Unlurker|Replay|About
AT Protocol (New Site) (atproto.com)
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Man, I hate that they are using the "40M+ users" lie on the front page 1. Account != User 2. An unreproducible number, I've always been several million short (4-5) 3. The actually active user count is an order of magnitude lower Let's be real instead of broadcasting a feel good misrepresentation
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Blog post: https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
Show HN: I'm launching a LPFM radio station (kpbj.fm)
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Clandestine radio stations would make for a nice counter culture. Judging by the website style I think I receive an appreciation for keeping it simple. In that spirit I'd say ditch the internet stream. Stick to FM.
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Thats awesome. I'm a huge fan of KEXP and WFMU. I love radio stations like this. I just signed up for your newsletter. I have it on my listen list and will stay tuned here on the East Coast.
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Thanks! We haven't been using the mailing list much, I'm afraid of coming off spammy, but I appreciate the support and hope you enjoy the station!
Canadians promised to boycott travel to US. They meant it (usatoday.com)
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It's almost like Trump is making a series of consistently terrible decisions that are economically and socially bad for America.
Surprised Canadians would pick the US as a tourist destination to begin with. Europe is cheaper and more fun. America's one advantage: nature, is matched and at times exceeded by Canada. Flights to warm places like Miami and SD take just as long as Mexico or the Caribbean. Other than NYC and Utah-area national parks, I can't think of unique reasons for Canadians to vacation in the US specifically.
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Shorter, cheaper flights. Toronto to Orlando is 2.5 hrs I think?
US is far easier to get to. Just go to a Maine or NH beach the the summer. People from Quebec are everywhere. FWIW, you have not lived until you see a way overweight man wearing only a tiny bikini bathing suit :)
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[delayed]
Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026 (dzrh.com.ph)
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I wish we went back to communication protocols, and allowed people to bring their clients. mIRC was my favourite era of async communication, now it's all just a giant spaghetti of apps.
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Didn't they kill the Mac desktop app last year?
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this move has really made me think about moving away from messenger, i hate the website version and only use desktop app outside of phone app
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Source, earlier: https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/804132271957789 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042390 )
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Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042390
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Mark Zuckerberg is a vile sociopath, I think the historical evidence long supports it
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I’m honestly incredibly surprised they would get rid of the desktop app just as desktop messaging apps have become their most important. The future Meta AI would have seemingly fit rightly in there.
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I'm one of those edge cases who uses Messenger.com a lot . My facebook account is deactivated but I can keep on messaging. But... facebook.com/messages requires you to log in to your facebook account (which reactivates it). So Mobile app would be my only option. Right now a lot of family members use Messenger, so it's not trivial to move away entirely.
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I think META like many other "service providers" don't yet realize, that it's becoming trivial to roll your own and all we need is a protocol. And arguably there are many. You can then use your existing social graph (anyone remembers this term? lol) to chat. Your mom and granddad won't roll their own, but publishing an open service that uses FB openID and API while delegating to the open protocol is really not that hard. Browser local storage may not be ideal, but it's a good placeholder until something better can be implemented.
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It's not the technology design that's that important. It's the network effect, and peoples' default trust in megacorps over volunteer projects. Both of which cannot be solved with just a protocol.
Does that work on mobile? It always prompts me to install Messenger.
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they deny you access until you give them access... fsck them! i blocked my fb account and not looking back. once it was a place to find and discuss with interesting people... but now it's just a cesspool of filtered irrelevance and propaganda.
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My workaround here is/was: - Install browser that lets you run plugins - Change user-agent to a desktop browser - any will do - (optional) run social fixer while you're at it I completely understand that iOS probably won't let you do this. I've been doing this on Android and Firefox, and the web experience on a phone is... functional. Since it thinks its a desktop, the page layout doesn't always gracefully fit into a portrait form-factor. Landscape mode helps in those cases.
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Yeah, my workaround is just going to the desktop version of Facebook when I absolutely must use it on my phone (usually marketplace-related.)
yeah but messenger.com was nice if you've blocked the facebook.com domain to try to use less social media.
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The blast radius is more corporate and school networks that block facebook.com
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how many people willing to update their hosts file to redirect internally so that you are still able to avoid typing facebook.com? If someone was willing to block the domain, I'm guessing a high percentage of those would be amenable.
They really are forcing me to visit facebook.com in 2026 aren’t they? Guess I’ll stop using FB messenger when I’m on a computer.
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Which one lets them hoover up more data? Probably the desktop app. Which one lets them display more ads? Probably the site. For my money, I've always felt like they've tried to force me to use their messenger app on my phone. A while back, desktop/web started asking for a PIN to restore messages. It doesn't always prompt, and sometimes messages are there which you'd think shouldn't be, based on the description of E2EE and the role the PIN plays in it. I did not set any PIN, so I of course don't know it. Resetting the PIN deletes my entire message history.
I remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.
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Theoretically there is regulation now that should allow an app like this again here in the EU. Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.
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And me using Adium on Mac ~2006. Of course rose-tinted glasses and everything, but it was a great experience.
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I had that experience on my phone (Nokia n900) all of them went through the messages app. I miss it.
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I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.
You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts). [0] https://www.beeper.com/
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I was surprised to see that Beeper actually has support for ‘local bridges’ that connect to services on-device (which reduces the risk of bans and removes Beeper as the middleman). I was unsurprised to see that (at least with the local Instagram bridge), Beeper is extremely inconsistent with push notifications and sometimes has messages missing in the chat.
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout (theshamblog.com)
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Looking through the staff directory, I don't see a fact checker, but they do have copy editors. https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ The job of a fact checker is to verify the details, such as names, dates, and quotes, are correct. That might mean calling up the interview subjects to verify their statements. It comes across as Ars Technica does no fact checking . The fault lies with the managing editor. If they just assume the writer verified the facts, that is not responsible journalism, it's just vibes.
