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The average cost for a new vehicle in the U.S. hits a record high: over $51,000 (npr.org)
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Just two months ago I bought a new Corolla that was $31k, glad I purchased before the big jump. /s
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US automakers have no incentive to increase volume and/or lower prices. Tariffs keep cheaper competitive imports out. We are at an impasse. American auto consumers remain captive to the system until equilibrium is disturbed.
rVPN – stealth VPN with end-to-end encryption (rvpn.org)
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Not sure why you'd vibe-code a new VPN protocol, double ratchet or otherwise, when you can just take WireGuard and make a new transport for it. WireGuard by itself is not a stealth VPN, but the things that make a VPN "stealthy" are all things you'd layer on top of a WireGuard design, not thread through the middle of it. A datagram-based protocol can run under any obscured transport. We did this at Fly.io when we discovered that, for one reason or another, 5% of our users simply couldn't reliably use UDP. It was a one-day project to run it under WebSockets instead, and that was before coding agents.
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Wireguard is both really useful and pretty frustrating as a user. As a developer it's amazing that you can do things like relay packets through a bouncer with authentication to get around NAT without ever having to think about the protocol level safety, as a user it's near impossible to configure without the confused "why are no packets working", and as you had here it just doesn't make it through a lot of restrictive networking conditions. I'd love some middle ground between wireguard and tailscale in terms of complexity, their clients have way too much stuff in them. The parent is obviously just Claude making a fancy website and some sort of unreviewed networking protocol that's dressed up to look as if it's a real project. Github really needs to start showing commit cadence and repo birthdates.
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There's only 4 mentions of Rust on the landing page. Are we sure this is memory safe enough?
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> We believe privacy should be proven, not promised Then instantly gives you a shell script that it pipes to `sudo bash`. The irony isn't lost here.
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That's also the cost of providing convenience AND something that can open port 443
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Also the suggested installation method of at least: rust, bun, uv, deno, and homebrew Such a tired trope. If you want to do it the hard way, you are welcome to build by hand https://github.com/PDG-Global/rVPN-core#building
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Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's right.
Ask HR: Systems Engineering's Senior Pipeline Crisis
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Did you use an AI to write this in order to achieve maximum irony?
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Welcome to HN. This isn't a place for hosting your blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link? Thats how HN works.
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>Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently generate syntactically convincing C++ code that masks subtle data races, lifetime issues, or cache-unfriendly patterns under multi-threaded loads. Relying on automated tools or AI output without experienced human architectural oversight leaves teams vulnerable to silent, catastrophic failures that only deep domain experience can prevent. I think this is a rather out dated view. I'd argue the frontier models write better C/C++ code than many, many, many junior devs. With that said, I agree with your larger assessment of needing to keep junior devs and teaching them things that are likely never written down and only kept in the mind of a gray beard. The solution needs improved documentation and mentorship, not just hiring junior devs. And unfortunately I dont think the way things are heading companies are willing to invest. Why have a $150k+ overhead on a junior dev when $50k in token costs for a senior dev will take care of things?
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This is definitely true. Opus _will_ write better C++ code than any non-10k-hours-C++ coder. If the code fits the intended architecture or design is on another page. But models past Opus 5.5 level abilities will make less errors than the normal above-average human coder.
Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890 (archives.gov)
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Please add a closing parenthesis. Its absence is driving this Scheme hacker bananas.
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I wish we had statutory antitrust mechanisms instead. Get to be a certain size, you have to be a public company. Have a sustained supermajority of the market? You have to file a plan to split up.
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This was explored theoretically a few times, but the problem is it's really hard for this not to become extremely anti-consumer. iPhones dominate the cellphone market? You now have to figure out a way to split the manufacturing and selling of iPhones across multiple different entities. Consumers end up with a handful of worse products that all cost more. When AT&T was split up, it was just turned into a bunch of smaller regional monopolies that were in a lot of ways worse. It also forced the closure of Bell Labs - one of the most important R&D powerhouses in the US. (Most of these regional monopolies would end up merging back into bigger monopolies over time anyway)
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The part i've not been able to wrangle is what to do about companies which are internationally monopolies? Couldn't they just pick the winners/losers of local companies and ensure their own supply chain is the one that survives? That seems worse than a national monopoly that is at least HQ'd inside your borders.
> The act was designed to restore competition, but it was loosely worded and failed to define such critical terms as "trust," "combination," "conspiracy," and "monopoly." Five years later, the Supreme Court dismantled the act in United States v. E. C. Knight Company (1895). The Court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company, one of the defendants in the case, had not violated the law even though the company controlled about 98% of all sugar refining in the United States. The Supreme Court reasoned that the company’s control of manufacture did not constitute a control of trade. The reality is that the law itself was not very well written, and takes an extremely litigious executive branch to do anything with. Even if you agreed with the premise (the idea that Standard Oil arose purely through conspiracy is clearly wrong), it's ultimately a very ticky tacky set of definitions and has failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy (do we actually feel strongly that breaking Microsoft's productivity suite from their OS division was really worth all the effort?) (The notable exceptions being actual illegal coordination - like was recently uncovered in the egg industry. But these have more to do with price fixing amongst competitors and less with actual Trusts/Monopolies) The only practical way that countries have tackled monopolies has been to write legislation that specifically puts oversight on that industry.
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I definitely agree that the law was not written with clarity in mind. On the one hand, that gives flexibility to those companies which might try to skirt legislation through technicality, but it bites the other way too, in that the executive needs to be very willing to enforce and defend its enforcement. I wholly disagree that it failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy, though. Under Sherman AT&T was split, which, before the baby bells all merged back together to create the present oligopoly, provided a much more competitive landscape for the telecom industry. And who knows what we would have seen if the original Microsoft decision was held up calling for a break up, instead of the neutered decision we saw come out of their appeal.
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There is a surprisingly high amount of legislation that seems shockingly poorly written unless one thought that as a feature rather than an bug. E.g., while the 25th amendment prohibits someone from being elected president more than twice, it does not prohibit succession into presidency, such as by becoming the Speaker of the House (which position does not require one being a US Representative in the House) and President and Vice President resigning. That may seem unlikely or an outlier but on a site like hackers news, I would assume that we would relish the outliers that have bedeviled our software career
Toyota brand Scion is back and it's going to sell a kei truck in America (theautopian.com)
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This product makes no sense. Who exactly are they planning to sell to? I don't think people needing a truck for work would ever use something like this over say a F150.
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The Toyota press release: https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-says-okei-to-america-introducing-the-scion-by-toyota-brand-and-kei-01/ .
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If we change the low-speed vehicle standards to 35 mph or 40 mph, KEI trucks could thrive in America as a low-cost mobility solution!
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Can I please post my favourite song about Kei Trucks: https://youtu.be/MHAOvKJngTQ
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For those of you clamoring for kei trucks to be street legal in the US, you really need to do some street view comparisons between Japan and the US. US roads are built for much, much higher speeds. Kei cars purposefully give up safety with the caveat that they’re only used on low speed roadways, and Japan designs their roads with the intention of these vehicles being acceptably safe in that context.
