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Colorado Lawmakers Push for Age Verification at the Operating System Level (pcmag.com)
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Vote out every single politician who supports this. If you can't successfully primary them, that means you might have to vote for someone of your non-preferred political party in the general.
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except there are only two parties and both want this (when they are in power, otherwise they’ll use it to try and get elected and then proceed with implementing it)
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Seems like a reasonable take for enforcing Age Verification. The issue is I don't want your age verification.
I made MCP cheaper in one command (kanyilmaz.me)
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MCP has some schemas though. CLI is a bit of a mess. But MCP today isn’t ideal. I think we need to have some catalogs where the agents can fetch more information about MCP services instead of filling the context with not relevant noise.
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I’m not sure how this works. A lot of that tool description is important to the Agent understanding what it can and can’t do with the specific MCP provider. You’d have to make up for that with a much longer overarching description. Especially for internal only tools that the LLM has no intrinsic context for.
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Cheaper, but is it more effective? I know I saw something about the Next.js devs experimenting with just dumping an entire index of doc files into AGENTS.md and it being used significantly more by Claude than any skills/tool call stuff.
Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer (spectrum.ieee.org)
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This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals (which only 10-15 years ago would have been treated as CS) in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry. DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and cacheing, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class). The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers. And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Nagle!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
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I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work , not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure). Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads? Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.
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This is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.
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It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.
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Probably similar to what I do with my papers and resumes, I write them myself then throw them through LLMs for suggestions and corrections, manually reviewing the output.
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And God is a DJ.
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The original title: "Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardy Explained." > and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.
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Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology! And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians? We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)
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Nice article, but that the signal chain in the top image doesn't match the signal chain described in the text annoys me more than it should.
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It's also a standard right handed strat, which seems like an oversight for a guy famous for playing with a right handed strat flipped upside down.
Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go (github.com/odvcencio)
the 90x figure is on Go source for apples to apples against CGO bound tree-sitter. your use case is not one i designed for although yeah maybe the readme has some sections too close. the only external scanner missing atm is norg. now that i know your use case i can probably think of a way to close it
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So your benchmarks are primarily just “how fast is go’s c interop” rather than any algorithmic improvement on tree-sitter? Edit: yep, you are just calling a c function in a loop. So your no-op benchmark is just the time it takes for cgo to function. I would not be able to get any perf benefits from e.g. rust
I work on a revision control system project, except merge is CRDT. On Feb 22 there was a server break-in (I did not keep unencrypted sources on the client, server login was YubiKey only, but that is not 100% guarantee). I reported break-in to my Telegram channel that day. My design docs https://replicated.wiki/blog/partII.html I used tree-sitter for coarse AST. Some key parts were missing from the server as well, because I expected problems (had lots of adventures in East Asia, evil maids, various other incidents on a regular basis). When I saw "tree-sitter in go" title, I was very glad at first. Solves some problems for me. Then I saw the full picture.
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Also, evil maids, what?
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Wait, are you suggesting that OP broke in to your server and stole code and is republishing it as these repos? I have questions. Have you reviewed the code here to see if it matches? What, more specifically, do you mean when you say someone broke in? What makes you think that this idea (which is nice but not novel) is worth stealing? If that sounds snarky, it’s not meant to; just trying to understand what’s going on. Why is that more likely than someone using Claude to vibe up some software along the same lines?
How is OP using Claude relevant?
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People should say what models/tools they used in even show the prompts.
OK for prototyping. Not OK for prod use if noone actually read it line by line.
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That ship has sailed, man…
well how did it do?
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Hard to say. Claude’s very good at writing READMEs. In fact, Copilot often complains about docs that sound like they’re about current capabilities when in fact they’re future plans or just plan aspirational. Without downloading and testing out your software, how can we know if it’s any good? Why would we do that if it’s obviously vibed? The dilemma. I’m not at all against vibe coding. I’m just pointing out that having a nice README is trivial. And the burden of proof is on you.
The Slow Death of the Power User (fireborn.mataroa.blog)
> Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. I feel like when I was twenty two I would have been very surprised if more than a couple of my peers knew this stuff.
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Used computers for about 35 years before the first time I first tried to "connect to a remote server via SSH". Go figure. DNS is a phone book, I think! But yeah, maybe "bad examples" by the author. The one that really confuses me is this, though: > You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation. Sorry, what are you saying? Software exists to unzip files. It used to be a "dedicated app" like WinZip, 7zip, WinRAR, etc. Now it's built into Windows. Or you use the 'unzip' command in Linux.
Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from. Try asking someone "What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?" you might be surprised how many people don't know and most importantly don't care . The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise. In many many domains I am that person. If a person doesn't know (except in the vaguest terms) where their water comes from, where their poo goes when they flush, where their food comes from (the supermarket!), or the energy that heats their home... what do they really know? Most of us know very little about the concrete networks and systems that keep us alive. But this is what civilisation is.
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I feel a certain comfortableness when I don't know these things. It's annoying, and yet it brings me many things as well. When I drive off in my car, I half visualize the clutch plates coming into contact with each other etc etc etc. But my kids call any internet connection WiFi. My wife didn't understand why she couldn't print with the WiFi switch off (back when we had switches). And every time I try to tell them "how the internet flows", I take them to the hotspot and tell them what WiFi is, how the UTP cable goes to the modem and the fiber goes into the ground and somewhere it gets information from some other computer. And I tell them why they have less issues with our local Minecraft server then when he gets invited to a worlds on someone's Playstation across town (in Bugrock). It's tiring in a way, even more so for people around me. And still, it also brings me many nice things.
> Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing From the same article: “Do not rely too much on your own judgment.” “human editors and writers often use em dashes”
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Indeed. People use em dashes. And curly quotation marks. And emojis in headers. And use boldface and italics to emphasize things. And overuse the "it's not X, it's Y" construction. People could also do all of these things at the same time. Or maybe do them sometimes and not other times for fun. It is obviously impossible to be able to tell with 100% certainty whether or not something is written using AI. But I think this most likely is. Could be that it's just copy edited with AI and not wholly AI slop. Who knows. Either way, it reads very much like AI to me.
The Pentagon threatens Anthropic (astralcodexten.com)
This is going to be a controversial take but I don't agree with Anthropic on this one. My gut instinct says that the Pentagon should back down, but my gut is wrong because of political bias. I can't claim to be serious about AI governance if Anthropic is able to sidestep the interests of the Pentagon, whoever might be in charge. Anthropic is not stronger than the US government, and it would set a dangerous precedent if they don't comply. At the end of the rabbit hole, it's all about enforcement, regardless of the contract. Who's going to enforce Anthropic's terms and conditions if they betray the Pentagon?
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Wait, so you believe everyone in America is a slave to the US government? We had very different civics classes!
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It's not about following whoever is in charge, it's about making the moral choice.
It's been amazing watching them cosplay ethicality while twisting themselves into knots attempting to justify selling their service to Satan. Who could have predicted that Satan would turn around and screw them, outside of everyone ever. Maybe they should have asked a person instead of Claude.
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Genuinely shocking. "We were totally fine with this being used to target people for surveillance and killing, but now you've crossed our arbitrary ethical fig-leaf so here's a big stink." I won't be surprised if they reach an eventual compromise that represents what the Pentagon wanted all along, while Anthropic can continue their chicken little act... all while building the very thing they claim to fear.
I wouldn't start up a new company in the US knowing that they are going full tyrant like this.
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It seems like an unfortunate reality that being a government contractor puts any company in any country at the whim of their government. AFAIK every government has 'pulled the rug out' from at least some contractors at some point.
Without reading every word of every embedded tweet, a part missing from the conversation is HOW they are strongarming. It isn't in private. It's a public threat in the court of public opinion to apply societal pressure on the company. They are attempting to reshape Anthropic's decision into a tribal one, and hurt the brand's reputation within the tribe unless it capitulates.
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> It isn't in private. We don’t know this
Can they not invoke the defense act without the public spat? Gag order?
