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Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic AI tech 'immediately' (cnbc.com)
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Might be the best thing to happen to Anthropic from a PR perspective and possibly IPO.
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Now will OpenAI have the same limits? LMAO at the US Government having to go with a Chinese open-source model...
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https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-escalation-in-anthropic-showdown-with-hegseth-03ecbac8?mod=WTRN_pos2
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Sounds like they also have the same limitations. And my guess is that thats non-negotiable as that would likely cause some of their staff to quit if they did lift those limitations.
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The next question, what person wants to send all their personal questions to an AI lab that will help the government do domestic surveillance
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The same type of people who would upload a picture of their "friends" and tell the AI to "roast" them or take off their clothes.
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Truth social post: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116144552969293195 Six-month phase out period, that's something. I guess the DoW's been using Claude quite a bit.
The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock (origami-robotics.com)
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"This deployment is temporarily paused" is the crappiest "this account has gone over its budget" error page ever. Does that mean the site's down, or is that some meta-joke like "you've reached the end of the Internet"? Quick, explain to my non-technical friends what a "deployment" is. They're not trying to go on a deployment; they're trying to look at a website.
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In this case, I'm not sure it matters what it says or how your non-technical friends interpret it. The site is down. Why it is down doesn't change the next thing casual viewers will do (close the tab).
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That's a nice piece of motor engineering. It's well known that high ratio gearboxes for robots are a headache. Back driveability doesn't work, and tiny teeth are fragile. Comments on this go all the way back to Feynman writing about his time spent engineering automatic gunnery aiming systems in WWII. This new discovery is that gearbox problems mess up a machine learning system. It's trying to track gearbox noise and is using up all its learning capacity on that. This discovery means that robotics people can tap machine learning funding for motor and gearbox development. Robotics labs used to be really low-budget operations. No longer. What you really want is a direct drive motor, but those have to be large-diameter. They can be flat; that's a pancake motor. That's too large for fingers. So their compromise moves partly in that direction; the rotor is flatter, torques are higher, speeds are slower, and gearbox ratios are lower. As they point out, reflected inertia is the square of the gear ratio, because the gear ratio gets you both going out and coming back. So this is a bigger than linear win. Good back-drivabiilty means much less risk of gear breakage on overload. Some of the academic designs, such as harmonic drives and series elastic actuators, have huge gear ratios in a small space. That's OK for prototypes but not production. As I've mentioned before, "you cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field", a line from a GE electric locomotive salesman around 1900. If an overload forces a motor backwards, nothing breaks. Would have been nice to hear more about the motor design. That's the real achievement here. There are CAD tools which understand electromagnetic fields now, so strange motor geometries are not as much of a trial and error and experience process as it once was. It's also respectable for an EE to work on rotating machinery again. That field matured around the 1960s, and until computers took over motor control, didn't change much.
It’s not X. It’s Y. Multiple times, over and over. We need to stop with the AI stuff.
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Tip for those who want to skip shit like this, excessive headings glued together by bullet points is quicker to spot, especially since the headings almost always start with "The". I now scroll any AI-adjacent article I see and just read headings and if I see this I know what I'm getting into: The Dexterity Deadlock The Problem The Geometric Curse The Sim-to-Real Gap The Structural Gap f(⋅) Seeing It in Motion The N^2 Impedance Mismatch The Chaos Term ϵchaos The Information Wall The Weakest Link Why Manipulation Needs Better What We Built From 288 to 15 Does It Work? Hardware Validation Robot Hand Landscape The Take-Home
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Once I became aware of this AI slop pattern, I can't stop seeing it everywhere.
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I think they did a search-and-replace to turn em dashes into semicolons in an attempt to hide the AI. Weird usage of semicolons.
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Plus a bunch of other elements that are dead giveaways. In this day and age, I wish people would ask any model OTHER than ChatGPT to rewrite their shit. At least we'd get a different flavor of slop.
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While it’s got some clear LLM patterns, the content seems novel enough to be worth the squeeze. That or I’m far enough outside of my Gell-Mann amnesia bubble that I can’t see the slop
There are a whole lot of tools intended for human use that I would use much more effectively if I could rotate my wrist repeatedly in the same direction.
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But that's a superset of human functionality, aka even worse.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT revealed an intimidation operation (cnn.com)
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Crazy to me that Chinese officials use ChatGPT to discuss sensitive operations lmao
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The amount of information about everything that people are giving OpenAI is astronomical, information that was previously kept closely guarded is now just freely flowing through foreign servers. Truly a paradise for american intelligence. Would have expected that the chinese officials be briefed on not using us tech companies, but opsec is hard to teach, and even harder to always follow.
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I'm assuming they would not disclose such campaigns by the US government. I can't imagine the amount of trade secrets, business plans, personal secrets, etc that people divulge on there.
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Pushing aside the fact that OpenAI is just a tool of the US regime. Will OpenAI release the same for other government officials from any other states? I can't wait to see Starmer's chats with ChatGPT. Anyway, all of this smells like 1934, "accusing them of what we are already doing"
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> “It’s not just digital. It’s not just about trolling. It’s industrialized. It’s about trying to hit critics of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with everything, everywhere, all at once.”
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> “This is what Chinese modern transnational repression looks like,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told reporters ahead of the report’s release. “It’s not just digital. It’s not just about trolling. It’s industrialized. [...] There's something poetic about OpenAI being asked to comment on mis-use of their slop generator, and their answer is composed entirely of AI slop.
I wonder what exactly the trigger conditions are that lead to the chats of an account being human-reviewed by OpenAI.
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This is -the- question.
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"Is this someone important enough to spy on?" One hopes the CIA/Secret service would be willing to provide the human to do the reviewing but sadly I've worked for European telco's and I know better.
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I'm pretty sure they can just prompt any convo in the background and ask "is this conversation sensitive ?" and the model can answer without this being added to the context of the convo.
Wow, our surveillance helped take down their surveillance. Yay, I guess?
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"Our glorious oversight vs their barbaric surveillance" (I kid, mostly. While the US certainly isn't pure, its scale of surveillance intrusion is light compared to China)
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> While the US certainly isn't pure, its scale of surveillance intrusion is light compared to China I assume that for someone to believe this, they either have to believe the U.S. has poorer surveillance capability than China, or, more likely, they consider U.S. surveillance unintrusive and Chinese surveillance intrusive.
I was in Shanghai recently and while casually testing one of their AI chat bots I typed "What do you think of the situation in Taiwan?". It started discussing like a Western bot would - "it's complicated, etc. etc." and around 5s it abruptly stopped and regurgitated the same line the CCP uses "... it's an unalienable part of China etc. etc.". After printing the line, a popup opened and my camera was activated. The app wanted me to submit my information, presumably to decide what to do with me next time I enter China. 1) All the lights and modern buildings cannot hide that China is a creepy authoritarian state underneath. 2) Given the bot started printing the Western consensus first, I bet $10 it was trained by distilling ChatGPT or Gemini.
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Same thing happened to me, except it was a facetime call from Xi.
If this were true, why didn’t the chatbot immediately recognize that the word “Taiwan” should trigger the response? Detecting the word “Taiwan” has been possible since before most of us were born. China has more restrictions on what you can say than the U.S. but what you are describing is not reality. Some westerner asking Deepseek about Taiwan is completely uninteresting. Just as the government do not chase people over VPN usage. China doesn’t try to hide that they are an authoritarian state. They don’t need to. Most people in China are no less happy with their government than westerners are with their governments. Governments reflect culture. And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.
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This is manifestly false. My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason. She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted. And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk. My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0. These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.
Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died (beyondthejoke.co.uk)
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He's dead Dave. At least he went peacefully in his Jeep.