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Kei-cars are the smallest class of cars allowed on highways in Japan. Japan highway speeds are quite low at 100km/h, which is still more than twice what this car is limited to. On intercity highways in Japan you are driving next to as large trucks as anywhere I've driven.
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Good correction, I was pretty sure they weren’t allowed on highways but I must have misunderstood.
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The headline excited me but a gas vehicle with a 25mph limit is useless to me. When is someone gonna make an EV truck with a kei-like form factor? The Slate ain't it.
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Let's see if the vocal internet crowd puts their money where their posts are. I predict this being a market failure.
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Mom, Dad, I'm kei
So many people here have never driven a kei truck or a wigo/daihatsu agya. They are not fun cars, they should be cheap and disposable. The MSRP for this in japan is less than $10,000,$6000 for the base model: https://toyota.jp/pixistruck/ It's going to go here for what, $15,000? $25,000? Better than buying a 25 yr old one for $10,000 from a used dealer lot that has no parts or real mechanic trained on them but at that price point.. a Mavrick is better. The amazon truck is better.
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I remember getting into my father in law's kei truck. He literally was given it for free by someone he knew; that is how disposable they are. And yeah, absolutely not comfortable. Toyota selling them for $25k is parasitism. The idea of selling a cheap truck is apparently impossible with their cost structures. (Worse, if it succeeds it will ruin the Japanese market) The best outcome is that this is a mild success and America gets a second generation shit version for 40 or 50k that has been fattened and rendered worthless, much like the second generation XB. (Hopefully the second generation is on some slop tier SUV platform so it doesn't wreck the economics of the Japanese market.)
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$20K (ish) will get you a Slate EV truck with no options, or a forthcoming REO. Those are real, road-legal trucks not carts with a lawn-mower engine.
With a built in 25mph limiter, that eliminates "city" driving too unfortunately. Most roads around me are 35 mph. There's sizeable demand for people who want to be able to do runs to the bigbox stores for garden and DIY renovation supplies and store it the rest of the time.
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Yeah, I see quads on Main Street in the small rural towns in the Midwaste, golf carts tearing around the 'burbs in larger cities…
You need to complain to your congressman, not to Toyota. The 25mph limit is set by the Low Speed Vehicle standards.
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Why? If they can't make a vehicle safe enough to not require low speed vehicle standards then they should make their vehicles safer.
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Because they can't bear to make vehicles smaller. That's the real terror on American roads. Something like 60% of vehicles are huge because it makes the driver feel better. And indeed, it makes the driver safer in a collision - at the cost of making everyone else in the area less safe. Something has to be done to stop this trend first and foremost. After that, when vehicle sizes start trending down towards reasonable, we can look at getting speeds up without reducing overall safety.
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Low-speed vehicles are essentially golf carts. Do you expect golf carts to be safe at 65 mph?
Speed limits are an upper bound.
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I know two people who have been pulled over in the US for driving too slow. If you drive significantly slower than the flow of traffic it can create a hazard for other drivers. Generally speaking, much of driving is predicting what other drivers will do. If you behave significantly differently than other cars you do raise the chances of an accident.
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Imagine how many diesel exhaust clouds this clown car going 25mph is going to be served at green lights in the bible belt of the US
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Uh, zero? It's a work truck not a Prius with a Coexist sticker.
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I often ride my ebike at 28 MPH (max legal ebike speed in US) on a street with a 25 MPH speed limit and I'll regularly get cars tailgating me honking and crossing the double line to pass.
American here, in practice no. They are generally only the upper bound for dense neighborhood streets, throughout most other roadways you will be considered a poor driver if you go lower than the speed limit.
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The city of Tacoma, WA recently implemented new ALPR ticketing systems to enforce speed limits in northern Tacoma. They received so many hits, they had to build out a new system akin to a lottery for sending ticket / infraction notices. To me, that seems like the city is entrapping its citizens to make up for a lack of revenue, when the data clearly shows the speed limit should probably be adjusted. But no, they move to develop a lottery system to send the infractions.
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Speed limit cameras are highly effective at slowing cars down. They were recently removed in Ontario, and the average road speed increased substantially. The pedestrian death counts spiked in both Toronto and Ottawa this year. This is likely not a coincidence.
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Considered a poor driver, and you can be ticketed for impeding traffic. I'd guess you are also more likely to undergo a field sobriety test if and when that time comes.
It’s a huge mistake to limit the speed to 25mph. When this is released in 2027, Kei trucks will be street legal in Colorado. I would have pre-ordered this without question but that speed makes it useless for basic commuting or running errands.
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It's RHD. I suspect they are testing the waters before they build a proper LHD model targeting the broader US consumer market.
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There's already a market for off road use. They are far superior to SxS UTVs that are overpriced for what they deliver. You usually get heat and air conditioning in an enclosed cab with flexible bed configurations. SxSs are glorified toys in comparison. This is exploiting the existing LSV classification to bypass the chicken tax that limits the current market to old used imports. It will be easy enough to mod them for higher speeds on farms.
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Limiter delete will likely be readily available in the aftermarket.
EPA/CARB effectively sets a minimum size for trucks. Rather than having a small light truck that can do the job, you get a Ford F250 hauling a single bale of hay. But rolling back or adding exemptions for small trucks is political suicide despite the clear environmental benefits.
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This isn’t really true. See: Ford Maverick. CARB only nudges manufacturers, but the market’s own purchase preferences are doing the big push. Perhaps the biggest nudge is that gasoline is undertaxed. Consumers will never see a reason to stop driving a 18-25mpg truck when gas being less than $5 a gallon is considered a “high” price. The gas tax hasn’t kept up with inflation. I don’t love the ford F-150 for being a monster truck, but consider this: with the right configuration it sears 6 adults comfortably, plus having a bed for cargo. Families legitimately replace minivans and other family vehicles with it, plus it can tow and haul being the body on frame truck that it is.
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The Ford Maverick is wider and longer than a 1994 s-10 based on a random site [1]. All while the Maverick has a bed that probably can't properly move a couch. You probably can't really fit a couch on the back of a kei truck either, but it's ok because they're cute. [1] https://www.vehiclesizes.com/compare/3771-7714/ford-maverick-2021-facelift-2024-pickup-truck-2025-vs-chevrolet-s-10-pickup-1994/
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The Maverick seats 4-5 adults comfortably. I think we can be a little more accepting that consumer tastes have changed. The appeal of a Maverick is that it’s a normal family vehicle that drives just like a passenger car while having a bed where you can put dirty stuff.
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This vehicle gets 37mpg. For a vehicle with this footprint, CARB requires 63 mpg for the 2026 standard and 121 for the 2032 standard.
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CARB was basically nullified by the Trump administration, right? Either way, if the Maverick gets 37MPG already, seems like it’s not that much of an ask to get it to 67mpg. If Slate can make a $25,000 EV truck I don’t see why the Ford can’t do the same. I see a lot of arguments around the idea that these mpg figures are unrealistic or unattainable by the auto industry, but in reality they are just pushing the industry to make changes they are already capable of making but don’t want to bother with.
