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In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet (arstechnica.com)
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Amazing that a 10-day hack from 1995 is still quietly deciding what half the files on the Internet actually are. Meanwhile my “temporary” scripts from last week can’t survive a single deploy. The Web really is held together by archaeological layers of glue code nobody dares touch because it somehow… still works.
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And we’ve all been regretting it ever since.
US seizes oil tanker off coast of Venezuela (usatoday.com)
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Imagine the outrage if the title were instead "China seizes Philippine oil tanker in South China Sea"
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At least the didn't blow it up and kill every crew member, yet.
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Under what authority???
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Under Operation Freedom. We're gonna make sure every drop of oil is liberated from Venezuela.
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The Epstein Distraction Act.
I bought a Grace-Hopper server for €7.5k on Reddit and converted it to a desktop (dnhkng.github.io)
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It's practically free
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That's awesome. These are the best kinds of posts
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Yep. Just enough to inspire jealousy while also saying it's possible
It's cheaper to buy a new printer every month (idiallo.com)
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The seeming paradox reminds me of a simlar flavor one: the fact that if you accidentally knock a hole in your drywall, it's cheaper to cover it with a flat screen TV than to pay someone to fix the hole.
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Cost disease gone wild
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Isn't that a pack of 5? So divide the ink price by 5. Much lower than the printer.
Quality ink is very cheap, unless you are an eshittified conehead, wanker printer company. I use this ink Winsor & Newton Drawing Inks 14ml Bottles £3.37 https://www.artsupplies.co.uk/p/winsor-newton-drawing-inks-14ml-bottles Let's Answer the Question: "Why is Printer Ink So Expensive?" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/lets-answer-question-why-printer-ink-so-expensive
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You put that in your inkjet printer?
The future of Terraform CDK (github.com/hashicorp)
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"Will be sunset on Dec 10"... commit date: Dec 10. That seems like rather short notice.
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we're using cdk since 100% of our stuff is in aws but will soon need to hook up some external resources like cloudflare. looked at tfcdk a while back but didn't think it was a good idea (glad). still trying to figure out a good way forward and hoping it's not to rip the bandaid and migrate everything to terraform / pulumi
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Good move. They clearly didn't have the resources they needed. The design of the CDKs was atrocious.
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This is particularly frustrating as I've spent the last year writing many thousands of lines of CDKTF Python. HCL just does not have the modularity and expressiveness that Python, or other languages CDKTF supports. I guess I'll spend another year migrating to Pulumi now..
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The lack of expressiveness of HCL is the point and what makes it so good
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What was the point of it? Terraform supports AWS anyway.
Hashicorp, an IBM company
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Hashicorp,an IBM company
It would be great to have an alternative to Terraform that uses a bit more advanced provider (at last for AWS). Does OpenTofu use that same provider?
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The providers for tofu are by design the same as for terraform. Also, for large providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc - these are often largely authored by the hyperscaler themselves, for better or worse.
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It does. What are you looking for in a more advanced AWS provider?
Rug pulls on infrastructure components seem even worse than other rug pulls as they can hit your entire infra codebase at once
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This is why infrastructure people are conservative by nature, it's so damn much gruntwork to migrate without downtime
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And it happens while we are all very enthusiastically dedicated to migrating off Kubernetes ingress-nginx. Just as planned.
Damn, what are the best alternatives here? For pure AWS I guess CDK directly is okay, but locks you in.
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Hm, we have a few very repetitive terraform projects to setup structured infrastructure clusters. For those, we just use ansible with a bunch of templating to generate a configurable, HCL-based terraform module and version that. It's a bit of an "Caveman solve problem with rock" approach, but for very regular projects it's great. A new cluster is some group vars, larger changes to the structures can be easily reviewed - and if you really really have to, you can also just modify the generated code by hand to fix something your generation code can't deal with right now.
I went with CDK, I'm locked into AWS already and it means my major dependency for IaC is my cloud vendor and not a third party. If I really need to migrate off of AWS at some point I'll throw an LLM at it.
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Exactly. It's just so much cleaner to do it in the Cloud provider's native tooling. The impedance mismatch from Cloud-agnostic abstractions always just makes thing shitty enough that in the long run you spend more time dealing with weird edge cases. Besides, actual full-scale Cloud migrations are exceedingly rare.
Terranix? ;-)
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Yes, the NixOS module system is so much more composable than the TF one
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Not gonna lie Terranix has been working great for us, all our configuration is in Nix files anyway so it's so easy to just pass stuff in rather than using Tf variables etc
Yeah I'm struggling to see the value here.
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The value for TFCDK was Developers don't have to learn another language, they can just continue to use existing language they already know. Downsides are doing infrastructure in a programming language was always problematic unless developer was skilled at Ops which most who used TFCDK were not.
It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame. I did try Pulumi a while back, but the compatibility with Terraform modules was not great, so I've switched to CDKTF, which can handle unmodified modules. Dunno if I'll switch back to Pulumi or just use OpenTofu directly.
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> It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame. Or it's legal trying to preempt a risk. If it was the author just wanting to point at IBM, they'd mention it just once or twice, but using that awkward phrase throughout the text makes me think it was an edit mandated by a careful lawyer.
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I have absolutely nothing good to say about Pulumi. Stay far, far away.
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please expand on this, I am interested (for real!)
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Strange, I have a lot of good things to say about both it and Terraform. Probably some specifics might be more useful there...
Does it do ephemeral values yet?
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Yep, as of yesterday’s 1.11 release it’s supported! That also includes a new “enabled” meta argument, so you don’t have to hack around conditional resources with count = 0. [0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-11-0/ Disclaimer: affiliated with the project
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How do you migrate from count/for_each to `enabled` ?
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You can just switch from `count = 1` to `enabled = true` (or vice-versa, works back-and-forth) for a resource and tofu will automatically move it next time you apply. It's pretty seamless.
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Amazing. Good work !
Super Mario 64 for the PS1 (github.com/malucard)
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Obligatory mention of Kaze, who has spent the past several years optimizing Mario64 using a variety of interesting methods. Worth a watch if your interests are at the intersection of vintage gaming and programming. https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
There was also just recently a Dreamcast port made, as well as Star Fox 64 for Dreamcast and also Mario Kart 64 for multiple platforms. https://github.com/CharlotteCross1998/awesome-game-decompilations
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They just finished a Star Fox 64 port as well
here's another video that showed good gameplay shots that I happened to see last night. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kscCFfXecTI
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The distorted textures and weird triangle clipping issues are exactly what you'd expect from an unoptimized port to a platform that doesn't support perspective correct texturing or depth testing.
For those that prefer pure gameplay to skip through https://youtu.be/kkJWZlAjZp0
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This is emulated as I'm sure the other videos are, but the PS1 back in the day had no way of running anything this crisp, so the emulator is `enhancing` it here. It's not an actual representation of what the game would have looked like.
Intermittent hypoxia increases blood flow and benefits executive function (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
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I'm not knowledgeable enough to confidently verify this from the linked material, but aren't they keeping CO2 levels the same during the hypoxic periods? i.e. isn't this significantly different than just holding your breath/being choked/sleep apnea?
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Another confirmation for wim hof breathing
Makes me wonder if professional divers are statistically more intelligent than average, as they will experience hypoxia as part of the job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_diving
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s/professional divers/free-divers/
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They shouldn't experience hypoxia. That's what the air supply is for.
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It's not so simple. Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving_blackout#Ascent_blackout
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I never got "deep" into it but everybody told me that breath holding diving can be really dangerous.
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Yeah, when I learned scuba, I was told the rule with freediving is your buddy stays on the surface while you dive; that way they can rescue you if you can pass out.
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Barring really traditional (and now very rare) pearl/scallop divers, professional divers aren't doing it by holding their breath.
Finally, an upside to sleep apnea
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There is overall no health benefit since the hypoxic phase is quite long and creates stress during a time when the body is supposed to rest and recover. And that compounds with the underlying issue, usually mouth breathing, bad pillow, bad sleeping position, or a combination of these.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits (eli.li)
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The Witch from Mercury is excellent. It's almost like a space opera version of Open AI board drama.
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Patrick O'Brian (author of the Aubrey/Maturin series) was a huge Austen fan and intentionally modeled his writing style after hers. Post Captain (book 2) is the most explicit homage, with a number of character names borrowed from Austen's work.
I don't really agree with this authors analysis of Austen. Like on Pride and Prejudice, "Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance." Elizabeth grew up with her parents fairly disastrous marriage (where her Dad doesn't respect her Mom) and inability to think in the future which put the girls in such a bad situation (her father should have saved money up instead of just assuming he'd have a son eventually). She is reacting against that, wanting a husband that will have mutual respect AND the economic security of someone who is responsible. She wouldn't just want to marry someone for love who wasn't able to provide her economic security, just like she doesn't want to marry Darcy she doesn't respect him. This article makes it sound like she is rejecting the social expectations of her society, but only her mom really wants her to marry Mr. Collins and as seen by her own marriage and support of Lydia's marriage she is a pretty bad judge of what's going to make a good life. Later they say "They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of" But that just describes basically everyone, none of us have no agency, but all of us are also caught up in larger systems we can't opt out of. But even within Austen you have Emma, who is entirely economically and socially secure and doesn't need to worry about anything and Fanny who lives entirely at the whims of others.
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Neveress all Austen's happy endings are due to the magical alignment of respect and love with security and social alliance. Jane's heroines are playing a (relatively, see below) high risk/high reward game of not wanting to sacrifice _anything_, which leads to their triumphs in the novels but most often led to loneliness and economic insecurity in the real world. Similarly, all people have choices, but these choices are often pretty agonising ones, and Jane almost never has her protagonists or us confront such life-and-death, very-bad-vs-infinitely-worse choices. And this was a conscious choice since the novels of the 18th century had been more or less filled with them.
Spoilers for Iron Blooded Orphans below. I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establishment, playing the establishment role. And spoiler spoiler spoiler, spoiler spoiler spoiler the establishment wins, the charismatic double-role leader dies trying to fulfill the prophecy which isn't real, the stoic soldier is cut apart in the final battle, and the remainder of the loyal band either gets their people rights in parliament or gets picked off in violent engagements over time in the denouement. Fantastic story. You don't see that kind of thing very often. Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
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> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" This probably has more to do with the type of content you are consuming. If you watch things for young adults, it will probably follow "the Heroes Journey" - wether it is LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Wars etc. (the West) or Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball/Journey to the West (the East)
War in the Pocket is also pretty good, if you haven't seen it. A bit dated now but I always thought of it as a "Business as usual" war story when I was young.
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war in the pocket is the best of them imo
gundam is probably one of my favorite pieces of media ever created, and yeah id say you nailed it! BUT this is pretty much true for almost every gundam show. They will usually end with a "but at what cost" or with 75% of the main cast dead and the protag in a worse position then they started. but yeah what you said rings true, it really is a special piece of media that is more than the genre/anime its made in but can only exist with anime if that makes sense.
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Yeah original Gundam is about a never ending war in which the protagonists are just cogs in the machine. And it turns out every side is led by immoral scumbags.
> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins". What's sorely missing is the very rare theme of "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing".
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SPOILER There is actually a little bit of that in this. While the charismatic leader has some points about how the establishment has gotten weak and corrupt, overall it seems pretty par for the course. To be honest, it's better he didn't win. He was a bit demagoguey.
LaO doesn't always follow that forumula. In some LaO the trial is botched or the law doesn't protect the victims or the perps escape justice due to political influence, et al.
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Still, cop shows generally are about the "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing" which the other commentator said is a theme that is sorely missing.
Nah, Avatar is Dances With Wolves
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Dances With Smurfs was a common comparison at the time.
Is it as funny and does it "make ridiculous" it's framing culture as much as Austen? I love Austen, still don't get why people consider P&P a romance primarily.
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I haven't read Austen, but there's an infamous exchange in the original series where the ceremonial head of the Space Nazis compares his son, the acting head of the Space Nazis, to Hitler. The son replies, essentially, "Thanks." There's a tension in Mobile Suit Gundam and its direct descendants. The Space Nazis (Zeon) are also sort of, kind of a stand-in for Imperial Japan during WWII, and between the implicit relatability therein, and the charisma and popularity of series antihero Char Aznable (a Zeon officer), there is an enthusiasm in fan circles (leaking into later productions) for humanizing grunts on the "villain" side while emphasizing the corruption of the side the heroes happen to be on. But this as subtext to the headline narrative of Zeon being mass-murderers and the Earth Federation trying to stop them. There's also running, unspoken theme of the various corporate conglomerates playing governments and ideologues against each other for profit, and occasionally stepping in (usually with a particularly powerful prototype robot) when one side threatens to blow up the Earth Sphere for realsies. The end result is a lot of people dying for no reason, and constant backsliding into a state of war, and main characters who realize how ridiculous such circumstances are, but (as per TFW) don't have much power to do anything other than try to survive and protect their loved ones. Viewers are able to see where the shape of that society is warped. That's without speaking much to the alternate universes. In Gundam Wing, the greatest threat to a global aristocracy-cum-junta is a small, loosely-associated paramilitary group made up of 5 teenage boys and their supporters. The machinations of colonial-era Europe are so philosophically feeble as to be legitimately challenged by NSYNC and Greta Thunberg.
Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA (alpranalysis.com)
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This is great work. Once ALPR coverage is dense enough that you can’t go anywhere without generating a permanent record, the “mere observation” argument falls apart. Mapping this openly is one of the few ways communities can actually understand what they’ve signed up for.
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I've thought about this a lot as I see more and more reckless driving in the areas I live in. Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. We seem to have a worst of all situations where traffic is getting increasingly difficult to enforce, driving is getting more dangerous year by year, and we're terrified of government overreach if we add any automation at all to enforcement. I don't know the solution, but I do know that in the US we've lost 10-15 years of progress when it comes to traffic fatalities.
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> but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. This is not what Flock seeks to curb.
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These cameras are currently not used at all for traffic/speed enforcement. The best they would do is track more serious crimes like hit-and-runs by photographing cars in the area.
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Ah, that's helpful and something for me to learn more about. Thanks for the info.
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I understand why these statistics may be interesting, but all I really want to see is a map of the locations of the ALPR cameras. I would add an easy link to that data on this site.
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https://ringmast4r.github.io/FLOCK/ https://deflock.me/
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DeFlock is the first link in the "Related ALPR & Flock Projects" section, it contains a map.
The county lists are wrong, at least they are for my state of New Jersey. We have 21 counties, not 27. Is it picking up the bordering counties that might have overlapping contracts or something?
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It pulls counties from OSM administrative boundaries of level 6, which according to the OSM wiki, is "State counties and county equivalents, Territorial municipalities" ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag%3aboundary=administrative ). It does lead to some weird oddities, like counties with under 10 homes... I'd rather not manually correct it, since I want to rely on pure OSM data. (Unless you mean there is an actual bug in the processing and there's counties listed that aren't in the right states...) I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to verify/edit.
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One of those counties is Rockland, which is in NY. I wonder if it's counting bordering counties for states, since the assumption may be that the closest essential services for some Rockland residents may be in New Jersey.
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I know at least in Rockland's case, their power utility extends slightly into NJ. Can see it on statewide power outage trackers like this one: https://projects.nj.com/data/outagetracker/
100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where filming in public is a constitutionally protected right and networked ALPR capability is possible (if not regularly offered yet) in commodity doorbell cameras.
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> 100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where filming in public is a constitutionally protected right a It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be protected under the fourth amendment.
Is it a bubble? (oaktreecapital.com)
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This thread is just full of people discussing why industrial looms are bad. The factory owners don’t think looms are bad. You can either learn how to be useful in the new factory or you can start throwing shoes.
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Is it "work"? Off--topic: how many get overpaid for absolute bullshit?
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If you look at the chart at the bottom comparing Dec 99 to today.... > during the internet bubble of 1998-2000, the p/e ratios were much higher That is true, the current players are more profitable, but the weight in SPX percentages looks to be much higher today.
Impressive that you have have that many assets under management and still not show a clear understanding of an industry you're prognosticating on. The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace. The recommendation that you take a moderate investment position and not overdo it could be shared without as much needless thinking out loud, and doesn't bring anything new to the conversation. Kind of like every other AI offering out there, if you think about it -- participating in something you don't understand because of FOMO.
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> The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace. There is literally a section that begins, "What will be the useful life of AI assets?" In bold.
Why is so much invested in AI but not in fusion power?
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Because wind, solar and battery tech have given us most of the benefits of fusion power and it actually works today.
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There is probably not any large market for fusion power as we conceive of it today. You will get a different result if you revolutionize some related area (like making an extremely capably superconductor), or if you open up some market that can't use the cheapest alternatives (like deep space asteroid mining). But neither of those options can go together with "oh, and we will achieve energy positive fusion" in a startup business plan.
The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
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LLM slop doesn't have aspirations at all, its just click bait nonsense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0 Drives people insane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU And LLM are economically and technologically unsustainable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA These have already proven it will be unconstrained if AGI ever emerges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM The LLM bubble will pass, as it is already losing money with every new user. =3
> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even believe I get to do it! I've spent over a decade learning an elegant language that allows me to instruct a computer—and the computer does exactly what I tell it. It's a miracle! I don't want to abandon this language. I don't want to describe things to the computer in English, then stare at a spinner for three minutes while the computer tries to churn out code. I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code . I want to write code.
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I'm quite ok with only writing code in my personal time. In fact, if I could solve the problems there faster, I'd be delighted. Instead, I've reacted to the article from the opposite direction. All those grand claims about stuff this tech doesn't do and can't do. All that trying to validate the investment as rational when it's absolutely obvious it's at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than any arguably rational value.
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It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.
Why is AI limited to just a raw LLM. Scaffolding, RL, multi-modal... so many techniques which can be applied. METR has shown AI's time horizon for staying on task is doubling every 7 months or less. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-14-how-does-time-horizon-vary-across-domains/
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Because all the money has been going into LLMs and "inference machines" (what a non-descriptive name). So when an investor says "AI", that's what they mean.
I think it'd be truer to say that you can't be sure it's a bubble until after it pops.
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That is like telling others who experience natural disasters to wait until it happens and then ask themselves "How much damage will it bring" and then someone else tells them that it costed them everything. Anyone who has lived through the dotcom bubble knows that this AI mania is a obvious bubble and the whole point is you have to prepare before it eventually pops, not after someone tells you that it is too late when it pops.
> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
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If by "code" you mean machine code, it's been true for decades now. Of course the instructions on how to auto-generate the machine code you want must be quite complex and highly precise if you want directly usable results, but the tech works very well. It's called Automatic Programming and is considered a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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source: me I wrote 4000 lines of Rust code with Codex - a high throughput websocket data collector. Spoiler: I do not know Rust at all. I discussed possible architectures with GPT/Gemini/Grok (sync/async, data flow, storage options, ...), refined a design and then it was all implemented with agents. Works perfectly, no bugs.
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I would be interested in a web series (podcast or video) where people who do not know a language create something with AI. Then somebody with experience building in that technology reviews the code and gives feedback on it. I am personally progressing to a point where I wonder if it even matters what the code looks like if it passes functional and unit tests. Do patterns matter if humans are not going to write and edit the code? Maybe sometimes. Maybe not other times.
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Everyone is doing this extreme pearl clutching around the specific wording. Yeah, it's not 100% accurate for many reasons, but the broader point was about employment effects, it doesn't need to completely replace every single developer to have a sizable impact. Sure, it's not there yet and it's not particularly close, but can you be certain that it will never be there? Error bars, folks, use them.
The line right after this is much worse: > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.
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Ask ChatGPT “is AI programming world class?”
[deleted]
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> Including how it looks at the surrounding code and patterns. Citation needed. Even with specific examples, “follow the patterns from the existing tests”, etc copilot (gpt 5) still insists on generating tests using the wrong methods (“describe” and “it” in a codebase that uses “suite” and “test”). An intern, even an intern with a severe cognitive disability, would not be so bad at pattern following.
World class? Then what am I? I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea. I am impressed by its ability to generate and analyse code, but its code almost never works the first time, unless it's trivial boilerplate stuff, and its analysis is wrong half the time. It's very useful if you have the knowledge and experience to tell when it's wrong. That is the absolutely vital skill to work with these systems. In the right circumstances, they can work miracles in a very short time. But if they're wrong, they can easily waste hours or more following the wrong track. It's fast, it's very well-read, and it's sometimes correct. That's my analysis of it.
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Is this why AI is telling us our every idea is brilliant and great? Because their code doesn't stand up to what we can do?
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Copilot is easily the worst (and probably slowest) coding agent. SOTA and Copilot don't even inhabit similar planes of existence.
>I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments that are both small enough for me to easily grok the AI-generated code and also aligned enough to the AI's training data for its output to be ~100% correct, b) correctly predicting ahead of time whether reviewing/correcting the output for each increment will take longer than just doing it myself, and c) ensuring that the overhead of a) and b) doesn't exceed just doing it myself. [0] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ [2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/ [3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-hard
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a) is exactly what AI is good at. b) is a waste of time: why would you waste your precious time trying to predict a result when you can just get the result and see. You are stuck in a very low local maximum. You are me six months ago. You don’t know how it works, so you cannot yet reason about it. Unlike me, you’ve decided “all these other people who say it’s effective are making it up”. Instead ask, how does it work? What am I missing.
Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I care a lot more about chunks and AI could reasonably validate . Instead of thinking “what’s the biggest chunk I could reasonably ask AI to solve” I think “what’s the biggest piece I could ask an AI to do that I can write a script to easily validate once it’s done?” Allowing the AI to validate its own work means you never have to worry about chunking again. (OK, that's a slight hyperbole, but the validation is most of my concern, and a secondary concern is that I try not to let it go for more than 1000 lines.) For instance, take the example of an AI rewriting an API call to support a new db library you are migrating to. In this case, it’s easy to write a test case for the AI. Just run a bunch of cURLs on the existing endpoint that exercise the existing behavior (surely you already have these because you’re working in a code base that’s well tested, right? right?!?), and then make a script that verifies that the result of those cURLs has not changed. Now, instruct the AI to ensure it runs that script and doesn’t stop until the results are character for character identical. That will almost always get you something working. Obviously the tactics change based on what you are working on. In frontend code, for example, I use a lot of Playwright. You get the idea. As for code legibility, I tend to solve that by telling the AI to focus particularly on clean interfaces , and being OK with the internals of those interfaces be vibecoded and a little messy, so long as the external interface is crisp and well-tested. This is another very long discussion, and for the non-vibe-code-pilled (sorry), it probably sounds insane, and I feel it's easy to lose one's audience on such a polarizing topic, so I'll keep it brief. In short, one real key thing to understand about AI is that it makes the cost of writing unit tests and e2e tests drop significantly, and I find this (along with remaining disciplined and having crisp interfaces) to be an excellent tool in the fight against the increased code complexity that AI tools bring. So, in short, I deal with legibility by having a few really really clean interfaces/APIs that are extremely readable, and then testing them like crazy. EDIT There is a dead comment that I can't respond to that claims that I am not a reliable narrator because I have no A/B test. Behold, though: I am the AI-hater's nightmare, because I do have a good A/B test! I have a website that sees a decent amount of traffic ( https://chipscompo.com/ ). Over the last few years, I have tried a few times to modernize and redesign the website, but these attempts have always failed because the website is pretty big (~50k loc) and I haven't been able to fit it in a single week of PTO. This Thanksgiving, I took another crack at it with Claude Code, and not only did I finish an entire redesign (basically touched every line of frontend code), but I also got in a bunch of other new features, too, like a forgot password feature, and a suite of moderation tools. I then IaC'd the whole thing with Terraform, something I only dreamed about doing before AI! Then I bumped React a few majors versions, bumped TS about 10 years, etc, all with the help of AI. The new site is live and everyone seems to like it (well, they haven't left yet...). If anything, this is actually an unfair comparison, because it was more work for the AI than it was for me when I tried a few years ago, because because my dependencies became more and more out of date as the years went on! This was actually a pain for AI, but I eventually managed to solve it.
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Did you do 5-10 years of work in the year after you adopted AI? If you started after AI came in to existence 3 years ago (/s) you should have achieved 30 years of work output - a whole career of work.
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I think AI only "got good" around the release of Claude Code + Opus 4.0, which was around March of this year. And it's not like I sit down and code 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I put on my pants one leg at a time -- there's a lot of other inefficiencies in the process, like meetings, alignment, etc, etc. But yes, I do think that the efficiency gain, purely in the domain of coding, is around 5x, which is why I was able to entirely redesign my website in a week. When working on personal projects I don't need to worry about stakeholders at all.
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imho models like opus 4.5 are functionally indistinguishable from average(+) human developers. It has all the same issues (sometimes getting stuck on stuff, writing somewhat awful code to "ship" a feature) and requirements (tests/objectives to keep them honest, clear requirements, architecture, guidance etc.). With the right management and them being really quite good at picking up patterns I don't find it much different, except of course it is around one and two orders of magnitude more time and cost-effective, respectively. I certainly don't have more of a problem of updating my mental model with their changes than in projects with multiple collaborators. Usually less, since I am literally pulling the strings behind larger changes.
They do. Where did you get this? All the providers have clauses like this: "4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer’s End Users may provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law, Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output." https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/
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The outputs of AI are most likely in the public domain. As automated process output are public domain, and the companies claim fair use when scraping, making the input unencumbered, too. It wouldn't be OpenAI holding copyright - it would be no one holding copyright.
Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight (karpathy.bearblog.dev)
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Wonder what grade the comments are for when AlexNet won the Imagenet challenge 13 years ago (hint - the majority of commenters were not that impressed with the power of deep neural networks in AFAIK the first public display of them - keyword deep ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830
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I believe that the GPA calculation is off, maybe just for F's. I scrolled to the bottom of the hall of fame/shame and saw that entry #1505 and 3 F's and a D, with an average grade of D+ (1.46). No grade better than a D shouldn't average to a D+, I'd expect it to be closer to a 0.25.
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I understand the exercise, but I think it should have a disclaimer, some of the LLM reviews are showing a bias and when I read the comments they turned out not to be as bad as the LLM made them. As this hits the front page, some people will only read the title and not the accompanying blog post, losing all of the nuance. That said, I understand the concept and love what you did here. By this being exposed to the best disinfectant, I hope it will raise awareness and show how people and corporations should be careful about its usage. Now this tech is accessible to anyone, not only big techs, in a couple of hours. It also shows how we should take with a grain of salt the result of any analysis of such scale by a LLM. Our private channels now and messages on software like Teams and Slack can be analyzed to hell by our AI overlords. I'm probably going to remove a lot of things from cloud drives just in case. Perhaps online discourse will deteriorate to more inane / LinkedIn style content. Also, I like that your prompt itself has some purposefully leaked bias, which shows other risks—¹for instance, "fsflover: F", which may align the LLM to grade worse the handles that are related to free software and open source). As a meta concept of this, I wonder how I'll be graded by our AI overlords in the future now that I have posted something dismissive of it. ¹Alt+0151
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One thing this really highlights to me is how often the "boring" takes end up being the most accurate. The provocative, high-energy threads are usually the ones that age the worst. If an LLM were acting as a kind of historian revisiting today’s debates with future context, I’d bet it would see the same pattern again and again: the sober, incremental claims quietly hold up, while the hyperconfident ones collapse. Something like "Lithium-ion battery pack prices fall to $108/kWh" is classic cost-curve progress. Boring, steady, and historically extremely reliable over long horizons. Probably one of the most likely headlines today to age correctly, even if it gets little attention. On the flip side, stuff like "New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care" feels like high-risk framing. Benchmarks rotate constantly, and “struggle” headlines almost always age badly as models jump whole generations. I bet theres many "boring but right" takes we overlook today and I wondr if there's a practical way to surface them before hindsight does
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Instead of "LLM's will put developers out of jobs" the boring reality is going to be "LLM's are a useful tool with limited use".
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A majority don't seem to be predictions about the future, and it seems to mostly like comments that give extended air to what was then and now the consensus viewpoint, e.g. the top comment from pcwalton the highest scored user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10657401 > (Copying my comment here from Reddit /r/rust:) Just to repeat, because this was somewhat buried in the article: Servo is now a multiprocess browser, using the gaol crate for sandboxing. This adds (a) an extra layer of defense against remote code execution vulnerabilities beyond that which the Rust safety features provide; (b) a safety net in case Servo code is tricked into performing insecure actions. There are still plenty of bugs to shake out, but this is a major milestone in the project.
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'pcwalton, I'm coming for you. You're going down. Kidding aside, the comments it picks out for us are a little random. For instance, this was an A+ predictive thread (it appears to be rating threads and not individual comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703512 But there's just 11 comments, only 1 for me, and it's like a 1-sentence comment. I do love that my unaccredited-access-to-startup-shares take is on that leaderboard, though.
This is a cool idea. I would install a Chrome extension that shows a score by every username on this site grading how well their expressed opinions match what subsequently happened in reality, or the accuracy of any specific predictions they've made. Some people's opinions are closer to reality than others and it's not always correlated with upvotes. An extension of this would be to grade people on the accuracy of the comments they upvote, and use that to weight their upvotes more in ranking. I would love to read a version of HN where the only upvotes that matter are from people who agree with opinions that turn out to be correct. Of course, only HN could implement this since upvotes are private.
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I long had a similar idea for stocks. Analyze posts of people giving stock tips on WSB, Twitter, etc and rank by accuracy. I would be very surprised if this had not been done a thousand times by various trading firms and enterprising individuals. Of course in the above example of stocks there are clear predictions (HNWS will go up) and an oracle who resolves it (stock market). This seems to be a way harder problem for generic free form comments. Who resolves what prediction a particular comment has made and whether it actually happened?
The RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) browser extension indirectly does this for me since it tracks the lifetime number of upvotes I give other users. So when I stumble upon a thread with a user with like +40 I know "This is someone whom I've repeatedly found to have good takes" (depending on the context). It's subjective of course but at least it's transparently so. I just think it's neat that it's kinda sorta a loose proxy for what you're talking about but done in arguably the simplest way possible.
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I am not a Redditor, but RES sounds like it would increase the ‘echo-chamber’ effect, rather than improving one’s understanding of contributors’ calibration.
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More than having exact same system but with any random reader voting ? I'd say as long as you don't do "I disagree therefore I downvote" it would probably be more accurate than having essentially same voting system driven by randoms like reddit/HN already does
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Reddit's current structure very much produces an echo chamber with only one main prevailing view. If everyone used an extension like this I would expect it to increase overall diversity of opinion on the site, as things that conflict with the main echo chamber view could still thrive in their own communities rather than getting downvoted with the actual spam.
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it depends on if you vote based on the quality of contribution to the discussion or based on how much you agree/disagree.
To be clear...prior to this recent explosive interest in LLMs, this was already true. Snowden was over 10 years ago. We can't start clutching our pearls now as if programmatic mass surveillance hasn't been running on all cylinders for over 20 years. Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely care about this, everyone should. I'm just saying any vague gestures at imminent privacy-doom thanks to LLMs is liable to be doing some big favors of inadvertently sanitizing the history of prior (and still) egregious privacy offenders. I'm just suggesting more "Yes and" and less "pearl clutching" is all.
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Who, exactly, is the "we" who you see "pearl clutching" instead of "yes and-ing"?
I love it when you share some insight about HN or internet communication for which you have relevant searches at the ready to explanations of the concept. A personal favourite is “the contrarian dynamic”. Do you have a list of those at the ready or do you just remember them? If you feel like sharing, what’s your process and is there a list of those you’d make public? I imagine having one would be useful, e.g. for onboarding someone like tomhow, though that doesn’t really happen often.
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I just remember them. Or forget them! The process is simply that moderation is super repetitive, so eventually certain pathways get engraved in one's memory. A lot of the time, though, I can't quite remember one of these patterns and I'm unable to dig up my past comments about it. That's annoying, in that particular way when your brain can feel something's there but is unable to retrieve it.
> because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade. It's a shame that maintaining the web is so hard that only a few websites are "good citizens". I wish the web was a -bit- way more like git. It should be easier to crawl the web and serve it. Say, you browse and get things cached and shared, but only your "local bookmarks" persist. I guess it's like pinning in IPFS.
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> It's a shame that maintaining the web is so hard that only a few websites are "good citizens" It's not hard actually. There is a lack of will and forethought on the part of most maintainers. I suspect that monetization also plays a role.
Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux (heise.de)
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Here’s their social media presence if anyone is feeling like they’d like to drop them a message: https://www.facebook.com/HDMIForum/ https://twitter.com/HDMIForum/ https://www.instagram.com/hdmiforum/ https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8553802
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I just use a DisplayPort to hdmi cable. Works well on my 4k@120 TV
It's about time somebody does some reverse engineering and just uploads the needed stuff online to make HDMI 2.1 work in Linux. It's getting absurd at this point. TV's need to start including Displayport, HDMI is a giant pain in the ass for gamers.
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Isn't HDMI held by TV manufacturers who are looking to make some extra bucks on the side getting a utility from cables/monitors/GPUs? I don't think they would intentionally nuke this revenue stream.
Not to mention, DisplayPort is the superior standard over HDMI in both technological terms as well as it being royalty free.
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As long as you are okay with a 1-3m long cable. Unfortunately, for longer runs, DisplayPory is kind of a nightmare. HDMI tends to "just work" as long as you use fiber optic construction.
Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.
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> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. I don't get it. Why would making a standard freely accessible impede its adoption?
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Yeah, I'm curious about this too. I would think that making a standard freely available (and at most doing what NVMe does where you pay membership dues) would make the standard be adopted far more universally than putting up weird barriers to even access the standard.
Your claim is weird. No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard. The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results. If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents. Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now. The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own. The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures. In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.
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> No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard. unfortunately there are examples in the Telecom world
It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.
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Yeah HDMI Forum shameful behavior in a way reminds me of those evil greedy scientific publishing houses. Standards and science should be open and free as in freedom to access AND implement and not gated behind some obscene monetary or other forms of restrictions, like patents. In this day and age these restrictions have no place and should be abolished.
FWIW, most USB docks are effectively this. DP goes in via USB-C and HDMI comes out the other end. I bought one from UGREEN on Amazon. I think it's called the 9 in 1. It does 4k@60 with HDR, coming out of SteamOS.
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But does it support VRR?
So why can't Samsung and LG do more do improve this mess and put USB 4 / DisplayPort in all their TVs?
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There's no financial incentive. No other mass consumer device besides PCs use DisplayPort, heck, even PCs generally have an HDMI port. So the percentage of TV buyers who actually need to use DisplayPort (basically Linux users) would be a very very very small minority.
No, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has access to the specs, they've implemented it in hardware and in their closed source Windows driver, but they're not allowed to add it to their open source Linux driver. Nvidia does support HDMI 2.1 on Linux since their driver is closed source (but that causes its own problems). Maybe AMD could compromise by releasing a minimal binary blob which only exposes the HDMI 2.1 implementation and nothing else.
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And IIRC Intel has handled this by making their cards internally use DisplayPort then putting DisplayPort -> HDMI converters on the board.
Yes, that might work. Strictly, HDMI is a registered trademark that might have strings but you could always say something like EIA/CEA-861... compatible instead
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trademark doesn't cover descriptive language. saying it is an HDMI port is trademarked. Saying it is compatible with HDMI cables and displays is a purely descriptive statement.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban (reuters.com)
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While I'm not sure about this ban, _something_ is causing normally nice, peaceful Australia to be somewhere I don't feel safe anymore. My relatives in Melbourne have left, after being physically attacked and had their property vandalized by mostly young "activist" types who, no doubt, get all their news from social media.
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how Corporate/Gov knows who is Teen on these account???? isn't this is just precursor to digital ID ?????
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I actually feel that teens shouldn't be on social media at all. But I also don't think I should be able to lord that opinion over other people via fiat. Sugar is pretty bad for teens as well but I don't think banning that will solve health issues anymore than this will help teens. Personal decisions > a government trying to be mom Governments always end up doing the most damage when their control is "for the good of their constituents." This might seem like a good thing while they're parenting for you on things you agree with, however, there will likely come a time when they do something you don't and by then it will be too late.
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If it's bad for teens it's bad for everyone. Banning for only teens makes little sense
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Excessive social media is detrimental (to everyone). Age restrictions are not a good solution, it effectively categorises it as an adult activity, and glorifies it further. Kids are very good at identifying hypocritical behaviour and scare tactics. It'll end up counterproductive like the D.A.R.E. program. If the kids are forced out, the adults should be too.
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I suspect kids just find their way around things. And then they're on platforms with zero protections because nobody knows they're a teen... end result is worse.
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I have kids and I like this but as we know, prohibition only makes the drink stronger and the thirst deeper.
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This bit a community discord server of mine where I am a mod last night since we have a large oceanic contingent, somehow NZ got swept up in it too and we scrambled a bit to change our onboarding and other general policies.
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Look. As gen z person who basically grew up with tech and social media and had it since I was ~12, there is no way that any ban that is not direct id verification will work, this will instead make the forbidden fruit more tasty and teens more tech literate since they will look for ways around the ban. It feels like a lot of older people are more detached to the times when they first got access to Internet and social media and assume that its all dopamine hits and brain rot, while in reality its curiosity for a bigger world beyond school and limited things that you can do while being underage, cheap entertainment, knowledge.
> Ban kids yep, done > implement identity verification checks nope, not done so what's your point?
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My belief is that late stage capitalism pushes democracies to fascism and the overton window requires politicians to break-up unpopular changes into a smaller changes. I am prognosticating why politicians would pretend to care about the mental health of children.
> This only protects 90% (made up number) of children so it's a joke.
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To suggest this protects children at all is the real joke.
Please don't do this here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generated%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208058
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Got it, thanks for pointing it out.
