's about it, and you should probably be happy they don't disconnect you permanently?
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I have no idea. I've been running my own web site without any CDN for nearly 25 years, and I don't have any idea what my host would do if I got DDoSed, because it has never happened.
Gemini 3 Pro Model Card (pixeldrain.com)
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>TPUs are specifically designed to handle the massive computations involved in training LLMs and can speed up training considerably compared to CPUs Who is training LLMs with CPUs?
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It's over. I just don't care anymore. I don't care what a pro model card is. I don't care what a humanity's last exam is. I don't care if the response makes me feel good about the prompt I made. I don't care if it's sentient. I don't care if it's secretly sentient. I don't care if it's just a machine. I don't care if the gov't has appropriated a secret model. I don't care if this is the precursor to AGI, ASI, AGGI, AGGSISGIGIG....I just. Don't. care. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.
Shouldn't you be carefully reading texts before you show it to children?
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No, I have an app that generates children's stories.
I think Anthropic is reading the room, and just going to go hard on being "the" coding model. I suppose they feel that if they can win that, they can get an ROI without having to do full blown multimodality at the highest level. It's probably pretty liberating, because you can make a "spikey" intelligence with only one spike to really focus on.
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It remains to be seen whether that works out for them, but it seems like a good bet to me. Coding is the most monetizatable use anyone has found for LLMs so far, and the most likely to persist past this initial hype bubble (if the Singularity doesn't work out :p).
What? The 4.5 and 5.1 columns aren't thinking in Google's report? That's a scandal, IMO. Given that Gemini-3 seems to do "fine" against the thinking versions why didn't they post those results? I get that PMs like to make a splash but that's shockingly dishonest.
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Every single time
The problem is that we know in advance what is the benchmark, so Humanity's Last Exam for example, it's way easier to optimize your model when you have seen the questions before.
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From https://lastexam.ai/ : "The dataset consists of 2,500 challenging questions across over a hundred subjects. We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting ." [emphasis mine] While the private questions don't seem to be included in the performance results, HLE will presumably flag any LLM that appears to have gamed its scores based on the differential performance on the private questions. Since they haven't yet, I think the scores are relatively trustworthy.
Can you explain what you mean by this? iPhone was the end of Blackberry. It seems reasonable that a smarter, cheaper, faster model would obsolete anything else. ChatGPT has some brand inertia, but not that much given it's barely 2 years old.
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Ask yourself why Microsoft Teams won. These are business tools first and foremost.
What's more impressive is that I find gemini2.5 still relevant in day-to-day usage, despite being so low on those benchmarks compared to claude 4.5 and gpt 5.1. There's something that gemini has that makes it a great model in real cases, I'd call it generalisation on its context or something. If you give it the proper context (or it digs through the files in its own agent) it comes up with great solutions. Even if their own coding thing is hit and miss sometimes. I can't wait to try 3.0, hopefully it continues this trend. Raw numbers in a table don't mean much, you can only get a true feeling once you use it on existing code, in existing projects. Anyway, the top labs keeping eachother honest is great for us, the consumers.
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I've noticed that too. I suspect it has broader general knowledge than the others, because Google presumably has the broadest training set.
It's not like they're making their money from this though. All AI work is heavily subsidised, for Alphabet it just happens that the funding comes from within the megacorp. If MS had fully absorbed OpenAI back when their board nearly sunk the boat, they'd be in the exact same situation today.
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They're not making money, but they're in a much better situation than Microsoft/OpenAI because of TPUs. TPUs are much cheaper than Nvidia cards both to purchase and to operate, so Google's AI efforts aren't running at as much of a loss as everyone else. That's why they can do things like offer Gemini 3 Pro for free.
Which app are you referring to?
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The ChatGPT app for Mac is native and very good.
Claude 3.5 came out in June of last year, and it is imo marginally worse than the AI models currently available for coding. I do not think models are 10x better than 1 year ago, that seems extremely hyperbolic or you are working in a super niche area where that is true.
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Are you using it for agentic tasks of any length? 3.5 and 4.5 are about the same for single file/single snippet tasks, but my observation has been that 4.5 can do longer, more complex tasks that were a waste of time to even try with 3.5 because it would always fail.
Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues (cloudflarestatus.com)
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is anyone's hackernews lagging when loading the comments? ive seen posts with 2k comments before but for some reason this took longer
"Unusual spike of traffic" can just be errant misconfiguration that causes traffic spikes just from TCP retries or the like. Jumping to "cyber attack" is eating up Hollywood drama. In most cases, it's just cloud services eating shit from a bug.