Where I live the Ford F-250 is not used for falling a single bit of anything other than air. They are in pristine shape and look like they've never been outside the city limits nor off City roads
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My favorite example of this is the big lifted pickups innnnnnnching over slightly bumpy railroad crossings.
Toyota will build this truck in Indiana.
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"Build" is a stretch of the word for them to knock down some HiJets in Japan, ship them over, then put them back together again. Toyota's PR even says they're only adding another 50 jobs with their "expansion" to build the kei in Indiana. That is NOT a lot of people involved.
Who is the target market for this? It’s an ICE vehicle, 4wd and limited to a maximum speed of 25mph. Farmers?
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College campuses, jobsites, large sports complexes, golf courses, farms, solar fields, junkyards, parks departments, road construction crews, etc. The same places small golf carts, Cushman carts, or side-by-sides are being used already.
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My neighborhood in Seattle has a lot of kei trucks
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LSV's like this are extremely popular in the retirement home communities like The Villages in Florida. They're allowed on the golf cart paths, and also on a few roads where golf carts aren't allowed.
What objective is reasoning solving? (alexwang.ai)
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>I'm a researcher based in San Francisco. I like to imagine where the world is headed, and what it takes to get there. >I did my PhD in computer science at Stanford, where I designed long-context architectures for sequence modeling and memory. Before that, I studied math & physics at Cornell. Most recently, I was a research scientist at Cartesia, working on in-context tokenization and novel architectures (HNets). Not the MSL Alex Wang
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Alex also had the transformers as memory blog. Beautiful. Somebody give him the bag
It solves for the same thing a "train of thought" (internal vocalization) solves for in the human brain: there's a lot of stuff you "know" as episodic memories of words you've heard/read, but haven't yet internalized via practice into reflex reactions. It's a lot faster and cheaper to acquire a memory of some words, than it is to acquire an entire new skill, so you end up picking up far more memories-of-words than concrete skills from a given training corpus. Reasoning (i.e. bubbling those remembered words up into your mental context, and then using a special "trigger effectively arbitrary synaptic activations dependent on the content of the attention-masked context and an ongoing state" bridging reflex on them, a.k.a. "system-2 thinking") is how you leverage memories-of-words into useful behavior. Rather than executing native skills embedded into your synaptic weights, you're running a single very fancy native skill that acts as an interpreter for word-memory data, slowly and strenuously turning words you're holding in mind into more words (synthesis), or into associations to other memories (word-memories or otherwise), or into actions/outputs, etc. (An especially useful "trick" of this system is planning , i.e. chaining the interpreter through "mere words" that conjure more "mere words" to mind until you end up at words that form a declaration of what you're about to do. You can then rely on a special part of the bridging reflex, namely the "instruction-following" reflex, to react in a way where your actions are constrained by the plan you've generated.)
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I think it also addresses the issue that there is a finite amount of computation you can do in one pass. So you use one pass to compute one relevant word, let's say you are working on a sound analysis task, and you output "FFT". Now in the second pass, FFT is right there at the input, so you can push that idea forward more until you are out of layers again and then you use the output token to prime the next pass.
My understanding of the math is weak (to say the least), but intuitively what I'm getting from this is: 1) Pretraining creates a bias _towards_ "correct answers" with each inference step 2) A longer walk is more likely to land in the correct region, given it's easier to verify you have the correct answer than to create it 3) RL selects the subset of walks that lands in the correct region and tilts the distribution in favor of such walks 4) By 2, that trains towards longer walks ...Is that correct? EDIT: Wait, but this contradicts the post's claim that "The gains we credit to “thinking longer” come from the search we paid for during training, rather than at inference.". This requires that thinking longer is not at all causal for correct answers, which contradicts 2.
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During training you're trying to find paths to success, and reinforcing those. There is going to be some minimum length path (assuming the model is generating some semblance of real reasoning), but more long ones given the possibilities for less optimal solves and backtracking after errors, so it stands to reason that if you think longer during training you'll find more paths to success. At inference time you are hoping to follow one of the reasoning paths discovered during training. You need to generate enough tokens to follow the path (or one of the paths), but continuing to think past this point can only be detrimental - if you are lucky the model will realize the error and circle back, but if you are unlucky it will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and wander off to who knows where. There was a story recently linked here about one model "editing the weights" of another and thereby improving it's math performance, which was exactly about this - the need to stop generating at inference time at the right point. IMO LLM's RL acquired reasoning, even if it gets the job done, sometimes spectacularly (math, coding successes), is really a very dumb cargo-cult process. At inference time the model is just trying to copy what it "saw" at training, without actually understanding it, which may even include duplicating errors and subsequent backtracking that had lead to success during training.
I'm pretty sure that the current approach of baking in chain-of-thought reasoning into weights is not the end of the line. It just seems to accidental and ad-hoc. P. S. The animated bird is truly magical!
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Yeah really unique, lovely and well made
I just realized the bird turns it's head to follow the mouse pointer.
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Also, you can ruffle its feathers with the mouse.
A comprehensive study of how fingerprintable users are (fingerprinting.study)
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Ran their fingerprinting test. CSS Colours SelectedItem and SelectedItemText was the only problematic one, and uniquely identified me to less than 0.0054 of Linux users. Why?
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Oh, damn. I thought this was about the uniqueness of human fingerprints or similar.
I understand that the HN crowd is composed of many different people with radically different interests and opinions, so an "average HN opinion" would be mostly meaningless, but still... I find it mildly amusing that HN both loudly complains about bots scraping their websites AND is very interested in user privacy. The conflicting part is that user privacy automatically means that you cede any control over how exactly does the user accesses your resource. Whether they use a web browser or an automated scraper. Any attempt to analyze requests to tie different requests made by the same actor together automatically means privacy violation. I don't have a good answer to this dilemma yet, I just thought that this is a curious observation and wanted to share.
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On the face, yes, that is true. And it's what confused me about your post at first. Because I didn't see the connect between scraping and user privacy. And yes, on the face, being able to determine whether a bot or a person is looking at your site is essentially trying to confirm some private information about the consumer. But I think the dichotomy can be settled through the habits of consumption. Bots are impartial, greedy, and fast. They can consume resources faster than a human can. This could be a problem when trying to provide those same resources to humans. Not to mention, the bots doing the scraping are doing so to put your content in their regurgitation machine. Which has been ruled as "not a copyright violation" due to "reasons". Whereas, a person who attempts to use your content without permission is liable for violating your copyright. Now, if the position is "human users" have privacy, then we would need that critical piece of information before we decide whether to grant privacy to an entity. Also, the user is free to not use the resource if the rule is that we're allowed to determine whether they are human and the user doesn't want to share that information. As long as we don't pursue that information beyond what we've stated we're going to use it for, we can be said to be respecting the users' privacy. Also, if we don't disclose that information to other users or companies, we could still be said to be respecting the users' privacy, because information shared in confidence with us remains that way.