There was nothing like Red Dwarf on TF (British or American) back then - a laugh-tracked show that could be simultaneously the most hilarious dry wit, not-so-dry bawdy humor, and a compelling and thought-provoking sci-fi action-adventure all at the same time. I fell off it after they had that comeback season roughly in 2000 where the whole ship got revived. Then I saw a few clips from a later season where everyone was pretty schlubby. I'll need to track down some way to re-watch the whole thing.
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I watched the whole lot thanks to lockdown. I used to like up until series six or so, but had a look at the later ones. Yes, the actors certainly all look more "lived in" nowadays. The later series/seasons are very uneven, which surprised me. I stopped watching originally around when Chloe Annette's Kochanski was introduced but I was surprised that instead of a steady decline that the quality was very up and down.
I have watched the American pilot, and one thing I found curious was that the two female characters were the most interesting (Cat and the Computer played by Terry Farrel and Jane Leeves who were both in major series - Deep Space Nine and Frasier). Holly/Computer has been female for much of the British series and Cat did work as a female character. Contrast with the British show which was very male except for computer (sometimes) and Kochanski when she became a regular character (Chloe Annette didn't really work. I wish Clare Grogan had been a regular instead.)
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I agree, Clare Grogan is still who I picture when I think of Kochanski tbh, I loved her energy
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Clare Grogan is definitely who I think of. I couldn't really see Chloe Annette being Kochanski, she was miscast and I don't think she got good scripts.
RIP, thanks for the memories. No sci fi effect has ever given me the same sense of wonder that I got from the shot of the camera slowly travelling over the gigantic ship in the Season 1/2 intro. Btw: @dang : Grant was the co-creator, alongside Doug Naylor, who is still kicking
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The intro was actually strangely eerie/bleak. I felt sorry for Lister (I think it is) out there painting the ship. There was kind of a sadness because he had lost pretty much all his friends and you could feel the vastness of space.
They’re all dead, Dave! What a great franchise.
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Peterson isn't, is he?
It's cold outside There's no kind of atmosphere I'm all alone More or less Let me fly Far away from here Fun fun fun In the sun sun sun I want to lie Shipwrecked and comatose Drinking fresh Mango juice Goldfish shoals Nibbling at my toes Fun fun fun In the sun sun sun Fun fun fun In the sun sun sun
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For a brief period there it was fashionable to have fish nibbling at your feet (in the 2010s?). Not goldfish shoals although that is probably what Lister wanted to farm in Fiji.
Leaving Google has actively improved my life (pseudosingleton.com)
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I used to use DuckDuckGo, until I realized I was using "!g" far too often. Then I tried Kagi, and I find that works the majority of the time, including their AI. Someone else in the comments here said Kagi's AI models are bad, but I don't think they are for answering the fairly basic questions that I typically search. I'm not going to have Kagi's AI model refactor code or something though.
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Is there a legitimate reason why only Google can trawl Reddit or is it just more monopolistic bullshit?
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These types of articles always remind of conspiracy theorists. Being so excited to view something in a new way, to degradate something popular, to view themselves as unique individuals and in control again. That they are outside the mainstream and that is superior because they have the secret knowledge. Also the "if something is free you are the product" is so obviously false if you think about it for a minute. A lot of people pay for Amazon Prime, yet they are still the product. Just because you had a company money does not mean they will won't maximize profit by monetizing your information. Not to mention Blender is free. Are they the product as well? It's just a saying with good mouth feel and nothing else. Definitely not something anyone should change their life around for.
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Brave and DuckDuck have been my defaults for a long time. There are two reasons I can think I use Google and Chrome for: - Search: If I want to be sold something - say I’m in the market for an electric heater, I’ll search for it on Google to be tracked and advertised. - Chrome: because there are some flows and UX that simply don’t work well in other browsers
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I tried DDG for a while but got frustrated because it wasn't giving me what I was actually looking for. Now I’m using Google with the Searchonymous add-on, which has helped me get much wider results, uninfluenced by my previous search history.
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This is not written by a former Google employee, it's written by a former Google user. Confusing title to see on hackernews.
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> I can't think of any other differentiating features in Gmail. Ads in my mail? Nostalgia? Originally, the differentiating features were multi-gigabyte storage limits and the public's goodwill towards Google, Inc. Gigabyte storage is now the norm, public goodwill for Alphabet, Inc. is minimal, and so there's nothing that really sets Gmail apart anymore.
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Ecosia is not just Bing, we offer a bunch of indexes, including bing and Google. We’re moving to our own index, which we are building in collaboration with Qwant, under the name European Search Perspective. I do see the point of the article however.
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This is very interesting and timely. I've been working on something to replace a lot of addictive or exploitive services we use today but there's some caveats. Will people pay? They pay for Kagi but will they generally pay for other things like news, maps, video, chat, weather, etc. The second question is what's stopping people from really quitting? I get the feeling it's sort of habits that we get stuck with. Even I still use Google. But the mention of brave and knowing brave has a generous free search tier for their api makes me think it's possible to replace Google search. But habits die hard. New habit formation may require an alternative approach hence so many buying into ChatGPT. One issue I also find with this sort of thing. It's hard to have a longer discussion that leads to building good alternatives. A thread appears, we comment and then it disappears. There needs to be more public discourse that leads to tangible results... To real issues that get solved.
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Startpage is good
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Leaving googles is for GROWN UPS and independent Individs. The ones that need to see more, to get out of the egg. I self host (feels damn great) but still check my old, antique, gmail once every 3-4 months. Makes me smile and say, I was one of them.
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Leaving Google was the best thing I did, some 10 years ago. It reduced my stress level dramatically. I had no idea about how stressed I was at G. The release, when leaving, was immense. Never ever, will I return to big tech. However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.
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Some of Google's products have really dropped in quality. In the past 5 or so years all the changes I've seen in Search, Youtube, and Gmail have been for the worse.
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Some of this is... pretty tortured: > Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. Which is to say, everyone else's spam filtering is awful, so you need to restrict access to your email so they don't fill your inbox. This is literally the same logic that says we shouldn't vaccinate women against HPV because then they won't learn to practice abstinence.
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AI is an area where having decades of private data hosted and indexed by a third party is actually paying off with a direct return (vs just using it to surface ads). All moral qualms about FOSS and whatever else aside, asking a question in plain english and having an "AI assistant" digging through years' worth of photos, emails, events, chats, restaurant reservations and more and returning an incredibly detailed answer that no person ever could feels like the magic of tech being realized in front of our eyes. Would I prefer this was all open technology instead? Yeah, of course. But it is abundantly clear that economic incentives don't allow open source to compete with the big players, and that's just how it is.
I use fastmail and kagi and love both. I wonder what OP is using instead of google docs for live co-authoring... Word Online? lol
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Not the OP, but I alternate between self-hosted instances of Outline ( https://www.getoutline.com/ ) and Nextcloud (with Collabora) for this. Outline I actually like better than Google Docs for most things. Nextcloud is a little rough, but it has change tracking, which I need sometimes. I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free". In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit, so I don't think any of the complaining will go away anyway. Just a new set of problems.
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> And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit As opposed to the current system where everyone is disadvantaged and the rich get richer? Every business transaction in history has had a producer and a consumer, where both parties are in direct contact. Advertisers, on the other hand, insert themselves in the middle, promising to help both sides, while actually being a leech without doing any of the work. It is a despicable industry based on psychological manipulation, responsible for countless deaths, the corruption of every form of media ever invented, and of democratic processes throughout the world. Sane business models are possible on the internet. Some of them exist already. But it's too late now for any of them to gain traction when advertisers are the same corporations that control it, and they have convinced the world that their products are "free".
