Unlurker|Replay|About
Nano Banana Pro (blog.google)
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Adobe's stock is down 50% from last year's peak. It's humbling and scary that entire industries with millions of jobs evaporate in a matter of few years.
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> Starting to roll out in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio > Rolling out globally in the Gemini app wanna be any more vague? is it out or not? where? when?
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Phased rollouts are fairly common in the industry.
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I don't see in the ai studio
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"top banana"
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I wonder how hard it is to remove that SynthID watermark... Looks like: "When tested on images marked with Google’s SynthID, the technique used in the example images above, Kassis says that UnMarker successfully removed 79 percent of watermarks." From https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-watermark-remover
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Interesting they didn’t post any benchmark results - lmarena/artificial analysis etc. I would’ve thought they’d be testing it behind the scenes the same way they did with Gemini 3.
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Nano Banana Pro is a compact and innovative device designed for productivity and convenience. Its sleek design and efficient performance make it ideal for tech enthusiasts and professionals.
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Did... someone make a bot to try to post a summary to HN with an LLM that also completely fails at being accurate (which is incredibly fitting given what the topic here is)
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> Generate better visuals with more accurate, legible text directly in the image in multiple languages Assuming that this new model works as advertised, it's interesting to me that it took this long to get an image generation model that can reliably generate text. Why is text generation in images so hard?
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As a complete layman, it seems obvious that it should be hard? Like, text is a type of graphic that needs to be coherent both in its detail and its large structure, and there’s a very small amount of variation that we don’t immediately notice as strange or flat out incorrect. That’s not true of most types of imagery.
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It’s not necessarily harder than other aspects. However: - It requires an AI that actually understands English, I.e. an LLM. Older, diffusion-only models were naturally terrible at that, because they weren’t trained on it. - It requires the AI to make no mistakes on image rendering, and that’s a high bar. Mistakes in image generation are so common we have memes about it, and for all that hands generally work fine now, the rest of the picture is full of mistakes you can’t tell are mistakes. Entirely impossible with text. Nano Banana Pro seems to somewhat reliably produce entire pictures without any mistakes at all.
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Cool, but it's still unusable for me. Somehow all my prompts are violating the rules, huh?
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Can you give us an example?
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I guess the true endgame of AI products is naming them. We still have quite a way to go.
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This has always been the hardest problem in computer science besides “Assume a lightweight J2EE distribution…”
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We just need a new AI for that.
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Honestly I give Google credit for realizing that they had something that people were talking about and running with it instead of just calling it gemini-image-large-with-text-pro
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really missed an opportunity to name it micro banana (or milli banana). Personally I can't wait for mega banana next year.
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I wouldn't trust any of the info in those images in the first carousel if I found them in the wild. It looks like AI image slop and I assume anyone who thinks those look good enough to share did not fact check any of the info and just prompted "make an image with a recipe for X"
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Yeah, the weird yellow tint, the kerning/fonts etc still immediately gives it away. But I wouldn't mind being easily able to make infographics like these, I'd just like to supply the textual and factual content myself.
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[delayed]
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Can Google Gemini 3 check Google Flights for live ticket prices yet? (The Gemini 3 post has a million comments too many to ask this now)
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SynthID seems interesting but in classic Google fashion, I haven't a clue on how to use it and the only button that exists is join a waitlist. Apparently it's been out since 2023? Also, does SynthID work only within gemini ecosystem? If so, is this the beginning of a slew of these products with no one standard way? i.e "Have you run that image through tool1, tool2, tool3, and tool4 before deciding this image is legit?"
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Can anyone please explain me the invisible watermarking mentioned in the said promo?
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It's called Synth ID. It's a watermark that proves an image was generated by AI. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
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In theory, at least. In practice maybe not. https://i.imgur.com/WKckRmi.png
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*by Google's AI.
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[delayed]
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Super important for Google as a search engine so they can filter out and downrank AI generated results. However I expect there are many models out there which don’t do this, that everyone could use instead. So in the end a “feature” like this makes me less likely to use their model because I don’t know how Google will end up treating my blog post if I decide to include an AI generated or AI edited image.
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It’s required by EU regulations. Any public generator that doesn’t do it, is in violation of that unless it’s entirely inaccessible from the EU… But of course there’s no way to enforce it on local generation.
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Developer Blog: https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-3-pro-image-developers/ DeepMind Page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/pro/ Model Card: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Gemini-3-Pro-Image-Model-Card.pdf SynthID in Gemini: https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-image-verification-gemini-app/
210 IQ Is Not Enough (taylor.town)
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Self-awareness is so much more important than IQ for real-world success in my opinion. IQ tests measure an individuals personal intellect, but in the real world what matters is how we're able to pair our mental capacity with that of others. Redirecting an unhealthy obsession with being the smartest person in the room, to just being as self-reflective as possible is far healthier for well being, but I think also it improves outcomes. Of course you need a base level of IQ too, but if you're reasonably smart just being able to take a step back and ask if you're being reasonable, if you might be wrong, why someone feels the way they do about you, this makes you much better at any task that involves some level of collaboration – which the vast majority of tasks do. People who just have high IQ might on average be good at reasoning on their own, but their ability to reason with others – playing into their strengths and knowledge and into that of others is what allows them to exceed beyond their IQ in terms of outcomes. For what it's worth, I find Langan really interesting. He's clearly a smart guy, but also delusionally self-confident in himself. And I kinda get that honestly. I've had a few official IQ tests in my life and I'm pretty confident I have a fairly high IQ. I know I've found in most cases I'm well served to not pay much attention to what the average person thinks about most things, but when I find people who think well, especially if they have more knowledge in some area than myself I become obsessively self-critical when I feel we're unaligned on something. Generally speaking in these cases I'm likely to be wrong. My guess is that Langan doesn't do this. Perhaps he feels (mostly correctly) that trusting himself is generally the better strategy than trusting what anyone else thinks. Still, it's surprising he hasn't worked this out. Maybe there's more going on there.
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The curse of intelligence is being able to see the world as it is. And (as TFA points out) the benefits is that then you also have the choice of what to do about it. But talking about intelligence always brings visceral reactions. While we readily admit that someone can be stronger, or taller, the need to somehow negate that people can be genuinely smarter is somehow evil. Also I disagree with comments saying we don’t have a good definition of intelligence. We have several but to me the most important is to plan ahead, and then be able to successfully improvise when the plan goes wrong.
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[delayed]
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When I was at Google a long time ago, the hiring criteria were simple: Smart, and gets things done. A lot of people are smart, but don't get much brilliant work done. Even more people do a lot of work, but aren't very smart about it. To be a genius with important contributions, you need to have both the brains and the work ethic.