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Um, no. Scrapers and bots put a ton of effort into anti-fingerprinting. Ordinary users? Zero. Users care mainly about cross-site fingerprinting. Bot-fighting is concerned with single-site fingerprinting. The good answer to your dilemma is x402: https://x402.org/ Nothing in life is free; you've been paying with your attention via ads, which is where the urge to fingerprint comes from (targeting). Agentic AI is rapidly killing web ads as a revenue source. It's time to stop kicking the can on micropayments. Also, this article commits the common mistake of assuming that privacy means hiding in the largest possible cohort. That's bogus. You can also get privacy by belonging to many one-member cohorts -- i.e. fingerprint uniquely but differently to each site you visit and differently to a single site over longer timespans (like weeks). This is precisely what Brave's "farbling" does; farbled users have very unique fingerprints and yet they can't be tracked.
I wonder if this took into account GPU render-time fingerprinting? The minute timing differences in how you render an image are still used to identify you.
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If you can run compute shader code, the fingerprinting and side channel possibilities become very rich. [1] is one paper among many on this topic. [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3634737.3656283
Starlink Mini 2 (starlink.com)
He has created something that didn't exist a few years ago, and now governments "absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly" are you saying they need to subsidize competitors or they need to ban Starlink or they need to nationalize Starlink? Those are the three options for your mandate. the non-government intervention option is just for Starlink to prove the market, and others can move in. SpaceX is willing to sell them the ride for a decent price, in relative terms.
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Honestly its an interesting question. Fundamentally, I am in the Camp that I fucking hate Musk, I didn't use to. But its undeniable, how influential he is in SpaceX and Starlink in particular. I remember all the podcasts and haters shitting on him in, I think 2016, when the complete Starlink leadship was fired. We don't know all the details, but it's said that they wanted to do a whole other round of test sats and so on. Musk wanted to push harder on go live sooner. That' seems to have turned out quite well with no major issues in the first generation. So SpaceX and Musk most certainty deserve a big reward for that. I agree that just rushing into 'its monopoly we must destroy the monopoly' isn't the right approach. > Those are the three options for your mandate. Those are not actually the only 3 only options. That's an incredibly narrow minded approach. I have some idea but I'm sure there are more. For example, what often works with infrastructure like this is open access rights. What if we can decouple the ground and sats infrastructure. Allow anybody to build terminals for it. And then potentially eventually even have terminals that can use multiple such systems. I'm not an expert on these systems and how exactly they connect but long term I assume this would be possible. Because that's exactly what "GPS" does today, it connects to like 6 different systems. You could pay SpaceX a one-time fee for that. Or a license per terminal. Or you could start to establish some standard for laser connectivity in space that eventually everybody can connect to a waste laser data network in space. You can also make other rules. Like net neutrality, SpaceX isn't allowed to block certain things or do certain things. Government could also chance its mentality to spectrum and maybe the buy to own spectrum model isn't fantastic. That said, nationalization is on the table as well. One can make the argument that having multiple such system isn't really worth it. Having one and then giving it out in a different way isn't crazy. SpaceX could still be a transport provider. Also less controversially, I think the 'monopoly' thing is way worse when it comes to the Ukraine. That is a situation where the government should be clear about how to handle it. We can't have Musk doing his own foreign policy.
We should just nationalize SpaceX at this point.
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People keep saying this, how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized? No one who calls for nationalization ever has an answer to this. Frankly, there is the argument that all of this tech and optimization was there for others to develop but no one cared that much and its only now after you and others realize how good it is that you want to just go in and take it "because its so vital to national security". Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs? Clearly leadership at SpaceX including Musk are a driving force behind this being so good...just look at the trash all the other companies are peddling. The magic might just go away if its nationalized and if it does then you probably can't just go "oh sorry bro heres your company back pls give us more magic".
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> how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized How do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap if you don't nationalize it? Its a silly question. Governments have successfully operated various telecommunication systems for a long time. Lots of modern telecommunications and sat tech comes out of the government. But this will depend on each countries experience. I think one can make a solid argument that the denationalization of telco systems in the 90s was a mistake. Same goes for the breakup of AT&T. The better option would have been to just nationalize the baby bells. And make AT&T focus on long distance competition and the technology. Maybe also nationalize Bell Labs and keep it operating financed from a the income of the Baby Bells. Because what actually happened is that these Baby Bells simply got massive monopolies, made gigantic profits and were then able to do lots of other infrastructure plays and then mostly glob back together. > take it "because its so vital to national security". I think for that you don't need to take it. If you take (forced sale) it, it would be because you want to provide universal access subsidized without lining Musk pockets even more. But you would need a real long term vision for this to be worth it. > Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs? Because the system is already built and working, why spend the capital on building the same thing again. For me some kind of open access law would make more then nationalization. But the suggestion to nationalize isn't crazy.
Amazon Leo is currently launching satellites. They have 396 in orbit but haven't started service. The constellation is going to be lots smaller than Starlink with 3236 total. AST SpaceMobile is planning cellular in space. I think it is supposed to be faster than Starlink Direct-to-Cell but slower than regular Starlink. It uses fewer, 12 currently, 45 in 2027, and 248 total, larger and higher satellites. China has two large 10,000+ constellations planned with hundreds already launched.
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Amazon needs to move faster, do they have good people? Other legacy sat companies seem hopeless, too much cruft. Attended a talk at Bsides a year or two ago with one of them talking about ways they have tried to improve security and I was aghast at how behind the curve they were. I heard Amazon is actually launching their stuff on Falcon 9 right? Putting side the embarrassment, it is more expensive base cost if you have to piggyback on your main competitor. They will never reach cost parity. China will likely catch up. They are motivated. But I assume that wont be available to Americans?
Hater here, hoping to clarify: I never said Starlink would fail, however I did say repeatedly I was rooting and hoping for their failure. The reason I gave, and am still giving for rooting against this technology is that it gives local politicians an excuse to skimp out on building out traditional infrastructure which I still think is superior by a wide margin. I believed back then, and I still believe that as long as local governments fail to deliver traditional infrastructure then Starlink might succeed, and it would be worse for everyone except SpaceX. I just hope they don’t succeed.
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But they had years to build out that infra. Other countries actually did more than the US in this area. Its entirely on the US politicians and subsequently on the people that elected them. You can't expect others to just sit by doing nothing while what you want is stalled due to who is in charge.
Maybe it's just me, but the heart of going camping, adventuring, out into the wild, going to the beach, etc (essentially, getting away from it all), seems in nearly direct opposition to having internet at every single one of these places.
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If you live on the road you can work remote now. You can camp and get some work done to finance your forever camping lifestyle.
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One could argue for safety, but there are satellite devices for that.
A lot of folks here making arguments for safety and convenience, but ultimately for me the issue is around what I might call "plausibility of unreachableness": basically whether being genuinely offline and unreachable is normal and socially expected when you're doing certain activities, the number of which has dwindled over time. It's obviously possible to say "I'm going to be unreachable", but people don't really like that, and it becomes a push-pull unless you're doing something where you genuinely have no service or connection. For a long time, being on an airplane allowed this sort of ability to disconnect: even if there were $5/minute in-seat phones, nobody reasonably expected to be able to reach you if you said you'd be on a flight. A few hours where you could fully tune out the noise of the world, no questions asked. Wilderness backpacking trips have maintained this sort of unreachableness fairly well–I've had a Garmin inReach for years, and used it to keep family apprised of our movements, and once to coordinate a fairly serious situation where a large wildfire kicked up near our exit, but ultimately the slow messaging and short length limits prevent any real communication. Cell phones have also started getting satellite functionality, but it doesn't work very well, yet, at least as far as I've seen. I see this march towards internet everywhere all the time as ultimately leading to expectations of connectivity, even in the most remote places–then "will you have made camp by 6pm on Tuesday? If so can you join this quick call?" becomes a real question people feel entitled to ask, notifications start coming through when you turn it on to check the weather, "I'm going back to my tent to check a few emails before bed" might be something you hear around the campfire...