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Realistically that's an empty threat, especially with the mid-terms coming up and Trump's attention span. The real threat, the actionable one, is the loss of a $200 mil contract. I suspect that the result here will be some highly visible face-saving compromise for Anthropic that means very little.
Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown (blogs.windows.com)
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Personally I'm not happy that they are touching and revamping most basic tool of the os. A Notepad, which is a innocent little thing in itself. Notepad should be last thing they should be fiddling with. I am sad that we have to install 3rd parties for basics now.
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psa: you can "uninstall" the bad sloppad and disable "App Execution Alias" for notepad.exe to get the better notepad back. just fyi
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So they kill Notepad, and then turn Notepad into Wordpad? It was supposed to be like this: - Notepad: Plain Text - Wordpad: Rich Text - Word: Documents Seriously? Markdown is the preferred method for rich text these days, so why didn't they just turn WordPad into a WYSIWYG Markdown editor? They also shove Copilot into it, but that's a whole different problem. Who is this current iteration of Notepad actually made for?
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Why is progress always assumed to be about adding more stuff? Sometimes, taking something away would be best, but humans tend to overlook it. Article: People systematically overlook subtractive changes - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y
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Thanks, I hate it. How do I disable it? Oh, I can't. Thanks, I hate it more.
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From an elevated Powershell prompt: > Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object { $_.PackageName -like 'Microsoft.WindowsNotepad*' } | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online
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Yes. Supports .md but when you try to save back to .txt it does something to line endings that you cannot see in notepad but if you grep your .txt files from wsl like, I do all the time, you get page long strings instead of matching lines. It's weird and I haven't dug into the cause as it was easier to save as a new note but pretty sukky for an IT company to miss something like that.
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Line endings between windows and Mac/Linux have been a problem basically forever. Windows uses carriage return and the others use newline or something like that.
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CRLF vs LF?
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Hasn’t .md always been supported?
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Article is published in January.
This is why I uninstalled Notepad. They are convinced it needs to be a worse vscode when all I want is something to edit plain text files.
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What I want in windows is Notepad++ or Kate (and even Kate is a bit much). That's the full extent of the features that I'd want in something like notepad. Adding RTF and a wysiwyg markdown editor is the last thing that I want from something like notepad. When I open notepad, I still want to see the characters that are present. Heck, I'd like to be able to see the difference between a space and a tab. I'd want to be able to see which type of line ending are being used (and switch to the correct one, \n) Hiding characters is antithetical to the reason I'd use notepad in the first place. I want to be able to search text and see text. Not compose a document or talk to an LLM.
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> Kate So install Kate? There's a Windows build.
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Oh I've ditched windows or I would go grab Kate (I use it on my linux box). I'm just commenting on how even if you were to enrich the features of notepad, the direction to take it is towards a kate editor and not towards an wordpad editor.
Notepad going the way of Wordpad, EDIT.COM becoming the new Notepad. What's next, in a few years we're rocking EDLIN when we need to operate on a text file safely?
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> EDIT.COM becoming the new Notepad. edit.exe[1,2] actually. And it runs on Linux too! Linux had a real lack of good text editors. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
I was about to make a joke about how I'm surprised they haven't shoved Copilot into Notepad yet, but surprise - they have ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-writing-with-ai-in-notepad-4088b954-c97b-46dc-813f-959be01746d5 )
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This might be the reason for Markdown support, LLMs love it.
I still say this is stupid AF, and that notepad should stay as simple as reasonable as a plain text editor and they should have resurrected "WordPad" for this purpose if they wanted it in Windows. I'm mixed on the enhancements to Paint... but this just feels a bit off. Maybe I'd mind it less if they put the new MS Edit in Windows by default, so again, there's a minimal plain text editor in the box.
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I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Internally, the Notepad project existed to provide a minimal, shippable product that we could use as a testbed. We used it to validate everything from compiler changes to kernel32 loader behavior on beta versions of Windows. If Notepad didn’t run, your feature didn’t work. This doesn't seem like a good idea.
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Well, you see, they got rid of all the QA so those tests stopped adding value ;)
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they have AI, they don't need QA or tests, come on man, aren't you a 9999999x engineer?
Wordpad presented a “free” tool that they couldn’t monetize anymore. They want you to use Office. Copilot is shoved into Notepad so they can monetize your data stream.
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They could've shoved Copilot in Wordpad
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And it would still compete with Word. They want you to switch to Office 365 (I mean, Copilot 365).
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You jest but they did name change it to Microsoft 365. Confused the hell out of me recently when I was looking for Office 365 on their website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_365
So the markup dialect that's widely used but suffers from a near-total lack of viewers will now finally be rendered as intended, at least on Windows? Markdown presents a chicken-&-egg scenario that has dragged on for decades: tons of Markdown documents, but almost nothing with which to simply view (not edit) them as intended. Mystifying.
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I used to write documentation in Markdown manually. About a year ago I started using a VSCode extension to tell me if there are minor errors in the documents, but nothing else.
I don’t see why people are complaining. If you use notepad for txt files, nothing changes.
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The ergonomics of the new version are slightly different. The default behavior of opening tabs with previously-open files is jarring to me. I just remove it (Powershell command line in another comment) and the original "Notepad.exe" takes over. I've spent a long time building up my muscle memory. I don't want my tools changing out from under me. If they wanted to ship an "enhanced" notepad they should have called its something else.
Oh I’m well aware, I just think this reaction is ridiculous. Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol.
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We used to have a perfectly good application that came with the OS. Then Microsoft ruined it. Yes I can make my own Notepad, but I shouldn't have to. If Microsoft really wanted a built-in text editor that had features Notepad didn't, they should've made a second application rather than ruining the minimalist one.
> Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol. If you use many different machines throughout your workday, this means you have to carry a copy of your bespoke solution with you on a memory stick or something, and hope that the machine you want to use it on allows the use of memory sticks or unapproved software. It's far better to use an application that you can count on already existing on the machines.
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TBF, a lot of people used to keep portable apps like this... then IT started locking down even being able to mount a USB storage device. I used to do this for my email and mail profile with a portable Thunderbird. I even worked on an app in a relatively secure environment where the work around for an early SPA and IE6-8 company wide, was for the systems analysts using our app to use a portable firefox browser on the user desktop. IE6-8 in particular were really bad when you had an SPA as you had events tied to dom elements across the COM bridge that wouldn't release unless all dom and script references were freed up. jQuery actually did this, if you managed everything through it, but our app was an early version of extjs... so after 3-4 hours it would just run out of memory and die.
The concern is that more features introduces more risk. See CVE-2026-20841 for a recent example. If the application remained a simple text editor, it is unlikely exploits like this would be possible. https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841
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true! more features is more risk. but i dont think most people here are complaining because of security risk... otherwise they wouldnt be recommending things like notepad++, other obscure editors, or editors with way larger code bases.
have you tried adding this to your settings json? workbench.secondarySideBar.defaultVisibility": "hidden",
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It's still annoying to have it by default even if you do make use of it.
Here's an even crazier idea, don't click the Copilot button. WHOA.
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Easiest way to do that is to not have the Copilot button at all. Easiest way to do that is to use Linux instead.
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Of course. Story about Windows 11 someone has to chime in "just use Linux". I welcome it, because hopefully that will be less people having a meltdown over an icon on a menu bar.
If this was actually (pre)installed with Windows, I wouldn't mind the changes to notepad nearly as much.
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It is preinstalled. Server 2025 (even Core Edition) and Windows 11 24H2 (or 25H2, not sure)...
While I'd love it installed by default, I still very much mind that they're ruining Notepad. Plus this Markdown preview functionality just caused Notepad to have a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in it.
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Oh it's still pretty stupid, and I think they should have simply resurrected the Wordpad name for this, and maybe a conversion utility for opening doc/rtf files to markdown in the editor for older file support.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-someone-on-hackernews-9480LFlqSMy6W1Y6p5qDxg Tested with python 3.10.6, Windows. It's the only version I have installed, for which I've also have installed tkinter. Welcome to 2026. You're late.