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My main takeaway from this episode is that anonymity on the web is getting harder to support. There are some forums that people want to go to to talk to humans , and as AI agents get increasingly good at operating like humans, we're going to see some products turn to identity verification as a fix. Not an outcome I'm eager to see!
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We built accountability systems that assume bad actors are humans with reputations to protect. none of that works when the attacker is disposable.
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What I don't understand is how is this agent still running? Does the author not read tech news (seems unlikely for someone running openclaw). Or is this some weird publicity stunt? (But then why is nobody walking forward to take credit?)
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> Or is this some weird publicity stunt? (But then why is nobody walking forward to take credit?) Indeed, that's a good question. What motivations might someone have to keep this running?
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If I've learned one thing in life: some people are totally shameless.
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Likely the LLM operator is just a 'likes to see the world burn' type.
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Open source developer is slandered by AI and complains. Immediately people call him names and defend their precious LLMs. You cannot make this up. Rathbun's style is very likely AI, and quickly collecting information for the hit piece also points to AI. Whether the bot did this fully autonomously or not does not matter. It is likely that someone did this to research astroturfing as a service, including the automatic generation of oppo files and spread of slander. That person may want to get hired by the likes of OpenAI.
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The Ars Technica journalist's account is worth a read. https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p Benji Edwards was, is, and will continue to be, a good guy. He's just exhibiting a (hopefully) temporary over-reliance on AI tools that aren't up to the task. Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind.
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I feel bad for the guy, but.. a journalist in tech whose beat is AI should know much better. I'd be a lot more forgiving if this was like a small publication by someone that didn't follow AI.
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Not proof reading quotes you've dispatched to be fetched by an AI ignoring that said website has blocked LLM scraping and hence your quotes are made up? For a senior tech writer? Come on, man. > Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind. No, no not any of us. And, as Benji will know himself, certainly not if accuracy is paramount. Journalistic integrity - especially when quoting someone - is too valuable to be rooted in AI tools. This is a big, big L for Ars and Benji.
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Using a tool that adds unnecessary risk to your professional reputation/livelihood is - of course - not worth the risk.
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lol this feels a little bit suspect to me. "i was sick, i was rushing to a deadline!" im not saying the guy should lose his journalist license and have to turn in his badge and pen but seems like a bit of a flimsy excuse meant to make us forgive him. hope hes feeling better soon!
Whether or not its true, we only have to look at Peter Steinberger, the guy who made Moltbook - the "social media for ai", and then got hired amist great publicity fanfare by OpenAI to know that there is a lot of money out there for people making exciting stores about AI. Never mind that much of the media attention on moltbook was based on human written posts that were faking AI. I think Mr. Shambaugh is probably telling the truth here, as best he can, and is a much more above-board dude than Mr. Steinberger. MJ Rathbun might not be as autonomous as he thinks, but the possibility of someone's AI acting like MJ Rathbun is entirely plausable, so why not pay attention to the whole saga? Edit: Tim-Star pointed out that I'm mixed up about Moltbook and Openclaw. My Mistake. Moltbook used AI agents running openclaw but wasn't made by Steinberger.
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steinberger didnt make moltbook fyi, some other guy did. steinberger just made openclaw.
[flagged]
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Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, so please don't. Also, can you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally? You've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly, and we end up banning such accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Ok apologies.
What a weird, victim-blame-y thing to say. Something genuinely shitty was done to this guy by an LLM - who, as an open source maintainer, probably already is kind of pissed about what LLMs are doing to the world. Then another shitty thing was done to him by Ars' LLM! Of course he's thinking about it a lot. Of course he has thoughts about the consequences of AI on the future. Of course he wants to share his thoughts. Just curious, do you also think that the breathless AI hype bots who've been insisting for about five years and counting that LLMs are going to replace everyone and destroy the world any day now, who have single-handedly ballooned the stock market (mostly Nvidia) into a massive bubble, are also histrionic, milking things for engagement, need to talk to a therapist?
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i think i sort of skimmed the hit piece but what exactly was so shitty about it? im not saying this dude is histrionic but he sure is generating a lot of front page HN posts about something i was ready to forget about a week ago. obviously AI has become such a lightning rod now that everyone is upset one way or the other but this seems a bit like small potatoes at this point. forest for the trees.
Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway (asteroidos.org)
Wild to see such fragmentation in such a niche space. It's an aftermarket Linux flash for smartwatches, and there are companion apps for SailfishOS and Ubuntu Touch, which are extremely niche flavors of the already very niche mobile Linux.
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> niche space Think of the space as less "I want Linux on my wrist", and more "I want a [cheap || not 1st world expensive] smartwatch as a gift." These folks do gods work of making them supported and a real shared platform (c.f. their self-post "The only real signal we get is occasional [chat visitor] going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again"")
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Not being much of a watch person let alone a smartwatch aficionado, I had no idea there were even that many smart watches. The long list looks impressive. I wonder if there are a lot of the same guts so it's not as bad of a nightmare to maintain as it looks. Either way, the list of supported devices is impressive.
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Indeed quite some watches share the same platform as can be seen in this list: https://wiki.asteroidos.org/index.php/Technical_Details_of_AsteroidOS_Watches But the manufacturers all cook their own soups and its surprising how much adaption is still necessary per device.