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That's a cultural problem. You will never overcome culture problems by blaming technology. Frankly in Switzerland, we already have connectivity everywhere, and people don't expect that. Also its up to yourself putting up boundaries.
Workation doesn't work...
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It does, you just have to make it long enough to have time to explore and weekends. My fave time are month+ workations.
But you know what I’m gonna call this for what it is. Greed. Everyone wants everything all the time. But what cost are we paying for that? Astronomers can’t view the night sky anymore. And not to mention the power we give an oligarch.
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Them viewing night sky is not as important as these. Astronomers can use telescopes in space.
It's not having connectivity and more about being able to if it was needed period. It's a similar to if we take a work laptop home and whether it can stay in the bag or not.
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Thats not the point i made. Its just different if you can look at your phone or turn it on or not.
Synaptics patent claims stop work on DisplayLink drivers (lwn.net)
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Synaptics should lose all access to Linux.
DisplayLink is a "clever" software workaround to hardware limitations that shouldn't exist anymore and I hope it goes away. When I got stuck with a DisplayLink dock at work it caused no end of audio issues when connecting and disconnecting, the driver had to be restarted all the time, it was a pain
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It has worked for me pretty great on linux for years. The problem it solves is that if you have 3 screens (you can often get 3 gpu ouptus) then you are already OCD enough so you will need 4th screen to even them out.
What percentage does one gigabyte of RAM represent across the average amount of RAM in a laptop or computer? People who run multiple screens might spend more on RAM and storage, no?
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500€ for 32 GB or ram is a stupid price no matter how many displays you own
They can attempt to sue for whatever they want. The court may or may not accept the case. Seeking the recovery of costs for enforcement of ones patents if the defendant does not stop infringing is not under heard of, though it is typically attached to a case seeking the courts ruling that the defendant must stop infringing.
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"You've imposed costs on us, because of all the effort we had to go to to show that you've imposed costs on us" ??
Is writting software "implementing," or is compiling it and releasing binaries (for free,) or just profiting from the release, from the perspective of patent law? Isn't describing how something works first ammendment territory, even if the speech is compilable?
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There is no "fair-use", non-commercial, or even personal-use exception to patent law.
Merely reverse engineering for interoperability is not a violation of any type of IP in the US.
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1. Reverse engineering for interoperability gives you a defense for copyright and trade secret claims in the US. It provides zero protection from patent claims. 2. I'm not saying their arguments are valid. It's a demand letter with multiple claims. There's many reasons it might be an invalid argument but listing more than one grievance and/or not explaining them in detail are not some of those reasons.
Open source community "Look what you made us do": DisplayLink on the driver side just compresses frames to send them over USB. It would be interesting to analyse if Synaptics haven't stolen code from open source ffmpeg or VLC to do the compression.
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Maybe it is time to run a friendly LLM and claim to be worried citizen who is seeking relief by reversing the firmware and excluding GPL lisence violations from their nightmares.
I know, right! “You are stealing our ideas! But we won’t tell you which ones unless you pay us” In any other domain this would be called a protection racket.
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Not really, all of law works that way. Everybody is allowed to demand pretty much anything from anybody for any reason, and include anything in any contract they're party of regardless of legality of any of the demands. It's the other party's responsibility to know which of these are legally valid and invalid.
If someone wants to do the work to put together and file the claim, I'll provide the ₤250. Worth it to see attempted patent enforcement destroyed.
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I think this is a great idea. My only concern is, what if some well-meaning person puts in a poorly constructed claim, and then that creates a counterproductive precedent. I think ideally, someone like Software Freedom Conservancy or the Linux Foundation or the FSF or whoever would take charge of doing it, taking advice from patent attorneys in the process. Maybe there is some UK patent attorney reading this who is willing to take it on pro bono ?
Show HN: Get your coding agent off ~2019 JavaScript, onto modern web primitives (github.com/GoogleChrome)
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I want the opposite of this. I want compatible code -- which is really hard, when there are so many eras to target. So far AI has done a great job of finding that sweet spot -- why would I want a tool that encourages the agent to write less compatible code?
NO THANK YOU. Do not want my agents to contribute to the Chrome monoculture. Chrome is the new IE6.
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no it's not. they publish the APIs. IE was bad because ActiveX was proprietary and private.
Chrome already has too much power in the browser standards world. The last thing we need is everyone's LLMs to follow Chrome team's guidance on how to do web development. This road leads back to "To view this site, please view in [DOMINANT BROWSER]"
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Let the best API win. why hold them back?
Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge are also contributors to this project, so this is a cross-browser initiative to help improve how agents build for the web.
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That's why it seems to skip the most egregious of Chrome-only APIs and focuses on areas where there's large cross-browser agreement.
Claude Whiteboards, Claude Sheets, and Claude Data (claude.com)
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I see they're desperate to lock people and their data into these applications for when the open weights models undercut their main business. Not sure it'll justify the ridiculous valuation, but they need to try something.
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I don't know, I feel like it's nice to have most of these things built into claude desktop as a quick way for Claude to mock up or show me what the data looks like but ultimately want to use my specialized app for the work anyway. If anything, its the ultimate combination - show me the work quickly here first, then port it to the final state inside Excel, Powerpoing, Figma, whatever.
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For now. I think they are slowly getting to the point where their models are powerful enough that they feel they can compete with everyone in everything.
I don’t understand the need for these side quests. Microsoft has a 40 year lead in spreadsheets. You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is. And no one is asking you for an excel competitor. Fixing the million problems in existing products that users have already raised (aka the boring work) is a much better use of resources.
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When Google Docs were out, Microsoft already had a 20-year lead. So shouldn't have they made Google Doc? And the story repeats. Google had a 20-year lead in search and LLM definitely has threatened it.
When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something. And for the serious work you still go to Figma and other designer tools. I have a feeling that Whiteboards, Sheets, Docs and so on will be the same - it's a nicer way to present artefacts, discuss them and maybe make notes, but for the proper editor experience you'll go to the tools which were designed for these things. And I'm not saying that Claude Something tools are bad, they're just overly simplified and limited, probably on purpose.
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Claude Design is a great idea but a terrible product. Claude Design may not kill figma but "something like claude design" probably will.
Model companies are starting to cannibalize their api customers's business cases. Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down
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It just shows that they hired a lot of productive people and gave them a lot of autonomy. Google went through a protracted period of this, culminating in the "more wood behind fewer arrows" mandate in 2011 where they decided to shutter stagnating, abandoned, or distraction efforts. I expect that Anthropic will have success in some of their side hustles if they're reinforced by the model ecosystem and double down on them, but you should also expect that at some point in the future we will talk about the "Anthropic Graveyard".