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>python >tkinter so you missed the part where notepad starts instantly, doesn't choke on files larger than 25KB and uses native Win32 controls ?
> discounting the overhead Are you moving the goalpost? The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself. I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.
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>Are you moving the goalpost? I mean you did originally claim that this was something that was "for the masses" and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use. Not that I doubt it couldn't one shot something this simple with a .exe wrapper.
Notepad++ is solid but they had a recent kerfuffle involving their security practices and the response didn't inspire much confidence. But if you turn off auto-updates then it's a good alternative if you're still on Windows.
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The issue Notepad++ is having, is the same as a lot of open source projects: They don't have a ton of money, don't have a business entity, and are struggling to get/keep a software-signing key in those circumstances. So the people taking pot shots at the developers, I guess, maybe be more specific with what they did wrong and what they should have done instead. Because if you actually understand the history/circumstances (and the fact it was a third-party hosting provider compromised), one would expect more blame on the systemic under-funding of OSS than "developers bad." Are people wanting them to create a business, monetize Notepad++, so that they no longer have issues with hosting/certificates? I'm guessing not .
I love Notepad++ but yea, zero confidence in that dev right now. Its programma non grata on my machines at the moment. Theyre also very political and giving them access to my machine now feels even more risky.
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If you'd like a lightweight replacement, here's Kate. It's somewhere around a zed featureset, a little less. A key benefit of it is that it's not an electron app. It's an old C++ app that's still just chuggin' along. https://kate-editor.org/get-it/
I don't have any use for Notepad++, but reading about this makes me wish I did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messaging The possibility of software being a personal, creative, expressive endeavor (which often includes politics), something I believed in back when I was in university twenty years ago, is a feeling that's receded deeply into the past. That might be as much about me as it is about the world, but I miss it.
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I think that different people want different things. It seems to me like these days the idea of software being a personal expression is in vogue more than not, but there are always going to be those who want that and those who don't. That said, if software is a personal creative expression, one must be prepared for the possibility that some people aren't going to like what one has to say. Often when the politics angle comes up with Notepad++, people will say "it's his software project, he has the right to put in political messages if he wants" as if that somehow compels people to be ok with the political messages. The author certainly has the right to use Notepad++ as a platform for his political opinions, and I would never dream of saying otherwise. I don't want him to go to jail, or get fired by his employer, or anything like that. But I similarly have the right to decide that I don't want to see his political opinions and use another piece of software. You pick up both ends of the stick, as the old saying says.
I remember a few years back there was an update where it would actually type the political message when you created a new text document. I abandoned it ever since. The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports.
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> The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports. Why would someone express political messages without being selective? It’s understandable not wanting overt politics in your software, but this line is odd.
Sublime is good too without the political rhetoric. It boggles my mind that windows users refuse the ways of vim.
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Was hoping to see Sublime mentioned here. Super stable and available for nearly everything (Windows, Linux, Mac).
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs (simonlermen.substack.com)
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Despite being pseudonymous, I don’t take great pains to hide who I am. I am in my 50s and live on the West coast. I don’t have socials and I don’t post anywhere else. Have at it! If you are semi-retired, you’re free from the threat of cancellation. As long as you aren’t posting about crimes, there’s limits to what anyone can legally do to you. (Still, it’s good to be prudent and limit sharing.)
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It’s not just what they can do legally, but illegally. Say enough of the right thing at the wrong time and you might be liable to “commit suicide” or have a “heart attack”.
That we identify social media as "tech" is very strange. Yes, they have a lot of servers. But that isn't their core innovation. Their core innovations are the constant expansion of unpermissioned surveillance, the integration of dossiers, correlating people's circumstances, behavior and psychology. And incentivizing the creation of addictive content (good, bad, and dreck) with the massive profits they obtain when they can use that as the delivery vector for intrusively "personalized" manipulation, on behest of the highest bidder, no matter how sketchy, grifty or dishonest. Unpremissioned (or dark patterned, deceptive, surreptitious, or coercive permissioned) surveillance should be illegal. It is digital stalking. Used as leverage against us, and to manipulate us, via major systems spread across the internet. And the fact that this funds infinite pages of addicting (as an extremely convenient substitute for boredom) content, not doing anyone or society any good, is a mental health, and society health concern. Tech scaling up conflicts of interest, is not really tech. Its personal information warfare.
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I didn’t say I hated technology, generally— I said I hate what the industry has morphed into in the US. What is or isn’t tech is immaterial. All of the odious things you listed are things that the ‘tech industry’ does, largely unquestioned these days. Frankly, it’s sickening.
Interesting. You could probably get into trouble in those two places for extremely different things you said.
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of course, and it has happened, but I think authenticity is usually appreciated
I remember their being a previous post about stylometry analysis of HN accounts. And people confirmed the top account correlations. It basically identified all the HN alt accounts
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And HN asked the author to take it down if I'm not mistaken.
Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid (arstechnica.com)
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Does anyone in these comments have any tips for would-be solar farmers or people who are generally interested in being part of building out the future of our grid? I'd like to get my hands dirty. I'm talking about getting into 5-10 MW projects, not solar on a roof.
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I bookmarked this thread because i'm very interested too. If AI takes all teh corporate jobs then I'm going to be a photon farmer. you can get land down in Brewster County Texas for about $1,500/acre but would need to find a spot close to a grid access point. There's some decent reddit discussions on this sort of thing.
It's incredible to me that California's primary generation source is cyclical solar — which it primarily offloads to PNW [0], who offsets any missing California solar with its MASSIVE Columbia River Hydro. Essentially co-dependant renewables, the entirety of West Coast through Colorado balancing primarily between solar and hydro (and natgas peakers). Nothing like Québec (¡hydro!), but still something . [0] < https://i.imgur.com/QMclWZu.png > grey "other" line == sold to neighboring grids ---- If ERCOT ("Texas") would get over their independant grid "benefits" [i.e. not having to follow federal regulations], they could be sloshing their primarily wind-derived kWHs into an even more-beautiful grid of flowing renewables. Instead, 10-year winter storms risk hundreds dead and billion$ lo$t. ---- TVA is in planning stages for its second massive pump-storage facility — but Texas is probably wiser in its nascent battery storage investment [1], instead. TVA's Racoon Mountain Pumphouse is definitely impressive, but with all the upcoming "depleted" car batteries being reconditioned into the stationary electric storage market... water power storage is probably the more environmentally-damaging method (definitely more expensive?). [1] < https://imgur.com/a/Nm0TFs1 > ---- Screenshots via < https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48 > [nerd warning: my favorite real-time dataset] US Lower-48 Primary Energy Sourcing: < https://i.imgur.com/BWXugy2.png > ---- My layperson recommendations to industry [I'm blue-collar, electrician]: reduce coal, increase nuclear; increase micro battery storage (e.g. see Chattanooga's EPB implementations); maintain but stop building dams/pumped storage. Solar/wind/nuclear/nat.gas will be able to run everything once we have enough battery storage to handle daily peaks . In a few more years we will be entirely able to remove our dependance from toxic coal [2] [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms
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> If ERCOT ("Texas") would get over their independant grid "benefits" Currently, even though it pains me to say this, ERCOT has one of the most mature battery systems in the world. Everything else is valid though.
I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries, maybe Tesla, maybe something else. But definitely not going back into the grid. Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this? Who are the best companies doing this right now in New England? What products are folks using to store electricity? Are there any good resources for this kind of thing?
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>I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries, >Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this? Pay a land use consultant or lawyer $500-$1k to go over you idea with you. There is a reason you do not see people DIYing land development that is not residential. You will likely find that the least terrible way to do what you're asking is to build some sort of minimal cabin or something to get the whole project to be residential. Even then you will likely have to dial back your clearing a lot and structure the project in multiple phases over manny years to not incur non-starter level costs. You're gonna learn more about the clean water act than you ever wanted to know.