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Government can subsidize the poor. Remember Obamaphones? Just expand that idea.
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1: If given the choice between ads or payments, megacorps will always choose both. If the choice is between ads or payments or data harvesting, megacorps will always choose all three. 2: We pay for access to the internet. It's on the provider to decide whether or not that level of access is sufficient. If it is not, restrict access only to those who pay more, ala Netflix/Hulu etc. If I choose to put a publicly open service up onto the internet, and people choose to use it, that shouldn't automatically entitle me to spy on them, shovel ads down their throats, track their every movement and human connection, and then charge them for the privilege. If I found out there was a person I knew who was doing that, I would at least chew them out and exhort them to stop being a worthless piece of shit, if I didn't kick their slimy asses for doing it in the first place. I'm ok with ads existing. I'm ok with paying for services that charge for their services. I am not and will never be okay with data harvesters, and if I ever meet one I'm going to tell them to their face that they are shit people working for a shit company doing shit things to innocent people and that they should be ashamed. If I meet someone who puts ads into paid services, I will do the same. In the meantime, I'm doing everything I can to cut those pieces of crap out of my internet life.
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But some of Apple or Spotify Premium's recent moves Re: advertising show that even those who _are paying_ end up getting the ad experience eventually. The old "If you aren't paying for a product, you're the product." adage doesn't apply anymore when even if you're paying, you're _still_ being productized. The real problem is increasing concentration of _everything_ into ever-fewer (viable) players. Doctorow's book "Enshittification" goes into way more examples of this phenomenon (though I'm far less optimistic than he is about the ability to reverse this trend).
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Amazon Prime is the same way. Thanks for paying, please watch ads for first two season of The Boys. Also look at this catalog of movies you can rent for an additional fee. The "low-cost airline" style of business.
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Critical services like email and search should be treated as a public utility. Those cost money as well, but are affordable to almost anyone, and social safety nets should be taking care of those who don’t.
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Government email, sounds great. Sign me up.
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The options are ads, pay, or public funding. Public funding is obviously the best option in many cases. For example, non-profit basic internet services
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Actually-free gets suppressed by free-with-ads. We don’t know how much the truly free hobbyist-volunteer ecosystem would pick up without competition from ad-supported options (often with deep pockets for advertising and promotion, plus monopolist positioning to cross-promote with other products in some cases). Ad-supported options suppress usership of truly free options, which suppresses interest in volunteering time and resources. It also suppresses open protocols. Protocols stagnated as the Internet centralized and commercialized for a reason. Some of these things could just be protocols. Not saying that would cover everything, but I am sure those two factors would “step in” to replace some aspects of the ad-supported Internet, if the ads went away. How much, I don’t know.
Kagi's models are also incredibly bad. I can't imagine how this person believes they are getting fair value from them.
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> Kagi's models are also incredibly bad. Congrats on totally discrediting yourself.
Not a fan of Google but I always find Gmail criticisms so weird. Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing? And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail. I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here. As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.
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Google had a feature in gmail for a long time that automatically sorts your email into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates, Forums, etc. It was automated and fairly effective imo. If you try to disable the 'smart' features they will then disable this categorization retroactively and dump thousands of emails in your inbox and then nag you about turning it back on.
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I’ve clearly had it turned off for years(?) and I’ve never had it nag about it.
> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in. DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead. I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam. The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it: > Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for. I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
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Well, yes, DuckDuckGo is not Google. You have to accept that. Not just surface-level, but for real . What made this easy for me is that Google is also no longer Google. Ever since it started basically ignoring my actual search query, I stopped using it. I used to be very good at using Google, too. DuckDuckGo is quite bad at times, yes. But then, so is Google. If I need to find something I cannot put into search terms, LLMs are helpful. From my trial experience I would say Kagi is also a capable search machine, for some niches.
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This is exactly my experience. I've had it as my primary search engine for 6-7 years now but add !g to about 80% of queries. Happy user of the DDG mobile browser though.
Same experience with DuckDuckGo. I've probably been using it as my primary search engine for, well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I want to say it was sometime during the pandemic so that must be, what, 5 years? Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it? It's just not very good. It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.
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Do you find the results are better when you use the same query on Google? Because I’ve also exclusively used DuckDuckGo for the past 5 or so years, and every now and then I get frustrated by the results try Google. But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG. Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.
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I’ve been using DDG since they started. But still often use !g. But I think the AI overviews in DDG and even Google have helped a lot. AI has helped search tremendously. I only search for things that should have exact answers.
> from Reddit threads Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1]. [1] https://www.lifewire.com/google-reddit-deal-8685766
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Kagi has tons of results from Reddit and they're always high and relevant. I don't know if this means they're doing it even though they're "not allowed to" or what but they definitely get it somehow.
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Kagi is probably paying Google for those results?
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That sounds like some excellent fodder for an anti-trust suit if you ask me.
They even work sometimes I have heard.
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Wipr2 is amazing. Never see ads on mobile Safari. On desktop, Orion is great.
Let's discuss sandbox isolation (shayon.dev)
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Sandbox isolation is only slightly important, you don't need to make it fancy, just a plain old VM. The really important thing is how you control capabilities you give for the agent to act on your behalf.
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QubesOS was built to give sandboxes kernel isolation via a hypervisor. It’s not surprising that most people don’t know about it, because QubesOS as a daily driver can be painful. But with some improvements, I think it’s the right way to do it.
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Its worth pointing out another boundary: speculative execution. If sensitive data is in process memory with a WASM VM it can be read even if the VM doesn't expose it. This is also true of multiple WASM VMs running for different parties. For WASM isolation to work the VM needs to be in a seperate process
OK, let’s survey how everybody is sandboxing their AI coding agents in early 2026. What I’ve seen suggests the most common answers are (a) “containers” and (b) “YOLO!” (maybe adding, “Please play nice, agent.”). One approach that I’m about to try is Sandvault [0] (macOS only), which uses the good old Unix user system together with some added precautions. Basically, give an agent its own unprivileged user account and interact with it via sudo, SSH, and shared directories. 0. https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
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Mac Mini + docker for openclaw. Mac Mini is nice because I didnt want to deploy on my local day-to-day machine, otherwise im aware it's not a true security mechanism for an integrated claw. Claude Code local - nothing. Claude Code remote - i just use anthropic's web service. no desire to send my data or use anyone's third party remote sandbox. I would deploy my own before I did that.
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Looked into Apples container framework first (for proper isolation) but switched to Docker sandboxes since they switched to mircoVMs too: https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/#why-use-docker-sandboxes
Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died (dignitymemorial.com)
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Hyperion was the first science fiction book that made me cry. I love all four books in the series. I never really engaged in any of his other writing. I have a signed copy of Ilium but never read it.
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RIP Hyperion Cantos is the most influential scifi story I've ever read personally. The first book is a masterpiece, while the rest remains one of the greats. :(
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Oh no! I just finished reading Hyperion this week and it has become one of my favorite books of all time. I will treasure my signed copy more so now, RIP.
I enjoyed the Hyperion books but this got him put on my "never read anything from ever again" list: https://web.archive.org/web/20060424105133/http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message.htm
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>never read anything from ever again I think it's a poisonous and reductive mindset to have. You can separate art from the character of the artist. If you cared about everything everyone has ever said or done in various stages of their lives, you wouldn't have much left to enjoy or appreciate.
Simmons opened new frontiers of thought for me with his Hyperion Cantos . A house with each room on a different planet. A heartbreaking tale of a daughter aging in reverse. A romance playing out over space and time. A grand piano on the pop-out balcony of a starship. The cruciform parasite. The Shrike. Branches of humanity torn between decadent stagnation and radical evolution. The artificial intelligence civilization with its own agenda. The All Thing (Internet) as the third branch of government. So much good stuff, published in 1989 no less. Rest in Peace to a true legend.