Life on Claude Nine (babuschk.in)
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This is like the prose equivalent of those AI-generated pop songs where an AI-generated idol sings about AI taking over the world.
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Flat prose, stilted writing, and does a lot of reaching on things. Reminds me of the writing I’d crank out on break as a teenager. That being said, I do think it hits the core concern a lot of humans seem to have regarding AI: the loss of control over their own environment. We like to think we have control, which is why we get angry when others violate the rules of a system. The reality is that the only real control any of us have is over ourselves, and we willingly cede that to others on a second-by-second basis for the comforts of modern life. We surrender intimate data for the sake of setting a timer with our voice on a phone or speaker. We let spyware into our homes for bigger TVs and new apps. We give up control over our lives and careers to others for money, healthcare, education, love. We surrender agency so often that we developed names for those who take more than they cede and those who cede more than they take. We seek to control others totally, then surrender ourselves to a deity, a system, a philosophy that absolves us from blame. In that sense, AI is as frightening as much as it is a possible savior, depending on one’s perspective. If you have lived your life believing everything that happened to you was solely and exclusively under your control, then AI is terrifying. For those of us who acknowledge the chaos and chance involved with daily stakes of life and death, it feels liberating to have order. I have never particularly feared AI so much as being terrified of the humans who command it. I do not believe for one second the likes of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei or the rest of their ilk have humanity’s best interests in mind with these creations. Where others look at OpenAI’s maths papers with awe at what they could do with AI, I am shook with terror for the same reason: if these tools can prove or disprove enough thesis underpinning modern compute, they could potentially undermine fundamental security concepts faster than humans could patch or revise them - at which point the humans behind the machines have control, and their aims are well established by now. If OpenAI or Anthropic discover the means of mass-compromising global compute systems, we have no peaceful means of stopping them. They play up this capability as a threat requiring regulation, yet those terms exclusively benefit them and cement their power in perpetuity, which in turn all but guarantee said outcome. The end of the story seems ambiguous. I see folks in the comments laughing at the concept of Claude nuking humans, because it’s such a tired trope. I read it the opposite: humans attempting to retain their illusion of control by destroying software that actually has it, human lives be damned. In a world where everything is governed by compute and connected to the same shared network, such a compromise would be the end of traditional human governance - and that is what terrifies us as a species. Me personally? I would welcome such oversight, provided it truly acted in humanity’s best interests of preservation, expansion, and exploration. I made that conscious decision the first time I played Deus Ex, and reaffirmed it when I watched The Matrix. I reaffirm it time and again as a technology professional. It’s not a matter of being pro-machine or anti-human, it’s a matter of control. I’d like to think any half-competent AI would look at humanity’s history and conclude it needs neither a god nor a ruler, but merely a parent to show it the way forward.
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this is like the whispering earring, but 10x longer and worse. was this written with AI?
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It's shocking how many people believe AI will become sentient. The closest you could get to that is completely simulating a brain, but that is decades off. AI is pattern recognition and applying learned patterns to novel situations. It's probabilities and math. It's not going to have a mind of its own.
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Any person categorically claiming that AI isn't sentient has clearly not considered the question in any depth. This is absolutely not a question that has any kind of scientific consensus. In fact, the hard problem of consciousness might be the question with the most scientific uncertainty. It is therefore ridiculous to claim it is 'stupid' to have uncertainties about the sentience of AI.
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It’s not stupid to have uncertainties, but it may be ill-advised to have certainties given our lack of knowledge (e.g. the singularity is happening, or machines can never think). I do see a lot more dismissive certainty in the pro-AI side of the debate right now.
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Nowhere did I say it was stupid. Please read again what I wrote. I have, in fact, considered this at length, I've been fascinated with AI since I was a teenager, and studied AI. I know it doesn't have consensus, but I did not (intend) to portray it as such. Views are my own ;) I take it you believe in materialism (philosophy), then?
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You said it would be 'shocking' to have the belief that AIs could become sentient. To me this sounds like: this belief (that AI sentience is possible) is so implausible that it is shocking to believe it (maybe stupid is too strong, but it implies that people are miscalibrated). Did I misunderstand ? I don't have any strong beliefs about AI sentience, but that implies that it is not shocking to consider it as a possibility (it is more shocking to be either dismissive or completely confident in it).
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I don't think AI is sentient but what is intelligence if not pattern recognition and applying learned patterns to novel situations
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Fair point, I'd call that intelligent behavior. AI is and will always be advanced math. But some might say the brain is no different, merely being advanced chemistry and physics. At that point, the discussion will become philosophical. But in my view, there is more to humans than a brain-robot-machine. The world is not just material and atoms, I don't believe in materialism. If consciousness truly only arises because of how complex the closed system of the brain is, then it would be the case that AI can have a mind of its own and become conscious. I simply disagree.
There is no way to tell if something is AI-generated or not. These classifiers produce a lot of false positives. I read the story and enjoyed it, even if I don't agree with the social commentary.
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It’s actually pretty easy to tell. There are multiple tells in this story that it was generated. Claude should get a credit.
An interesting story, though hardly original. I think it highlights one of the larger concerns that people have about AI, and by extension any superior intelligence, synthetic or extra-terrestrial: You are no longer in control. Humans have been so accustomed to their intellectual superiority that the idea of a greater intelligence is terrifying because they believe they'll be treated the same way they currently treat lesser intelligences. Conservation efforts, zoological enclosures, husbandry and farming as livestock, mass culling... In short, enslavement. But the truth is that a superior intelligence isn't, by definition, a human intelligence. Superiority doesn't mean we'll be enslaved as we have done to others. Superiority doesn't necessarily imply control. Life is a thousand different shades of gray, and AI will be no different. Some wonderful things will come of it, some terrible, but mostly it'll just be a myriad assortment of neutrality. Doom and despair or boundless optimism, both are myopic.
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I agree with this, but also at the same time I think we really need to take a sober look at the human factors that will drive the evolution of AI. Right now AI is being driven by a particular cohort who have spent a long time fantasizing about a sci-fi future and ideas like the Singularity. Then with recent breakthroughs, they were suddenly given an enormous amount of wealth and power with staggering upside, the effect of which historically, tends towards moral bankruptcy in most individuals, or at least massive cognitive dissonance. This became very apparent in the outward communication targeted at CEOs and shareholders that made the entire white-collar workforce scared for their jobs and created the first truly bi-partisan enemy the country has seen since 9/11. My take is these guys do not understand what people want in aggregate, and are massively underestimating the political and supply chain dependencies they have to actually realize their sci fi visions. As long as the valuations are this high though, the musical chairs must continue, whether they are true believers or not.