Saw a screenshot last night of someone who can't get into JIRA (or some other Atlassian product) until they either submit two forms of government ID or record a face scan. Seems like a great and effective initiative /s Text of the screen: "Your Atlassian account is not age verified. Laws in your country require us to verify your age before accessing some products, including Jira and Confluence. This process takes 5-10 minutes. This can be done using two pieces of government ID or by performing a face scan."
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Sounds like a great excuse to not have to partake in office BS.
I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization. I think phones and social media are harmful, but I get the sense there's a political motive behind this. We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions, etc... And suddenly they ban social media. Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America. I don't believe they're overly concerned with "helping the kids" unfortunately
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The ingredients for this legislation trace back to an organisation called "Collective Shout"[1], by Melinda Tankard Reist, who readers may be aware of from their previous efforts to pressure Steam to restrict games. I happen to think there are plenty of valid points regarding harmful content on steam and valid arguments about the harms of social media, but I do not believe Collective Shout is a benevolent actor in combatting those harms or steering the solutions, as their proposals nearly always deliver harmful effects on LGBTQ people - and this fits with Reist's previous work[2], eg under Sen. Harradine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist
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I think not letting children get barraged with misinformation and foreign propaganda might help them.
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> Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America. I get the sense this is supposed to mean something; don't know the name but looking at their profile, great career, Obama's chief of staff. What's the implication?
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Asking "cui bono?" is always a sound question to ask in a political or commercial context, but it should not be the only one. Don't fall prey to appeal to motive. Even if the motivation is self-serving, it need not be bad per se.
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The policy has like 70% popular support. "What are they really doing?" is a stupid conspiracy brained question: trying to win the next election obviously and whatever you may think, representing the electorate. (I hate the policy personally)
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This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.
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But think of the children! Or the terrorist! Or communists! Whichever makes you accept the surveillance state.
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I think adults are barely able to take reasoned political positions in today’s online environment, but at least an adult has the experience to make the attempt. Exposing kids to the type of online political persuasion we have today means that we are exposing them to something they have not got the tools to navigate. They just get swept up into whatever the popular idea of the day happens to be. To me, the argument that separating kids from social media separates them from today’s political onslaught is one of the best arguments in favor of it.
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unfortunately there is nothing we can do in any society without seeing comments like this… whatever “move” is done comments like this will be there with endless “analysis” about “motivation” for the move… it is what it is…
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The nature of democracy and open dialogue I suppose. But really, when banning a large portion of the population from social media, political motives should absolutely be entertained. Politics is inextricably related to social media in 2025
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Clearly this comment is propaganda. This bill had bipartisan support and the Labor government has a significant share of the young voters who are over 18.
> The ban doesn't stop teens consuming social media content like tik tok. That is exactly what the ban aims to do? TikTok is literally listed in the article as one of the platforms ordered to ban access by under-16s
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The ban is on having an account. Tiktok video is publicly viewable.
It's also a massive propaganda channel. We can argue about whether any one particular state is involved in that or not but gut reaction is that if this were the real concern, their solution would be to regulate and censor what is posted online rather than kicking them off the platform and thus detaching them from the teat of (alleged) indoctrination. (that push for censorship also exists). Maybe Australia and the US are not involved in any social media propaganda campaigns but, at least in the case of the US, there is most certainly an abundance of precedence. I don't know the sincere feelings of these types wrt the safety and well-being of children but I don't think the goal is "getting them back" wrt policy or whatever.
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> It's also a massive propaganda channel. The problem is that school curriculum is as well. I remember going to school in Texas and hearing the phrase "Northern War of Aggression" to describe the Civil War. Censorship is never about cutting off information, it's only ever about cutting off information that the censors don't like. Given how openly hostile both AU and the US's governments are to progressive politics and worldviews, I am dubious that this isn't about controlling kids' access to a more open view of the world than their schools will give them.
It could be designed to be anonymous. Government runs authentication service that has your personal details. User creates account on platform Y, platform Y asks government service if your age is >18, service says y/n. Platform never finds out your personal details. OAuth for age verification.
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Would zero knowledge proofs work here? I'm not enough of a cryptography nerd so I don't know if it would be a practical use-case.
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Some concerns: - government gets a list of every website that requests your age - every website has to register with the government to initiate age verification checks Which pretty much puts an end to any notion of an open internet. But maybe a system I prefer to one where a bunch of random startups have my age verification biometrics .
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The government then knows all the services you use. No bueno. There are better ways to do this including zk proofs, but you gotta work against people mass reselling them. Could do some rate limited tokens minted from a proof maybe.
I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified. These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content. Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them. If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.
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> These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. From their users in Australia? Clearly not.
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> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation Why not? Why won't you give political agency to young adults? I'm saying this as a kid who grew up in Romania, just after Ceausescu had been executed, so throughout the '90s, I do very well remember all the political news and commentary coming my way (I was a teen), but I can't say that it bothered, not at all, it made me more connected to the adult world and hence more prepared to tackle real life just a little bit later on. I won't comment on the other stuff, because that would make me bring back memories of watching TV1000 (a Swedish TV satellite channel) late at night on Saturdays, also in the early '90s, I won't say for what but suffice is to say that I turned out ok.
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There's hardly any parallel between the type of political content (or corn) that was available on TV in the 90s, and what's found in today's social media. It's not political commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial behaviour.
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The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.
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Adults love 'garbage'. How do you define that? There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.
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I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great. The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.
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In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices. Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.
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> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. You mean like the outside world? What happens when these hot house flowers of yours reach whatever magic age and get dumped into all of that, still with no clue, but with more responsibilities and more to lose? I haven't noticed a whole lot of governments, or even very many parents, worrying about doing much to actually prepare anybody for adulthood . It's always about protection, never about helping them become competent, independent human beings. Probably because protection is set-and-forget, or at least they think it is... whereas preparation requires actually spending time, and paying attention, and thinking, and communicating. Maybe even having to answer hard questions about your own ideas. ... and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics ? We used to call that "civics class".
If we are so concerned about the materials make the platforms moderate them like they used to do. Banning them reeks of favoring the murdoch outlets which are free to spread misinformation
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I bet you Sky news gets more views through social media than TV broadcast these days! Many of their hosts are all over X, spreading misinformation. They are downstream from social media now, not seperate from it I suspect. Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the landscape of social media provides. I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies: "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you get there that has the contention).
The traditional outlets you are referring to are now worse because of social media.
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nothing is worse than social media - absolutely nothing
The ban is being enacted by the Australian Labor Party, which the Murdoch media is certainly not friendly with. If it ends up favouring Murdoch, it won’t have been deliberate.
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You mean this guy? https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/08/29/albanese-murdoch-meeting-silence/
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Murdoch media killed a story critical of Labor government member so there is not _no_ evidence of support here. https://archive.is/Hlr4l
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified. This may be true but it has nothing to do with what the person you are replying to said.
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> 1: "I get the feeling this has nothing to do with preventing harms" > 2: "heres the harms and why I think we should prevent them" Not trying to be rude here colordrops but I think you're being a too obtuse here, especially when the original person's comment was basically just "I don't trust them" (which is totally fair), I would rather engage in a good faith discussion of our opinions. > This may be true Do you think it's true?
The original comment suggests that the policy is politically motivated. The commenter replied with other reasons for the policy other than political agitation. I think its a valid response. I also don't buy the implied claim from the original commenter that age-limits are paternalistic/suppressive with regard to political thought/speech. Large tech platforms control political thought/speech on a regular basis, a lot of which is executed by state actors. Even in the absence of devious actors, algorithms are editorial by nature; they are not neutral infrastructure by any means.
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No, sorry, it's orthogonal to the poster's comment, which states that, regardless of merit, the purpose of the ban is political. Arguing for or against it is beside the point. Perhaps the original comment should have been more direct in and just said that Zionists are the ones pushing for these bans. The head of the ADL has made comments about this. A video by Sarah Hurwitz, Obama's speechwriter, went viral recently about how social media needs to be banned for young people because it's hurting the zionist movement. https://x.com/jennineak/status/1992395176283922767
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[delayed]
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The head of the ADL is a firehose of stupidity; that does not mean he controls policy. I also reject the pretense that public opinion of Israel would be higher among teens without social media, given their actions over the past few years.
>I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws. Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am. > I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences. Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong simply because people in the past were, but it does make me think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric. Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an example, the question isn't "should we have all or no freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle somewhere in the middle. Here's one vox pop with the introduction of breathalizers in UK (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_tqQYmgMQg
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> "Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you?" Whatever your conclusion is, it’s sort of beside the point I was making, which is that the many of the arguments about mandated seatbelts (or smoking, alcohol) are meaningfully different than the arguments being made today about age verification for websites. >“ So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am. ” This is kind of reinforcing what I said in my first comment. Most, if not all, of the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there. I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities. Which is why I thought your comment of “eerily similar” was off-base.
I'm curious to understand why your approach to TikTok is banning it. Why do you think this is the right solution? Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?
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You assume that banning usage was the first step instead of the last step. I'm not OP, but I'm guessing they started with talking to the kid, or more intermediate steps. > Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control? Kids aren't fully independent for good reason, and a very hard part of parenting is deciding how much independence to give them vs. sheltering them from the parts of the world that will hurt them. If a kid comes home with drugs or hardcore porn it is completely reasonable to confiscate them with no regard for independence and control. Is TikTok the same as heroin? No. But it is provably harmful in any number of ways that young brains do not have the tools to handle, and the benefits are arguably non-existent for most. With other things like sports, we know that there is the possibility of getting hurt, but that can be mitigated and the benefits far outweigh the risks.
No, it’s that he will spend hours doom scrolling whatever they feed to him.. I’ve tried to lead him down a path of watching more educational stuff on YouTube but he will just end up doom scrolling shorts.. I’m trying to figure out ways to enable him access but not have him waste hours with shorts.. I know there must be short form content that’s good but I’ve not seen any evidence watching over his shoulder.. I block shorts on YouTube for myself even.. at this point the best I can think of is allowing access in short windows of time with longer chunks of blocked access.. if anyone has ideas I’d love to hear them.
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Short-form content (if you can call it that) is a weapon of mass attention span destruction. IMHO the doom-scrolling loop it creates should be illegal, regardless of the audience.
I actually do think people directly see the negative public health impact, its so visceral in so many parents lives, and that that is the driving force behind all of this. I love being cynical, but I actually do buy these efforts as being purely "for the kids", kind of thing. Sure, there are knock-on effects, but I do buy the good faith-ness of phone bans in school and of these social media bans for kids.
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Banning the printing press in Europe would have stopped the 30 years war. Somehow I don't think anyone here would approve of the long term consequences. The end result of this will be that everyone needs to give their real name and address to view social media. Anything you say or watch that the current government doesn't like will result in police coming for a chat.
> its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and malware ridden ones It very much is not.
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It very much is. Free VPNs almost always have some sort of catch. E.g. HolaVPN users agree in the ToS to become an exit node for other VPN users: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN) If social media is so compelling, then teens almost certainly will take whatever steps are necessary to access it.
> Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn. One does not follow from the other. We make speeding illegal even though even the most affordable cars can trivially bypass all speed restrictions. It doesn't mean that the efforts to curb speeding are in bad faith just because it is still possible to bypass speed reduction rules.
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Thats a great comparison. Wonder why banning homelessness works so well. Oh we dont ban it? Must be because we dont care enough
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> That[']s a great comparison. Thank you. I thought it was a pretty good analogy, too. >Wonder why banning homelessness works so well[?] Oh we don[']t ban it? Must be because we don[']t care enough[.] I do not understand what point you are trying to make about homelessness, and how that would be at all relevant to keeping teenagers from having accounts on social media. That's not a great comparison. I was just pointing out that the existence of ways to violate a law, does not in any way, mean that passing the law or enforcing it is a bad faith effort.
> It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires regulation at the national level because I can't win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok. Sorry, but this just isn't the case. I have children very much in the target age here, and they only have a passing understand of what social media even is due to us explaining how unhealthy it is to them. It's unfortunate you feel incapable of achieving the same, but abdicating your responsibility as a parent to the state isn't the answer.
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I remember there being an experiment where parents were placed in a room with some toys their children were allowed to play with and some toys their children weren't allowed to. They measured the parents perceived level of control against their actual level of control by seeing if they stopped their children from playing with the researchers laptop that had been left in the corner of the room. Part of me wonders if it was apocryphal, I'm not sure if a test like that would get past an ethics committee (at least since laptops existed)
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Likewise, the state abdicating its responsibility and placing the burden solely on parents isn't fair either, and that is exactly the environment we currently find ourselves in.
My son is 15. My talk to him went something like this: There's a lot of porn and nasty things that you can't unsee, so be careful what you look at. Also, those extortion gangs target teenage boys, so if some girl is suddenly hot for you online, come see me immediately so we can troll the ever loving fuck out of them. I think it went pretty well. We like doing things as a family, but more like the Addams family...