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He predicted social media as well. So many themes in this work only mentioned in passing, too many to develop in full...
I sincerely hope they don't make any adaptation... after the slaughterhouse they've made with 3 Body Problem, Foundation, Altered Carbon, et al Not to mention all the damage done to other more traditional works of fiction.
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You don’t have to watch them.
Processing power is my second favorite explanation. My first favorite would have been: they don’t use the humans for anything, the pods are just the most efficient way to store humans. The machines think they are being benevolent, just want peace and quiet and for humans to stop doing dramatic things like scorching the sky. But I don’t know where the plot would go from there.
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There is backstory that the films could have gone into, though I don't know if it was written before or after the first film. The humans in the matrix were allied with the machines and they put them in the matrix to protect them from the war. They were being benevolent.
I tried reading it but I couldn't get into it. Maybe it the heavy religious themes or just the science fiction being so far into the future? I really should give it a shot again
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It starts very slowly and the worldbuilding is exquisite and you will likely uncover many facets only upon rereading it. However, it is well worth persisting. Work with considerably more action are Olympus and Ilium.
Hyperion is the better novel but Carrion Comfort is just really exciting and creepy. And the way the mind controllers treated regular humans like toys hits far too close to home now.
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Oh absolutely, I don't want to spoil anything but (to sound like a nutcase for a second) if there is an Illuminati then I think they were avid readers of Carrion. Apropos given your username XD
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Yeah, one of the bad guys even had a private island where he invited all his rich psychopathic friends.
> The Hyperion Cantos is a masterpiece which every scifi fan ought to have read You have to have some affinity to religious/Christianity/church topics, otherwise it’s quite a turn-off.
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Atheist. Loved it.
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Entirely untrue.
> just the default Western canon It’s particular topics of that canon, and you have to fancy their treatment in a science-fiction setting. Some people like science-fiction because/when it proposes fresh perspectives that aren’t rooted in, by lack of a better description, non-enlightenment parts of that canon.
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The clean slate of banks - where we discarded culture to embrace the "culture" and look where this "winging" it got us. Turns out the operating system of a society is important- and the atheist distilled synthetic one is not really working - same goes for alot of others. The utopist urge for cultural tabula rasa is a retardation, a attempt of the brain to shirk embracing and discovering complexity. One has to look at the "backwards" parts to start to understand what works in a society and with the actual human beeings lifing in a actual society, not the wingless Star Trek Angels in PJs. Embrace complexity, embrace analysis, build something without defining the endstate first. Make small things that work, combine them into bigger things that work. Way less calling for cullings of the "sabotaging traitors" as they are usual with utopists on the march.
I’m not saying that you have to be religious. But if you find those topics and related symbolisms rather uninteresting in your sci-fi, then the books may not be for you.
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Well, i detest jihadism, but still could enjoy dune
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation (techcrunch.com)
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Puff puff until it pops!
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$730B pre-money for a company where each model is roughly 2x profitable on its own, but each next model costs 10x the last. The whole thing only works if scaling keeps delivering. Research (Sara Hooker et. al.) is not encouraging on that front, compact models already outperform massive predecessors on downstream tasks while scaling laws only predict pre-training loss reliably. Wrote about both the per-model math and the scaling question: (1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/ai-models-as-standalone-pls/ (2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-most-expensive-assumption-in-ai/
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Is OpenAI giving employees RSUs? What good are those under these astronomical valuations?
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they have PPUs
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Presumably it’s all relative. Apple gives me RSUs with a much higher valuation (although at least it’s on the public market already).
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OpenAI's just trading equity for GPU credits at this point?
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Does this mean they won't IPO this year?
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Hard not to hear the word “bailout” in my head when I see this many billions being tossed around.
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[delayed]
Less than a decade ago companies reaching 1 trillion was still every much "out there". Now we have an IPO at almost 1 trillion. It's clear that the stock market cannot be considered normal anymore, held up on hopes at prayers at best.
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Sure it can. The value of the dollar coincides with stock market valuations.
Interesting story for sure (to be clear I'm not talking about the writing by Reuters), but would you buy or skip the OpenAi IPO? To me it feels like one of those throw some play money into it and see what happens sort of situations. Expect it will return negative due to the raw financials and outlook, but small chance the brand carries enough weight with the public that it spikes. I'd love to hear other thoughts though
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If the IPO was at 20B maybe I could throw a 1000$. But at such numbers it's nonsense. I don't see any moat. Enterprise is on Gemini/NotebookLM and Copilot as it's a natural extension of the Google and Office suite they use. Devs are in Anthropic camp, but they will jump as soon as they can save 90% of the money for 99% of the output. But imho, very soon we'll be coding in threads ala GitHub issues/pr with copilot-like remote LLMs.
Would the current administration bail out OpenAI?
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They would give OpenAI anything they want if they proclaim the current guy the bestest and biggliest president of all time, ever. (edit: I meant, if chatgpt were to consistently claim that the current guy is the greatest president ever)
IMO this looks largely like another circular investment. Amazon's investment is tied to OpenAI using AWS for their Frontier product and I assume Nvidia's conditions are that OpenAI continue buying hardware from them. Then there's SoftBank though given that those are the same guys that invested heavily in WeWork, I assume this is just very brash bullishness on their part. From my perspective, I hope that OpenAI survives and can pull of their IPO but I just have that nagging feeling in my gut that their IPO will be rejected in much the same way that the WeWork IPO was rejected. On the one hand you can look at these companies investing and take it as a signal that there is something there (in OpenAI) that's worth investing in. On the other hand all these companies that are investing are basically getting that investment back through spending commitments and such and are just using OpenAI as a proxy for what is essentially buying more revenue for themselves. When their IPO hits later this year I hope that it's the former case and there's actually some good underlying fundamentals to invest in. But based on everything I've read, my gut is telling me they will eventually implode under the weight of their business model and spending commitments.
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Comparing OpenAI and WeWork is a nonsensical perspective. OpenAI is shipping the most revolutionary product in a generation, with 800 million monthly active users. It's the fastest revenue ramp ever, at incredible scale -- $20B+ ARR. These are real fundamentals. They matter. And the cost of inference is coming down all the time. WeWork was a short-term/long-term lease arbitrage business. The two are nothing alike.
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It used to be revolutionary, but now there is plenty of competition, and this is the main difference. They are even lagging behind (GPT-5 is a weaker coder than Claude, Sora is a toy compared to Seedance 2.0, etc).
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The only reason to draw this comparison is to show SoftBank are not as competent as they'd like to appear to be - so putting their name in relation to investors of OAI does not strengthen the prospects we should share re. OAI.
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How will they make money on their product exactly? To the tune of being worth nearly a trillion dollars? There is no guarantee that inference will go down, we’ve seen some improvement with cheap models, but they aren’t what people want, and otherwise models stay expensive to run and use
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Inference is already profitable (training is not)
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It’s one of the worst takes I’ve heard. OpenAI creates the fastest growing app ever, spawns a revolution bigger than the internet, and this guys take is they are like WeWork…
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This piece that was on HN yesterday corroborates your gut: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/2/19/how-will-openai-compete-nkg2x
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Nvidia sells the picks, AWS rents the mine, OpenAI digs, and the money just loops around the table...
The "circular investment" is mostly start up companies using their stocks instead of cash to pay for server hardware and cloud computing. There is a few extra steps in between that make things look weird and convoluted, but the end results is really just big companies giving hardware and getting shares of ai companies in exchange for it.