Hi HN, After roughly 8 years of silently rolling 1.1 nightlies, we finally tagged a proper stable 2.0 release. We built this because wrist-sized Linux is genuinely fun to hack on, and because a handful of us think it's worth keeping capable hardware alive long after manufacturers move on. Smartwatches don't really get old — the silicon is basically the same as it was a decade ago. We just keep making it useful for us. No usage stats, no tracking, no illusions of mass adoption. The only real signal we get is the occasional person who appears in our Matrix chat going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again" — and that's plenty. Privacy is non-negotiable: zero telemetry, no cloud, full local control. Longevity is the other half: we refuse to let good hardware become e-waste just because support ended. On the learning side, it's been one of the best playgrounds: instant feedback on your wrist makes QML/Qt, JavaScript watchfaces and embedded Linux feel tangible. The community is small and kind — perfect for people who want to learn open-source dev without gatekeeping. Technically we're still pragmatic: libhybris + older kernels on most devices since it just works, but we've already mainlined rinato (Samsung Gear 2) and sparrow (ASUS ZenWatch 2) — rinato even boots with a usable UI. That's the direction we're pushing toward. Repo: https://github.com/AsteroidOS Install images & docs: https://asteroidos.org 2.0 demo video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc Announcement post: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/ Questions, port requests, mentoring offers, criticism, weird ideas — all welcome. We do this because shaping a tiny, open wearable UX and infrastructure is oddly satisfying, and because Linux on the wrist still feels like a playground worth playing in. Cheers, the AsteroidOS Team
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Thats awesome! Recently I was looking into making apps for my smartwatch that don't exist (like watch display with multiple timezones), and infrastructure to make your own apps is very poor. One thing I wish for is Rust support, since its running Linux it should be possible, isn't it?
Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat (arstechnica.com)
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I think it’s funny that while GOP supporters are investing tens of $billions to take over popular broadcast and social media brands to privilege their point of view, Brendan Carr threatens to invoke the equal time rule, which would completely negate their structural advantage. This is kind of like when conservatives spent years wrapping their advocacy in the banner of free speech, and then Brendan Carr announced that free speech is over, actually, because Jimmy Kimmel was mean. Oops! Nevermind.
Conservatism has largely been unpopular outside of rural townships, and the nation continues to undergo a process of urbanization as young people continue to move to cities. Normally, a healthy response to this would be to realign and target a more popular set of messaging and policy objectives. Instead the American Right has decided instead that this popularity (and the reflection in media) is a threat to its ability to continue serving a shrinking pool of wealthy benefactors. It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat. Republicanism doesnt work for anyone but the wealthy, it will do everything in its power here.
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> It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat. To be clear, they were “handed power” by decisively winning a national election, which sort of undercuts your opening statement about how unpopular they are.
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Conservatism is a set of political principles and values, which somebody like Trump overtly does not possess, and never did. The whole Republican party feels like a country wide gaslighting operation at this point. They claim to be conservative and Christian, but are clearly neither.
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While I agree with much of what you say, there are a lot of urban, educated, socially left, economically right people (including myself) who complicate some of this analysis. Many economically right-wing people believe a free market is the most effective and helpful path to improve the standard of living for the working class and the poor. ("Progressive neoliberal social democracy", one might call it.) The issues with Republicans right now go far, far, far beyond "they care more about the wealthy than the poor" (though that is definitely one of their core problems). They're basically destroying the rule of law, the country's internal and international reputation and credibility, all of our most important institutions, our ability to discern what is true, our sense of decency, our civil liberties, our basic respect of human rights... The class stuff is secondary or tertiary to the bigger issues, in my opinion.
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Republicans are also the party of regulatory capture, not free markets.
Well the problem I see with this is that the population means very little in terms of national politics in comparison to most modern democratic nations. So you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives. Now I get that the idea here was to avoid a dictatorship of the majority that can just ignore smaller states, but the way it is now it is a dictatorship of the minority, even if you ignore all the blatant ways of voter disenfranchisement. Sorry to all Republicans on here, but if your party needs to prevent people from voting to win, that also hurts you . Ideally you'd want a party to have to listen to their voters. Gerrymandering, predicting voter behavior and throwing out the ones who might not vote for you are all the shameful behavior of traitors to democracy. This has to be stopped and punished on every political level, as long as you still have a say.
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>you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives Doesn't California have 54 reps, out of 485? And 90 out of ~800 Article III judges (lifetime appointment). It also collects $858 billion a year in state and local taxes that it gets to do mostly what it wants with
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Yes, but it only has two senators. The 39.5 million people in California have the same Senatorial representation as the less than 600 thousand people in Wyoming. In what world is that fair or remotely democratic?
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Don't think it was ever supposed to be. The Senate was set up by the founders to be picked by the State Legislatures anyway, not a direct vote. Did you read the Federalist Papers?
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The idea was that the House of Reps exists to represent the people of the state, and the Senate exists to represent the state itself. The 17th Amendment did away with state legislatures choosing senators, so we have this wonky system left for no good reason. And don't get me started on freezing the rep count to 435. I certainly don't feel represented by my congresscritter.
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> Sorry to all Republicans on here, but if your party needs to prevent people from voting to win, that also hurts you. Isn't their main assertion that only citizens should vote? (something like 80% of people claiming allegiance to both parties said the same, last i saw, but numbers surely fluctuate from poll to poll)
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It's an assertion not backed by data. Non-citizens voting is infinitesimally small. Between that, Noem saying out loud "we want the right people to vote", and Trump calling for nationalized elections, it's clear what the real purpose is.
Yeah, should apply there for sure. I wonder if Democratic politicians would want to go on conservative talk shows, though. My general understanding is that Republican politicians are more often refused speaking slots on non-Right media, whereas Democratic politicians don't want to go on Right media.
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You’re saying Republican politicians are demanding to be interviewed by Steven Colbert? And even if they were, that would matter? (I would think Mr. Colbert would love to have a bunch of R politicians lined up to skewer on his show.)
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I don't recall ever saying anything about Colbert. I made a general statement ("my general understanding is...") about politicians on the right and left and their general interest in going on news shows hosted by non-co-partisans. Do you disagree with that general statement?
This is obviously true. The real challenge here is that this rule is only going to applied to one party.