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That's the only way that can work in the long term.
you could if you just whitelisted the apps you wanted your kids to use
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and delete the web browser?
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Computers (they each had their own) in public space and no phone until 14. Worked great w/o no filtering or whitelisting of any sort.
Youtube really wants to send me down the alt-right pipeline. I watch a few WW2 history videos and suddenly I must identify with "Mr Mustache" as the kids say. TikTok wants to radicalize me the other way, and shows me every video of a cop abusing their power that they can find. It cuts both ways. I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium. Mamdani did really well by making good social media posts. Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse because they have a competent grasp on social media in common. Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up. Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
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> I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium. Generally agree, but > Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse Yeah, but that wasn't entirely positively received, despite his earlier social media success. Him buddying up with Trump was a huuuuge turn off for me. > Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up. Newsom's content is also a huge turn off for me, and I am not convinced that his supposed approval ratings are not simply more CTR type machinations from the DNC. Maybe there's some segment of the population that genuinely wants whatever the hell Newsom is pushing content-wise, I certainly don't have #s on my side. Mamdani's efforts - Trump buddying aside - were much better. > Dems being a million years old is killing the dems. Yes, but I think age is simply a proxy for a number of other highly correlated behaviors and positions. Most progressives can name a couple of >70yo dems for whom these complaints do not apply.
Each party is splitting into factions. I imagine the establishment of both parties think social media is a problem
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Every political party ON THE PLANET has always had to manage internal factions, it doesn't matter if you're talking the Soviet Communist Party, the Democrats, the Republicans, The Tea party faction. There's absolutely nothing new about parties having internal divisions. Even the fact that at the moment everything is so partisan is nothing new, history has shown that several times over the past century that politics has followed a penudulum that swings from partisan extremes, back to centrist moderates, and then back to the extremes.
It's almost as if a country's population need more than 2 parties to express themselves.
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The two party system exists because even in a multi party system (eg. those that exist in proportional representation governments) still end up as "In government" vs "In opposition" Secondly, we employ "adversarial" systems for two branches of government (legislative and judicial) because it's a hell of a lot easier to spot flaws in ideas of people you are opposed to (as opposed to some European Judiciaries that have "inquisitorial" systems, where a judge investigates activity) Very often in the proportional systems people opine that "grand coalitions" should form, with the two largest parties, although that loses a lot of the advantages of the adversarial system, and has a tendency to steam roll smaller interests in the country. Finally, the Greeks pointed out that governance within societies cycles through a series of styles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory The USA itself has gone through SIX iterations of how parties should look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_system#United_States
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I think the Greeks called our form of government an oligarchy. Elections as popularity contests are so easily swung by money. Instead, democracy was determined to be selecting public officials by random lots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition I guess it's a bit like the jury system. I read an article not long ago on here about how promotions in companies should also be done by lottery in order to break up cabals.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind they'd ban it for adults too, would help me from wasting time on them. In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email? I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
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Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met friends I later traveled countries to meet. Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms. So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was. But what about hn?
I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived. Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
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At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.
I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted. Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse. My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
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It's the combination of ads, analytics, personalization, and scale. Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put out very different products. Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given change to figure out what makes the product more addictive. Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be addictive to you , personally, rather than just generally addictive to people. And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time on the problem of making the product more addictive. I don't know what you do about it.
The Australian ban doesn't block anyone from accessing content.
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Unless the social media site puts up super random login gates and A/B testing anti-patterns that blocks you from accessing content?
Is the assumption that non "tech industry" communities (e.g: voat, parler, ovaries, gab, truth, lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 8chan, etc) are less likely to be a problem or to negatively impact teens than the mainstream "big tech" ones (e.g: facebook, twitter, youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc)?
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The thing with those alternative communities is that they sort of orbit around the larger tech platforms. Their agenda is set by the news-of-the-day within certain X/FB/YouTube subcommunities. Its sort of analogous to wire services in traditional media. Additionally, people that post on those platforms originally gained notoriety on the bigger tech platforms, and took their audience with them.
> the voting record proves it. Putting on my tin-foil, devils-advocate hat... AKA I don't necessarily believe this but I also have no counter-argument: Mostly performative. When it's decided that something actually needs to pass, then you'll get some sacrificial lambs that vote across the aisle. Typically they'll be close to retirement or from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote.
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I mean at some point arguments like this become more akin to Russell's Teapot. If you're making an almost unfalsifiable claim, then the burden of proof is on you to prove it and not others to disprove it. From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in a positive light it would sound more similar to "the state population falls on both sides of the issue and thus either vote could make sense from their legislator depending on exigent circumstances and other factors" or any number of other explanations depending on the vote and populations.
We very clearly are making progress on these century long issues, unless you somehow think kids now are growing up in more hostile physical environments than they were 100 years ago. This ban does not prevent kids from using IM platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, Discord so your argument that this somehow restricts the ability for online communication is false. What you are arguing against is the restriction of access to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat —- all of which are filled with predatory algorithms that have shown to have negative affect on the mental health of teens, young adults, AND adults.
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> What you are arguing against is the restriction of access to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat —- all of which are filled with predatory algorithms that have shown to have negative affect on the mental health of teens, young adults, AND adults. Actually, what I'm arguing against is the restriction of whatever apps a government chooses to apply their very loose definition to. What happens when the kids congregate on another platform? Presumably they'll just add that to the list too, right? Does a cat and mouse game seem productive? To say nothing of the precedent set being used for political ends. What I'm arguing for is stuff that may actually solve the underlying issues - like, for example, addressing those predatory algorithms you refer to.
Online abuse works the exact same way. Most kids don’t choose to be abused online either.
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Yes. What I'm saying is that people can choose to leave online spaces that are abusive, as opposed to abuse at school or home, which are much harder (usually impossible) for children to escape.
As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage. The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems the estimation is accurate. Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.
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> but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this I’m a 40 year old man and I’ve been impacted. A huge circle of people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic when they keep it (despite saying they don’t) and then get breached in 6 months.
Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.
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Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.
DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says (finance.yahoo.com)
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These bans are hard to enforce. You just need any company outside china that isn't under sanction to buy them and then sell them. Even further, you can skip the hardware buying entirely and set some shell company to buy compute from the dozens of vendors.
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The gamernexus point about "open one eye, close one eye" was on point here. China instructed companies to stop using nvidia chips too...knowing fully well it'll not stop. It achieves their aim though - a strong nudge in the direction of independence. Much of Chinese top level direction seems to be that way - indicating direction of travel and implied future threats for companies not rowing in said direction As for the US side of the ban - that's about as sound as the war on drugs. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that's futile
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As someone who doesn't want to live in a country run by corporations, that first part of indication the direction of travel sounds like a good idea. Obviously, the companies should follow the direction set out by the nation willingly and not because of threats, but otherwise it doesn't sound like a dumb idea to try to unify people toward some goal rather than the goal being "individuals can get very, very rich and wealthy".
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kawaii nonsense, please do some journalism and dig into some relevant stuff, Mr. Dump and Mrs. Pump
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I mean of course that’s the case
I thought this was common knowledge. DeepSeek’s Wikipedia entry says that they trained all their models on Nvidia chips procured before the U.S. embargo to China on them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means. I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
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Lol @ quoting 3 companies that broke any possible copyright law as victims.
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Everyone trains on queries from other models, it's called distillation
> Yes. The bans are export controls. These export controls increasingly look like "tax". The White House said the US government would take a 25 percent cut of the chip’s sales, similar to a deal with AMD and Nvidia earlier this year that allowed them to sell lower-powered AI chips to China while paying the US government 15 percent of the proceeds. > Using them in China is legal in China. Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips. https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-innovation/artificial-intelligence/china-nvidia-h200-627924 / https://archive.vn/B2pah
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That's Corporatism. It's from the fascist playbook where the state takes partial or complete ownership of private companies. Where does that money go, to some slush fund for the president? The reason for the export controls is to keep our potential adversaries from being on the bleeding edge of frontier AI. It goes against the US's interests to give China a leg up with advanced chips. It's almost laughable, of course, as the Nvidia chips are already manufactured in a country that China claims as their own. If they ever pressed the issue, we could find ourselves without the most advanced chips.
Projection. China does not even try to export their ideologies to the rest of the world who they see as clearly different culturally. The “west” OTOH does not have a good track record of that.
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China certainly does export their ideologies by telling the world Taiwan is part of China and telling others to not recognize Taiwan as a country. They also have major if not direct influence on Myanmar's civil war. North Korea. Let's not forget the taking land(India, tibet) and extending their borders with man-made islands so they can extend their fishing territories. that's a great track record. you're not biased at all.
Freedom of course. Do you believe in communism?
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Oh god, it's like talking to my Dad. What is Communism?
I see Chinese citizens traveling abroad every day. Doesn't look like they cannot travel. Freedom of what exactly? Are you really free in America when you have to toil away 12 hours per day to make ends meet? Honestly funny to see people falling for American propaganda.
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Very few Americans commenting here have to toil away for 12 hours to make ends meet.
> less than legal means. This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade. Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state. Of course people will evade sanctions; what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
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The companies it "stole" from broke the law in their own country while acquiring the training data; frankly sanction avoidance is lesser and arguably not even their (it's the people in US that smuggle them, nothing breaking china law afaik) crime
I mean, it makes sense in the USA's head. They want to win the AI race. What they are doing is making it so China has no choice but to develop an alternative to Nvidia chips. Eventually China will make their own shovels to dig up the gold. I'm not sure what this would do to Nvidia, but I'm sure we will find out.
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The funny thing is we do not have the ability to do more than slow them down briefly, so this will simply result in the production of a totally parallel capability that can then be sold to the rest of the world
The same government that runs Guantanamo prison, known for it's illegal torture practices and imprisoning people with no charges? Can't be!
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Fun fact, when US prisoner of wars were water boarded by the Japanese, these got death sentences. When a US soldier was photographed in Vietnam waterboarding a vietnamese PoW he got 22 years of prison. Then came 2002 and rule of law stopped applying.
The plans weren't wishes, they were things they were actively working on to make happen. The point is they didn't need "Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy" to motivate it, they were already motivated to do it anyway. Yes, they were "actively working on it"; no, they had made little significant progress despite throwing tons of money at the initiative. There were lots of stories along the lines of https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/technology/china-microchips-tsinghua-unigroup.html from the early 2020s, not so many lately. Their internal posture will now be the same as Russia's post-1945 push for the Bomb. Continued failure will (possibly literally) place heads at stake. The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated. They are coordinated well enough, but with the goal of magnifying Cheeto Benito's personal influence and cultivating his in-group's fortunes.
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> Yes, they were "actively working on it"; no, they had made little significant progress despite throwing tons of money at the initiative. That's how things sometimes go when you're building up a capability. I'm sure they were going to work through the setbacks, regardless. >> The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated. > They are coordinated well enough, but with the goal of magnifying Cheeto Benito's personal influence and cultivating his in-group's fortunes. No. That problem is bigger than the Trump administrations, focusing on him is lazy.
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No. That problem is bigger than the Trump administrations, focusing on him is lazy. It's absurd to say that without elaborating on how anyone else was "just as bad," which I expect will be a key part of your next reply. Trump is fucking bad , and if you disagree after all we've seen, you're either arguing in bad faith, or you're not such a great person yourself. He is costing us every drop of soft power we ever had as a nation.
Mexican cartels were branching out into the avocado trade, so why not.
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Cartels, mafias and other criminal organisations have been involved in other industries for many generations now. Money laundering requires legitimate businesses and if that business happens to turn a profit. That's even better. Just look at the construction industry in new York or Italy many decades ago.
The US sanctions have nothing to do with free market maximalism. I thought that was quite obvious historically and specially now. They've imposed tariffs on literally every country on the planet.
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Tariffs are applied to countries that we are "ripping off", if King Donald's definition is used consistently for every country. If we had a surplus, you still get a 10% tariff that Americans have to pay...
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country. So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing. Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.
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Can't they do it here? or will the authorities go after these kind of upgrades?
License leases, this is what they can do. You log into the Nvidia Enterprise Portal and download a license file that is temporary valid (e.g. 7 days) and bound to the specific serial numbers. You transfer that file to your local license (DLS) server. It does not need to be permanently connected to the internet, but it needs to be refreshed periodically. Your local server now holds the tickets that the GPUs need to use to run (obviously checked by the GPU itself, not on a driver-level, though driver could be a first step). https://docs.nvidia.com/license-system/dls/index.html If an account is suspected of violation, they get suspended and need to pass the KYC again. It's not perfect (as violators can use shell companies), but it is relatively elegant. In case of shell companies, they can get caught one day or another. Regular users or those who don’t need air-gapped network can just stay online and the lease automatically renew in the background. Friction-less. Added benefit: nobody is going to try to steal your cards Minus: enshittification of the world in the name of politics, and Nvidia will lose sales, and backfire at the US economy I hope they don't plan it
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This guy worked for Microsoft. I can tell.