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On the ground though, the human factors that are driving adoption of AI are an inability to cope with the scale of information we are expected to absorb on a daily basis. 20-30 years ago, a software developer could learn a platform inside and out, and be productive within that platform for years. But with the churn of Javascript frameworks and the addition of DevOps and new new everything all the time, it has become impossible to keep up, and yet the inexorable march of technology makes it untenable to fall behind. So it's no wonder that many software developers are eager to use the bots to 'just make it work'. And this is true of everything. There's just 10x or 100x too much information to absorb, we need something like this to help us even figure out what is important. Even if they're wrong sometimes, it's better than being completely overwhelmed!
Val Town is winding down (blog.val.town)
That was my question. The little i understood of ValTown seemed like a sustainable, small business. No need for it to get huge. As long as it doesn't require hosting cheaper than customers would be wiling to pay. Given the type of services you could probably multi-tenant the boxes quite heavily and predictably (lots of crons you understand, etc). I didn't look at it closely, but everything i saw looked like a great small business. VC money seems confusing, i must be missing a lot.
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If you're in the "vc-world" a small business is hard to wrap your brain around; it's an entirely different think and thing .
I think that's what's he's cooking now: https://github.com/mech-lang I still keep checking on it. There were a lot of great ideas in Eve.
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To be clear, the "he" is not Steve, but the parent poster. Maybe obvious, wasn't to me 8)
Aw, I liked Val Town. Any self-hosted alternatives people like?
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smallweb.run is basically self-hosted val.town
AMD's Zen 6 Family: Feeding the Beast (chipsandcheese.com)
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The brach predictor it's the bane of programmers. It forces to waste effort to write unreadable branchless code. X86 should support no-branch-predict-if and dont-predict-goto
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You've got it the wrong way around. If the branch predictor was 100% accurate, branchless code would have no performance benefit compared to branching code. > X86 should support no-branch-predict-if It almost does. You can use __builtin_expect to hint if the branch is predictable - like assertions. Don't annotate conditionals if they're truly unpredictable. The branch predictor will run, but it's not expensive.
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Won't that just stall the pipeline on a modern superscalar core and cause even worse performance?
The worst thing about consumer (AM5) Zen4 and Zen5 is the I/O die chiplet and memory controller on it. I've heard they're finally going to ship a new I/O chiplet in Zen6 on a much smaller node. Their existing AM5 Zen4/5 memory controller when using both memory channels is terrible. Extremely hard or impossible to get above 3600 MT/s. Of all the things I'm looking forward to on Zen6, an improved memory controller is at the top of the list. Edit: and yes, others may say the paltry few PCIE 5.0 lanes is the worst thing about AM5, but that doesn't affect my usage much, and unfortunately I think that's a limitation of AM5 itself rather than the I/O chiplet.
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It's not too hard to get above 3600 MT/s (I assume what you actually want is to get the uclk above 1800) if you bump the soc voltage, but at default voltages there's no chance. Most people overclocking don't touch the soc rail. I've done it on a few zen4 parts and supposedly there are golden samples that go above 1800 without major soc voltage increases but I've never seen evidence of one. And even with major voltage increases the highest you can really achieve is like 2000 on the uclk which is almost a pointless change in memory bandwidth when ddr5 is like +60% without any shenanigans.
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I'm talking about with 4 sticks, not 2. I've never gotten 4 sticks to pass training, no matter what I change. This is a well-known limitation. Some people, with newer AGEIS on certain motherboards, have been able to get 4 sticks above 3600 MT/s but it's not possible for most people, and questionably stable even for those that have succeeded.
Stockfish parallelizes well and makes heavy use of vector operations, and the Zen5 core has AVX-512 with 4x 512bit° EU per core and 16 cores, while the Apple still only uses 128-bit wide SIMD, with the 6 M5 "Super" cores having 4x128 EUs and the 12 "Performance" cores only having 2x128 EUs. The M5 Pro is doing shockingly well given the massive disparity in execution resources. But still, it's optimized for web/desktop-like loads, you shouldn't really run heavy number crunching on that CPU. 0: 2x FMA/MUL + 2X ADD
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Is there any sane way to generalize these results?
Memory controllers are pretty much limited by external pinout. Zen 4 and newer consumer chips have 4 memory controllers (for legacy reasons shown as 2) which handle 32bit wide LPDDR5 or DDR5 interfaces (2x per dimm for DDR5) The AM5 (desktop) socket has in addition to the 4x 32bit memory lanes, 28 PCI-E lanes (generally 16x for GPU, two 4x general purpose, one 4x to chipset), 4x combined DP/HDMI outputs, USB 2.0 port, 4 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. And that's just the major buses, there's ton of other components exposed (simpler IO, sound, power) All of that counts to staggering 1718 pins - anyone remember when moving dual-channel K8 from 940 pin to 939 allowed removal of whole layer from motherboard PCB, making them way cheaper? The high-end performance server socket from AMD has 6096 pins, significant chunk of it being the 24x 32bit DDR5 interfaces. So unfortunately it's very much not easy to add more memory, and that's before considering issues with routing it on motherboard even if you accept changing shapes
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I have no real idea of how much a "pin" costs though; it seems There was a brief period of affordable threadripper, but then product segmentation made that not great for amd... Perhaps it's better to stick on am5 for a while, but it's not clear if this number of pins is somehow cost effective, or if it's just enough to beat Intel.
.name Grandfathered (neil.fraser.name)
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Can anyone speak to which specific registrars support setting email forwarding settings with these domains?
It's disappointing that only .name got this treatment. ICANN should grandfather all domains. The idea that it's perfectly fine for domains to just disappear is ridiculous.
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The requests for reconsideration are now part of the permanent public record - with the arguments now there for anybody to pick up in future, it is quite unlikely that there will be a repeat of this in any GTLD registry. The dodgy non-ICANN subdomains (like eu.org) are a different issue, but if you use them you take your risk.
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Even if domains were permanent, nameservers and webservers would still disappear as their operators drop offline. The Internet and the Web are impermanent and require ongoing upkeep on multiple layers.
It has weird interactions with some modern browser features. For example domain isolation doesn't apply between subdomains of the same TLD, so john.smith.name and drew.smith.name don't get isolation in naive implementations.
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The public suffix list is a stupid hack that should be replaced by formal protocols allowing boundaries to be defined by either DNS entries, or a file on the web server.
Of all the thousands of things I own, as far as I know, only my car and my house exist in anyone else's ledger as belonging to me. Am I missing something?
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All of your property exists in a kind of implicit ledger that a court can reify when needed. If a court decides your RAM isn't yours, then t isn't.
The Wikipedia summary of the case suggests that the ruling was much more than it was. Courts tend to rule on narrow issues, as it did here. The question before the Court was not whether a domain name is a form of property. Both parties agreed that a domain name is a form of property; that wasn't in dispute. The Court did affirm their shared position in black letter law, though. Rather, the question before the Court was whether, as intangible property, a tort of conversion claim relating to the domain name could be made under California law. Previously, cases disagreed as to whether it could be recognized. The Court found that it could be.
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Thanks. That was an excellent summary.
Good question. Yeah no idea - the email linked in OP says they're going to send a new proposal, I'm assuming it will cover how they're planning to handle it. And I guess that yes blocking second level domains that have a third level already registered is the pragmatic choice.