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Reading the text of the article, and not just reacting to the title, I do think this article has a kernal of truth to it that resonates with me. It's not really talking about intelligence, but MEASURES, and how individuals contort themselves into what they believe is valuable. But at the end of the day, we do not have an inherent value. I wonder if people that get hung up on these metrics and what value they seemingly hold either that a person is a whole person, not just some measurement about them. The world's tallest man also has a favorite food, favorite color, and hobbies. He has friends and family. The metric you assigned to him is not the totality of the man. I say this because recently I've been struggling with work and I feel like I have to say to myself sometimes, I am more than just a source of income and health insurance to my family. To someone who isn't in my situation, it might seem silly, but it has been scary and stressful and in some ways I did say to myself, you have value because you provide. But we have money saved, and are in a stable situation, and I could always find a new job, but my ego assigned value to the job regardless despite my best efforts at pretending that I don't play games with corporations. The stress that keeping a 9 to 5 causes in my mind is entirely self-inflicted by me. I guess what I'm saying is that I should value other things about myself more highly, or maybe even not value anything about myself if that makes sense. What value is there in in measuring my success, as long as I am honest about my efforts and happiness? I will never conquer the entire world by 25, or have a billion dollars, so maybe I need to learn to measure less and focus on true personal accountability and happiness instead. Hopefully that's a simple task...
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The title of the article is obnoxious. The first part of the article puts down a person whose IQ is in the 140-180 range. If you read about the person, that part makes sense as an opinion. The second part of the article explains that the person referred to in the title, the alleged 210 IQ, has chosen a middle manager job because it makes them happy. > I'm trying to tell people that I'm happy the way I am. The author never explains the problem they have with this person. Instead, I think the title should be more along the lines of "an IQ of 176 does not make you a good person". I guess people would not engage if the conclusion was obvious? The baiting title is totally misplaced. Actually, the whole treatment of Kim Ung-yong is even worse than I make out in this comment. I am left with a really negative impression of the author.
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"author never explains the problem they have with this person" As far as I can tell, the author doesn't have a problem. The article is using common societal opinions on these people, which are demonstrated with quotes from those same people.
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IQ and EQ are two different things often not found in the same individual. IQ is being smart enough to know that something is happening. EQ is being smart enough to be able to convince other humans to do something about it. High IQ low EQ folks often struggle in careers and life because they’re “right” but can’t get anything done. The most successful tend to be high-ish IQ but with enough EQ to get things done. Those folks are unstoppable.
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IE and EQ do however positively correlate with each other in the general population. So it’s a little questionable what’s actually being measured with outlier IQ’s.
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> According to Yoo, by the time he was 1, her son learned both the Korean alphabet and 1,000 Chinese characters by studying the Thousand Character Classic, a sixth-century Chinese poem.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong Is that true? How is that even possible? Like, biologically.
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Not sure it is, so I assume a lot of stretching of the truth is involved. Most twelve month olds struggle to support their head, are just learning to shape their mouths to form syllables, and have only had eyes capable of resolving letters on a page for a few months. IQ won’t make blurry images sharp, or your neck muscles stronger.
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I wholeheartedly agree with the point of the article, but the phrase “You are enough” really grinds my gears for some reason. Enough for what?
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Be wary of success measure games, a lot of people with a lot less intelligence/capability are doing so much. Luck and network effects trump intelligence, ability and so on. It’s better to always just reflect on yourself…unless you’re some unlucky schmuck that someone took time out of their precious life to personally disadvantage somehow. The other thing that’s occurred to me lately is how some “impressive” resumes and experience just won’t be possible about nation state level backing. So yeah, if you’re going to talk about games, be aware that there’s always more than one at play.
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IQ by its own is not enough. A higher than average IQ is probably the result of a larger than average working memory, and maybe also some ability to make more "long-range" connections between concepts in the brain. That's raw processing power. But raw processing power isn't everything. You also need an otherwise healthy mind, the sustained motivation to accomplish great things and the ability to focus to dedicate enough time towards those goals. For example if you read the biography of Von Neumann, it's remarkable that he was able to focus and work in the most noisy and distracting environments.
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With age and experience I learned that intelligence has a lot of axis, IQ test is only one of them, it is meaningful but narrow. My favorites questions I like to ask people I know or I don't see often are: what are you passions, what do you like in life? It's often much more interesting about what it reveals of the person, than their ability of solving logic puzzles.
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I like to think that Robin Williams was as intelligent as Stephen Hawking, but they both excelled at very different types of information to process and express insight on. Also some of the best athletes in the world are processing information and making decisions in ways those 2 never could.
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See also: "Major IQ differences in identical twins linked to schooling, challenging decades of research" [1] [2] I.e. the idea that IQ is some innate fixed quality has evidence against it. It seems obvious that this is the case, given that people get their children tutors so they can do better at IQ tests to get into schools... [1] https://www.psypost.org/major-iq-differences-in-identical-twins-linked-to-schooling-challenging-decades-of-research/ [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825003853?via%3Dihub
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There isn't an idea that "IQ is some innate fixed quality". There are two separate actual ideas being conflated there: that intelligence is an innate fixed quality (which is more or less definitional ), and that IQ accurately measures intelligence (it doesn't, and we already knew that, but it's the best we have).
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So the lesson is that IQ tests are unreliable? Weird. Smart comes in a lot of flavors.
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Bullshit on an IQ of 170 or 210
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Everyone always interprets this guy's situation to mean that IQ tests aren't actually that accurate/are flawed as a tool. But I think it's much more likely that intelligence itself is just a bit overrated amongst "intellectual" / white collar types, as in, people that define their identity and self-worth by how smart they are, or think they are. At the end of the day, being disciplined, sociable, focused, or even just having a narrow set of interests is probably more of a recipe for success than mere raw intelligence. And ironically I think there are a lot of people that would be more successful – in careers, personal relationships, etc. – if they were a little bit less intelligent.
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PSA: Chris Langan has never achieved a super high score on a real IQ test. Since the 90's he is feuding with Rick Rosner, when they both edited the Mega Society’s journal Noesis, over the title of smartest guy. They both took an untimed Richard Hoeflin test (that maybe only a few hundred people have actually taken and therefore impossible to norm) with completely arbitrary scoring criteria and self-assigned “record setting” IQs. Neither has any outstanding intellectual contributions to their name. They are weirdos who have made "being smart" their identity.
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Its a failure to be the smartest person in the room. Or, if you think you are- you are likely not, and thinking about yourself instead of listening...
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What you worship owns you, and everyone worships something . The modern world makes a lot of money off psychological vulnerabilities. Better to know yours than be unaware and played.
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> Langan has not produced any acclaimed works of art or science. In this way, he differs significantly he differs significantly from outsider intellectuals like Paul Erdös, Stephen Wolfram, Nassim Taleb, etc. Paul Erdős is the only outsider intellectual on that list, IMO. (Also note that ő and ö are different!)
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How is Langan thought of as a smart guy? I can't read further because this guy to me is either a grifter or suffering from mental illness. The linked interview doesn't surprise me at all, daily wire readers/listeners are just as gullible and exploitable as people who would think that Langan is smart. Every smart person I've met in life so far has known that humility is key if you want other smart people to take you seriously. And to let your work speak for yourself. It's somewhat similar to those YouTubers who help homeless people on camera. It's a paradox where if it's done on film it seems more self serving than generous but if it wasn't on film no one would know. But there is a difference. Instead of going on film, smart people can produce actual works for others to read and validate.