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All you need is a solar charge controller and a battery, and optionally an inverter. You dont need a company to do this for you, unless you want pay $$ to connect wires.
Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2. Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
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Or alternatively, a hundred 10 mile by 10 mile installations. Or on average 2 such installations per state. Hardly seems anywhere near comparable to a Dyson sphere
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Currently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms. Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point. The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
10k square miles of photovoltaic power plant would cost about 1 trillion current US dollars, even assuming that such a project does not drive the cost down. This is easily achievable and roughly 20 orders of magnitude cheaper than a Dyson sphere.
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that's a very nice target to cause a country wide blackout, just saying. It's probably better to built a thousand 10 square mile power plants.
I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
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> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense. Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted). At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief). "Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote". HN is truly lost.
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It depends how you look at it > Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there. So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly. Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime (To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)
Why though? For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death. This probably wouldn’t work with 80% of the populace enslaved but would work very well with 10-15% enslaved.
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Slaves aren’t free. You still need to feed them, clothe them, and house them. You need to do basic medical care. And now you have the problem that most of them would happily murder you in your sleep/if your back is turned, or run away never to be found. So the tend to be a pretty big security risk. Oh, and also they’re slaves so good luck getting them to care about their work - way worse than a typical new hire retail employee even. So you need to do heavier supervision. Oh, and you had to pay to acquire them - instead of give them an offer and pay them after they’ve worked for you successfully. So add that to the ‘risk’ pile.
Exactly. As distasteful as it is to put it in these terms, some slaveholders had massive "balance sheets" consisting of thousands of human "assets". Outlawing slavery meant reducing the value of these assets to zero.
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Which is identical to all the balance sheets today will oil and gas infrastructure and the billions dumped into ICE R&D they were hoping to amortize over the next 30 years. They’ll fight tooth and nail
There’s an effort to whitewash the horrors of chattel slavery that is really disgusting. Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves. This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners. There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more desirable for domestic labor. By the 19th century this had gotten so absurd that some slaves were almost indistinguishable from white people due to generations of repeated rape, basically. There was a book whose name escapes me that analyzed the records of one of the largest slave markets and it found that the price of girl slaves went way once they started menstruating. This was advertised. Why do you think that was? We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.
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> We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved. Yeah, but not for the reasons you think. A country that would just kill a significant share of its citizens for something that used to be legal very recently is not going to end up just fine. Moreover, due to normal distribution of human traits the next generation would have the same percentage of 'evil' with or without your well-intentioned genocide.. go figure.
Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold. I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.
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Offshoring generally improves the lives of the people who get the offshored jobs. Usually foreign companies pay more and have better working conditions than the local companies.
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It's worse than that because it takes something that should beg the question what modern things we peddle today because they make $$ are in fact morally wrong into a trite "hurr durr past people bad we smart now" that nobody learns anything from.
> Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end. Human slavery might be one of the few exceptions to this. People can reproduce and create more people provided they are given the bare necessities of life. As long as you could keep the enslaved under control, you would have new slaves you could constantly sell and they mostly took care of themselves. Honestly it sounds like a great life for an unambitious, lazy person. Maybe we’ll all be able to experience something similar when humanoid robots are commonplace in the future. Find an isolated piece of land with a few robots. Make them grow food and commercial crops. Raise some animals. Live a life of relative self sufficiency and leisure.
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The issue (for the masters, and besides any ethical issues) is being a slave master is a very tenuous position, and prone to revolts. Too capable (but also valuable!) slaves tend to be self sufficient and strong enough to throw you off. Too weak (and therefore non-valuable!) slaves tend to be easy to control - but are a huge drain on the system, including ‘master’ management, which is often the most constrained resource anyway in any hierarchical system.
> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have? Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers. > Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere. > And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma. Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
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"Oxen? Paid laborers? " In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that. I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well. But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones. "The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere." Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.) And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not? "it was at least in part cultural." Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.
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> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that. Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit. > But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones. There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South. > Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide. What we'd now call the developed world. That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.
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"What we'd now call the developed world." The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either. I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria? "The Russians you mention managed it in 1723" Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles. Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category.
Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka
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Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity? I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp. OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
In several countries their freight trains are electric today. Trucks can be electric too, and a lot of shipping needn't run on fossil fuels although we're further off widespread commercial offerings than we are for trains or trucks which you can just buy today. The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather than try to pass on unaffordable prices and eat the fuel cost when there aren't enough buyers.
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Given the rapid expansion of solar, and that it keeps accellerating, we're less than 10 years away from seeing a massive decline in demand for gasoline. I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop. It won't get cheaper than solar though.
I think Venezuela and Iran are more about restricting the oil to China in case of a conflict rather than providing energy for the US, although getting ahead of an anticipated demand increase from AI data centers is probably a contributing motivation.
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I don't think interdicting Venezuelan oil in a US/China conflict would be too much of a challenge for the US, given... geography. It certainly doesn't require us to control the country or its oil industry.
I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level. Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer. Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
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Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level. Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?
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Maybe you should learn to read at a level that you understand what I wrote? Smugness based on an intentional misreading just makes you look dumb.
The Misuses of the University (publicbooks.org)
Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either. "Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related. I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.
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The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the private sector would give them. But that deal has also shifted. Duties have changed and often many of the academics do not get to do much research, instead being managers of grad students who do the research. Being a professor is a lot of work and it is a lot of bureaucratic work. I'm not sure why you're complaining about researchers. Think about the system for a second. We've trained people for years to be researchers and then... make them managers. Imagine teaching people to program, then once you've decided they're fully trained and good programmers we say "you're free to do all the programming you want! But you have to also teach more programmers, grade their work, create their assignments and tests, mentor the advanced programmers, help them write papers, help them navigate the university system, write grants to ensure you have money for those advanced programmers, help manage your department's organization, and much more." This is even more true for early career academics who don't have tenure[0]. For the majority of professors the time they have to continue doing research (the thing which they elected to train to do! That they spent years honing! That they paid and/or gave up lots of money for!) is nights and weekends. And that's a maybe since the above tasks usually don't fit in a 40hr work week. My manager at a big tech company gets more time to do real programming work than my advisor did during my PhD. I'd also mention that research has a lot of monetary value. I'm not sure why this is even questioned by some people. Research lays the foundation for all the rest. Sure, a lot of it fails, but is that surprising when you're trying to push the bounds of human knowledge? Yet it is far worth it because there are singular discoveries/inventions that create more economic value than decades worth of the current global economy. It's not hard to recognize that since basically the entire economy is standing on that foundation... [0] Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you don't have a lab full of graduate students who need to graduate.
Beautiful essay. Such quiet scathing critique. Written from the POV of a history professor witness: > The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza. These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
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I also found that quote to be great. I'm starting to read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom so this is an apt comparison. Thanks.
Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club) It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed
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Am I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. If we wanted elite colleges to provide the benefits that they are supposed to; then we would, if anything, want to reduce matriculation. Stanford,—and I would hazard a guess many other HYPSM schools,—are already minting out too many students; this is especially true when it comes to non-PHD masters degrees, which are essentially an unbecoming cash cow for departments. Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours; increasing matriculation would only lead to more auditorium-sized classes that are run by lecturers or postdocs—these classes are essentially at the same level as trudging through online material. Your proposed "solution" would have a Procrustean effect: I can't speak for Chinese or Indian universities, but while schools like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, University of Michigan, et seq... have good reputations, they have a noticeably lower reputation than the ivy leagues and certain private colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech—and a worse reputation for being degree mills. If you think that Stanford having 180,000 students matriculated will give everyone a quality education, then I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality. The only benefit that would come of it would be popping the degree bubble and prematurely ending the current moribund trajectory that universities are on; where they are already treating degrees as if they were artificial-scarcity NFTs, rather than providing the actual scarcity that is access to,—and direct training from,—high-level researchers.
When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
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1970 or so. There is this version of it https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.
Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective (worksinprogress.co)
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Work in the industry: way too many planners and transit consultants are fixating on too many stops as being a problem, likely since it's the one piece of infrastructure they can control when roads and traffic lights are designed for cars not people. Depending on the road network and land-uses, removing stops only 200-metres apart to make them 400-metres apart (the industry standard) could decrease access to transit within a 5-minute walk by anywhere from 10-50%+, so it's limited to where you can actually apply it without penalizing (ie. putting them outside of a 7-10-minute walk) so many customers that they look for alternatives. In Europe stop spacings are much longer even for local routes (over 400-800-metres), but this is because everyone generally lives within walking distance for their errands, so transit is used only for longer, more commute-like trips, where a longer walk for faster travel times makes sense. Accessibility is also less of a priority there so they're less sensitive to requests from seniors and those with disabilities, with many buses not being wheelchair accessible. In US/Canada, a lot of transit riders live over a 20-30-minute (often with hostile walking conditions like crossing highway ramps) walk from the nearest grocery store, school, pharmacy, etc., so they'd oppose adding 2-3-minutes of walking to shorten a 10-minute bus ride. Moreover, closely spaced stops are really only an issue in older (pre-war) downtowns where frequent stops are the result of decades of requests from residents (especially seniors) and from schools/churches/grocery stores/retirement homes/medical clinics. Out in the suburbs, buses usually bypass most stops, and schedules take that into account. And in places with amazing land-use like Pheonix and Vegas, you have long stretches of nothing so of course there'll be higher average stop spacings. Lastly, much of the time-savings from express routes (that skip stops) and bus stop consolidation/balancing, is from being more in sync with the lights, which are usually designed for through traffic (ie. a green wave). Transit Signal Priority can help achieve significant savings (over 10-30%+) without removing any stops, though moving stops to after the light makes it more effective (and even that can be politically difficult).
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Isn't the solution to this to implement bus lanes + express busses on rush hour instead of removing half of the bus stops. Every bus stop is amazingly valuable as it's the gateway to the public transit system. This doesn't mean every bus needs to stop at every stop along its route. This is not a magical European invention even, any busy Asian city will have sth like this. Bus lanes are much more effective than the express busses to increase ridership by the way. Busses avoiding the traffic jams while the cars getting stuck in them changes the mind of even the most hardcore petrolhead.
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Just because bus lanes are beneficial where feasible doesn't mean optimizing the number of bus stops isn't also beneficial. Clearly it's possible for there to be too many bus stops. You wouldn't put a bus stop every 30 ft. So it's also possible that some existing bus routes have too many stops, and spacing them out more would help.
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The problem with riding the bus in the US is that you end up around a lot of undesirable people.
I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false. One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article. Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. They’re asking themselves how much they have to spend on buses. This is the core of the problem: low cost services are in a death spiral in the US. Budget cuts -> services get worse -> reduced users -> more cuts. In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Further, the arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. This means you need to arrive ~10 minutes early and time your bus so that you also arrive at your destination early. You will be wasting possibly 20+ minutes each way. Of course you are also standing in the sun or the cold or the rain while you wait, and probably walking on a hostile stroad and across several lanes of traffic before that point. So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.
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I will say in my city I tried the bus twice and the number one reason I never used more is that it was incredibly slow. And the frequent stops were absolutely a contributing factor. People could pull the chord to get off nearly anywhere and did. And a trip that might take 15 minutes by char could take 45 minutes to an hour and fifteen. That said, I do agree that this being the number one issue everywhere or even where I live is far from certain. As a driver, the number one thing I hate are bus stops near intersections without dedicated bus lanes.
But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus. Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions. So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities. I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!
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I also live in Chicago and wouldn’t mind walking extra to another stop, but Chicago also has a massive traffic problem, particularly post pandemic. During rush hour, the bus is stop and go already. I’m really curious how this would pan out here, but it can’t be the only solution.
> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further “A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people. Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reader consider them as a primary means of transportation. As such latency isn’t necessarily as critical vs coverage here.
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Having lived in SF I've seen many cycles where the SFMTA says "We'd like to make (insert any changes)..." and the 'advocates' immediately come out of the woodwork to make the argument you're making, about how walking another block or two is impossible for some constituents. Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry. The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught. To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.
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I think this is a US-centric perspective. In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car. The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy. In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving. This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory. In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.
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This isn’t really US-specific. The same pattern shows up in small cities, villages, and rural areas across Europe. Outside major metro areas, buses are mostly used by the elderly and lower-income riders. If you can afford a car, you usually get one, because service is infrequent, often doesn’t run late at night or early in the morning, and trips take much longer. An 8-minute drive can easily turn into two 10-minute bus legs plus waiting, transfers, and walking. 30 minutes door-to-door isn’t unusual. This seems more like a population density issue than a US cultural issue. When density is low, frequent, fast, car-competitive transit is hard to sustain anywhere.
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Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways: 1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions. 2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.
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Incidentally, London has a "Freedom Pass" (free transport for retirees), which is funded in the way you describe. Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport. As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.
No, it's not unavoidable. Just ditch the buses and switch to cars, soon to be self-driving. Even the rush hour traffic is trivially solved by mild carpooling (small vans for 4-6 people).
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Not Just Bikes makes a compelling argument that self driving cars are not the answer, and will almost certainly make things worse
> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)
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> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because: 1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service. Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries. This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.
As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty. A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours). I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding parking, paying for it is another issue, common in Europe where (luckily) city centers are often millenia older than cars. At no point of me living in the US I found the car-centric model anywhere better.
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I sometimes take a peak into European busses but I don't see 25-30 people sitting in there on average. That is a lot of people. Busses, at least the one where I live in Europe, are very loud, noisy and smelly. I'd rather have 20 cars pass my home than one bus. I don't hear or feel those cars but once that bus passes my coffee cup visibly shakes. I also don't mind cycling behind most cars but cycling behind a bus is a terrible experience. You feel the heat blasting out of the rear-right side and the diesel smoke is terrible.
Trams have the same problem trains have. If something happens on a tram line (and these are a lot more integrated with roads than train lines, so things do happen), a big segment of the network comes to a standstill. They're not like buses or cars that can drive around a major accident in an emergency, even if that meanns they'll skip a stop or two.
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My experience of public transport modes in various cities is at odds with this. Trams and trains generally offer far more reliable schedules, frequencies and journey times than busses because they either have completely dedicated alignments or have priority where there is any interface with normal traffic. Most buses inevitably bunch (see https://setosa.io/bus/ for a nice simulation) and/or get stuck in traffic as a matter of routine. The inconvenience may be less per delay but busses are delayed far more frequently than trams and trains on most of the public transport systems I've used. So for regular users, the cumulative inconvenience is much worse on busses than on trains/trams. Which is why people flock to trains and trams when available as an alternative to busses. Specifically with regard to the parent, the frequency at which unplanned outages happens with tram services in Zurich is extremely low in my experience - certainly planned changes to schedules or routes (for maintenance, upgrades, etc.) are far more frequent. And when "something happens" (i.e. a traffic accident), the path for trams is cleared as quickly as possible - often in 30 minutes or less - so you'd really have to be unlucky to be inconvenienced by such an occurrence.
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In most situations you want trams to have own lanes and semaphore priority which reduces collision chances to a minimum. Worst case you can have some spare busses to provide temporary replacement services for such situations or you can divert some buses from other lines to provide services in problematic sector till situation isn't resolved.
Half of all dutch people own cars (10,062,194 cars / 17,904,421 people). The majority of people still ride bikes or take public transport to move around except when they need to take their car. For comparison, a majority of americans have a car (259,238,294 cars / 333,287,557 people). Note that the denominator includes children in both cases. You're not asked to give up going to the wilderness. Regarding scheduling, in my eyes public transport where the mean time between busses is not under 15 minutes is not public transport . Running after a bus is a signal that the frequency is too low. "I need to leave five minutes ago to take the bus I intended" should be followed by "if I leave now I'll be a few minutes early for the next one".