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Nope wrong framing. Nvidia is investing assets into OAI - it has to. Because OAI needs to become successful for Nvidia's story in the long-term to play out, to justify its current stock price.
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I think you’re just describing how it’s circular. It’s like Toys R Us not having enough money to pay Mattel for Barbie dolls and telling Mattel they can have partial ownership of the company if they just supply them with some more toys. But the problem is that Toys R Us is spending $15, 20, or maybe even $50 (who knows?) to sell a $10 toy. Toys R Us continues selling toys faster and faster despite a lack of profit, making Mattel even more dependent on Toys R Us as a customer. It blows up the bubble where a more natural course of action would be for Toys R Us to go bankrupt or scale back ambitions earlier. Because it’s circular like this, it lends toward bigger crashing and burning. If OpenAI fails, all these investors that are deeply integrated into their supply chains lose both their investment and customer.
Great analogy. ;-) Doubt Jensen sees himself as a “dealer” but considering the vendor lock-in and margins, he pretty much is the Tony Montana of Ai Chips. It’s nuts that this type of financing is legal.
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It's like credit cards loaning money to people who are unemployed and will default on payments. It's a risky business that is legal and can be very profitable, but may also be disastrous in the future.
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It is legal because Jensen isn't selling drugs, payday loans are legal too!
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It’s legal because both sides have armies of lawyers and are voluntarily entering into contracts where each party gets consideration. How someone can compare the above situation to a person getting a payday loan to put a roof over their head or food on their plate is beyond me. The “it’s like <insert wild and inappropriate analogy to stoke emotion>” is a tired trope.
> On the one hand you can look at these companies investing and take it as a signal that there is something there (in OpenAI) that's worth investing in. On the other hand all these companies that are investing are basically getting that investment back through spending commitments and such and are just using OpenAI as a proxy for what is essentially buying more revenue for themselves. I don't understand how this is some kind of cheat code. Let's say I give you $100 on the condition that you buy $100 worth of product from me. And let's say that product cost me $80 to produce. Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80? I don't see at all how that's me "basically getting that investment back".
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The problem is here: > Let's say I give you $100 on the condition that you buy $100 worth of product from me. And let's say that product cost me $80 to produce. Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80? Why limit myself to $100 for a product that costs $80? I could just as well give you $1 000 000 to buy this same product from me. That way, I have a $1 000 000 share of your company, and I have $1 000 000 in revenue, and it only cost me $80. This distorts the market for the product we're trading, and distorts the share price for both my company and yours.
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> Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80? In your accounting, you can claim that you have an investment worth $100 and book $100 worth of revenue. You're juicing your sales numbers to impress shareholders - presumably, without your $100, the investee wouldn't have bought $100 worth of your product. The last thing your shareholders want to see are your sales numbers stop growing, or heaven forbid, start shrinking. Nvidia is not the first company to "buy" sales of its own product via simple or convoluted incentive schemes. The scheme will work for a while until it doesn't.
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The reason this doesn't make sense is that this is the math of monopoly creation! The government should be making sure companies don't go around throwing money at circular deals that will make them and their friends a fortune while cornering the market, but it seems that capitalism rules don't exist anymore in the US.
I give you $100 cash and you give me $100 worth of stock in return. Now you give me $100 cash to buy something from me that cost me $80 to produce. I end up with $100 worth of stock in your company which cost me only $80. No? NVIDIA gross margins lately are like 75%, so it's more like you give me $100 to buy something from me that cost me $25 to produce, hence I end up with $100 worth of stock in your company and it only cost me $25.
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> hence I end up with $100 worth of stock in your company and it only cost me $25. You also lost out on $75 worth of cash revenue (opportunity cost from selling the same thing to a different customer), so really you just took stock in lieu of cash. It'd be different if Nvidia (TSMC) had excess production capacity, but afaik they're capped out. So it's really just whether they'd be selling them to OpenAI and getting equity in return or selling to customers and getting cash in return. If OpenAI thinks their own stock is valued above fundamentals, it's a no brainer to try and buy Nvidia hardware with stock.
They wouldn’t have bought $100 worth of product if the deal weren’t offered, because they didn’t have $100 to spend.
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If they couldn't borrow $100, or get $100 from any other investor, that just puts you in the position of being an investor, and even then the difference between bradfa's version and mine is simply when you became an investor, not that you became one. Again, this is not a cheat code: if you sell $80 of cost for $100 of stock, the stock you now own can go up or down, and if you overvalued it then down is the more likely direction.
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The primary cheat code here would actually seem to be (a) getting preferential access to Nvidia's production through these deals and (b) creating a paper story of increasing OpenAI private valuation.
Aaaannd get to claim the 100 as revenue to show investors that the company is performing better than if I had not made the deal, which also means that demand for the product stays inflated which also means I can keep my margins higher by not needing to discount my product.
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Urgently need an IPO so losers can chip in. If the sandcastle plummets before, funds and other AI companies lose a lot, so better bet again and again, even if this is nonsensical.
Very convenient to put "AGI" in all these agreements because the term is fundamentally undefinable. So throw out whatever numbers you want and fight about it and backtrack later.
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The problem with AGI is not that it's undefinable, but that everyone has a different one. Kinda like consciousness in that regard. Fortunately, OpenAI already wrote theirs down. Well, Microsoft[0] says they did, anyway. Some people claimed it was a secret only a few years ago, and since then LLMs have made it so much harder to tell the difference between leaks and hallucinated news saying this, but I can say there's at least a claim of a leak[1]. [0] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/02/27/microsoft-and-openai-joint-statement-on-continuing-partnership/ [1] It talks about it, but links to a paywalled site, so I still don't know what it is: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/
They don't need to reach AGI. They just need to put all of the engineers on HN out of work. A year ago I would have said that was crazy. In the last month, I've been using Claude Code to write 20kloc of Rust code every day (and I review all of it). A week is now a day. If that figure doubles, I have no idea what will happen to us. And I think it's coming.
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That’s the same definition of reviewing code as saying watching the movie is the same as reading the book it’s based on. No human has ever reviewed 600k lines of code in a month, ever. It’s hard to find someone who can even read and understand that amount in that time.
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> write 20kloc of Rust code every day (and I review all of it) Only one of this can be true. It's not a shame to say you don't bother reviewing it, in the future that may well be the norm.
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So you now have 400Kloc of Rust code? Doing what? How much of that is "new"? I can't get Augment / Opus 4.5 to edit a few C++ files from within VSCode without going off on a wild goose chase or getting stuck in an infinite loop after I tell that it should be doing this: "oh, you're right, I need to do X", "To do X, I must understand how to do Y", "I see now that to do Y, I should look at at Z". "Let me look at Z", followed by: "oh, you're right, I need to do X"..
I've seen this sentiment (OpenAI collapse imminent) a lot on Youtube and Reddit, but it somehow evaded me on here Bad comments about OpenAI's long-term viability I've seen plenty here. But that's not the same as the people predicting one of the hottest companies right now will somehow suddenly run out of cash all on its own
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Its hottest service by far is completely free, the vast majority of users of its free service aren't converting to users of its paid services (and often stop using the free service too because they were just tourists seeing what all the fuss was about, or they were compelled to use the free service by their employer), and its data center plans are an impossible money pit. The fact it's become a household name internationally (giving it the appearance of success) can't save it from spending dramatically more money than it makes. It's been coasting on investments, but it's not even close to being actually profitable. Huge or well-known companies have collapsed before, even though - because people become so used to them existing - it never quite feels like it will actually happen until it does.
Not agreeing with the parent, but that hardly matters. Google has a real business, advertising, that brings in $400 billion a year and income around $150B. They can afford to throw away tens of billions every year while still remaining immensely profitable and quite solid as a business. OpenAI has no such income to spend so it's as the above comments reflect, entirely unsustainable while Google's spending on AI is a drop in the bucket for them.