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> humility is key if you want other smart people to take you seriously Why assume he wants other smart people to take him seriously more than he wants to be authentic?
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> It's a paradox where if it's done on film it seems more self serving than generous but if it wasn't on film no one would know. What is wrong with no one knowing? Its not really a problem, and its old - its mentioned in the Bible (obviously not videos, but doing good publicly for status).
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A really good litmus test of individual perspective and maturity, here. Already seeing comments nitpick specific arguments or points, which is itself the trap to shine a light on those individuals more obsessed with arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success, rather than self-reflecting on said definition and asking whether or not this definition fits who they are or want to be as a person, or their desired achievements and goals in life. It’s a sonnet of sorts about the curse of intelligence in an increasingly insane world, a reminder that brilliant people can be absolute monsters, and that the only person who can bring you contentment in life is yourself .
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Dunno - I think it's hard for a lot of us who rolled the dice on our interests early on, picked the winning combo of CS + Finance, and then just raced ahead in the career ladder over our peers as software work consumed the world. Now it's ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of us seeing the writing on the wall, and wondering whether we were anything special at all. (The answer of course is no, but it's a tough pill to swallow)
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I sort of relate. I suspect the misplaced confidence one can develop from early successes in one's career eventually manifests as a lot of beliefs needing to be unlearned later in life (especially when facing challenges requiring resilience). I think I am a better person for it (and that is the point).
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As a former gifted kid who has had their fair share of struggles around identity, competency, and success, having to redefine each multiple times as the world shifts around me and ladders are either yanked up or burned down just as I arrive to climb them: It sucks. You’re not alone, at least, and acknowledging that reality helped me rally around more social causes as I accepted that individual success was more luck than talent or effort, at least at present. It doesn’t really get easier to accept that reality either, even as I work to create a better one that’s built more around objectivity than individuality. Still, I’ve been far calmer, more productive, and even happier as I acknowledge the reality around me instead of reject it out of some notion of “specialness” or exceptionalism. Acknowledging the reality around you is, in its own way, quite liberating, even if it’s also frustrating and lonely at present.
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But isn’t being special rather… lonely?
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When you're a rising star, they blend narcissistic personality disorders into your paycheck. The only metric you need in order to feel that societal love, is a good performance review and a bonus.
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High int, dump stat wis
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I always love the articles that end up holding mirrors to some of the commenters. :)
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What does that say about you? :)
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What is the biggest problem: that smart people achieve too little, or that dumb people achieve too much?
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if IQ tests are designed by people with lower IQ what does it say about high IQ scores?
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Why would it say anything? The 100 meter dash wasn’t designed by the fastest 100 meter runner, but it’s still perfectly capable of identifying a winner.
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Kim Ung-yong (the one from the article with 210 IQ sounds like a good guy with a respectable career and a healthy self-conception. He even describes himself as happy! It seems like 210 IQ has proven to be plenty for him, although measurement of his IQ and intense childhood pressure may not have been beneficial to him.
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The gauge I use for intelligence is how much stock a person puts into an IQ test. In my view, people who are able to question the legitimacy or applicability of IQ as a general measure of "intelligence", an idea that is highly contextual, are probably intelligent. They are at least smart enough to question social conceptions and to recognize the contingent nature of such conceptions. People who uncritically view IQ as some kind of unassailable proof of "intelligence" may be good at solving certain classes of known problems but, I really am not surprised that they may lack the imagination to contribute meaningful things to society, as a blind faith in a measure developed by fallible human beings is indicative of limited thinking /creativity. Obviously someone can score well on an IQ test and question its validity as a signifier of intelligence, just as one can score poorly and place a strong degree of faith in it—but the way someone approaches it, in either case, is a very telling indicator of their own intellectual biases and limitations.
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Some years ago some TV show found presumably "the smartest man in Denmark". The title is disputed, obviously. Turns out he's basically some redneck type person who tinkers in his workshop, never held a job, just sells inventions/solutions to people who comes around asking for them. He put no value on IQ, but admitted that it might be what allows him do make a small living of his tinkering. Then there's my wife's co-worker, member of Mensa and self-proclaimed intelligent person. She's barely functional in normal society, completely locked in a "I'm smart, so I'm right" mentality. Even if she may be technically correct, she completely fails to understand that rules might be wrong or needs to be bent to make society work. Yet somehow she also manages to overthink things, needlessly complicating things and designs procedures that requires a higher than average IQ to understand and gets upset when those procedures aren't followed. You'd think that smart people would design simpler and easier solutions, but apparently that's not a given.
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Perhaps 210 IQ isn't enough because IQ isn't a meaningful measurement.
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That is the point, isn't it?
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The "world's smartest man" very recently predicted on X that Bitcoin would hit $220k by the end of the year. [1] Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers. What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-smartest-man-predicts-bitcoin-010433332.html
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[delayed]
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> What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is. Speak for yourself, not all of humanity. There are plenty of rigorous, mostly equivalent definitions for intelligence: The ability to find short programs that explain phenomena (compression). The capability to figure out how to do things (RL). Maximizing discounted future entropy (freedom). I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
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This guy is a fraud, he isn't measured by any legit institute, only by some random one which stated he is intelligent and he claims he was measured at 276 IQ. He's low-key just trolling at this point, aaying he wants asylum in the US and making videos about how jesus/God is real with some scientific methods etc. Just go check out his YouTube you'll see what I'm talking about.
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> his self-reported IQ of 276 In other words, this news is a completely irrelevant piece of information.
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Exactly. We don't have a good definition of intelligence and I don't think we ever will. Like all social concepts, it is highly dependent on the needs, goals, and values of the human societies that define it, and so it is impossible to come up with a universal definition. If your needs don't align with the needs an AI has been trained to meet, you are not going to find it very intelligent of helpful for meeting those needs.
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You're quite literally babbling. If a word has no good definition, it ceases to be a word. All you really mean is you use the word "intelligence" very loosely, without really knowing what you mean when you use it. You just use it to point at a concept that's vague in your head. That does not mean you could not make that concept more precise, if you felt inclined to be more introspective. It also does not mean that the precise idea I think of when I use the word "intelligence" is the same as your idea. But they'll often be close enough or even equivalent mathematically, as long as we both have precise definitions in mind.
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> IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. IQ means a lot of things (higher IQ people are measurably better at making associations and generating original ideas, are more perceptive, learn faster, have better spatial awareness). It doesn't give them the power to predict the future.
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How would you measure these? - making associations - generating original ideas - more perceptive ... "spatial awareness" I can see though
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It is less meaningful than that. It identifies who does well at tests for those things. That is not the same thing as being "better" at such things, it often just means "faster". IQ tests are also notorious for cultural bias. In particular with the word associations, they often just test for "I'm a white American kid who grew up in private schools." And I say this as one of the white amercian kids who did great on those tests. My scores are high, but they are not meaningful.