I think that was the British? We are just getting over hating them ourselves.
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A quick read of some British press and you'll realize that the British are going through their own self-hate moment, so everyone is aligned. This is what living in the ashes of an empire does to you. Will come for the USA in time.
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[delayed]
Qwen3-Omni-Flash-2025-12-01：a next-generation native multimodal large model (qwen.ai)
Yes - there is a way: https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp
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Whisper and Qwen Omni models have completely different architectures as far as I know
A simple way is to split the model’s output stream before TTS. Reasoning/structured tokens go into one bucket, actual user-facing text into another. Only the second bucket is synthesized. Most thinking out loud issues come from feeding the whole stream directly into audio.
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There is no TTS here. It's a native audio output model which outputs audio tokens directly. (At least, that's how the other real-time models work. Maybe I've misunderstood the Qwen-Omni architecture.)
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True, but even with native audio-token models you still need to split the model’s output channels. Reasoning/internal tokens shouldn't go into the audio stream only user-facing content should be emitted as audio. The principle is the same, whether the last step is TTS or audio token generation.
Thanks Was it being closed weight obvious to you from the article? Trying to understand why I was confused. Had not seen the "Flash" designation before Also 30B models can beat a semi-recent 235B with just some additional training?
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They had a Flash variant released alongside the original open weight release. It is also mentioned in Section 5 of the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17765 For the evals it's probably just trained on a lot of the benchmark adjacent datasets compared to the 235B model. Similar thing happened on other model today: https://x.com/NousResearch/status/1998536543565127968 (a 30B model trained specifically to do well in maths get near SOTA scores)
Based on things I had read over the past several months, Qwen3-Flash seemed to just be a weird marketing term for the Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B series, not a different model. If they are not the same, then that is interesting/confusing.
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It is an in-house closed weight model for their own chat platform, mentioned in Section 5 of the original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17765 I've seen it in their online materials too but can't seem to find it now.
Does Qwen3-Omni support real-time conversation like GPT-4o? Looking at their documentation it doesn't seem like it does. Are there any open weight models that do? Not talking about speech to text -> LLM -> text to speech btw I mean a real voice <-> language model. edit: It does support real-time conversation! Has anybody here gotten that to work on local hardware? I'm particularly curious if anybody has run it with a non-nvidia setup.
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That's exciting. I doubt there are any polished voice chat local apps yet that you can easily plug this into (I doubt the user experience is "there" yet). Even stuff like Silly Tavern is near unusable, lots of work to be done on the local front. Local voice models are what's going to enable that whole Minority Report workflow soon enough (especially if commands and intent are determined at the local level, and the meat of the prompt is handled by a larger remote model). This is part of programming that I think is the new field. There will be tons of work for those that can build the new workflows which will need to be primarily natural language driven.
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I did find this app: https://github.com/gabber-dev/gabber The creator posted a little demo of it working with Qwen3 Omni that is quite impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DBFVe3cLto He didn't include any details regarding how the model was running though
None of inference frameworks (vLLM/SGLang) supports the full model, let alone non-nvidia.
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That's unfortunate but not too surprising. This type of model is very new to the local hosting space.
Launch HN: InspectMind (YC W24) – AI agent for reviewing construction drawings
What kind of system to you have for parsing symbology? Do you check anything like cross discipline coordination (e.g. online searching specification data for parts on drawings like mechanical units and detecting mismatch with electrical spec), or it wholly within 1 trades code at a time? edit: there's info that answers this on the website. It seems limited to the common ones (e.g. elec vs arch), which makes sense.
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We parse symbols using a mix of vector geometry, OCR, and learned detection for common architectural/MEP symbols. Cross-discipline checks are a big focus as we already flag mismatches between architectural, structural, and MEP sheets, and we’re expanding into deeper electrical/mechanical spec alignment next. Would love to hear which symbols matter most in your workflow so we can improve coverage.
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I do electrical so parsing lighting is often a big issue. (Subcontractor) One big issue Ive had is drafters use the same symbol for different things per person. One person's GFCi is another's switched receptacle. People use the specialty putlet symbol sometimes very precisely and others not. Often accompanied by an annotation (e.g. 6-15R). Dimmers being ambiguous is huge; avoiding dimming type mismatches is basically 80% the lutron value add.
Would love to run it and give feedback if it's cheap to do so; my company just finished a bunch of projects and would love to cross reference if it catches the issues that we found by hand (assuming it's inexpensive enough). I do high rise electrical work for a subcontractor.
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We’d love that — perfect use case. Send a recent set and we’ll run a discounted comparison so you can see what we catch vs. what surfaced during construction. If helpful, we can hop on a quick call to walk through results and collect feedback. Email me aakash@inspectmind.ai
Totally fair callout and appreciate the feedback. We’re already testing alternative hero layouts focused purely on real customer results and example issues caught. Our goal is to win trust by demonstrating usefulness/results, not who invested in us.
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where would my firms documents end up (on whos servers) to do this checking? I dont know how any firm would just hand out their cd's just like that? Or is being that lax normal these days? Aside: this field is insanely frustrating, the chasm between clash detection and resolution is a right ball ache...between acc, revizto, and aconex clash detection (and the like)..the defacto standard is pretty much telling me x is touching y....great...can you group this crap intelligently to get my hi rise clashes per discipline from 2000 down to 10? Can you navigate me there in revit (yes switchback in revizto is great) but revizto itself could improve.
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Documents are stored on AWS with strict access controls, meaning they are only accessible to the file owner and, if necessary, our engineers for debugging purposes. After the check, users can delete the project and optionally permanently delete the files from our S3 buckets on AWS.
Size of Life (neal.fun)
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Sorry to say that my first reaction was that this is heresy. . . all this talk of science is a hoax. But then the music calmed me right down and I wended my way through, not understanding 99% of what I saw but in awe of nature and Neal's art nonetheless.
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It was great until Sea snail appeared in inches. Transitioning from micrometer/milliliter to inches is pretty rough
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For me it appears in millimetres, but I'm in Canada not the US. I'm guessing the default is chosen based on your browser's language. You can change the units in the top right. Edit: I checked the page's code and it does indeed set the units based on language. If your language is "en-US" you get imperial by default, everyone else gets metric.
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Blood cells are huge!
Man I played Operation Neptune a lot when I was a kid. I wonder if it was the first game to do this style of adaptive music layering. It predates the iMUSE system used in LucasArts games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter. For anyone curious, you can actually play it here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Operation_Neptune_1990
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The arcade classic Space Invaders had a primitive soundscape in that every time the remaining invaders advance, it plays a short bass note. As fewer and fewer invaders remain, it takes less time for them to advance, and the note repeats faster and faster, it adds a remarkable amount of increasing tension as each level progresses. So not exactly the same, but perhaps prototypical. I think Asteroids did as well.
as a former virologist, I love the thought that LLMs are the virus of reasoning :)
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Once a virologist always a virologist I always say.
I like it, but the switch from metric to inches is confusing, and I think introduces a bug - there's no way a sea snail is 5-6 neurons high.
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You can change the units in the top corner. It defaults to metric for me, but if your browser language is "en-US" you get imperial by default.
Leaving the U.S. for the Netherlands (newyorker.com)
Guns and (relatively) freedom of speech (yes I'm aware it comes with asterisk) are the two big ones. If I left the USA it would probably be to a place with weak governance on these points in practice rather than on paper. Only Yemen, Iraq, Somaliland, parts of Pakistan, parts of Rojava and maybe KRG (Kurdistan), Idlib, and Palestine are only places I know of with looser (to me better) gun laws than America and out of all those I'd only really consider Somaliland & KRG & Rojava as places where a westerner could probably settle without getting their head cut off. Freedom of speech, IDK where, hard to find anyplace with looser speech restriction than America. However if you are willing to go with de facto rather than de jure, plenty of places in Africa and Latam can be freer on these points, especially if you have a little coin. Financially though, places like Dubai blow away the absolutely dystopic USA controls like FATCA and world taxation/filing, KYC, AML and other madness USA uses to keep an iron grip on traditional finance channels.
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In Switzerland you can have guns, so it’s just factually wrong.
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Sure but bearing arms is a lot more restrictive in Switzerland. I'm not claiming you can't have guns in other countries, hell you can have a gun even in places like Japan in a limited capacity with the right permits. Where I live in Arizona you can 3d print a handgun, load it, stick it down your pants, and walk around with it around town all day doing basically whatever (as long as you don't go to a school, jail, or courthouse basically). All with zero background checks, licenses/permits, or even needing to carry an ID. Can I do that in Switzerland? I doubt they would let you do that even with a long rifle, unless you are going to/from some sort of approved activity. The only euro-controlled place I know where you can basically do that is Greenland, as long as it is a bolt action rifle. Greenland is actually looser than USA in that regard, you can buy a bolt rifle like a hammer from a hardware store in Greenland with zero checks or license (IIRC, even as a foreigner) whereas in USA you could only do that if you bought it privately or made it yourself.
For me it was a factor to some degree. I am not a firearm collector. For me it was knowing that I was moving from a state that hates firearms and wants to justify law enforcement budgets by punishing anyone that defends themselves to a state that not only has very few restrictions on firearms and ammo but also actively and legally supports people defending themselves and their neighbors. That was just one of many factors however. No state income tax was also a big plus for me personally.
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I know nobody who owns a firearm and I am pretty sure close to nobody of them know somebody themselves. Same goes for being a victim of a criminal offense. Against what/who are your defending with those firearms in the US?
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Who would tell you they have them if you are in a country where it is illegal? For instance the fgc-9[] commonly seized in parts of Europe was invented by a German in Germany (ethnic Kurd though). No one knew who he was until he was arrested and for the most part until he was dead. Lots of guns in Europe by people who aren't supposed to have them. Either because they are criminals thus don't care about gun laws, or if they are 'good' people then they should know not to pull out a gun unless their other option is to be dead -- at which point 'fuck the law.' [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9
In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution (e360.yale.edu)
Didn't advocate for "more highways" -- I totally get it. More offering that maybe these problems shouldn't be viewed as a purely zero-sum game, where cities get all the benefit at the expense of the larger region due to a form of geographic tyranny. (Or at least, perhaps we shouldn't pretend that externalities don't exist through studies that largely look at quality-of-life factors in the hub.) You can see some of these same dynamics playing out in SF with the decommissioning of the 'Great Highway' on the west side, which led to a recent recall of the local council member. Why does the majority vote of a city of 800k people get to unilaterally dictate the transportation options for a region upwards of 7MM?
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> where cities get all the benefit at the expense of the larger region A pair of thought experiments. The tri-state area is depopulated and turned into a nature reserve. Everywhere except for New York City. How does it do? Now, New York City is leveled and turned into a nature preserve. How does this affect those states’ non-urban populations? (Hint: economic collapse. Budget cuts. Unemployment.) Cities suck resources from outside. But by and large, they also distribute largesse to their proximities and subsidize life for everyone around them. > led to a recent recall of the local council member. Why does the majority vote of a city of 800k people get to unilaterally dictate the transportation options for a region upwards of 7MM? New York City has a population of 8.5mm [1]. That’s almost half of the metropolitan area’s population [2]. Include New York State and the non-voting population effect is a minority. Congestion charging isn’t a tyranny of the minority. As for why, self determination. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
> But why should they even care to begin with? Why should they care about something that they feel will hurt them financially when they're already struggling and restrict their freedom on top of that? Why wouldn't they care? > Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing? Uber's "surge" pricing was what first introduced many of them to a world where the price of something they depend on changes from moment to moment. Dynamic/discriminatory pricing schemes have been worrying people for a long time now. People don't like it, they consider it scammy, and they don't want it to spread. I think that if NYC had just jacked up the toll price all the time it wouldn't have set off as many alarms, but ultimately people in other places aren't really worried about congestion pricing in New York, their worry is that it will come to where they drive and they can't afford people taking more money from them. They're struggling to keep food on the table and are drowning in record high levels of household debt. Of course they're scared of congestion pricing catching on. Mind you, while some of their fears are reasonable, not all of them are. I've seen some of the more conspiratorial people talking about it as a way to control and restrict the movement of poor people (something shared with criticisms of 15-minute cities). The core of the problem though is that their standard of living is declining, their trust/confidence in government is bottoming out, they know that they're getting screwed over by the wealthy and they're on edge. They see NYC using some scammy pricing scheme to take more money from people like them while the wealthy are unaffected and it hits a nerve. They'll have plenty of skin in the game if congestion pricing spreads (and its success makes that increasingly likely) and that skin is already stretched thin which is making them feel highly skeptical of government, suspicious of people's motives, and angry over being asked to make their lives worse for the convenience of the wealthy. They worry about driving where they need to go becoming a luxury they can be priced out of, and as bad as NYC's public transportation is (compared to what's seen in other countries) most of them don't have anything even close to it in their own cities. That's what I'm seeing in discussions surrounding this issue both online and offline anyway.