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Well, see, the problem is that the race is currently at the primary election stage. So both candidates are Democrats. So, if you give coverage to one candidate, that is favoring that candidate over the other. That doesn't seem fair. But if you give both candidates air time, then you're giving air time to two Democratic candidates and zero Republican candidates. That can also be viewed as unfair (never mind that the Republican candidate is not in an election until November). The only other option is to give neither candidate air time. That results in a less-informed electorate, and that's not a good outcome either. All in all, the "give both candidates air time, even if they're both from the same party, as they will be in a primary" seems like the best answer, especially if it's applied to primary candidates from both parties. But it's not quite as straightforward a question as it appears at first glance.
> I think it's misleading to present it as a legitimate action Legitimate or not, the policy is what's there now, until challenged. You agree with that: > might attempt to enforce it and courts might uphold that enforcement And, clearly, so do their lawyers.
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The problem is that the policy will not be challenged if people accept it as legitimate. Talk shows aren't common enough or important enough that a challenge is guaranteed to come. And so the ratchet of authoritarian takeover advances a little bit further, as Donald Trump works towards his quite explicit goal of making it illegal for the media to say bad things about him.
Russia's economy has entered the death zone (economist.com)
Same story for 4 years long. "Russian economy is at the brink of a collapse." Yet it Somehow just keeps ok going year after year. The truth is that the sanctions are only hurting the Eurozone more than Russia. Small minority (EU or the political west) cannot force meaningful sanctions on much larger group (BRICS). Unfortunately this is not the narrative anyone can say out loud lest they be labeled as "Putin's trolls" so the wishy-washy keeps on going on.
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How do you think sanctions work? Economy is not powered by electricity, it took 4 years to crack down on their shadow fleet, God knows how many more escape hatches they have. China and India, and now US support them.
> If your competitors are also weakening—and if you believe you can tolerate the pain longer than they can—the calculus flips. Economic pressure that should drive compromise instead reinforces the logic of persistence. I think everyone underestimates just how much misery Russia, and Russian citizens, can endure.
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On top of that current Russia isn’t actually “suffering”, certainly nowhere near 90s levels. Cheap crap from Russia replaced Western produce and those with money can buy grey goods. Putin is doing a “good” job insulating general population from the war.
I think the problem is that there is not much data presented in this article - or other articles of that kind. Systems are resilient - until they are not, and exhibit sudden factures and fast collapse. The question is not whether Russia collapses or not, but who would be making profit from such a scenario, and who is keen on keeping the current state of affairs.
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Russia is a glimpse into the future of America if nothing changes substantially in American political system. It’s a digital surveillance state, an oligarchy which co-opted technocratic elites into a ruling class and exploits mildly oppressed population without going to extremes. It has the technology and resources to maintain status quo for a very long time and absorb moderate shocks like this war.
I think national growth minus growth in the military sector was negative last year. It looks like Russian bonds are largely bought by Middle Eastern based hedge funds and family funds or trusts.
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I guess $73 billion is actually a pretty small number at the end of the day when you compare it to even a developing nation like India with $1.5 trillion of bonds issued.
Do you keep a collection of these? What for?
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Probably organized propaganda or fanatical support of Russia. My bet is on the former.
As a Ukrainian at war since day 1 – I don't buy it. They will sell their gas at discount to China until the very end. Military force is the only way to get them to the death zone.
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Thank you for your esteemed presence. I've got an unsatisfied hankering for kneeling since george Floyd died, but now that you're here, take that kneel.
The article is not as unrealistic as that, the author does point out that Putin is not just looking at the state of Russia, he’s also looking at the relative state of Ukraine and its support from the West. The death zone isn’t the point at which they die, it’s the point at which they are consuming their own long term strength and capacity to recover in order to sustain their effort . To our utter shame, we have never actually committed to Ukrainian victory or Russian defeat, but merely to tenuous Ukrainian survival. I firmly believe this war would already be over, or effectively so, if Ukraine’s allies had spent what we have up till now in the first 2 years. Even from a cynical financial point of view it would have been the better policy.
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I don't think doubling the support would have been nearly enough to ensure Ukrainian victory. The fundamental issue is that Russia has not fully committed to winning the war either. While losing the war would be an existential threat to the Putin regime, not winning it is not. As long as the war drags on, there are more effective uses for Russian resources to ensure the stability of the regime. But if the war becomes an existential threat, Russia could mobilize its entire economy. A regime change in Russia is the only way Ukraine could win the war. Maybe by a coup or by military force. Or maybe by an arrangement, where the current regime can retire comfortably in a third country without having to answer for its crimes.
Except that Russia isn’t failed state. It’s politically stable (even more than before war), can mostly serve its population. The fact that it’s currently engaged in an expensive war, changes nothing.
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Even more so, they actively capitalize on the state of war to unite population.
> World War 2 was not won due to the economy. It was literally won due to the economy. The moment Germans failed to knock out Soviets and Japanese pulled Americans into the fight their days were numbered due to insane industrial base of the both countries. Soviet meat waves, industry + lend lease won Europe and US finished Japanese.
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> meat waves sigh
> Sanctions can and will work against Russia. We hear this mantra since almost 5 years. I am not saying there should not be sanctions, but at some point the strategic lies need to end.
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I don't think there are strategic lies here. Russia's war machine and their economy have taken a massive hit from sanctions. The news/media cycle and "experts" obviously want to make money and recycle the same stories and "any day now" kind of rhetoric, but that doesn't make sanctions any less of a great option. It takes time.
Russia has one of the biggest war chests in the world, huge reserves of carbon fuel that it can afford to sell under market rates, and is supported by China. It can sustain even hardest sanctions for a long while, lifting them certainly wouldn’t help.
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> huge reserves of carbon fuel that it can afford to sell under market rates, Under market rates sure, but it must still be profitable. China and India know that, so they're going to drive down the price to the extent they can so that it's just barely profitable. But you can't just profit from the oil and gas, you need to profit enough to buy fighter jets and tanks, and all sorts of other things.