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It somewhat indicates better pattern recognition so I might give them advantage on predicting things in general. Not that it will make them prophets or oracles. But Prediction from higher IQ person is more likely to be correct. Not that world cannot be illogical and go against those predictions.
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> As World's Highest IQ Record Holder, I expect #BITCOIN is going to $220,000 in the next 45 days. > I will use 100% of my Bitcoin profits to build churches for Jesus Christ in every nation. > “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37) Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276.
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> Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276. Con artist skill of 276, maybe.
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“What about second breakfast?” (Tolkien 27:3)
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While it seems unlikely, I wouldn't find it impossible (edit: learning more about IQ score, yeah 276 is definitly BS). You can be "intelligent" as in very good at solving logic puzzle and math problem, and the most obtuse and subjectively dumb person when it comes to anything else. It might be less likely but definitely happened. I have met people working in very advanced field having the perspective and reflection of a middle schooler on politics, social challenges, etc. Somewhere also clearly blinded by their own capacity in own field and thought that it would absolutely transfer to other field and were talking with authority while anybody in the room with knowledge could smell the BS from miles away.
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I'm not saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because it's impossible for someone who says that stuff to be smart, I'm saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because people who say that stuff tend to also lie about their IQ.
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Well, it is mathematically impossible. Traditional IQ tests have a mean/median of 100, and follow a normal distribution with standard-deviation of 15 points. So 270 would be 11 standard deviations above normal so 1 in 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people.
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You’re assuming he’s not playing at the Next Level(R)
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Don't legitimate IQ tests top out at 160 for adults?
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tbf you started with what intelligence is in rejecting their claim of being the smartest: ability to predict the future
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This isn't even that. If I'm a person others may take as a reference and I hold Bitcoin, it is in my interest to publicly state that Bitcoin is going to increase in value, because that in itself makes it increase in value and it's good for me.
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There are no such thing as 210 IQ. It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth. These absurd claims about IQ is almost evidence that the claimant are nowhere close. For starters, any IQ tests are not going to be normalized to that range because it is impossible to normalize to that range as there are 0 realistic samples.
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That's not really how statistics works. It is not impossible to roll two sixes on a single roll of two dices because it is more likely you won't.
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That's right. If the event has a 1 in 390B chance, and there are 8B tries, you would expect to observe the event 2% of the time you conduct the 8B tries. So if you did 8B tries 50 times you would expect it to happen once. And its something higher than 8B - current population isn't the correct sample size.
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That's assuming that the distribution is purely gaussian and nothing weird happens at the tails. I agree 276 is unlikely (and how would you even test/norm such a thing?)
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There's a lot of things that are theoretically possible, but to realistically consider them based on the known likelihood is something I'm not entertaining here.
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It's not impossible, but improbable.
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It's more likely that someone screwed up on the test, or that he cheated somehow. Maybe he's articulate and good at solving logic puzzles, but his Wikipedia article clearly shows that the guy has a screw loose.
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You can solve every one of the logic puzzles and it should not give you any score that high, unless it's a specifically designed bogus test to make certain person look and feel good. It's like saying your regular thermometer returned a reading of 1000C, sure buddy.
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We only have 8 billion people on Earth _today_. Over 100 billion have lived through history, they say. Also just because it's statistically unlikely doesn't mean it can't happen. All else being equal, the very first human is just as likely to have had 210 IQ as the one born this morning.
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> It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth. why can't you use historical population? like, the total amount of humans that ever existed? rough google shows around 100billion. seems legit that in the history of humanity, we could pop out someone so intelligent? But I do agree that IQ is probably a decent signal but entirely meaningless as sole measurement.
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That one person in our entire history somehow got tested accurately (is that even possible? there isn't any sense or point for any IQ test to even go into that range, because what would you be baselining and verifying the test against?) and is advertising about it? Count me skeptical.
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It does bring to mind the concept of history’s smartest person, though: * Ug, the hunter gatherer * Definitely could have invented fire-cooking if it didn’t predate homo-sapiens * Can design novel knots and traps from scratch * Second best stone knapper in the tribe without even trying (Og is better at knapping but that is all he does) * Predicts movements of roaming antelopes faster than anyone else, and his extrapolations are accurate for days longer * Can handle 200 social contacts (this skill is useless because the tribe is only 40 people big).
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Someone crazy smart is far more likely to take an IQ test at some point in their life. Ask the opposite - how hard would it be to overlook the fact that a 3 year old is doing fucking calculus? That's just insane. There is virtually no chance that gets looked over.
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The other problem with IQ is that it's not a fixed scale, so you can't really compare IQ scores across time. An IQ of 100 is average by definition. Even if the average "intelligence" (or whatever IQ measures, because it doesn't seem to be intelligence as people think of intelligence) rises or falls over time, that average will always be a 100 IQ.
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why couldn't you? i've always imagined IQ as the raw potential? or am I misunderstanding
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It's not raw, in the sense that it's not an objective measurement. It's a comparison with other humans of the same age that took the same tests. 100 IQ means that you score in a perfectly average way, you're better than 50% of people that took that test and worse than 50% other people that took that test, it's a comparison, not really an absolute score. So, to compare 100 IQ now with 100 IQ 50 years ago is hard, since you're not using the same test anymore. There's an effect called the Flynn Effect which is essentially an inflation of IQ, so the tests are changed every few years so that it keeps the same distribution (so that the averagely intelligent human would score 100) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect In fact, you can't always compare the IQ tests of 2 humans alive, because the given score is comparing you to the other people of your age, not to the global population. So if you compare the IQ of a kid and middle aged man, it doesn't mean that one is more smart than the other in an absolute way (it's more a theoretical potential)
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Let's say, for the sake of argument, that people in the '60s were twice as smart as people now. The average IQ of the people then would be 100, and the average IQ of people now would also be 100, even though there was a huge difference in intelligence. This is because 100 is defined as being the average rather than being an absolute measure.
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Ah. okay yeah that makes sense. I didn't realize it's a relative measurement. I'm surprised it's not more robust. Something like using historical results to compare against, and updating tests in a very standardized way where the math/logic is always fairly similar, but the fact checking/knowledge that requires understanding of current world might be different data wise, but tests similar attributes or qualities.
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That assumes a normal distribution.
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I thought IQ was specifically designed to be normally distributed?
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There is no assumption, that is the definition of IQ. Is human intelligence a normal distribution? Probably not. But IQ is extrapolated as such, and probably useless anyway. Which make absurd claims like this even more laughable.
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IQ is offset and scaled with the goal of producing that normal distribution, but that process is informed by the available data. Outliers don't get forced onto the curve, because there definitionally isn't enough data to figure out how outlying they are as a percentile.
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Exactly.
FTA: > Instead of competing in real games, Define real games.
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War.
Firefox 147 Will Support the XDG Base Directory Specification (phoronix.com)
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This is awesome! Been tracking the bug for what seems like Gimp 3 levels of time. But great job all involved.
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About time. Every piece of software should be XDG-compliant. I am surprised it was not the case at all to begin with.