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You are right, I was not asked to give up going to the wilderness; I just want to go to the wilderness of my choosing and not be constrained by someone else's transportation. Funny thing about scheduling. I have to plan to leave an hour earlier than I need to, and even then, I'm frequently late. Yet, my hyperfocus kicks in when I sit in the car and go through the rituals of "I'm driving now." The vigilance can be exhausting, but usually only bothers me when I'm leaving an observing site at 3 o'clock in the morning or I'm driving at twilight in deer country.
1. Makes sense. 2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though. 3. Trains.
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Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car. Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities. One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.
But also too, packed with junkies who, at best, behave erratically and at worse assault randoms. Taking the bus around sf makes it immediately clear why (not all, but most) people who have options choose them.
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Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency. Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput. My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out of service and the wait would be 30-40 minutes. Unless a bus was right there, it was faster to walk.
In many places, yes, US pedestrian infrastructure is worse. In other ways - wheelchair accessibility for example - the US is miles better than many European cities.
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Wheelchair users are a subset of pedestrians. If your pedestrian infra is shit, your wheelchain infra can't be much better. (Sure, only if you count whatever remains of pedestrians infra, it might look acceptable).
Similarly, the article also glosses over the issue of disability. Perhaps because the US tends to treat its bus system as welfare, it is adapted heavily to people with disabilities and limited mobility. I'm sure there are solutions to this, but at the moment removing bus stops tends to disenfranchise people who can't walk longer distances.
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This is true for everywhere tbh, and thr solution is to make the last mile walkable by people with disabilities. I see a lot of idolization of NW Europe from the US, but this is still a problem in Europe too. True, it's better than most of the world, but not every NW European city is as walkable or as accessible as people think it is.
BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service). Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders. Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now. Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?
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I left SF ~2021, but even in 2019 it was kind of in a death spiral. Hopefully it's better now, loved it back when I lived there. But still hear mixed reports from friends.
I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars, but I could be wrong about that.
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They don't own cars because owning a car in the city sucks in a lot of ways, more so than in rural areas. So yeah, if your point is that if you take away all the bad parts of using a car, and leave public transit as is, then using a car comes out ahead. Splendid.
that's simply not how it works, and quite obviously so. the stop time is absolutely not linear in the number of people who board the bus. just think about all the time it takes to slow down, possibly make the whole bus kneel, and then sit up again. by your argument, there should be infinity bus stops, each of which only allowing one single person to load. like, what? surely we can think more critically than this...
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So your counter argument is that we should actually only have two bus stops. One a the start of the route, and one at the end? surely we can think more critically than this...
I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus (github.com/benjismith)
I used to always reflexively blurt out 67 when asked for a random number. I'm a proto gen alpha. I 6-7'd before it was cool.
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For a second I assumed you meant 69 but then it hit me, i'm getting old.
Since its unclear whats going on, Gemini first gave me some python. import random random_number = random.randint(1, 10) print(f"{random_number=}") Then it stated the output. Code output random_number=8 "This time, the dice landed on 8." Code output random_number=9 "Your next random number is 9." I would guess its not actually executing the python it displayed? Just a simulation, right?
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Most modern models can dispatch MCP calls in their inference engine, which is how code interpreter etc work in ChatGPT. Basically an mcp server that the execution happens as a call to their ai sandbox and then returns it to the llm to continue generation. You can do this with gpt-oss using vLLM.
But .. how do you know? It says it wrote code, but it could just be text and markdown and template. It could just be predicting what it looks like to run code. Mine also gave me 42 before I specified 1-10. Does it always start with 42 thinking its funny?
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Click on the link I provided and you'll know why I know. It's not markdown, it shows the code that was ran and the output.
"I expected an automaton to be a good source of entropy and it turns out it is not." BTW LLM here is doing a great job of emulating humans. They are not good at this task either. > Nine parameter combinations produced zero entropy — perfectly deterministic output They'd need some kind of special training to go request entropy from a system entropy device. Behaving deterministically is a feature, not a bug.
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Just because the LLM happens to be bad at something humans are also bad at, doesn’t mean the system is “emulating humans”.
The part about injecting randomness is the most intersting bit of the article. So if you want your LLM responses to be more distributed (beyond what setting the temperature will allow), add some random english words to the start of the prompt.
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Meh, I tell it "use uuidgen and get your randomness from that". Of course, that won't work on ChatGPT web, but works well enough on the command line.
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In a way that sounds like setting the seed.
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Kinda, but the same seed will not guarantee the same result the next time around.
US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives (reuters.com)
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Imagine if the EU builds it's own alternative services to those provided in the US, and these EU services do not rely on advertising revenue and don't shove AI in our faces at every opportunity. Europe, please Make the Internet Great Again!
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And in related news, major European democracies are spending real money architecting sovereign cloud tech - planning on replacing not just the infra, but also the key parts of commonly used SaaS stacks. (How do I know? I got a job offer from one of those governments to help them architect that; exciting times).
What kind of success are countries having finding technical talent with the right savvy fighter mindset to sever the dependence on an aggressive and culturally-entrenched threat? (Even the ordinary open source world has a lot of intrigue to be careful of. And most developers still think nothing of pulling in a fleet of dependencies from PyPI/NPM/Cargo/etc. as well as third-party network services. Everyone is being taught in school to play to FAANG interview rituals, and many go on to a career style of performative sprints. HCI is almost lost as a field to UX euphemism. Almost no one can deploy a system that won't be compromised, and most don't even try, except for some mandated ineffective theatre. AI homework-cheating mindset isn't helping. Etc. Not to complain, but to be clear the kind of inertia a country is facing.) Do the countries wanting to fight this have enough of they right homegrown talent already, and know how to find and nurture it? If they're importing additional talent, do they know how to find and incentive the right people, while turning away the ones with the wrong mindsets for this mission? (ProTips: Look for the hardcore privacy&security non-careerist nerds. The left-leaning, societal-minded ones. Give them what they've been looking for, or support to help make what they've been looking for. Don't offer to pay too well. Anyone who asks "Why would I want to live in your country, when I can make more money elsewhere?" gets a permaban.)
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The UK used to have a cloud provider (UK Cloud) but it got aggressively outcompeted by the US Hyperscalers, despite primarily targeting government departments. It's interesting that at the time the UK didn't consider data sovereignty enough of an issue to support a local cloud company. Shocking really.
Don't worry, China is coming out pretty far ahead so I'm sure we'll still be in a unipolar world when this is all over, and you can sleep safe at night. I imagine you didn't know.
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I don't know man? The Chinese are clearly doing some "rebalancing" lately. Some would even say that "rebalancing" is not a strong enough word. "De-linking" is a word a lot of those people are more comfortable with using to describe what we're seeing. You can't really have a unipolar power if that power simply "takes all their marbles and goes home" so to speak. I think we need to really do some strategic planning around scenarios where China or Europe simply withdraws from the rest of the world. Or decides they only need subsaharan Africa for instance. Or, the nightmare scenario; where China, Europe, and subsaharan Africa actually figure out that together they don't really need anything from the rest of us.
> I can’t imagine how any country would think the US is trustworthy enough to be the place where everyone stores their data. I do not necessarily disagree, but playing devil's advocate here... Who else would you trust with your data besides the US? China...where you cannot criticize the CCP? Europe...where they throw people in jail for social media posts? What do you think when they find out peoples' private convos? Canada...where the gov is basically the same as Europe? Or the US where even the mainstream media can challenge the president? Give me the US any day.
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Can you explain what happened to Larry Bushart?
> Meanwhile a US citizen was jailed for a meme quoting Trump after Kirk death. And that was wrong, too. Also newsworthy because it is so unusual. > First link I think it's probably legal under US jurisprudence, but fine, you can have that one. How about the guy who got raided for calling Robert Habeck a "professional moron"? Or the 170 other people raided in Germany for their online speech?
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This is not what actually happened; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46431000
> But it's not like the USA is now DPRK. I'd say the perception is probably worse kim is simply not a threat he also hasn't threatened to invade us, and he's not kidnapped any foreign leaders (recently)
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Exactly. These guys have blinders.