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That's not saying that Gemini is profitable though.
Do you know any history? You dishonor the people who died from horrible atrocities in WWII to make some glib performative political posturing. It's shameful behavior. Do better. Be better.
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WWII didn’t start overnight. The Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as “The Brownshirts,” have a strong similarity to what we’re seeing with ICE and CBP. The SA were Hitler’s enforcers before the SS, during the 1920s and early 1930s. They were eventually usurped by the SS during “Night of the Long Knives” where SA leadership were executed by the SS. Largely because Hitler had felt threatened by the power Ernst Röhm had amassed (among other reasons). And the SA, like ICE, was made up largely of untrained sycophants and thugs who enjoy violence. They committed violence, harassed citizens, and had no consequences for doing so. They were also instrumental in laying the foundation for the genocide and atrocities committed by the Nazi party. It’s not a dishonor to their memories, or the atrocities committed, to call that out. It is not a dishonor to say there are stark and real similarities between the way the US is operating and treating civilians. I personally find the opposite, IMHO it is dishonors their memories to refuse to acknowledge the similarities. I’ve posted a comment similar to this one here before, and like how I ended it. I strongly encourage you to read about the history of Nazi Germany and how it came to happen. It wasn’t just a zero to death camps, it was 15 years in the making. That history is deeply shocking, as it is depressing, because the parallels and timelines are too similar for anything besides outright discomfort, sadness, and fear between it and the US. But without knowing it, we are ever more likely to repeat it. One final thing to note: the US has a history of extreme violence, slave patrols and the treatment of non-whites of the 19th century were an inspiration for Hitler.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything" (unsung.aresluna.org)
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It could absolutely be false nostalgia since I was a Mac fan from about 2005 to 2009 with an MBP that had the breathing feature but this really felt like a high point for computer hardware. It felt slick and performant but still serviceable. Ironically, after a series of uninspiring Windows machines the next laptop that made me feel any level of enthusiasm like that Mac is my current Framework 13 running COSMIC on NixOS. Quite an about face!
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That light was a big deal - I remember when I got into Arduino years ago this was one of the common projects people would do to add a breathing LED to everything, including a pumpkin: https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2010/a-pumpkin-that-sleeps-like-a-mac/
In the Choose Your Own Adventure novel Supercomputer , you receive as the grand prize in a contest an AGI-capable computer and go on various adventures with its advanced thinking capabilities. One of its features is said to be a "smile light" which illuminates in a pleasing greenish color when the machine is happy. The breathing light always reminded me of Conrad's "smile light" and just went to show that Apple engineers were reading the right type of science fiction novel.
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I loved that book! It also has some endings which familiarizes the reader with ethics.
The dot in the "i" in "Thinkpad" on my laptop's lid does this, copying the mac, I expect. It's red, mimicking the trackpoint.
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Trackpoint’s red color is also a story worth reading. No, I won’t spoil it here. :)
The sleeping light - because what all hardware requires is blindingly bright LEDs that are always on. Even when that hardware is asleep
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As the post states, it was almost always accompanied by a light sensor. It always got dimmer either by that sensor or internal clock. My desk was at the end of my bed. The MacBook with sleep light was always on that. It was never bright at night. Dimming half a second after I turn the light off. Even if the lid was closed. Oh, also, you can swap batteries of Macs during sleep if it has a removable battery, without losing state. This is why Apple is Apple.
Allocating on the Stack (go.dev)
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> ... > On the third loop iteration, the backing store of size 2 is full. append again has to allocate a new backing store, this time of size 4. The old backing store of size 2 is now garbage. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a worst-case scenario? realloc can, iirc, extend in place. Your original pointer is still invalid then, but no copy is needed then. Unless I'm missing something? Equally, what happens to the ordering of variables on the stack? Is this new one pushed as the last one? Or is there space kept open? E.g.: var tasks []task var other_var int
alloca() is super useful, but it's also quite dangerous because you can easily overflow the stack. The obvious issue is that you can't know how much space is left on the stack, so you basically have to guess and pick an arbitrary "safe" size limit. This gets even more tricky when functions may be called recursively. The more subtle issue is that the stack memory returned by alloca() has function scope and therefore you must never call it directly in a loop. I use alloca() on a regular basis, but I have to say there are safer and better alternatives, depending on the particular use case: arena/frame allocators, threadlocal pseudo-stacks, static vectors, small vector optimizations, etc.
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> alloca() is super useful, but it's also quite dangerous because you can easily overflow the stack. This is not a problem for Go, because it has resizable stacks.
> The obvious issue is that you can't know how much space is left on the stack [...] Oh, huh. I've never actually tried it, but I always assumed it would be possible to calculate this, at least for a given OS / arch. You just need 3 quantities, right? `remaining_stack_space = $stack_address - $rsp - $system_stack_size`. But I guess there's no API for a program to get its own stack address unless it has access to `/proc/$pid/maps` or similar?
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It's certainly possible on some systems. Even then, you have to fudge, as you don't know exactly how much stack space you need to save for other things. Stack memory is weird in general. It's usually a fixed amount determined when the thread starts, with the size typically determined by vibes or "seems to work OK." Most programmers don't have much of a notion of how much stack space their code needs, or how much their program needs overall. We know that unbounded non-tail recursion can overflow the stack, but how about bounded-but-large? At what point do you need to start considering such things? A hundred recursive calls? A thousand? A million? It's all kind of sketchy, but it works well enough in practice, I suppose.
NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays (cbsnews.com)
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I made sure to watch the first SLS launch in person as I'm not confident they will be able to launch again.
11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.
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We've probably answered wrongly. Even money aside, how many more people die in traffic accidents due to the extra miles driven because of delays in construction? Some regs are worth it, certainly, but being overly cautious is in itself unsafe.
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Sure and sometimes you just need to actually issue safety equipment and install a fall net. The historical comparisons are complete BS: they wind up at "if we sacrifice enough people to the industrial god he will reward us" rather then discussing anything real.
Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2. Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens. Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
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That doesn't imply that it was faster though. It just implies they didn't have the technology to simulate it, nor CNC machining to do it another way. I mean does it sound like that was faster then what we can do today?
On the surface, the changes appear logical. The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run. I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting? I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient? (It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
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NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations. correction : there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime. If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.
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Isn't this a non-sequitur though? Artemis presumably doesn't have to actually load up humans on the rockets to flight test them.
The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.
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Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then they launched Challenger against the recommendations of the engineers in charge of o-ring seals. For Columbia, they has seen foam strikes in earlier launches, but since they had not caused catastrophe in the past, they decided that foam strikes were acceptable. Even when it was clear that a large foam strike had occurred on the launch of Columbia, management wasn't concerned enough to try to get ground-based images of the shuttle to check for damage. Could Columbia's crew have been saved had they known the extent of the damage? No one can say of course, but not even trying to do everything possible was inexcusable.
I don't think so, because both losses were due to bad management decisions under irrational political pressure, not any lack of engineering knowledge that more unmanned testing could have provided. Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed. Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
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> They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. Should such testing have been needed? No. Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.
We have no idea what starship has cost. It's a private company.
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Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.
Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.
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The whole moon thing is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. But if one wants to do it, one should choose between the working approaches.
> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city. R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn. That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
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I read it last some years ago too but I think it was in relation to many early moonshot failures - first half of Luna program and also early attempts at Mars and Venus. Have to reread it too. Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable. Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9. N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried.
Yes, but if you asked someone at SpaceX before flight 1 where they would be by flight 11, I doubt they would have been happy about the reality.
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And?
Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented. Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
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Challenger was pretty directly caused by the Reagan admin pressuring NASA to launch it too, so yes? Politicians have pressured NASA for launches previously and it has killed astronauts.
Went to Florida some years ago when my kids were all teens and pre-teens. Did Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World, the works. We unanimously agreed KSC was by far the best of all. If you only do one thing in Florida, that would be it.
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Been once as a kid and once as an adult. Wonderful place. The rocket garden is wonderful.
Every new story about Artemis gives me even more respect for the Apollo engineers.
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I’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.
ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies – study (theguardian.com)
No, see both. LLMs are great for second opinions, as long as you give it the relevant info and don't try to steer it. Even though we all know we're supposed to get second opinions on medical things, we usually don't bother because it's too expensive in both time and money. If it could be an emergency, see a doctor.
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If you need a second opinion, ask another doctor. My question would be, do you tell him "Here's the first doctor's diagnosis, do you agree?" or do you go in cold and see what he comes up with?
It sounds strange to me that you would use GPT to start consulting to your doc, as if you suddenly know better than them. You don't want to be doing their job for them. If I used GPT for my medical issue last year and everybody took my word for it, I would be dead.
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Neither "the worst case would be" nor "everything is a sliding scale" are good single hueristics. There are rarely There are rarely good single hueristics, but implying them tends to color discussions strongly.
I'd greatly prefer a blind study comparing doctors to AI, rather than a study of doctors feeding AI scenarios and seeing if it matches their predetermined outcome. Edit: People seem confused here. The study was feeding the AI structured clinical scenarios and seeing it's results. The study was not a live analyses of AI being used in the field to treat patients.
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The number of people who die each year just in the United States for causes attributable to medical errors is believed to be in the hundreds of thousands. A doctor’s opinion is not the golden yardstick. It may be interesting to study if there is some kind of signal in general health outcomes in the US since the popularization of ChatGPT for this purpose. It may be a while before we have enough data to know. I could see it going either way.
Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification (github.com/c3d)
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From the other post about this law. > That's likely no big deal for Windows, which already requires you to enter your date of birth during the Microsoft Account setup procedure This seems like an over reaction because of a simple date field
For Linux it will be way more problematic because: - A lot of of corporate contributions comes from SV. - Linux Foundation is incorporated in CA. - Linus himself is CA's resident AFAIR. So there is zero chance of claiming no jurisdiction. The only hope is whoever is enforcing this batshit wouldn't go after what is essentially not an OS for the purpose of the bill, but rather an internal component (it would be like going after a vendor of bolts and nuts for noncompliance of a toaster).
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I think Linus Torvalds lives in Oregon.
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It's more likely to be an issue for distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. Although, if I'm understanding this correctly, I think all they would have to do to comply is have something during installation that asks for the age category, and write a file that is world readable, but only writable by root that contains that category that applications can read.
Court finds Fourth Amendment doesn’t support broad search of protesters’ devices (eff.org)
> "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." ~ Cardinal Richelieu (Cardinal and former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of France)
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This apocryphal quote was a statement about his overwhelming power (strong enough to hang people who have done no wrong), not on the mutability of the law. It is frequently mis-applied.
They may be the top stories, but they have never appeared on any list of voters' top concerns. It's always crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care. People can say whatever they want to journalists, but they say different things to the politicians. Standing up for privacy does not get you elected and so we will continue to get anti-privacy laws and Attorneys General who won't enforce what we do have. The best you can hope for is a judge deciding how they want the Constitution to read, and that's far from the slam dunk you'd expect.
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> crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care These are the post-facto rationalizations voters cite to explain or defend their vote. But the actual decision is made much earlier than voting time, and it’s one driven primarily by emotion and social influence. The “issues” are a convenient alignment mechanism but not the primary motivator. This should be obvious by the fact voters must choose between two viable candidates – the choice has been made for them, long before they get the luxury of sorting through which issues are most important to their vote.
Then how did we get the laws we have now? How did we get the constitution and the amendments?
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A bunch of rich white slave-owners wrote the rules over the space of a few months in Philadelphia. One of the rules is that it's damn near impossible to amend the rules. It hasn't been done in a half century. (Setting aside one oddball originally written by those rich white guys but left in a drawer by accident.)
A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification (pcgamer.com)
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It's not clear that this applies where the "operating system provider" does not have "accounts". Linux should be OK, but "Ubuntu One" might have problems. It's a good reason not to put cloud dependencies into things.
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Was there HN discussion at the time the bill was introduced / passed?
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Next it will be all devices able to run Doom.
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Many of you commenting haven't read the legislation and it shows.
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How will this work with ephemeral VMs? If you spin up a few hundred a day, will each one prompt you for birthday ? And whose birthday ? The CEO?
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> That's likely no big deal for Windows, which already requires you to enter your date of birth during the Microsoft Account setup procedure That isn’t age verification at all
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Trump - making heroic efforts to give Newsom the presidency in 2028. Newsom valiantly resisting those efforts.
Sounds to me that this is how kids learn to spin their own operating systems (a la LFS, Gentoo)and apps. This is how people bought personal computers when the mainframe priesthood banned them. It appears that very soon, young people will "de facto" need to have this level of competence in order to survive and thrive in a world of "in loco parentis" operating systems and apps. The latin reveals my age, but one thing about my age: People my age did exactly that. We built our own hardware when there was none. We compiled (or copied) operating systems and apps. A couple of my friends wrote an operating system and a C compiler. "My generation" created this entire internet thingy, installed and web-based apps. Indeed, dumb-asses are going to level up young people.
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It wasn't illegal when we did it. They're working on that too.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." - unknown
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I doubt good intentions had anything to do with this.
There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place." There are just too many examples. For instance: - Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode switch bug cannot be patched...) - 3D printers should have a magical algorithm to recognize all gun parts in their tiny embedded systems - Now, you need to verify your age... on your microwave? At this rate, California should just go back to the Stone Age. Modern technology is simply not compatible with clueless politicians who are more eager to virtue-signal than to solve any actual problems or even borther to study the subject about the law they are going to pass. There will be more and more technology restrictions (or outright bans on use) in California because it's becoming impossible to operate anything here without getting sued or running afoul of some overreaching regulation.
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The incentives are all wrong. You can serve up to 6 two-year terms in the Assembly or up to 3 four-year terms in the Senate, but regardless of which combination you do, nobody in the California legislature can serve more than 12 years combined across both Houses of the legislature. So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals, we have a resumé-building exercise that we call the legislature. They’re all interchangeable and within 12 years, 100% of it will be changed out.
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Technology is currently worring for a lot of people so the moronic response is to simply reject it.
> There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California You can remove the in California
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Young people generalize everything and end up not solving problems. Older people have already seen all the patterns, and realize you have to focus on specifics, and that helps clean up the general issue.
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Yeah but let’s not and say we didn’t.
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this
> Now, you need to verify your age... on your microwave? Anyone buying or selling a microwave with an app store deserves this mess.
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Downvoter (and GP) didn't RTFA. This is addressed in the parts of the law TFA quotes.
I'm, again, glad to run linux. The distro I run has no affiliated online "account" at all, and I would expect this exempts it from the requirement. I'm no democrat, although I'm sure as hell no republican, and as a resident of the state, I'm also a routine critic of the California state government. I agree that a lot of their activities are indeed, performance art in nature. However I do agree with the identification requirements on guns and ammo. You can't shoot someone with a computer, no matter what OS you run. The idea that lethal weaponry is the same as any other consumer product is just not accurate.