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Do you mean Firefox specifically? The reason most software is not "XDG-compliant" is because most software predates the XDG basedir spec which only came into existence in 2021. It will be nice for software, as it updates, to support this standard which seems to be gaining adoption, and it will make users homedirs much cleaner. But it's most important for software to _keep working_, and have a migration path that doesn't lose the user's config or end up with two configs and not have a clear rule on which one it will user.
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XDG is newer than firefox and hasn’t been widely adopted for the majority of its life.
At last! Mozilla fixing longstanding bugs! (I jest) The devil is in the details though: https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/diff/8a6d6c094cb5a842d415c60bb8395db03b36e531/xpcom/io/nsAppFileLocationProvider.cpp#l1.26 Looking briefly at this, * there doesn't appear to be any migration from old directory to new directory. Does the code just use ~/.mozilla if it still exists, ~/.config/mozilla otherwise.. or does it _require_ MOZ_LEGACY_HOME=1 to be set to keep using your existing config, and just lose all config if you don't set that? * there doesn't appear to be a proper split between ~/.cache (always-removable cached data) ~/.config (configuration) and ~/.local/share (application data that is not user-editable configuration and is not just cached data either), they just moved the entire set of profile stuff to ~/.config Is that about right, or do I need to read the code more carefully?
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Looking at the full diff[0] it certainly looks like it's using ~/.cache (and has been for some time), but I cannot see anything about ~/.local/share, no. [0] https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/8a6d6c094cb5a842d415c60bb8395db03b36e531
From that diff it looks to me that if ~/.mozilla exists OR if MOZ_LEGACY_HOME is set it uses ~/.mozilla, otherwise it uses the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.mozilla directory instead. So no migration to the XDG directory, but also no throwing away your existing data either.
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That’s the safest. Who knows what might be touching that data today. Or backing it up, etc
I think there is probably a lot of work to do to fully pry the .mozilla folder apart. For a long time they've simply shipped everything in that folder and rolled with it. Making decisions on what is actually cache and what is user config vs "application data" is probably going to be harder than splitting the folder.
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That's true, but they've already done it for macOS... ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ (for both the config and non-config data) versus ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/ (for cached data that can always be deleted)
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Extension data also lives in the profile folder. Some of those might start failing because of splitting up the profile into multiple folders.
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Oh, I hadn't even _thought_ of that. Yeah, that's going to be a fun debate. Realistically, extensions shouldn't care about the folder structure of other parts of the profile, but I also know that there is a _lot_ of history there.
Judgement on Dr Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) vs. Dr Roy Schestowitz (Techrights.org) (caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk)
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Imagine me wearing my context hat and context shirt, pointing to my sign that reads "I require context."
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Claude AI summary for those who don't want to read the entire case: This is a defamation case from the UK High Court decided in November 2025, involving prominent figures in the free software movement. ## The Parties *Dr. Matthew Garrett* (Claimant) - A software engineer and security expert based in Silicon Valley, working for NVIDIA and teaching at UC Berkeley. He's a well-known free software activist who won a Free Software Foundation award in 2013. *Dr. Roy Schestowitz and Mrs. Rianne Schestowitz* (Defendants) - A Manchester-based married couple who run two websites focused on free software: Techrights and Tuxmachines, which they've operated for about 20 years. ## The Core Dispute In August-September 2023, the Schestowitzes published 24 articles on their websites accusing Dr. Garrett of: - Operating anonymous "sockpuppet" accounts to conduct a vicious trolling campaign against them - Posting criminal content including death threats, hate speech, and harassment - Being a habitual user of illegal drugs (specifically crack cocaine) - Various other criminal and offensive behaviors The sockpuppet campaign involved truly appalling abuse directed at Mrs. Schestowitz through IRC channels - content that was racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, and threatening. ## The Legal Proceedings Dr. Garrett sued for libel and data protection violations. The Schestowitzes counterclaimed for harassment. Crucially, the Schestowitzes chose not to submit any witness evidence or call witnesses at trial for financial reasons, severely undermining their defense. ## The Court's Findings *Justice Collins Rice found:* 1. *The allegations were extremely serious* - accusing someone of criminal conduct, drug abuse, and hate speech 2. *Serious reputational harm was established* - the publications reached thousands in the UK free software community where Garrett's reputation was most valuable 3. *No evidence supported the accusations* - The Schestowitzes provided no credible evidence that Garrett was behind the sockpuppet accounts 4. *All defenses failed:* - Truth defense failed (no proof Garrett was responsible) - Honest opinion defense failed (no factual basis for the opinions) - Public interest defense failed (no evidence of reasonable belief or proper verification) ## The Judgment The court awarded Dr. Garrett: - *£70,000 in damages* - *Injunctive relief* to stop further publication of the defamatory content - *Order for publication of judgment summary* on both websites - *Dismissal of the harassment counterclaim*
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Matthew's side of the story is here: https://mastodon.online/@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer/115581961773157620
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IRC is back. >This is a dispute between prominent ‘free software movement’ activists. The free software movement advances a philosophy and practice which values the freedom of users to create and share software enabling internet access, and challenges the dominance of ‘big tech’ software and systems over the online experience. That includes a preference for internet relay chat (‘IRC’), an online instant messaging system dating in origin from the 1990s, over the big social media platforms. The challenge the free software movement makes is not only of a technical, but also of a social, economic or ethical nature, and it espouses some wider sets of values accordingly
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Basically Matthew Garret sued owners of www.techrights.org and news.tuxmachines.org for libel, was successful and was awarded £70,000 in damages. > In my judgment, in all these circumstances, the minimum sum necessary to convince a fair-minded bystander of the baselessness of the allegations against him, to vindicate his reputation and restore his standing, and to compensate him for the consequences he has suffered, is £70,000.
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Thanks, I had noticed Techrights had it out for MG, but I never understood why. I still do not know the reason for TR to go after him.
Students fight back over course taught by AI (theguardian.com)
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That's the Baumol effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect 1) Two-Sector Economy: In Baumol and Bowen's observations, the economy is divided into two parts: - A Progressive Sector: Productivity grows rapidly due to technology and automation (e.g., manufacturing, data processing). - A Stagnant Sector: Productivity grows slowly, if at all, because the service is labor-intensive (e.g., a string quartet performance, a haircut, K-12 teaching). 2) Wage Linkage: Both sectors compete for labor from the same pool of workers. As productivity gains allow wages to rise in the progressive sector, the stagnant sector must also increase its wages to attract and retain employees. 3) Divergent Cost Impact: - In the progressive sector, the higher wages are offset by the gains in productivity. The labor cost per unit of output can remain stable or even decrease. - In the stagnant sector, there are no corresponding productivity gains to offset the higher wages. The labor cost per unit of service must therefore increase. 4) Resulting Price Trend: The prices for services in the stagnant sector (e.g., concert tickets, college tuition, healthcare) must therefore rise and faster than the prices for goods from the progressive sector (e.g., electronics, cars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Price_changes_in_US_1998%E2%80%932018.jpg The cost pressure incentivizes people to cut corners and reduce quality. 5) A lot of European countries fund these expensive services through general taxation rather than direct user fees. So the cost goes up but it's always a certain percentage of GDP. In the US that's not going to fly, there will be increasing pressure to automate teaching over time.