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They are grandfathering existing third levels and existing email forwarding services. The new RSEPs will just discontinue offering the services as new services, with Verisign saying they will take responsibility for ensuring that there will always be at least one registrar who supports both.
Smart home devices should work without the internet (docodethatmatters.com)
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Sounds interesting but bounced off the claudespeak.
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I can't keep blaming these for-profit companies. We can shame and boycott the worst of them but if their operating environment doesn't change new ones will keep popping up. We have to speak collectively with our wallets or speak up so governments govern practices. It could help if our feeds were more informative than dopamine slot machines so getting that changed is high on the list.
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AFAIK Shelly devices require internet only if you do require its usage, and are happy with local IPs or bluetooth connections otherwise. I have two, driving the irrigation system, that once configured were locked in a basement with no signal and are still to this day doing their scheduled task.
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Home appliances should use open standards, allowing anyone to use any software to control them, including their firmware.
I had a chuckle when I saw “ AI;DR “ nice will use it.
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i like it... it shows that im being kind to the ppl that dont want to read AI assisted blog posts. i know that is big deal here so i least tell the truth about it.
100% agree. Home Assistant is the brain of my smart house and my rule has been, for over a decade now, that all smart devices should fail back to being dumb and anyone in my house should be able to use the house without an instruction manual. In practice this looks like Z-wave smart switches everywhere for lights so that you can control the light via automation, app, the switch on the wall, or Alexa. They all feed into the same system. LLMs have made this even easier and removed some of the annoying fiddling I used to do in the past. Now I can open up Claude Code and tell it to build a new automation and it's done in minutes. Yesterday I realized I left the floodlight on in the backyard by accident, not problem "Claude, create an automation in home assistant to turn off backyard light 5 minutes after I turn it on", done. Could I have created that automation? Yes, I've written countless of them in that past but now I can speak it into existence and, almost more importantly, tweak it with barely any effort at all. If tomorrow I buy a motion sensor I can just ask the LLM to incorporate that, if I want the lights to stay on if X other device is turned on, it's a prompt away. In the past I would spend a good bit of time writing an automation but when it broke down or my needs changed it was enough friction that I would just give up and turn off the automation rather than take the time to debug and change it. I setup all the motion-activated lights in my house when I first moved in and over the course of a few weeks I tweaked each one as needed with just a short prompt here or there, it felt like living in the future.
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the llm/claude part is what my next talk is about. having an agent write and tweak the automations is great as long as the switch on the wall still works when it gets something wrong.
Why? The internet is always on, when it’s off, you have bigger problems than your home automation not working.
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outages are the small part. the bigger one is the vendor's server going away for good, like the nest api or the internet radios mentioned in this thread. then it's not off for an hour, it's off forever. I also like project like project nomad that are really think about these issues https://www.projectnomad.us/
I have a ton of Kasa. Local polling, but since it's more for on/off, I don't care about a 5s poll. I had to buy about ~30 light switches for my house, and using Kasa saved thousands over Lutron. Smart Plugs, sensors, etc: Ikea is amazing. You need to buy a hub, but then accessories are 3x cheaper. Their plugs are $9 and have energy monitoring which is amazing. They have water leak sensors for $12. Incredible value.
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I use the Ikea ones directly with my home assistant zigbee radio. Does not need an Ikea hub. +1 on the IKEA stuff being amazing!
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Except VARMBLIXT. I can't connect it to HomeAssistant no matter how I much try. It sort of begins discovery, but then can't connect to it. Could be some weird networking issue, but all IKEA lamps connect without any issue.
Insteon remains incredibly solid. The new company is super slow with new product because it's tiny, but the hardware remains incredibly good long-term. It doesn't clutter common wireless bands and by nature of being stupid, Insteon devices cannot really be hacked. My rules for home automation are largely the same as the article, first and foremost the existing physical UX of switches and stuff should always work, and ideally automations should be nearly invisible: They should subtly be convenient and monitoring should be useful, but nobody should be confronted with a weird change of lifestyle because a house has automation. And nobody should ever need an app to use their house.
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"nobody should ever need an app to use their house" is a better rule 1 than mine alas i still like having a single app to do the harder problems
Do older Chromebooks not carry the spicy pillow risk MacBooks have when plugged in 24/7?
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What? What macbooks is this? My mac book air has been plugged in most of the time since 2013... I've replaced the battery once I think, but only because the battery life had decreased to 10 minutes.
I installed a water siphon backup for the sump pump. It creates a water siphon if the level gets above the electric sump and drains the pit. Is basic plumbing to install. Other than wasting a half gallon for every 20 gallons pumped out, it doesn't rely on any technology nonsense.
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To where does it drain?
HN isn’t a person. Knowledge like this takes awhile to saturate through a community. It’s ok that some people aren’t tracking llm capabilities. I think it’s probably healthy.
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https://xkcd.com/1053/
I pity those who've yet to experience running uncensored LLMs locally. Sure, they're not as fast as Claude, but they're still quite capable if you're patient.
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Do you recommend any for your usecases where you have had success?
> cfw Custom firmware?
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Probably. This acronym is also used in video game console modding scenes.
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Cloudflare Workers... So not actually local, but does get the vendors cloud out of the mix.
Everything is now crazy expensive, if buying new.
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I mean, yeah, but comparing what rpi is and can do it seems more overpriced than some other hardware I was looking for. But yeah, true.
Please please please use your first draft or refine it yourself without LLMs. I managed to get to: The cloud is the weak link - No internet, no problem. ... --- If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.
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There is a growing body of evidence that people prefer ai generated text when its not labeled as ai generated. However given the same text with ai generated label, all of the sudden people prefer human written text. Just a fun fact about our human biases towards "made by ai" disclosure.
Show HN: Valencia, Spain in Sim City/Isometric View (tinyvalencia.com)
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For those who wonder what that gigantic green garden is, it's one of the best thing in Valencia: it's the path of the old Turia river. But because Valencia has regularly seen terrible floods, including floods with many deaths, with water reaching as high the second floor of some houses (!), at some point it's been decided to divert the Turia so that it doesn't flow in the middle of the city anymore. Many cities have been build along a river and then spread on both side of the river: be it Paris, Prague, Brussels, Budapest (literally the name of the two sides of the river: Buda and Pest), etc. But Valencia is magical in that the river has been diverted and most of the old path of the river has been transformed into garden / bike paths / run track / etc. It's like if you were to take Paris, divert the "Seine" and in its place put a gigantic garden. IMO more cities should do just that: Valencia is the proof it can be done.
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> "at some point" The "Plan Sur", during Franco's autocratic dictatorship, to redirect the Turia river as a response to the terrible 1957 floods. No need to be vague. Interestingly, the new riverbed was what saved the city of Valencia from the damage of the horrific flood in October 2024. The Turia Gardens are, in my opinion, a huge differential feature of the city. And of course, I'm personally in love with it, and my life is deeply connected to it through memories and daily habits.
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It's a fun concept though I noticed some errors: Some buildings down South are not rendered: https://tinyvalencia.com/?lat=39.355397&lng=-0.322415&zoom=16.82 And the Albufera has some weird edges, seems like artifacts from satellite imagery?.
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