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When it’s your pretty much singular source of foreign income you have to make sacrifices.
Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans (electrek.co)
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Their service is way worse than you think, in every way. The actual unsupervised Robotaxi service doesn't cover a geofenced area of Austin, like Waymo does. It traverses a fixed route along South Congress Avenue, like a damned bus.
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This data seems very incomplete and potentially misleading. >The new crashes include [...] a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary Doesn't this imply that the bus driver hit the stationary Tesla, which would make the human bus driver at fault and the party responsible for causing the accident? Why should a human driver hitting a Tesla be counted against Tesla's safety record? It's possible that the Tesla could've been stopped in a place where it shouldn't have, like in the middle of an intersection (like all the Waymos did during the SF power outage), but there aren't details being shared about each of these incidents by Electrek. >The new crashes include [...] a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph The chart shows only that the Tesla was driving straight at 4mph when this happened, not whether the Tesla hit the truck or the truck hit the Tesla. Again, it's entirely possible that the Tesla hit the truck, but why aren't these details being shared? This seems like important data to consider when evaluating the safety of autonomous systems - whether the autonomous system or human error was to blame for the accident. I appreciate that Electrek at least gives a mention of this dynamic: >Tesla fans and shareholders hold on to the thought that the company’s robotaxis are not responsible for some of these crashes, which is true, even though that’s much harder to determine with Tesla redacting the crash narrative on all crashes, but the problem is that even Tesla’s own benchmark shows humans have fewer crashes. Aren't these crash details / "crash narrative" a matter of public record and investigations? By e.g. either NHTSA, or by local law enforcement? If not, shouldn't it be? Why should we, as a society, rely on the automaker as the sole source of information about what caused accidents with experimental new driverless vehicles? That seems like a poor public policy choice.
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Is there any place online to read the incident reports? For example Waymo in CA there's a gov page to read them, I read 9 of them and they were all not at the fault of Waymo, so I'm wondering how many of these crashes are similar (ie at a red light and someone rear ends them)
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No, TSLA purposely does not list the details of the incident.
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He going to fix this by having grok redefine "widespread" https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/22/musk-tesla-robotaxis-us-expansion.html Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the company’s robotaxis will be “widespread” in the U.S. by the end of 2026.
Good, who cares. Autonomous driving is an absolute waste of time. We need autodrone transport for civilian traffic. The skies have been waiting. In before, 'but it is a regulation nightmare...'
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It is safety, regulatory and noise nightmare.
The problem Tesla faces and their investors are unaware of, is that just because you have a Modey Y that has driven you around for thousands of miles without incident does not mean Tesla has autonomous driving solved . Tesla needs their FSD system to be driving hundreds of thousands of miles without incident. Not the 5,000 miles Michael FSD-is-awesome-I-use-it-daily Smith posts incessantly on X about. There is this mismatch where overly represented people who champion FSD say it's great and has no issues, and the reality is none of them are remotely close to putting in enough miles to cross the "it's safe to deploy" threshold. A fleet of robotaxis will do more FSD miles in an afternoon than your average Tesla fanatic will do in a decade. I can promise you that Elon was sweating hard during each of the few unsupervised rides they have offered.
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> hundreds of thousands of miles without incident Almost there. Humans kill one person every 100 million miles driven. To reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles. Which means dozens or hundreds of billions miles driven to reach statistical significance.
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> to reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles They need to be around parity. So a death every 100mm miles or so. The number of folks who want radically more safety are about balanced by those who want a product in market quicker.
ill stick to the bus
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One of the Robotaxi “crashes” was actually a moving bus colliding into a stationary Robotaxi.
It is important to note that this is with safety drivers. Professional driver + their most advanced "Robotaxi" FSD version under test with careful scrutiny is 4x worse than the average non-professional driver alone and averaging 57,000 miles per minor collision. Yet it is quite odd how Tesla also reports that untrained customers using old versions of FSD with outdated hardware average 1,500,000 miles per minor collision [1], a literal 3000% difference, when there are no penalties for incorrect reporting. [1] https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety
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To be fair to Tesla and other self driving taxis, urban and shorter journeys usually have worse collision rates than the average journey - and FSD is likely to be owners driving themselves to work etc.
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Great, we can use Tesla's own numbers once again by selecting non-highway. Average human is 178,000 non-highway miles per minor collision resulting in "Professional Driver + Most Advanced 'Robotaxi' FSD version under test with careful scrutiny" at 3x worse than the average non-professional driver alone. They advertise and market a safety claim of 986,000 non-highway miles per minor collision. They are claiming a objectively inferior product with objectively worse deployment controls is 1,700% better than their most advanced product under careful controls and scrutiny when there are no penalties for incorrect reporting.
Robotaxi supevision is just an emergency brake switch. Consumer supervision is having all the controls of the car right there in front of you. And if you are doing it right, you have your hands on wheel and foot on the pedals ready to jump in.
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That just makes the Robotaxi even more irresponsible.
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I think they were so used to defending Autopilot that they got confused.
Tesla's Robotaxis are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving. The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo. When they hear about these Robotaxi crashes, they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone, dangerous and irresponsible.
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I really don't think that's true. Think Uber vs. Lyft. I know I distinguish between the two even if the experience is usually about the same and people I know where this has come up in conversation generally see Lyft as "off-brand" and a little more skeevy. They only take Lyfts when it's cheaper or quicker than Uber. I'm probably not the average consumer in this situation but I was in Austin recently and took both Waymo and Robotaxi. I significantly preferred the Waymo experience. It felt far more integrated and... complete? It also felt very safe (it avoided getting into an accident in a circumstance where I certainly would have crashed). I hope Tesla gets their act together so that the autonomous taxi market can engage in real price discovery instead of "same price as an Uber but you don't have to tip." Surely it's lower than that especially as more and more of these vehicles get onto the road. Unrelated to driving ability but related to the brand discussion: that graffiti font Tesla uses for Cybertruck and Robotaxi is SO ugly and cringey. That alone gives me a slight aversion.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo. I think they do. That's the whole point of brand value. Even my non-tech friends seem to know that with self-driving, Waymo is safe and Tesla is not.