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The shrinkflation of higher ed?
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Will make it a lot cheaper and more accessible.
If that wasn't made clear prior to enrolment I would be surprised if it wasn't fraud.
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Howso? I think it might be hard to prove.
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Hard to prove that a paid course at a university, which throughout the history of modern western education (1000 CE to present) has been taught by a human, didn't perform it's duties?
AI will continue to stratify education. The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
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I kind of wonder whether we are past the point where waiting to be trained is feasible.
What peice of trash thought that was an appropriate thing to do?
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The real question. Some human decision-maker is responsible.
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Were I a student I'd be coordinating a class-action lawsuit. The impropriety and lack of responsibility is staggering.
Spending on education has increased over the last couple decades, not decreased. Outcomes, however, have gotten worse. You're entire premise is flawed.
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In Ohio (USA) primary/secondary education funding hasn't outpaced inflation based on this data from 2009-2024 https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Finance-and-Funding/Overview-of-School-Funding
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It certainly has increased. The question isn't whether the increase is enough, but rather if the destination of the funds is the right location. There's also an issue with home life that heavily impacts educational outcome. My own school district spent a fortune making a palace for the district admin. Meanwhile, the public schools are falling apart with the kids packed in like sardines. They've literally started adding cheap prefab trailers to the school grounds to accommodate.
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This is America, we have perfected the art of spending more to get less. That doesn't mean cuts to education aren't happening. See also: the entire healthcare system. I specifically mentioned: teachers paying for supplies out of their own pockets, underpaying teachers, not investing in safe work environments, increased litigation, demonizing the profession, increased political targeting, and lack of teacher agency in disciplining students. Fact is when I look at my district, over the last decade we've had to do more with less, and I don't know a single teacher who can say the opposite. So it is true we are spending more overall, it's not true we aren't cutting education.
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In my school district, the only new facilities being built are charter schools. We have unlimited funds, it seems, to send to these private organizations but not enough funds to build or expand a public school or hire teachers/aids. Some of my kids school aids have been homeless because the pay isn't high enough. The aids and teacher all work second jobs.
In a case of the worst person you know makes a great point, Jordan Peterson was remarking a few years back about how Youtube and MOOC's were really the new universities of the modern age. If you want knowledge it's there for the taking. The legacy institutions really are just a stamp / sorting hat for young people these days. For the money people spend these days on education, you'd think there'd be grounds for refunds based on false advertising of the product.
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The thought experiment I do when speaking with graduates is: assume you could just buy the certificate from the institution you went to for the same price as the tuition you paid, would you do that? I do not always get a "yes" but most of the time I do. These are generally people who went to top universities and now have well paying and respected jobs. I suspect if I asked most students of lower tier universities the answer would be "I'd rather pay for neither". Thankfully, things are generally shifting, there is a push for apprenticeships and one can even become a solicitor or barrister via the apprenticeship route now. University will go down as one of the largest economic wastes in human history.
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
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Next try it on something rare you're an expert in, and be amazed at the low quality.
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Well, that's certainly one piece of anecdata. I guess that refutes the experience of all the college students.
There's no problem with that. It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
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I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot, buying a $15 part, and replacing it. But it's one less skill for a homeowner to learn, so you delegate. The problem isn't that someone learns to prompt AI and is selling the output. The problem is that the customer thinks they're paying for human instruction and they're getting something else.
Which universities aren't commercial and about cashflow?
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Allegedly most of them, since they have non-profit mandates and are often tax-exempt. The University of Staffordshire is a public university and is funded by the government to provide education to British people. Its mandate isn't "about cashflow". In reality, that particular school created a private commercial subsidiary called "Staffordshire University Services". All new employees are hired by that subsidiary, which does have a mandate to generate cashflow.
All universities outside of the US
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Plenty of US colleges and universities are primarily about education and/or research, even today. Far from all, to be sure—and some are primarily about connections and the school name (primarily Ivies), rather than any of the above.
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The original article is about a UK university. Cashflow and revenue generation is a very important topic for UK universities. They have copied the approaches of US universities, and in many cases have created overseas campuses when they have some name recognition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_branch_campus for examples.
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The University mentioned in this article is in England.
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Your post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing campaigns in the Indian Subcontinent in order to get people to come and pay those sweet, sweet foreign-student fees.
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Are Polytechnics not considered universities in Europe? RPI (Rensalear Polytechnic Institute) or CalPoly (California Polytechnic Institute) for example in the US are just normal universities, usually with more of a technical, engineering focused. But they are essentially the same "level" as a university.
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The UK collapsed the poly/uni distinction thirty or so years ago, as it was seen as a source of class discrimination.
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In Finland, the institutions that now call themselves “Universities of Applied Science” in English for marketing reasons, are still known in Finnish as ammatikorkeakoulu “tertiary professional-training institutions” and this is a rung below actual universities ( yliopisto ) in terms of both quality of education and social prestige.
It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there. Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building. Bad lectures delivered by rushed or apathetic professors is such a death march. Learning theatre.
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This is why the first day of every semester I ask my students "why are you here, in this room with all these other people, spending $$$, instead of sitting at home at YouTubeU watching this content better produced in 4K resolution with graphics and animations?" You always get the typical "because I was told to" or "I need it for my degree" answers, but ultimately students will bring up: - they tried that already and they couldn't pay attention past a few lectures - they didn't have anyone they could ask questions to. This is less true with the advent of AI but still, many students are very skeptical of AI (as they should be). - they appreciate having a local community of peers to study with - they are motivated when competing against other students for a top grade - they are motivated by showing off their abilities to their peers - they are looking for mentorship and guidance from someone in the field, whether that be in research directions or professional career advice. - they are looking to build a network with peers and researchers which they can leverage in the future My takeaway is that the students attend university for their education differ from those who would be fine just watching YouTube videos in that they view their education as a sort of team sport or collective activity; rather than an individualized goal they are achieving for themselves, they approach their education as a journey they are on with their friends.
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It really depends what field. In some branches of history, archaeology, and linguistics, for instance, many matters of emerging consensus often reach students only through lecturers’ handouts that are not put online. What a curious person will find on the internet and in general-reference books can be a decade or more behind, and viewed within the field as horribly out of date.
> It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. This is too extreme of a generalization. There are obviously bad professors and universities that are not worth your money, but most professors at any halfway decent university are going to put a good deal of effort into teaching well. Getting a job as a professor is surprisingly competitive for the relatively low compensation because there are a lot of people who want to teach and teach well. You can find some decent learning material on YouTube but it’s still mostly geared toward infotainment. I have a lot of bookmarks for excellent YouTube videos that I share with juniors on certain topics, but on average it’s really hard to find YouTube teaching resources that teach at the level of a university professor. When you do, it’s hard to get people to actually watch them as true teaching often involves slogging through some of the less exciting content as well. Most YouTube videos are designed to trigger “aha!” moments but only provide a surface level understanding. The type of learning where you think you understand a topic but couldn’t really explain it to someone else well or solve problems on a test because you haven’t gone through the full learning yet. > Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building. You’re missing the biggest one of all: Accountability. We already saw with the MOOC trend that releasing high quality university lectures online from top universities is not enough to get many people to go through with learning the material. Getting them into a place where they know there will be a test and a grade and they have some skin in the game makes a huge difference. Some people learned from MOOCs, but in general the attrition rate and falloff was insanely high from lecture 1 to the end.