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PEBKAC error
If anyone needs commands for turning off the CF proxy for their domains and happens to have a Cloudflare API token. First you can grab the zone ID via: curl -X GET "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones" -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" | jq -r '.result[] | "\(.id) \(.name)"' And a list of DNS records using: curl -X GET "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$ZONE_ID/dns_records" -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" Each DNS record will have an ID associated. Finally patch the relevant records: curl -X PATCH "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$ZONE_ID/dns_records/$RECORD_ID" -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"proxied":false}' Copying from a sibling comment - some warnings: - SSL/TLS: You will likely lose your Cloudflare-provided SSL certificate. Your site will only work if your origin server has its own valid certificate. - Security & Performance: You will lose the performance benefits (caching, minification, global edge network) and security protections (DDoS mitigation, WAF) that Cloudflare provides. - This will also reveal your backend internal IP addresses. Anyone can find permanent logs of public IP addresses used by even obscure domain names, so potential adversaries don't necessarily have to be paying attention at the exact right time to find it.
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Good advice! And no need for -X GET to make a GET request with curl, it is the default HTTP method if you don’t send any content. If you do send content with say -d curl will do a POST request, so no need for -X then either. For PATCH though, it is the right curl option.
I'm still trying. Still can't load the Turnstile JS :-/
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install tweak chrome extension and mitm yourself and force the js to load from somewhere else
How did we get to a place where either Cloudflare or AWS having an outage means a large part of the web going down? This centralization is very worrying.
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Short-term economic forces, probably. Centralization is often cheaper in the near term. The cost of designing in single-point failure modes gets paid later.
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Agreed. More worrying is that it appears standard practice or separation between domain and nameserver administration has been lost to one-stop-shop marketing.
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Consider joining the Internet Society. An entire group of people who care!
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It's weird to think about so bear with me. I don't mean this sardonically or misanthropically. But, it's "just the internet." It's just the internet. It dones't REALLY matter in a large enough macro view. It's JUST the internet.
Some of them do. There are very few products or services where all of them will.
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Sure, but some people who were going to buy your competitors product forget about that and will instead find your product. I assume it all evens out.
Would you rather not have LLMs?
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Not to speak for the other poster, but... That's not a good-faith question. Most of the problems on the internet in 2025 aren't because of one particular technology. They're because the modern web was based on gentleman's agreements and handshakes, and since those things have now gotten in the way of exponential profit increases on behalf of a few Stanford dropouts, they're being ignored writ large. CF being down wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal if their service wasn't one of the main ways to protect against LLM crawlers that blatantly ignore robots.txt and other long-established means to control automated extraction of web content. But, well, it is one of the main ways. Would it be one of the main ways to protect against LLM web scraping if we investigated one of the LLM startups for what is arguably a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, arrested their C-suite, and sent each member to a medium-security federal prison (I don't know, maybe Leavenworth?) for multiple years after a fair trial? Probably not.
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I'm Sure there will be an investigation... By the SEC when the bubble pops and takes the S&P with it. No prison though, probably jobs at the next ponzi scheme
Yep for anyone unaware of how awful things truly are, look up what a "residential proxy" is. Back in my day we called that a botnet.
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You can make a little bit of cash on the side letting companies use your bandwidth a bit for proxying. You won’t even notice. $50/month. Times are tough!
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Oh, they're still botnets. We just look the other way because they're useful. And they're pretty tame as far as computer fraud goes - if my device gets compromised I'd much rather deal with it being used for fake YouTube views than ransomware or a banking trojan.
Privacy through uniformity, operational security by routine, herd immunity for privacy, traffic normalization, "anonymity set expansion", "nothing to hide" paradox, etc. I.e., if you use Tor for "normie sites", then the fact that someone can be seen using Tor is no longer a reliable proxy for detecting them trying to see/do something confidential and it becomes harder to identify & target journalists, etc. just because they're using Tor.
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Huh never thought about that. I wonder how many people do that? Seems like a public service.
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It certainly feels like one at times!
I mean, it was a problem before AI crawlers with just bots and attacks in general.
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[delayed]
> The issue is that real life is not adaptable. Resources and capital are slow. > That's the whole issue with monopolies for example, innit? The much bigger issue with monopolies is that there is no pressure on the monopolist to compete on price or quality of the offering.