The US doesn't have diplomats anymore. Just Republican donors with no experience. Hell, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's dad is a diplomat. A really bad one.
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Ambassadors being rich socialites is a both party problem and it is not new. No the difference is that Trump's ambassadors are directly getting involved in the local politics of their postings. And they're not even hiding it.
Are you sure it's just 'this administration'? I don't think the memory of America as a bully will go away soon, regardless of who comes into power.
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You're speaking as if the image of the US as a bully is anything new. It's only Europeans know that are getting a taste of US strong-arming.
US 'diplomats' are campaigns big donors, or primary supports. I've eaten with someone who expected to be named diplomat in Europe because he supported Obama by 2007, but was one-uped by a richer donor post-primary.
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How much do you have to donate exactly? I’m always surprised by how little it takes to bribe your way into government favor. I always think it must cost millions, then I hear it’s only like $100k or so. Sometimes even just $25k for local governments.
New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes (marginalia.nu)
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I’ve occasionally found myself wanting a comments filter with an account-creation date cutoff. A -3dB cutoff might be >= 01/01/2020, to pick a round figure. Yet I never browse https://news.ycombinator.com/classic Perhaps a classic comment filter might work…
Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could - which made it easy. Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM. That combined with the fact I sometimes write longer posts and naturally default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar, is basically a perfect storm of traits. I've already had posts accused twice in the past year of being an LLM. Kind of sad some random quirk of LLM training caused a fun little typography thing I did just for myself (assuming no one else would even notice) to become something negative.
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Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.
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I also used em-dash before LLMs, though I would not call myself a typography geek. But yesterday I wrote a birthday message to someone and replaced my em-dashes with minus signs, because I did not want them to think that my message is LLM generated..
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Nice try
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Exactly what an LLM would say, haha.
I'm also increasingly aware that my own writing style and punctuation seem to line up with what might be associated with an AI, but some of the tells (em-dashes, spaces after periods, etc) seem like artifacts of when in history we learned to write. I wonder how much crossover there would be between a trained text analysis model looking for Gen-X authors and another looking for LLM's.
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I worked on something like this in 2000-1. We were attempting to identify the native language and origin region of authors based on aberrant modes in second languages (as a simple case, a french person writing english might say "we are tuesday.") It was accurate and fast with the sota back then; I think you could one-shot a general purpose LLM today.
I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context. Not like I have a perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :) This applies not only work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters.
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This only works as "proof" up until someone innovates an "authenticity" flag on the LLM output.
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I appreciate you including a few minor mistakes in this very post: > I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context[s]. Not like I have ~a~ perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :) > This applies not only [to] work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters. I conclude you are real.
unrelated but I've never understood how to put a smiley at the end of parenthetical sentences (which comes up surprisingly often for me since I use smileys a lot and also like using parentheses). Just the smiley as an end parentheses (like this :) feels off but adding another parentheses (like this :) ) makes it look like it should be nested which causes problems since I also tend to nest parenthetical sentences (like (this)). Yes I enjoy lisp, how could you tell
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Post C++11 you can just do (like this:)), no extra space needed before the last parenthesis.
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I have the same problem. I just ditch the smiley face. :)
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Your comment made me realise that there's logic to this (like this :) , since in HTML we can: <li> do this <li> and this instead of: <li> ... </li> and <img alt='this'> instead of <img ... /> You might like Lisp, but what you're saying reminds me of the late 00s/early 2010s xHTML2 vs. HTML5 debate :)
The ellipsis problem is solved by using ... instead of the dedicated unicode character
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3 characters instead of 1, how can you live with yourself??
Honestly, first paragraph sounds more human and sincere for sure. Also adding better "context" into the discussion, than the usual claims/punchlines of marketing-speak. Maybe it's not exactly the grammar itself but also overall structuring of the idea/thought into the process. The regular output sounds much more like marketing-piece or news-coverage than an individual anyway. I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor.
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> I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor. If I understand you correctly, then Yes I completely agree, but my worry is that this can also be "emulated" as shown by my comment by Models already available to us. My question is, technically there's nothing to stop new accounts from using say Kimi and to have a system prompt meant to not sound AI and I feel like it can be effective. If that's the case, doesn't that raise the question of what we can detect as AI or not (which was my point), the grand parent comment suggests that they use intentionally bad human writing sometimes to not be detected as AI but what I am saying is that AI can do that thing too, so is intentionally bad writing itself a good indicator of being human? And a bigger question is if bad writing isn't an indicator, then what is? Or if there can even be an good indicator (if say the bot is cautious)? If there isn't, can we be sure if the comments we read are AI or not Essentially the dead-internet-theory. I feel like most websites have bots but we know that they are bots and they still don't care but we are also in this misguided trust that if we see some comments which don't feel like obvious bots, then they must be humans. My question is, what if that can be wrong? It feels to me definitely possible with current Tech/Models like say Kimi for example, Doesn't this lead to some big trust issues within the fabric of internet itself? Personally, I don't feel like the whole website's AI but there are chances of some sneaky action happening at distance type of new accounts for sure which can be LLM's and we can be none the wiser. All the same time that real accounts are gonna get questioned if they are LLM or not if they are new (my account is almost 2 years old fwiw and I got questioned by people esentially if this account is AI or not) But what this does do however, is make people definitely lose a bit of trust between each other and definitely a little cautious towards each message that they read. (This comment's a little too conspiratorial for my liking but I can't help but shake this feeling sometimes) It just is all so weird for me sometimes, Idk but I guess that there's still an intuition between whose human and not and actually the HN link/article iteslf shows that most people who deploy AI on HN in newer accounts use standard models without much care which is the reason why em-dashes get detected and maybe are good detector for sometime/some-people and this could make the original OP's comment of intentionally having bad grammar to sound more human make sense too because em-dashes do have more probability of sounding AI than not :/ It's just this very weird situation and I am not sure how to explain where depending on from whatever situation you look at, you can be right. You can try to hurt your grammar to sound more human and that would still be right and you can try to be the way you are because you think that models can already have intentionally bad grammar too/capable of it and to have bad grammar isn't a benchmark itself for AI/not so you are gonna keep using good grammar and you are gonna be right too. It's sort of like a paradox and I don't have any answers :/ Perhaps my suggestion right now feels to me to not overthink about it. Because if both situations are right, then do whatever imo. Just be human yourself and then you can back down this statement with well truth that you are human even if you get called AI. So I guess, TLDR: Speak good grammar or not intentionally, just write human and that's enough or that should be enough I guess.
Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments: word noob new p-value ---------------------------- ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016 actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05 code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081 real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08 built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10 data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05 tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05 agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024 app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078 tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e-06 model 6.8% 2.39% p=0.00013 agents 6.67% 2.11% p=5.2e-05 api 6.53% 1.12% p=2.7e-07 building 6.13% 1.54% p=1.3e-05 full 6.0% 1.97% p=0.00017 across 5.87% 1.4% p=1.3e-05 interesting 5.33% 1.54% p=0.00014 answer 5.2% 1.4% p=9.6e-05 simple 4.93% 1.54% p=0.00043 project 4.8% 1.26% p=0.00015
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Worth pointing out that calculating p-values on a wide set of metrics and selecting for those under $threshold (called p-hacking) is not statistically sound - who cares, we are not an academic journal, but a pill of knowledge. The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05, you are bound to get false positives. In academia it's definitely not something you'd do, but I think here it's fine. @OP have you considered calculating Cohen's effect size? p only tells us that, given the magnitude of the differences and the number of samples, we are "pretty sure" the difference is real. Cohen's `d` tells us how big the difference is on a "standard" scale.