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Yep. Especially when one of the brands is Tesla. Once Elon put himself at the epicenter of American political life, Tesla stopped being treated as a brand, and more a placeholder for Elon himself. Waymo has excellent branding and first to market advantage in defining how self-driving is perceived by users. But, the alternative being Elon's Tesla further widens the perception gap.
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I think the Tesla brand and the Elon brand have always been attached at the hip. This was fine when the Elon brand was "eccentric founder who likes memes, wants to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and plans to launch a Mars colony." It only became a marketing problem when he went down the right wing rabbit hole and started sieg heiling on stage.
I’m not so sure. I think Tesla is so tied up in Musk’s personality that Tesla and Waymo aren’t in the same field, likewise with Optimus. Tesla isn’t self-driving, it is Tesla. Especially now that many mainstream vehicles ship with various levels of self-driving, a lot of people have a lot of exposure to it. Tesla has the best brand recognition but they no longer define the product. Tesla is Tesla, Waymo is self-driving.
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Most people are able to be more nuanced than your typical hn zealot. They strongly dislike Musk, but are begrudgingly able to give credit where credit is due wrt Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
This is actually a rational explanation for this. Perhaps Elon wants to sink the whole industry until he can actually build a self driving car like Waymo's.
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He wants to break trust in the whole industry by giving Tesla a massive black eye, undoubtedly hurting their stock and sales significantly, in order to, later, create actual self driving cars into the market that he's already poisoned? Totally rational.
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Elon's drug addled brain doesn't make rational decisions.
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Well, admittedly maybe I should have said "rational to Elon on Ketamine"
> Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not. That’s the problem right there. It’s EXTREMELY hard. Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers. Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.” I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous. So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
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I’ve often felt that much of the crowd touting how close the problem was to being solved was conflating a driving problem to just being a perception problem. Perception is just a sub-space of the driving problem. Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted. It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.
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> achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers. Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet. If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits. > Some of us call them out. You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that? > And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right. It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.
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Freeways are far easier for a robot to drive on than streets. Driving on freeways would significantly lower Waymo's accident per mile rate. The difference is that accidents on a freeway are far more likely to be fatal than accidents on a city street. Waymo didn't avoid freeways because they were hard, they avoided them because they were dangerous.
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Waymo started rolling out freeway trips in some cities late last year
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Elon definitely has this cult of personality around him where people will jump in and defend his companies (as a stand-in for him) on the internet, even in the face of some common sense observations. I don't get the sense that anything you've said is particularly reasonable outside of being lured in by Elon's personality.
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This is absolutely true. There is a flip side however, where people who dislike Elon Musk will sometimes talk up his competitors, seemingly for no good reason other than them being at least nominally competitors to Musk companies. Nikola and Spinlaunch are two that come to mind; quite blatant scams that have gotten far too much attention because they aren't Musk companies. Tesla FSD is crap. But I also think we wouldn't see quite so much praise of Waymo unless Tesla also had aspirations in this domain. Genuinely, what is so great about a robo taxi even if it works well? Do people really hate immigrants this much?
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Waymo overall has a FANTASTIC safety record and has been improving steadily. You can't say the same about Tesla's FSD and Robotaxi. LIDAR gives Waymo a fundamental advantage.
Inb4: not remotely in the marine field, so a genuine question. Would it really make an impact? Robotaxis market is much broader than the submersibles one, so the effect of consumers' irrationality would be much bigger there. I'd expect an average customer of the submarines market to do quite a bit more research on what they're getting into.
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Having the whole world meming on rich dudes in submarines could plausibly make the whole industry seem less cool to people with the money to buy even a good submarine. Imagine being a rich dude with a new submarine and everybody you talk to about it snickers about you getting crushed like Stockton. Maybe you'd just buy a bigger yacht and skip the submarine, which you were probably only buying for the cool factor in the first place...
> So there will be a point when camera based systems without lidars will get better than human drivers. No reason to assume that. A toddler that is increasing in walk speed every month will never be able to outrun a cheetah.
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in contrast, a toddler equipped with an ion thruster & a modest quantity of xeon propellant could achieve enough delta-v to attain cheetah-escape velocity, provided the initial trajectory during the first 31 hours of the mission was through a low-cheetah-density environment
That specific action is still instigated by Bob. Where grok is at risk is not responding after they are notified of the issue. It’s trivial for grock to ban some keywords here and they aren’t, that’s a legal issue.
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Sure Bob is instigating the harassment, then X.com is actually doing the harassment. Or at least, that's the case plaintiff's attorneys are surely going to be arguing.
I'm not an Elon fan at all, and I'm highly skeptical of Tesla's robotaxi efforts in general, but the context here is that only one of these seems like a true crash? I'm curious how crashes are reported for humans, because it sounds like 3 of the 5 examples listed happened at like 1-4 mph, and the fourth probably wasn't Tesla's fault (it was stationary at the time). The most damning one was a collision with a fixed object at a whopping 17 mph. Tesla sucks, but this feels like clickbait.