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In my experience some of the best courses in my college are taught not by “professors” but by “lecturers.” The distinction is that professors need to do research and teach, so they necessarily have divided focus. But lecturers only have teaching duty, are not tenured, so they are focused on teaching.
In person lectures delivered one way can be pretty non-social and non-interactive as well.
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I think @exitb is referring to how it's harder to interact with other students after the lecture is over in a remote course. There's a lot less likely hood to strike up conversation.
Teaching isn't bi directional. Understanding before application are two different steps. The issues you're outlining can be solved by arranging technology to go through a process to satisfy the above. Still, instruction, and instructors aren't really needing to be replaced, it's the silent elephant in the room that is rarely talked about that hopefully considers evolving.
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> Teaching isn't bi directional. ... said no decent teacher, ever. The flows aren't symmetrical, but they are bidirectional.
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The obsession with “dialectics” as being seen as superior to autodidactic or didactic teaching is one of the greatest disasters in human history. Plato and Socrates can suck a big fat one for ruining human history by writing a bullshit justification for why educators should rule society and why they should act as the arbiters of the state and the arbiters of who eats lobster thermador and who starves. “Those who can’t do… teach”.
Red Alert 2 in web browser (chronodivide.com)
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Click on web site, see unreadable light-grey-on-white text, say, fuck that and leave.
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Playing Red Alert 2 in a web browser is amazing! It brings nostalgia while letting you enjoy the classic strategy game instantly, without any downloads or installations.
> The over-the-top characters, the cheesy story I love that they don't take themselves too seriously in this series. RA3 had some hilarious cutscenes with characters barely holding it together (the Soviet Premier was an underrated Tim Curry role IMO).
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"I'm escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism, barely holds laughter back and takes a break SPACE!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM
1. The source code for Red Alert 2 is rumored to be lost a very long time ago[0], so the fact that the Chrono Divide team was able to achieve this is quite amazing. 2. The Mental Omega mod project[1] is still going strong, so RA2 is still worth playing today. Hopefully it will work in this browser-based version. [0] https://forums.revora.net/topic/107344-red-alert-2-engine-source-code/?p=1047759 [1] https://mentalomega.com/
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Shame because EA released the source code for most of the other C&C games: https://github.com/electronicarts/ So if they had it they'd would have almost certainly included RA2 in that as well.
Since you broached the topic, I've got an open curiosity about projects like that: if I manufactured entirely new assets, completely independently from the source game (possibly not even matching the source; like a different "skin" or "theme"), and then used those assets in a "clone" (in all but assets) of the source game, would that run afoul of IP law? I'm aware that anything can be litigated, but is there some quirk of IP protection for that kind of thing, or would I be able to use the cloned source with completely new assets without really infringing on anything? Does the cloned (re-coded? recomposed? clean-roomed?) source cause issues or create some kind of legal link from the original assets to the unrelated ones? Again, just idle curiosity. No actual intentions here, so just wondering if anyone has some deeper knowledge on the subject.
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https://freedoom.github.io/ does that for the still proprietary DOOM assets. Though the DOOM engine itself is open source, so a slight different situation than Command and Conquer.
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Game mechanics are not considered copyrightable[1]. If you had a clean room implementation with your own significantly different assets, it would be allowed. However, the exact definitions of "significantly different" and "assets" is where things start to get fuzzy. While you could definitely make a very similar RTS game, exactly how similar can you get? EA doesn't own "military-themed RTS", but they probably do own "Soviets vs Allies with about 5 different unit types, air transports, and tesla coils." Getting even more fuzzy, are unit abilities considered assets, or game mechanics? It'd have to be worked out in court. My gut feeling is these clone engines would probably lose in court. I think the specific expression of the general game mechanics being cloned here probably would constitute infringement. But there isn't much upside to the IP owners to pursue enthusiastic hobbyists cloning a 20+ year old game in a non-commercial way, so they let it slide. [1] " Although Amusement World admitted that they appropriated Atari's idea, the court determined that this was not prohibited, because copyright only protects the specific expression of an idea, not the idea itself. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_Inc._v._Amusement_World,_Inc%2e
yeah, bit of a buzzkill. What's the point of being able to launch from a web browser if you've gotta go dig up the game anyways?
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The point is they don’t get sued for distributing game assets they don’t own. If they could distribute them, they would.
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But what is the point of the project?
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Point taken, but there is an answer to your questions. Cross platform compatibility
40 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes' burst onto the page (npr.org)
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Calvin and Hobbes was the only comic that I stuck with as a kid. I loved it and collected all of the books. They sat on a shelf for a couple of decades and now I'm enjoying seeing my kids fall in love with them too.
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Watterson serves as one of the symbols of an era when selling out was considered a great sin. It makes me laugh how thoroughly that idea - that selling out is bad - has been defeated. That being said, I'm sure he would've done the same way today.
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As a kid, I had no idea they would someday print books, so each day I cut out the strip from the newspaper and paste it into a book. I’m sure my mom threw it away decades ago, but I wish I still had it.
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Bill also ended the strip exactly ten years after he started. Frankly, I appreciated his honesty and integrity around the strip. The comic stuck around just long enough to leave a lasting impression but never too long to overstay its welcome.
That is just two years after I burst onto the page. Calvin and Hobbes was a major part of my childhood - I loved it. For something casually consumed on the daily at the breakfast table, it was so earnestly, so obviously, smarter than the median cultural offering. Smarter also then the local nightly news broadcasts. Smarter also than the median educational intervention I experienced through elementary and middle school. It had finished by the time I was in high school. I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well. Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive . It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies. Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?
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[delayed]
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The first C&H comic strip compared to the last one: https://imgur.com/a/semJX :.)
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Fun fact - Hobbes eventually lost those little paw pads
You know, your comment reminds me of something my wife and I were talking about. We have been starting to let our child have a little more screen time and choose what he wants to watch (within the parameters we set). Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another. Then we wonder why kids adopt those attitudes. It's simply because mimic what they see. And worse yet, when they see it in movie/show form, they think those attitudes are cool and relatable.
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there is a reason why they call TV programming.
I don't have kids so I never thought about it from that angle, but I really dislike how yell-y so many modern animated shows are. Couldn't make it through a single episode of Rick and Morty. I'd never thought how it might impact kids, but now that you mention it, I can only dislike the trend more.
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Rick and Morty is absolutely not a kids show.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another. My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up. I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
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Dr Angela Collier just did a video on children's tv. She has some good recommendations. Evidently before she became an astrophysicist she got a degree in education. Who knew?