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Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing? Why is this national news? Everything you're saying has zero impact on 93-97% of the US population (New York State is 6% of the US population, NYC is 3%). None of these people have real skin in the game, because this literally has no effect on them. New Yorkers don't vote in other states. Why is a single student's grade in OSU national news? Why is congestion pricing national news? Why is a library in the middle of nowhere California news? None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system. In fact they're exactly unrelated which is why we're blasted with this stuff on the news 24/7. You're worried about a slippery slope argument when most of us are already being fleeced by current, real policies from government and corporations. Congestion pricing is not the thing screwing over American families, it's the thing they're pointing at so you don't look at the actual thing.
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> Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing? Because in all likelihood this isn't going to be limited to Manhattan, and I'd argue (like many others) that it probably shouldn't be. The fact that it's been so successful makes it all but inevitable that the practice will spread. Why would people wait until they're forced to choose between driving to work and affording groceries before they speak out against it? > None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system I think a lot of people would argue that dynamic pricing schemes and governments taking increasing amounts of money from their pockets is, at least in part, why they are stretched thin. In any case, regardless of the cause of their struggles they are struggling. If they were feeling financially secure they might grumble at the increasing likelihood of paying fines to drive where they want to, but they wouldn't be panicking over it like they have been. Congestion pricing isn't seen as something that's screwing them over right now, but it is seen as the latest scheme cooked up by government that will be screwing them over if they can't put a stop to it. I think we'd agree that congestion pricing isn't the biggest issue impacting the struggling American family right now, but I can understand why it's being seen as a concern and as something they want to keep out of their own cities. For some that means putting a stop to the practice before it spreads.
Sure, but that also drives the question of "why don't we have functioning public transit?" or "why aren't we building out our public transit?". There will be a stop and balance struck everywhere, but this sort of thing really does make people that deal in the car industry nervous. I'd gladly ditch my car tomorrow if I could catch a bus within walking distance. I'm unfortunately 5 miles from the nearest bus stop.
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> that also drives the question of "why don't we have functioning public transit?" or "why aren't we building out our public transit?" The answer to which in many American cities being because there isn’t enough density. Outside America’s 4 to six largest cities, ditching cars probably doesn’t work.
Workable is not a great endorsement. If things are not fast and frequent people will prefer to drive even if transit could work. Also both have workable transit only for some destinations - I don't live in either city, but I'd guess without looking getting downtown is easy but if your destination is one suburb over it is technically possible but you could baby crawl faster.
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Yup, it's something I think people need to experience. I lived in the UK for 2 years without a car and it ultimately did not negatively impact me (other than needing to memorize local bus routes). I lived in towns as small as 10000 people (Newtown, Wales) and they had both a connected rail system and a couple of bus routes serving the town and connecting it to other towns. Buses absolutely can work in even quiet rural locations, they just need to be properly funded and prioritized. They also need to be subsidized. The American notion that public transit needs to either run net zero or turn a profit is backwards and fundamentally stopping it from working well.
> Truckers aren't intentionally giving kids asthma The number of trucks I see that are either horribly maintained or purposefully modified to defeat emissions devices spewing massive clouds of black smoke every time they step on the accelerator pedal speaks otherwise to me. Rolling Coal is absolutely a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
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You really don't see that here in NYC. Enforcement for big rigs and even pickups curbed a lot of that. Used to be common to see a big truck or especially a city bus belch black smoke but nowadays with enforcement and emissions systems it's much less common. Ironically, the worst offenders are the obviously poorly maintained school busses.
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Even those people don't deserve to be "dragged from their cabs and beaten by angry mobs"
This fits the template in the post you're replying.
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No; it was already economically infeasible, and thus the drop was not marked .
Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon (the307.substack.com)
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HN let this one fall through the cracks I guess. Usually this article would get flagged in under 10 minutes of being up.
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It was flagged and enough people complained about censorship that is was resurrected with a pinned post from dang about how we should be civil
There are a few different angles to this. 1. If any other state had done this, we'd be correctly calling this a terrorist attack and there wouldn't be any question about it; and 2. Palantir was a partner in developing several AI systems used for targeting missile strikes in Gaza. Collectively these tend to be called Lavender [1][2]. Another of these systems is called "Where's Daddy". What does it do? It targets alleged militants at home so their families with be collateral damage [3]; and 3. These systems could not exist without the labor of the humans who create them so it raises questions about the ethics of everything we do as software engineers and tech people. This is not a new debate. For example, there were debates about who should be culpable for the German death machine in WW2. Guards at the camp? Absolutely. Civilians at IG Farben who are making Zyklon-B? Do they know what it's being used for? Do they have any choice in the matter? My personal opinion is that anyone continuing to work for Palantir can no longer plead ignorance. You're actively contributing to profiting from killing, starving and torturing civilians. Do with that what you will. In a just world, you'd have to answer for your actions at The Hague or Nuremberg 2.0, ultimately. [1]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticias/palantir-allegedly-enables-israels-ai-targeting-amid-israels-war-in-gaza-raising-concerns-over-war-crimes/ [2]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ [3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-ai-system-wheres-daddy-strikes-hamas-family-homes-2024
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If any other country handed out explosive pagers to terrorists and had them blow up in their faces and balls we'd consider it terrorism? Really? I thought terrorism was targeting civilians. Are you arguing that Hezbollah's top brass were civilians?
Because history started on October 7th, apparently, and implying otherwise by bringing in facts and nuance is antisemitic, apparently. It'd also be antisemitic to point out the various Israeli aggressions against Lebanon, too.
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I can't imagine why Israel was carrying out strikes in Lebanon after October 8th. It's a total mystery.
> The pager attack is where Israel intentionally put civilian devices in the civilian supply chain That is not true. They targeted devices acquired by Hezbollah and distributed by Hezbollah to their commanders. These devices had a military purpose and never entered the civilian supply chain.
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Have ye any citations?
Everything you say here is false. 1. Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians. 2. Arabs speak a semitic language; the "semites" in "anti-semite" has always referred to Jews. 3. Jews, including white Ashkenazi European Jews, are levantine in origin. Their lineage traces to Judea. 4. "Antisemitic" means anti-Jew. You are using it to mean anti-Arab, but arabs are not semites 5. You did make all that up!
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>Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians Sure, yeah, just like it was in any number of previous operations, which at the time they declared successful, even though they did quite a bit more of the latter. Per Occam's razor, either they are prodigious bunglers, or you are overly credulous.
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> 1. Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians. And yet so many dead civilians. It's almost like a genocial terrorist country like israel always lie. Also, I was referring to israel's genocide of the semites in palestine to found "israel" up to present day. You conveniently forgot about it. > 2. Arabs speak a semitic language; the "semites" in "anti-semite" has always referred to Jews. Arabs are ethnic semites who speak a semitic language. "Israelis" are non-semitic europeans pretending to be "jews". Ethnic europeans are not semites and can never be semites because they come from an entire separate branch of the human family tree. > 3. Jews, including white Ashkenazi European Jews, are levantine in origin. Their lineage traces to Judea. No they do not. Maybe a handful. > 4. "Antisemitic" means anti-Jew. No it does not because semite doesn't mean "jew". A semite and a jew are two different things. > You are using it to mean anti-Arab, but arabs are not semites No. I'm using semite to mean semite. Arabs surely are semites. Europeans are not though. > 5. You did make all that up! If arabs are not semites, then what are they? You say arabs are not semites and I'm the liar? I'm making shit up?
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1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that this was a 2 year war fought in a built-up urban environment fought against a plainclothes terrorist enemy that violated every law of war, including using hospitals and schools as military bases. 2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews. 3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste. Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry, and about half of Israelis are Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim. 4. See above. Semitic is a language family, not a people. "Anti-semite" as a term has always meant "anti-Jew." 5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity.
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> 1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that... It's amazing how similarly zionists/israelis and nazis rationalize. > 2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews. "Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples." --wiki > 3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste. Germanic is a language group and an ethnic group. Using your logic, germans are not germanic peoples because germanic is a language group. > Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry, They have less documented middle eastern ancestry (none) than elizabeth warren has of native ancestry. > The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim. Considering that most "israelis" are ATHEISTS and most "israelis" are non-semitic and most "israelis" do not adhere to or respect the torah, it is a factual claim. > 5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity. Why do you lie? People can literally google "semites" or "semitic peoples". If you lie about something like this, what are the odds you are lying about israel killing civilian semites in palestine?
> Maybe this is not the forum, but then what is? A philosophy class you took ten years ago? Funny that you mention it, but Israel/Palestine was also a banned topic in the “Ethics and International Law” course I took circa twenty years ago. I advocate concerning yourself with the things you can control, which does not include this forum’s idiosyncratic moderation style.
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> I advocate concerning yourself with the things you can control, which do not include this forum’s idiosyncratic moderation style. I can control my comments, which are a part of this forum's moderation style, and I can advocate in those comments for people to act in good faith, and appeal for help in figuring out how to make it more common. If we can't discuss important topics in good faith on a nerd website, what hope do we have of discussing them elsewhere? It's not hyperbole anymore to say that if we don't come to some consensus we are going to end up in authoritarianism or war.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218945 That one doesn't seem to violate the rules, and there is a lot of discussion below it.
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Agreed, and I unflagged that one a while before you posted your comment here - most probably you had a non-refreshed version of the page.
>That number is much too high IMO, so I assume we interpret the site guidelines very differently. looks like it. going through entire conversations there is a bunch of comments of comments saying that israel is terrorist nation/engages in terrorism not flagged, and many comments saying that hezbollah members are valid military target/collateral damage was minimal/etc are flagged. from this (and many similar topics) it looks like official guidelines that are followed on this site as follows - throwing any criticism and accusations at israel in line with guidelines - presenting counter arguments and facts against guidelines. it will be much easier if you will codify it into official guidelines. if you think that it's not the case, can you please fix flagging abuse. like give ability to flag comment only if it reached -20 or something. or just remove ability to flag comments in general - i don't think this contributes to quality of discussion here
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I don't agree, and there are many counterexamples in this thread alone. People who are passionate about a divisive topic often feel like the site/moderators/community are hopelessly biased against their view. The people with opposing views feel exactly the same way—which, ironically, becomes the one thing they can agree about, although they disagree about the direction. This is ultimately a function of how the passions work, so I don't believe there's much we can do about it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22always%20feels%22%20mods%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment
A lot of my comments calling out Israel for this terrorist attack are flagged. Also, this should certainly not be flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219097
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That last sentence is arguably on the wrong side of the line, but ok, I've unflagged it.
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Thank you (even though it's not my comment). I feel like if people are free to say the pager attack was "brilliant", then saying it was an act of terrorism (which obviously I agree with) is the equivalent on the other side.
Can expound on what software did this on its own?
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There are various software filters based on past abuses by related accounts.
Hi @dang. Here is a factual comment of mine that does not break the rules which, along with many other comments on one side of the Israel/Palestine issue, was unnecessarily and unjustifiably flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45832233
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I think that one is borderline but, in the context of a topic this divisive, borderline is not so bad, so I've unflagged it.
OK, sure. How 'bout this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221729 Or this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221631 Or this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221972
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It's a war, you know. People die. Sometimes in perfectly legal and justified strikes, sometimes in attacks that contravene the laws of war. And given that Hamas uses the civilians under their control as both a sword and a shield, and that Egypt simply refuses their obligation under IHL to allow refugees to flee, collateral damage is an unfortunate inevitability. Lumping together all civilians killed by Israel in the course of war is overly reductive: Some were killed in unlawful intentional acts, some were unfortunate collateral damage of lawful acts, and some were intentional victims of Hamas brutality, sacrificed at the altar of making Israel look bad.
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>It's a war, you know. It's an occupation that has been ongoing for almost 80 years, not a 'war' that began unprovoked, along with recorded history and the universe itself, on October 7th. >Sometimes in perfectly legal and justified strikes, sometimes in attacks that contravene the laws of war. More than half the time, these 'perfect justifications' don't hold water and in fact rest on the hope of total impunity from IHL. >Hamas uses the civilians under their control as both a sword and a shield Not according to any sane definition that is internationally agreed upon. Conversely, the IDF's use of human shields - as defined in IHL and in their own propaganda - is abundantly documented. >Egypt simply refuses their obligation under IHL to allow refugees to flee, collateral damage is an unfortunate inevitability. Rather odd that rendering Palestinians stateless is just a law of nature in your books, and that Israel's obligations as an occupying power and the agent that created a refugee crisis - ie, prosecuted a campaign of human cleansing - is not part of your calculus at all.