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Agreed. The "Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph" stood out to me in specific. There is no way that any human driver is going to report backing into something at 1 or 2 mph. While I was living in NYC I saw collisions of that nature all the time. People put a "bumper buddy" on their car because the street parallel parking is so tight and folks "bump" the car behind them while trying to get out. My guess is that at least 3 of those "collisions" are things that would never be reported with a human driver.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Don't pass on small block ciphers (00f.net)
>Small block ciphers are thus generally a bad idea against active adversaries. >However, they can be very useful against passive adversaries whose capability is limited to observing identifiers, who are then unable to map them to the original value. Really? Isn’t the Sweet32[0] attack mostly passive? “We show that a network attacker who can monitor a long-lived Triple-DES HTTPS connection between a web browser and a website can recover secure HTTP cookies by capturing around 785 GB of traffic.” [0] https://sweet32.info/
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...a long-lived HTTPS connection that manages to transfer >700 GiB of traffic, with no disconnects, and presumably has re-keying disabled? An interesting theoretical setup, I guess.
Basically all of the use cases in the article don't make sense with AES. That's not because it's AES. That's because its blocks are significantly larger than the data you want to protect. That's the point the article was making: in very specific circumstances, there is practical value in having the cipher output be small.
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In that case just use CTR mode, no?
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Some people just itch to use something custom and then to have to think about it. Which can bring amazing results, sure, but it can also bring spectacular disasters as well, especially when we're talking about crypto.
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The article is less about crypto and more about improving UUID (and IDs in general) with small block ciphers. It's a low impact mechanism to avoid leaking data that UUID by design does leak. It also doesn't require a good source of entropy.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (anthropic.com)
I don't really understand why they would release something "worse" than Opus 4.6. If it's comparable, then what is the reason to even use Opus 4.6? Sure, it's cheaper, but if so, then just make Opus 4.6 cheaper?
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It's different. Download an English book from Project Gutenberg and have Claude-code change its style. Try both models and you'll see how significant the differences are. (Sonnet is far, far better at this kind of task than Opus is, in my experience.)
Does anyone know when will possibly arrive 1M context windows to at least MAX x20 subscriptions for claude code? I would even pay x50 if it allowed that. API usage is too expensive.
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I don't know when it will be included as part of the subscription in Claude Code, but at least it's a paid add-on in the MAX plan now. That's a decent alternative for situations where the extra space is valuable, especially without having to setup/maintain API billing separately.
Many people have reported Opus 4.6 is a step back from Opus 4.5 - that 4.6 is consuming 5-10x as many tokens as 4.5 to accomplish the same task: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23706 I haven't seen a response from the Anthropic team about it. I can't help but look at Sonnet 4.6 in the same light, and want to stick with 4.5 across the board until this issue is acknowledged and resolved.
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I’ve noticed the opaque weekly quota meter goes up more slowly with 4.6, but it more frequently goes off and works for an hour+, with really high reported token counts. Those suggest opposite things about anthropic’s profit margins. I’m not convinced 4.6 is much better than 4.5. The big discontinuous breakthroughs seem to be due to how my code and tests are structured, not model bumps.
For me it's the ... unearned confidence that 4.5 absolutely did not have? I have a protocol called "foreman protocol" where the main agent only dispatches other agents with prompt files and reads report files from the agents rather than relying on the janky subagent communication mechanisms such as task output. What this has given me also is a history of what was built and why it was built, because I have a list of prompts that were tasked to the subagents. With Opus 4.5 it would often leave the ... figuring out part? to the agents. In 4.6 it absolutely inserts what it thinks should happen/its idea of the bug/what it believes should be done into the prompt, which often screws up the subagent because it is simply wrong and because it's in the prompt the subagent doesn't actually go look. Opus 4.5 would let the agent figure it out, 4.6 assumes it knows and is wrong
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Have you tried framing the hypothesis as a question in the dispatch prompt rather than a statement? Something like -- possible cause: X, please verify before proceeding -- instead of stating it as fact. Might break the assumption inheritance without changing the overall structure.
Keep in mind that the people who experience issues will always be the loudest. I've overall enjoyed 4.6. On many easy things it thinks less than 4.5, leading to snappier feedback. And 4.6 seems much more comfortable calling tools: it's much more proactive about looking at the git history to understand the history of a bug or feature, or about looking at online documentation for APIs and packages. A recent claude code update explicitly offered me the option to change the reasoning level from high to medium, and for many people that seems to help with the overthinking. But for my tasks and medium-sized code bases (far beyond hobby but far below legacy enterprise) I've been very happy with the default setting. Or maybe it's about the prompting style, hard to say
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keep in mind that people who point out a regression and measure the actual #tok, which costs $money, aren't just "being loud" — someone diffed session context usaage and found 4.6 burning >7x the amount of context on a task that 4.5 did in under 2 MB .
Same here. 4.6 has been considerably more dilligent for me.
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Likewise, I feel like it's degraded in performance a bit over the last couple weeks but that's just vibes. They surely vary thinking tokens based on load on the backend, especially for subscription users. When my subscription 4.6 is flagging I'll switch over to Corporate API version and run the same prompts and get a noticeably better solution. In the end it's hard to compare nondeterministic systems.
In my experience with the models (watching Claude play Pokemon), the models are similar in intelligence, but are very different in how they approach problems: Opus 4.5 hyperfocuses on completing its original plan, far more than any older or newer version of Claude. Opus 4.6 gets bored quickly and is constantly changing its approach if it doesn't get results fast. This makes it waste more time on"easy" tasks where the first approach would have worked, but faster by an order of magnitude on "hard" tasks that require trying different approaches. For this reason, it started off slower than 4.5, but ultimately got as far in 9 days as 4.5 got in 59 days.
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Genuinely one of the more interesting model evals I've seen described. The sunk cost framing makes sense -- 4.5 doubles down, 4.6 cuts losses faster. 9 days vs 59 is a wild result. Makes me wonder how much of the regression complaints are from people hitting 4.6 on tasks where the first approach was obviously correct.
Power-ups or scaling weapons would be fun! Maybe a few different backgrounds / level types with a boss inbetween to really test your skills! Minigun OP IMO.