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Thank you marginalia_nu for article and this comment (word stats). I got similar feeling. I'm new here, but got a feeling that some comments are like bot generated. Such low p-values are proof that something is going on. Hipotesis (after your recent word statistics): that some bots are "bumping up" AI related subjects. Maybe some companies using LLM tools want to promote some their products ;) marginalia_nu respect for your work :)
It's funny - some months ago I noticed that I use the word "actually" lot, and started trying to curb it from my writing. Not for any AI-related reason, but because it is almost always a meaningless filler word, and I find that being concise helps get my points across more clearly. e.g. "The body of the template is parsed, but not actually type-checked until the template is used." -> "but not typechecked until the template is used." The word "actually" here has a pleasant academic tone, but adds no meaning.
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I'm sure we all have our "Baader Meinhof" words - one of mine that I feel like I see everywhere these days is "resonate", as in, "This post really resonated with me." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
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> good typographical conventions Here since 2010 in this account, I use em-dashes. It's easy—and effective—to type using “Opt Shift -” on a Mac. Oh yeah, left and right “curly quotes” as well, and the occasional … > It's so sad Don’t forget «’» — but ain’t nobody got time for that! A few more to reclaim typography: https://howtotypeanything.com/alt-codes-on-mac/
I switched to semicolons... They look similar enough in use to string things together. I'm sure AI is coming for those too though, and that will be a grim day because those are my last stand.
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There are times when an em dash can be used in place of a semicolon, but I don't think that's the usual LLM usage. Instead it's replacing a replacing a comma, colon, or period. Unless you're talking about restructuring your sentences to allow for a semicolon; that's fine. For example that semicolon could have been an em dash, but I don't think it's the type that LLMs over favor.
The account was immediately shadowbanned after re-awakening from a long period of inactivity. I agree it doesn't seem obviously AI. The early comments are all in the same writing style and smell human. Lots of strong opinions e.g. "logged in after years away and had basically the same experience. the feed is just AI slop and engagement bait now, none of it from people I actually followed." [about Facebook] HN has got a big problem with silently shadowbanning accounts for no obvious reason. Whether it's an attempt to fight bots gone wrong or something else isn't clear. By the very nature of shadowbanning there is no feedback loop that can correct mistake.
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Pretty sure they weren't shadowbanned immediately , since people replied to some of those [dead] comments. Most likely the shadowban was applied retroactively after posting the more obviously generated stuff.
Never buy a .online domain (0xsid.com)
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Does anybody know any good alternative to Name Cheap? It seems like they keep raising prices on all the domains. Website is very sluggish, especially for finding domains quickly.
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cloudflare is the cheapest - they do it at cost.
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.com is definitely the gold standard, I got an .io more than a decade ago and if I would go back in time, I would just use .com, the pricing for .io been increasing for no apparent reason.
The point of the system is what it does. They can't just say "we don't want to deal with small timers who will not pay us big bucks doing nonstandard things" without pushback but they can write the policy so that a huge fraction of those use cases fall into some crack that can only be got out of by incurring the kind of expense that's a non-starter for those users. Your municipal code is rife with examples of this.
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This is a catchy aphorism, but not really true. Things can be badly implemented so that they fail to achieve their purpose.
I’m a different person, but this happens to me, too. I have the kstrauser@yahoo.com email address because I signed up for it like 25 years ago. I log in every 6 months to see what the few other kstrausers in the world have signed me up for. Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff. I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it.
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Yeah I have josephg@gmail. The amount of spam that account gets is wild - about 50-100 emails hit the inbox per day. I got soft-locked out of google docs a few months ago because my google account's 25gb quota was exhausted. Some of the emails are really unfortunate stuff. "Your account was added as a backup address." - Then inevitably, a few weeks later, dozens of password reset emails. Sorry bud. I've received pay stubs. Orders and invoices. I get phone bills every month for someone in India. Its chaos. Early on I'd sometimes reply to these random emails telling people they've got the wrong address. The most astonishing reply I ever got was from HSBC bank telling me I needed to come into the branch to change my email address. Over the course of a week, I explained about 3 times that that was impossible. That I live in Australia. That I'm not their customer, and its not my account. Eventually they told me they were disabling online banking on my account. Now I've given up replying at all. Send emails into that pit of PII misery if you want. I don't read them.
IAN Y L, though! Offering legal advice with the disclaimer “I am not a lawyer” could be prosecuted as practicing law if a reasonably party could still infer a potential lawyer-client relationship from your message and/or intent. Instead, “I am not your lawyer” explicitly denies the lawyer-client relationship, which closes the door on both being accused of practicing law illegally and on being found as party to a lawyer-client relationship whether or not you have the appropriate certifications.
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> closes the door on [...] being accused of practicing law illegally Does it? So I can say, "I'm not your lawyer, but I'm happy to go ahead and give you specific legal advice on your case." and I can't be accused of illegally practicing law? I was under the impression that this could still get you into hot water. But not being your lawyer, due to the fact that I am not a lawyer at all, I don't know if it is true or not.
Self censorship requires a threat or risk of detriment if the party doesn't self censor, right? Where is that here? What Radix does has no impact on Google, and I don't see how Google would be incentivized to pressure Radix. So I don't see how to make the leap blaming Google for Radix's incompetence. Yes, Google should recognize the risk of this happening, but they'd have to balance that against the rewards (or at least what they consider rewards)
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Google is making false statements about the safety of a domain and it has significant collateral damage. Google is the cause. They should be liable for losses. I had my main family domain put on Google's safe browsing block list and it has a massive impact. No one can visit the site. I think apps using system browser runtimes (ie: mobile) may stop working. I've seen reports that it can impact email deliver-ability. And, now, we see that it can get your domain put on serverHold so the problem becomes impossible to rectify. Google should have to pay for the damage. In my case, it was about 4h of work to figure out what was going on and how to fix it, so not much, but I've seen small businesses that rely on their primary domain to drive most of their sales via web and email. In those cases, having your domain placed on server hold because of Google's false statements can have a serious, detrimental financial effect.
Marking a website as "unsafe" in Chrome is equal to standing in front of the door of a small restaurant and blocking 71% of people going inside. Everyone first has to agree that they will enter the restaurant at their own risk. That is more than an opinion. Chrome has a monopoly and should act accordingly. Blocking entry to a website should be a last resort, not just because someone didn't add their website to the whitelist.
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Yeah. Everyone uses their list and being blocked by all web browsers is like having someone cover the doorway with a massive DANGER sign. It's insane that people are roaming around here arguing that it's ok because the damage caused is a necessity for "internet scale".
At internet scale, this would roughly be equivalent to not doing any warning or detection at all. Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged. There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.
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> Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged. Giving everyone a fair trial just doesn't scale. It costs too much.
Not sure how you feel about them as a company, but I use Cloudflare because they sell domains at cost.
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Of the suggestions, I think I would lean to CF, too.
Red Hat takes on Docker Desktop with its enterprise Podman Desktop build (thenewstack.io)
The best alternative to Docker Desktop on macOS is to abandon the GUI entirely use colima to create the linux VM. brew install colima docker docker-buildx docker-completion docker-compose export DOCKER_HOST="$HOME/.colima/docker.sock" >> ~/.zshrc source ~/.zshrc colima start --cpus 8 --vz-rosetta --ssh-agent --mount $HOME:w then add this line to your $HOME/.docker/config.json "cliPluginsExtraDirs": ["/opt/homebrew/lib/docker/cli-plugins"], that will get you a fast virtiofs VM with the latest docker, including compose and buildx. it may seem scary to replace an officially blessed tool like Docker Desktop, but i have had zero issues with colima. it isn't "docker compatible". it's docker. just need to run `brew upgrade` and `colima update` every once in a while to keep it up to date.
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Tried Podman about a month ago; UI was kinda meh, 'compose' was beyond unusable... then tried Colima (+ lazydocker, a lightweight, beautiful TUI providing the little overview I need) and haven't looked back for a single second.
I build containers for multiple platforms using orbstack, and that requires the containerd backend. So yes, it's in there somewhere.
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Huh. Are you actually talking to containerd directly or are you just doing something via the docker frontend that requires containerd to function?
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Presumably it's talking to the docker daemon which itself farms some piece out to containerd? I'm really not sure how the integration works.
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