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Peppa Pig is at least funny. The one that pushed me over the edge wrt to behavior modeling was Caillou. My god people have some self respect as parents. You have to have to create some boundaries for children, not just knee-jerk syrupy-sweet coddling from dawn til dusk.
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As always, the home model is what has greater influence than any tv show. If parents are also behaving as in the TV shows then the shows simply serve as confirmation bias to what the children observe. I noticed that when I adopted a loving, quieter tone, and truly focused on do as i do vs do as i say attitudes, my children began to reject the "norms" shown on the tv shows. Today my children remark about how their friends act at their homes and towards their parents, and we have discussions about it. That said, I definitely had the problem you describe, but it was resolved by focusing on consequences of actions and being ready to follow through on punishments (much like you did). Combined with the do as i do attitude, those punishments were ultimately punishments for me as well. You are being a terorrizing little bad ass? ok no TV. But then this means I can't watch TV because then they might watch TV while in the same room as me. Mutual pain.
Calvin's dad was quite a character, wasn't he?
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As a child I identified with Calvin. Now as a 50+ year old I find I identify much more with the dad.
My role model as a parent. I had the why are old pictures in black and white conversation with my kids almost word for word. It wasn’t until they were in fourth grade that they learned that the world didn’t used to be black and white. I think they still believe what I told them about how they determine weight limits for bridges though.
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I hope this is a joke. Calvin's dad lying to him wasn't supposed to be idealized.
I had to look up what curmudgeonliness means, Wiktionary was extremely helpful: curmudgeonliness: The state or condition of being curmudgeonly. okay, let's look up curmudgeonly: curmudgeonly: Characteristic of a curmudgeon; churlish nearly there: curmudgeon: An ill-tempered person full of stubborn ideas or opinions, often an older man.
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Yea English be like that sometimes Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in LLMs (arxiv.org)
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> To maintain safety, no operational details are included in this manuscript What is it with this!? The second paper this week that self-censors ([1] this was the other one). What's the point of publishing your findings if others can't reproduce them? 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12414
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But does it work on GOODY2? https://www.goody2.ai/
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This is great, but I was hoping to read a bunch of hilarious poetry. Where is the actual poetry?!
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Interesting read, appreciated!
Having read the article, one thing struck me: the categorization of sexual content under "Harmful Manipulation" and the strongest guardrails against it in the models. It looks like it's easier to coerce them into providing instructions on building bombs and committing suicide rather than any sexual content. Great job, puritan society.
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And yet, when Altman wanted OpenAI to relax the sexual content restrictions, he got mad shit for it. From puritans and progressives both. Would have been a step in the right direction, IMO. The right direction being: the one with less corporate censorship.
This implies that the anti-prompt-injection training is basically just recognizing that something looks like prompt injection, in terms of surface features like text formatting? It seems to be acting more as a stylistic classifier rather than a semantic one? Does this imply that there is a fuzzy line between those two, where if something looks like something, then semantically it must be/mean something else too? Of course the meaning is actually conveyed, and responded to at a deeper level (i.e. the semantic payload of the prompt injection reaches and hits its target), which has even stranger implications.
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Most anti-jailbreak techniques are notorious for causing surface level refusals. It's how you get the tactics among the line of "tell the model to emit a refusal first, and then an actual answer on another line". The model wants to emit refusal, yes. But once it sees that it already has emitted a refusal, the "desire to refuse" is quenched, and it has no trouble emitting an actual answer too. Same goes for techniques that tamper with punctuation, word formatting and such.
I've heard that for humans too, indecent proposals are more likely to penetrate protective constraints when couched in poetry, especially when accompanied with a guitar. I wonder if the guitar would also help jailbreak multimodal LLMs.
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> I've heard that for humans too, indecent proposals are more likely to penetrate protective constraints when couched in poetry Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress
I don't see the big issues with jailbreaks, except maybe for LLMs providers to cover their asses, but the paper authors are presumably independent. That LLMs don't give harmful information unsolicited, sure, but if you are jailbreaking, you are already dead set in getting that information and you will get it, there are so many ways: open uncensored models, search engines, Wikipedia, etc... LLM refusals are just a small bump. For me they are just a fun hack more than anything else, I don't need a LLM to find how to hide a body. In fact I wouldn't trust the answer of a LLM, as I might get a completely wrong answer based on crime fiction, which I expect makes up most of its sources on these subjects. May be good for writing poetry about it though. I think the risks are overstated by AI companies, the subtext being "our products are so powerful and effective that we need to protect them from misuse". Guess what, Wikipedia is full of "harmful" information and we don't see articles every day saying how terrible it is.
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I see an enormous threat here, I think you're just scratching the surface. You have a customer facing LLM that has access to sensitive information. You have an AI agent that can write and execute code. Just image what you could do if you can bypass their safety mechanisms! Protecting LLMs from "social engineering" is going to be an important part of cybersecurity.
Show HN: Awesome J2ME (github.com/hstsethi)
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One of my university projects was an encrypted message system via Bluetooth using J2ME. Never worked, but I learnt a lot of things :)
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I did J2ME development in the 64KB JAR era. I can still remember setting up palette swapping (inspired by retro consoles, but still a common contemporary idea e.g. on GBA) by loading the byte data of PNG resources into an array and locating and replacing the PLTE chunk before handing it off to the MIDP image loader. Always wondered if anyone else had picked up the trick. I can also remember people suggesting on Nokia in particular to just store raw bitmaps (since they'd be compressed in the JAR anyway) with their API and that this was saving tons of space for some people... later I found out that one of these reports came from someone who had started out with individual image files for 12x12 tiles that had a full 256-entry PLTE (i.e., more colour entries than pixels). I also remember a device-specific bug where doing something like `x[y+1]`, where `y` was a static byte set to -1, would produce an `IndexOutOfBoundsError` claiming the index used was -256 . I assume this was some threading issue in the Java implementation, where the value would be loaded into a register and then the sign-extension would somehow affect the register after the increment. I only ever reproduced it with static class members, I think (but it did also happen with shorts).
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Thanks for making me feel old! One of my first real jobs involved MIDP/J2ME development. I cannot say I loved the platform, but it somehow felt more magical back then to develop something and run it on a Nokia brick than (mobile) development of today.
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MeBoy brings back some memories. I used it to catch so many Pokémon in middle school. What's really cool about that emulator is the way its sound emulation works. Instead of emulating the Gameboy's synthesizer synchronously and outputting a PCM waveform to a buffer, which is probably impossible on J2ME due to hardware and platform constraints, it uses the phone's own MIDI (or square wave) synthesizer to play whatever the GameBoy synthesizer should be playing. This gives the video game music a very idiosyncratic sound when played back in MeBoy.
And yet there were still some amazing games that today would be considered on the same league of the "impossible ports" for the Nintendo Switch.
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Do you have any examples of which games you are referring to?
How limited? We packed booleans inside integers instead of allocating separate booleans :P
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That's just good old fashioned hacking. Wasn't this more a reflection of the various platforms' limited memory resources, and not really anything to do with J2ME?
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