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The definition of a monopoly basically resolves to "those companies that don't get pressured to meaningfully compete on price or quality", it's a tautology. If a firm has to compete, it doesn't remain a monopoly. What's the point you're making here?
I’m not so sure about that. The pre-internet age had a lot of forced “mental health breaks”. Phone lines went down. Mail was delayed. Trains stalled. Businesses and livelihoods continued to thrive. The idea that we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one and I’m not that convinced by it. Obviously there are some scenarios that need constant connectivity but those are more about safety (we don’t want the traffic lights to stop working everywhere) than profit.
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Just want to correct the record here, as someone who worked at a local CLEC where we took availability quite seriously before the age of the self-defeatist software engineer. Phone lines absolutely did not go down. Physical POTS lines (Yes, even the cheap residential ones) were required to have around 5 9s of availability, or approximately 5 minutes per year. And that's for a physical medium affected by weather, natural disasters, accidents, and physical maintenance. If we or the LEC did not meet those targets contracts would be breached and worst case the government would get involved.
My wife and I own a small theatre. We can process orders in-store just fine. Our customers can even avoid online processing fees if they purchase in-store. And if our POS system went down, we could absolutely fall back to pencil and paper. Doesn't change the fact that 99% of our ticket sales happen online. People will even come in to the theatre to check us out (we're magicians and it's a small magic shop + magic-themed theatre - so people are curious and we get a lot of foot traffic) but, despite being in the store, despite being able to buy tickets right then and there and despite the fact that it would cost less to do so ... they invariably take a flyer and scan the QR code and buy online. We might be kind of niche, since events usually sell to groups of people and it's rare that someone decides to attend an event by themselves right there on the spot. So that undoubtedly explains why people behave like this - they're texting friends and trying to see who is interested in going. But I'm still bringing us up as an example to illustrate just how "online" people are these days. Being online allows you to take a step back, read the reviews, price shop, order later and have things delivered to your house once you've decided to commit to purchasing. That's just normal these days for so many businesses and their customers.
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Does the flyer make it clear that in person sales will have a discount?
> I think as a community we have a responsibility to do better than this. I have always felt so, but my opinion is definitely in the minority. In fact, I find that folks have extremely negative responses to any discussion of improving software Quality.
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I always see such negative responses when HN brings up software bloat ("why is your static site measured in megabytes"). Now that we have an abundance of compute and most people run devices more powerful than the devices that put man on the moon, it's easier than ever to make app bloat, especially when using a framework like Electron or React Native. People take it personally when you say they write poor quality software, but it's not a personal attack, it's an observation of modern software practices. And I'm guilty of this, mainly because I work for companies that prioritize speed of development over quality of software, and I suspect most developers are in this trap.
The Miracle of Wörgl (scf.green)
If they don't affect the rich, why have the rock didn't so much time, effort, and money eroding such taxes over decades?
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Eroding them is beneficial to other groups of society, not the rich. It's like with corporations. Corporations love complex legal systems, as they are the only ones with money to deal with them. Simplification actually benefits smaller enterprises.
Yeah, it seems like most people assume there is a reach and scope of taxation that isn't really possible. Wealth can be expatriated, it can be in non-fungible objects (paintings, &c), it can be in goods held in common such that no transfers occur (for example, a house that people live in together and jointly own). There isn't anywhere an index or lookup table of all legal rights a particular person has to wealth (or, in truth, to "things", since anything can be worth something and contribute to wealth). There are things they may have a right to that they don't even know about.
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They can hide wealth (at their own risk) but it prevent them from extracting money from the country: The cannot own houses, factories, monopolistic contracts o media. It makes harder to influence politics ( in a legal way). The housing issue is specially important because city space is limited and the demand is very inelastic
"the town and the community quickly went from an unemployment rate of over 30% to near zero" According to Wikipedia the unemployment rate sank from 21% to 15%. -- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgler_Schwundgeld#Auswirkungen (in German)
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I chased down the wiki citation https://heimat.woergl.at/verschiedenes/freigeld-woergl which appears to be an official museum? Translated source says: > While unemployment in Austria increased by 19% in the period of the free money campaign, it fell by 16% in Wörgl Assuming translation is correct, maybe the confusion here is about absolute vs relative changes. Over 30% claim comes from the idea that if Worgl was performing normally it would have also increased 19%. Instead, it fell 16%, making the total change over 30%.
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