Indiscriminate bombing is not legal, and it should not be legal, and you're a bad person for promoting the view that this is somehow likely to be legal. It is an obvious war crime on this alone, and even more so when one considers that the israeli decision makers know that Hezbollah is a group of mainly civilian organisations and still went through with this project. You don't have to imagine, powerful israelis have claimed that they absolutely have prepared such consumer products in the same way in "all sorts of countries".
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It wasn't indiscriminate, is the main point. Almost exactly the opposite.
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Do you know what the word "Indiscriminate" means?
> I actually consider the pager attack to be legal. If it was done to "israelis", I bet you'd be singing a different tune. Imagine if iran or saudi arabia or anyone else did this to "israelis", some whiny people would be calling it terrorism.
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If Hezbollah executed this same attack against the IDF it would also not be terrorism.
I don't know if it's "legal" or not and by who's laws, but it certainly seems like terrorism to me (i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror). I think if Lebanon found a clever way to assassinate the top 45 military commanders in Israel the same people who are defending this wouldn't be calling it a "Legal act of war".
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I don't whether something is terrorism as something that's relevant for whether it's allowed by the laws of war. Instead what we have is IHL, i.e. the Geneva and Hague conventions etc., and if you are targeting military personnel or other targets of military importance, without any extra cruelty or attacks on civilians, what does it matter if it looks like terror-bombing? If it's allowed by IHL but is terrorism by British or French of German law or whatever, it's allowed. IHL is the actual binding thing.
Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition. If it was just random devices exploding, then sure, that could be considered terrorism. But it wasn't random devices, it was communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members for their own purposes.
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> Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition. I mean, you're not wrong: the State seeks monopoly on violence; the kind of damages it can inflict, where, when and however it wants. Everyone else is ... a terrorist, and whatever they do is ... terrorism. > communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah Replace "Hezbollah" with "the US Govt" and you'll arrive at some answer. Btw, off-duty / non-combat personnel aren't deemed to be "at war".
The issue is that Israel has no idea where those pagers were at the time of the attack, civilians were directly hurt by the explosions: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/survivors-of-israels-pager-attack-on-hezbollah-last-year-struggle-to-recover
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You think you are not allowed to do a military strike if civilians may be hurt?
No. Generals are always legitimate military targets.
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The Geneva Convention ought to have something to say about how a general may and may not be attacked. If I remember correctly, the assailant must be dressed in some sort of military uniform to be considered a prisoner of war if captured. Lacking the uniform, it would be espionage and no Geneva Convention rights. Obviously, neither side in the conflict is adhering to these rules. I should give this a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
So let me just understand your position here. Suppose the US declares war on Venezuela. Suppose a venezuelan living in America just looks up a bunch of US generals addresses online, and then sets all their houses on fire killing them in their sleep in their McMansions in suburbia. Are you saying that's a valid military strike, and therefore can't possibly be terrorism? Suppose this person is so successful he kills 1,000 and generals and numerous quit their jobs and move in fear for their life, just to really clarify what you're arguing here.
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> Suppose a venezuelan living in America just looks up a bunch of US generals addresses online, and then sets all their houses on fire killing them in their sleep in their McMansions in suburbia. I don't think the analogy is apt. Members of Hezbollah do not occupy a positions of similar relationship to Lebanon as US generals does to the US. As far as I've heard, flag officers and others are escorted by personal security for an attack of any sort, such as the 2009 Ft Hood shooting. [0] Moving past that, a civilian citizen of Venezuela in the US who performed actions against US military targets would not be a valid military strike since that person would not be an identifiable member or Venezuela's military. It would more akin to a spy or assassin. Below is an excerpt from an article representing a US-centric view of history [1]. But the right to kill one’s enemy during war was not considered wholly unregulated. During the 16th century, Balthazar Ayala agreed with Saint Augustine’s contention that it “is indifferent from the standpoint of justice whether trickery be used” in killing the enemy, but then distinguished trickery from “fraud and snares” (The Law and Duties of War and Military Discipline). Similarly, Alberico Gentili, writing in the next century, found treachery “so contrary to the law of God and of Nature, that although I may kill a man, I may not do so by treachery.” He warned that treacherous killing would invite reprisal (Three Books on the Law of War). And Hugo Grotius likewise explained that “a distinction must be made between assassins who violate an express or tacit obligation of good faith, as subjects resorting to violence against a king, vassals against a lord, soldiers against him whom they serve, those also who have been received as suppliants or strangers or deserters, against those who have received them; and such as are held by no bond of good faith” (On the Law of War and Peace). 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting 1. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/assassination-law-of-war/ Edit: /Hamas/Hezbollah/
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I'm pretty sure even that is allowed, yes. Obviously he must wear a uniform while actually conducting the attack though.
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I think it is a valid military strike if a Venezuelan soldier does it on an order. Military targets where a strike are in danger of killing civilians are a hard judgment call. Generally one should never risk targeting civilians. Military law is a complex subject and officers spend quite a lot of time being educated in it. Here is a Swedish defence college course on it. https://www.fhs.se/en/swedish-defence-university/courses/international-law-of-military-operations.html
So you're arguing if the US declared war on Venezuela, that Venezuela could just use a drone to blow up the US president and that's just how war should work from now on? Because it's only a matter of years until drones get small and stealthy enough that nobody is safe; exploding pagers are a clear first step in this direction.
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They could do that now and it might be legal under international laws of war. We've massed forces for an attack, attacked their ships, violated their airspace with combat aircraft (that's today), and extensively and publicly threatened them. They'd be in their legal rights to strike preemptively, including possibly a decapitation strike (this is why the Dubya administration kept repeating the term "preemptive strike", even though it was obviously nowhere near applying in the case of Iraq—it was a way of asserting its legal basis) [edit] As thereisnospork points out in a sibling comment, however, this doesn't mean it'd be a good idea.
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The US and Israel do the equivalent of that and have been for years. An assassination is an assassination. The weapon makes little difference.
When Ukraine assassinates a Russian general with a car bomb, is that "terrorism" or is that just a targeted killing of a military leader during a war? Do you think this is somehow morally problematic beyond the typical standards of war? Do you think that "normal" means of military action, like dropping a 500lb bomb, is less "terroristic" than essentially setting off a firecracker in their face/hands/pocket? Because, like, that's the alternative. If your position is that all forms of war are illegal, then you have the right to that opinion, but it's not a realistic position.
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>When Ukraine assassinates a Russian general with a car bomb, is that "terrorism" or is that just a targeted killing of a military leader during a war? That depends on when the car detonates. If the car detonates when he and his guard enter it at 6 am near the defense ministry sure. If the car detonates when it is parked in the middle of Moscow at noon and 100 people are around then by pre-2022 standards it would be terrorism. I think instead of these fake whataboutisms we should just admit that there is no universal bar and if it's "our team" then we are willing to change the standard. In this case, we know that when Israel set off these pagers some innocent bystanders got hurt. No need to "whatabout".
I think this was a brilliant operation and perfectly lawful. I also think that if Lebanon (not Hezbollah) were in a state of war with Israel, yes, that would (depending on proportionality and target discrimination) be perfectly legal, too.
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> perfectly lawful Are you a lawyer / expert in conflicts? If not, curious how you arrived at this conclusion.
you are right, however I was never a member of an organization that killed and kidnapped journalists/politicians/diplomats/ordinary civilians, is a regular part of the international drug trade, killed hundreds of american and french soldiers and just started a war with its very pissed technologically advanced neighbor If I would choose a career in an international terror organization, I'd might quit it once I had children
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I too, wouldn't join the IDF.
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Well, I guess we disagree on this, but I think it's a shit move to blow up a bunch of any object that is normally benign and which could logically be sitting next to or in the hands of an innocent. I'll die on that hill. I know it goes against most people's opinions on HN but I don't mind that. As you can see, I have some points to spare so feel free to downvote me to oblivion, even though that downvote button is meant for people who go against the rules; I don't believe I have in any of my posts in this thread, but I am willing to apologize if so. Also, I have a thought for you: what would you call it if a foreign nation which your country had poor relations with, possibly open hostility, had blown up the work laptops (which they might take home) of a bunch of high ranking military members in your country? Would that be terrorism or a legal attack to you? What would you think of the innocent lives lost to such an attack?
The intended targets of the exploding papers weren't civilians. Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons. It's about as targeted an attack as one can achieve from a distance. As an act of warfare, Israel did a splendid job on this. Thoroughly impressive work.
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Yes, since conveniently the attacker also gets to define who is a civilian.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-hezbollah-aims-counter-israels-high-tech-surveillance-2024-07-09/ Here is Hezbollah boasting to Reuters before the pagers attack, about how it moved to using pagers and couriers to counter Israeli intelligence. As you can guess, with the advent of mobile phones in the 2000s, pagers became obsolete in Lebanon
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Unless you’re a Lebanese doctor? Not to you specifically, but it is astounding how indiscriminate terrorism is lauded as “brilliant”. Is it because the victims were not of the white Judeo-Christian variety? Seriously trying to understand the mental gymnastics here.
Fair enough, 12 total only includes the original pager attack, not the subsequent radio one. However, you seem to have made the same mistake. 42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets. In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source), it seems extremely dishonest to claim that all 4000 were civilians or that there were only 42 targets.
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>42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets. So they only managed to hit 30 targets with 12 misfires… that makes it even worse. > In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source) That’s 1500 in addition to the 4,000 civilians. The fact they managed to wound 2.5x+ as many civilians as targets isn’t exactly making them look better…
I haven't seen a report of 4000 civilians injured. I have seen a report of 4000 people injured across the two attacks, but presumably some fraction of these are targets. 42 killed, of whom Hezbollah said 12 were civilians (later admitting some of the 12 were fighters). Historical average is about half of the wounded or killed in conflicts to be civilians. < 12/42 would be a relatively "good" ratio.
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You didn’t see 4,000 because you didn’t look for it. It’s literally in the wikipedia article linked in the thread you’re responding to with multiple associated citations.
McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash (bbc.co.uk)
I am as tired of AI slop as everyone else but I think the backlash to this is way too exaggerated. Commercials are already "slop." There is no expectation of quality at all. The average Christmas commercial involves a bunch of elves singing "Taking Care of Business" while dancing in front of office supplies. This commercial sucked because nobody wants to hear "it's the most terrible time of year." I don't really care if they used AI.
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I think this one was especially bad because a massive corporation can't be arsed to do better. Like, Apple exaggerates a lot on their advertising, but at least there's some heart to it. (Coming from someone that doesn't like Apple.)
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Unless they do an ad where they literally crush creativity into a thin slab, an ad they had to later apologize for. Pepperage Farm remembers.
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People care way too much about this. Ads suck, in general. They're slop whether a human or an AI made it, and I don't want or care about them regardless.
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So don't. But if mega corps want to juice our brains with their slop, to the degree that it's difficult to escape it, then we should also be able to sneer at the ads that miss the mark even more than usual.
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You're foolishly giving them attention. Marketing teams know this. If an ad is bad, it's better to ignore it and not write news articles about some marketing-fabricated controversy. Now you're thinking about McDonalds, which is what they wanted! They don't actually expect you to buy a burger tomorrow because of this.
Empathy towards what, in this case?
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Each other. Christmas is a holiday of the family, especially if you reject the consumerist overtones. It's — for me — a lovely week of spending time together, eating too much, and watching bad old movies. I really like everything about that atmosphere, so the McDonald's ad felt shitty, heartless, and cynical. Why bother making the holidays better for others, just come to McDo!
As I see it, the purpose of AI is the same as the purpose of every technology ever since the hand axe - to reduce labor. Humans have a strong drive to figure out ways to achieve more with less effort. Obviously there are higher order effects, but same as we wouldn't expect the Homo Erectus to stop playing with stone tools because they'd disrupt their society (which of course they did), I don't understand why we should decide to halt technological progress now.
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> As I see it, the purpose of AI is the same as the purpose of every technology ever since the hand axe - to reduce labor. Humans have a strong drive to figure out ways to achieve more with less effort. Yes. > Obviously there are higher order effects, but same as we wouldn't expect the Homo Erectus to stop playing with stone tools because they'd disrupt their society (which of course they did), I don't understand why we should decide to halt technological progress now. The difference is the relationship of that technology to the individual/masses. When a Homo Erectus invented a tool, he and every member of his species (who learned of it) directly benefited from the technology, but with capitalism that link has been broken. Now Homo Sapiens can invent technologies that may greatly benefit a few, but will be broadly harmful to individuals. AI is likely one of those technologies, as its on the direct path to the elimination broad classes of jobs with no replacement. This situation would be very different if we either had some kind of socialism or a far more egalitarian form of capitalism (e.g. with extremely diffuse and widespread ownership).
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