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It's about as easy to restrict the proliferation of firearms and ammunition as it is to restrict the proliferation of open source software. Anyone can make functional firearms out of supplies from any hardware store, this is true regardless of how many laws you pass. Look at the weapon that was used to assassinate Shinzo Abe. That was manufactured and used in a country with gun control laws that basically make California's gun control look indistinguishable from Texas. No number of laws have ever or will ever stop criminals with a rudimentary grasp of basic physics and basic chemistry. You can't put the genie of firearms back in the bottle any more than Hollywood can put the genie of p2p file sharing back in the bottle. Trying to do so is like trying to unscramble eggs. It doesn't matter how valid your desires or justifications for attempting to so are, it's an act of banging your own head against the cold, hard wall of reality.
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Political office in general attracts the sort of people who like the "performance art" parts of it. It doesn't attract the sorts of people who like "getting things done" because the political process by design moves at a snail's pace, and if you actually solved problems you would remove issues run on in the next campaign.
I’m more curious in the genesis of these laws, whether their sponsors received written suggestions or ghostwritten bills, etc. as a form of parallel construction. It seems all at once, everywhere that many groups that have a vested interest in forcing precedent and compliance of non-anonymous access across the computer world. It smacks of something less-than-organic.
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This law doesn't do anything that prevents non-anonymous access. Here's how you would access things anonymously if you bought a new computer that implemented this. 1. When you set up your account and it asks for your birthdate, make up any date you want that is at least far enough in the past to indicate an age older that what any site you might use that checks age requires. 2. Access things the way you've always done. All that has changed is that things that care about age checks find out you claim to be old enough. The only people it actually materially affects on your new computer are people who cannot set up their own accounts, such as children if you have set up permissions so they have to get you to make their accounts. Then if you want you can enter a birthdate that gives an age that says non-adult, so sites that check age will block them. From a privacy and anonymity perspective this is essentially equivalent to sites that ask "Are you 18+?" and let you in if you click "yes" and block you if you click "no". It is just doing the asking locally and caching the result.
Death threats mainly. Personally I think it would be easier if they just made it so that platforms ran a tiny LLM against the content that will be posted - determined if it is a death threat, then require them to be identified before it's posted, then it would solve a lot of these problems. TLDR: Evil people be doxxed internally not everyone.
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a "tiny large language model"? lol
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Yeah, a small one that is cheaper because they'll be processing billions of messages per year.
Hmm i think at te moment its only Linux that has by default local only accounts except if being used in some sort of SSO environment . Microsoft has been pushing aggressively to deprecate the local and funnel everyone to Microsoft online accounts , while Android and macOS/iOS are already in such a state by default. Coupled with the same accounts being used for online login, looks like a feature creep panopticon in the making. With Linux lucking out be default.
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why the downvotes on this?
One could cope that this regulation can not apply to Linux or other OSS operating systems. But this is only true unless the bootloaders on consumer devices are mandated to be closed next. We already have Secure Boot, the infrastructure is in place. It is currently optional, but a law like this can change that.
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The law is written so broadly, I think it applies to them already: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043 > (c) “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application. This is basically any program. > (e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an application. This would include any package manager like dnf/apt/pacman/etc. They facilitate download of applications from third parties. > (g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device. This sounds to me like it would include distro maintainers. They develop and/or control the OS. Also, would this include the kernel devs? How would they be responsible for the myriad of package managers. The overall law reeks of politicians not knowing what they're legislating.
Are lawmakers bored? Who is asking for this? Not the tax paying citizens.
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Lobbyists for intelligence agencies. It’s part of de-anonymization so you can be punished for speech online. See UK , Germany and Australia
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> Lobbyists for intelligence agencies. I think it's one peg below intel agencies. It's the local gov agencies that want that power. The 3 letter peeps can already tell who writes what, both at scale and targeted.
Is `ls` an application? Is `cat`? This thing is so broadly-written, the only thing saving you from needing to give you age to your toaster is that it's not a "general-purpose" computing device. Never mind that it can run DOOM...
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Do you download `ls` from anything resembling an "app store"?
Companies like OpenAI are advocating for this because it shifts the burden of responsibility off them. They don’t have to age verifying Microsoft is handling that for them.
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As a startup owner, if there has to be age verification, then I'm all for doing that at the OS level. As a human with privacy concerns, I'll continue using Linux.
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I think doing this on an OS level might be the most privacy focused way to do this but the issue is that this is not going to be the way this is implemented. Like, I’m not American and in Germany we have ID cards that actually have your age encoded on an NFC chip in the card and an ID number that encodes the age. Like, age is part of the ID number and checksum. You could totally do all of this age verification offline on device and just expose an API that offers the age of the user to applications. You’d never need to talk to the internet for this, the API just says if you are a minor or adult, the browser can pass that to websites who don’t need to collect personal data and everything is fine. But that’s not going to happen. It’s gonna be some AI facial recognition kinda garbage that is gonna send your face in every angle to Apple or Microsoft or another third party. As is common these days they are going to try really hard to absolve you as the user of any responsibility for the sake of protecting kids so they can’t let this be a simple offline thing where your personal information never ever have to leave the device because what if kids find a way around it? Well the obvious answer is don’t let your kids just use a computer without supervision but if people would do that we’d not be in need of this garbage anyway.
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So basically, you have no morals? Weird thing to admit online, but whatever.
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You’re on hacker news, a double digit percentage of posters think that doing whatever you can get away with is moral. Look at the thread on Block’s layoffs while they are profitable.
> “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, Client side JavaScript can be considered an application, and then ad business would need to first verify that I am over 18 in order to allow me to see their ads. Ultimate ad blocker.
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This law means that your operating system has to collect your age and make it avilable to every website/application so ad businesses can just get that data from our OS automatically and go right on serving ads without having to verify anything themselves.
Sure, I'll ask where the user is located, and if they choose California, I'll ask them for their age. And if they choose over 21 I'll scold them for voting for Gavin.
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Ask where the user is located and if they choose California tell them that your website/service/OS isn't available for users in CA because you will not be complying with this law and they'll have to go elsewhere.
No but then the next step is "well we need a way to enforce it because people are just lying about their age". I guess let me show a slope I found over here, just past the boiling frogs, watch your footing though, it's recently been greased and is quite steep.
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I was just at some .gov site from another HN post. It asked are you Over 18, I clicked No out of curiosity. Showed Access Denied, but the buttons stayed. I clicked Yes, and got in. I don't attribute to stupidity that which is clear malice. They'd don't actually give a flying fuck about what "kids" can get to, they only care about controlling everyone, of every age, as much as they possibly can.
As noted at the end of the article, I suspect the impact for many OS's is going to be that they add a line in the fine print somewhere saying not for use in California.
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You're assuming they don't want this just as much as the government. Still feel fine about self-installed Linux, but every OS and device we don't have control over, even ones powered by Linux, will be very happy to include it, assuming it's not too difficult to add.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down
>incarcerating people for saying the phrase "we love bacon" at a construction site You conveniently neglected to mention that it was the site where a _mosque_ was being constructed. Changes things a bit.
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>Changes things a bit. No, I don't think it does.
can be solved with a hybrid model that degrades when the central service is down. No?
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Well they provide that if you want. they have both a OTP dongle, a OTP loud speaker and one that uses FIDO U2F (though you need to pay for that one). https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/how-to-use-mitid/?language=en-gb
That's very true for a lot of PKI systems too. The revocation lists are published, but nobody is reading them.
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At least they exist. I've tried looking into this in the past, and I haven't really found any public passport revocation list, even of just numbers (i.e. without disclosing associated names or any other sensitive data).
Sweden have one other viable alternative that is Freja ID, it does not have at all the coverage as BankID but it's something.
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Another one just popped up recently though it does not have a lot of coverage if anywhere yet: https://corporate.e-boks.com/loesninger/e-wallet/e-boks-id/
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