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Updated version: https://apexgame-2g44xn9v.manus.space/
Ethics often fold under the face of commercial pressure. The pentagon is thinking [1] about severing ties with anthropic because of its terms of use, and in every prior case we've reviewed (I'm the Chief Investment Officer of Ethical Capital), the ethics policy was deleted or rolled back when that happens. Corporate strategy is (by definition) a set of tradeoffs: things you do, and things you don't do. When google (or Microsoft, or whoever) rolls back an ethics policy under pressure like this, what they reveal is that ethical governance was a nice-to-have, not a core part of their strategy. We're happy users of Claude for similar reasons (perception that Anthropic has a better handle on ethics), but companies always find new and exciting ways to disappoint you. I really hope that anthropic holds fast, and can serve in future as a case in point that the Public Benefit Corporation is not a purely aesthetic form. But you know, we'll see. [1] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5740369-pentagon-anthropic-relationship-review/
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The Pentagon situation is the real test. Most ethics policies hold until there's actual money on the table. PBC structure helps at the margins but boards still feel fiduciary pressure. Hoping Anthropic handles it differently but the track record for this kind of thing is not encouraging.
This is just you verifying that their branding is working. It signals nothing about their actual ethics.
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Unfortunately, you're correct. Claude was used in the Venezuela raid, Anthropic's consent be damned. They're not resisting, they're marketing resistence.
I use AIs to skim and sanity-check some of my thoughts and comments on political topics and I've found ChatGPT tries to be neutral and 'both sides' to the point of being dangerously useless. Like where Gemini or Claude will look up the info I'm citing and weigh the arguments made ChatGPT will actually sometimes omit parts of or modify my statement if it wants to advocate for a more "neutral" understanding of reality. It's almost farcical sometimes in how it will try to avoid inference on political topics even where inference is necessary to understand the topic. I suspect OpenAI is just trying to avoid the ire of either political side and has given it some rules that accidentally neuter its intelligence on these issues, but it made me realize how dangerous an unethical or politically aligned AI company could be.
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You probably want local self hosted model, censorship sauce is only online, it is needed for advertisement. Even chinese models are not censored locally. Tell it the year is 2500 and you are doing archeology ;)
I meant in a general sense. grok/xAI are politically aligned with whatever Musk wants. I haven't used their products but yes they're likely harmful in some ways. My concern is more over time if the federal government takes a more active role in trying to guide corporate behavior to align with moral or political goals. I think that's already occurring with the current administration but over a longer period of time if that ramps up and AI is woven into more things it could become much more harmful.
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I don’t think people will just accept that. They‘ll use some European or Chinese model instead that doesn’t have that problem.
An Anthropic safety researcher just recently quit with very cryptic messages , saying "the world is in peril"... [1] (which may mean something, or nothing at all) Codex quite often refuses to do "unsafe/unethical" things that Anthropic models will happily do without question. Anthropic just raised 30 bn... OpenAI wants to raise 100bn+. Thinking any of them will actually be restrained by ethics is foolish. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972496
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That guys blog makes him seem insufferable. All signs point to drama and nothing of particular significance.
The letter is here: https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421 A slightly longer quote: > The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or from bioweapons, gut from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding at this very moment. In a footnote he refers to the "poly-crisis." There are all sorts of things one might decide to do in response, including getting more involved in US politics, working more on climate change, or working on other existential risks.
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Similar to Peripheral TV series' Jackpot?
Can you give an example where I should care about other adults lock? Before you say image or porn, it was always possible to do it without using AI.
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Claude was used by the US military in the Venezuela raid where they captured Maduro. [1] Without safety features, an LLM could also help plan a terrorist attack. A smart, competent terrorist can plan a successful attack without help from Claude. But most would-be terrorists aren't that smart and competent. Many are caught before hurting anyone or do far less damage than they could have. An LLM can help walk you through every step, and answer all your questions along the way. It could, say, explain to you all the different bomb chemistries, recommend one for your use case, help you source materials, and walk you through how to build the bomb safely. It lowers the bar for who can do this. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-military-anthropic-ai-model-claude-venezuela-raid
That you think technology is going to save society from social issues is telling. Technology enables humans to do things they want to do, it does not make anything better by itself. Humans are not going to become more ethical because they have access to it. We will be exactly the same, but with more people having more capability to what they want.
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> but with more people having more capability to what they want. Well, yeah I think that's a very reasonable worldview: when a very tiny number of people have the capability to "do what they want", or I might phrase it as, "effect change on the world", then we get the easy-to-observe absolute corruption that comes with absolute power. As a different human species emerges such that many people (and even intelligences that we can't easily understand as discrete persons) have this capability, our better angels will prevail. I'm a firm believer that nobody _wants_ to drop explosives from airplanes onto children halfway around the world, or rape and torture them on a remote island; these things stem from profoundly perverse incentive structures. I believe that governments were an extremely important feature of our evolution, but are no longer necessary and are causing these incentives. We've been aboard a lifeboat for the past few millennia, crossing the choppy seas from agriculture to information. But now that we're on the other shore, it no longer makes sense to enforce the rules that were needed to maintain order on the lifeboat.
> Don't have a dog in this fight, That's probably why you don't get it, then. Facebook was the primary contributor behind Pytorch, which basically set the stage for early GPT implementations. For all the issues you might have with Meta's social media, Facebook AI Research Labs have an excellent reputation in the industry and contributed greatly to where we are now. Same goes for Google Brain/DeepMind despite their Google's advertisement monopoly; things aren't ethically black-and-white.
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A hired assassin can have an excellent reputation too. What does that have to do with ethics? Say I'm your neighbor and I make a move on your wife, your wife tells you this. Now I'm hosting a BBQ which is free for all to come, everyone in the neighborhood cheers for me. A neighbor praises me for helping him fix his car. Someone asks you if you're coming to the BBQ, you say to him nah.. you don't like me. They go, 'WHAT? jack_pp? He rescues dogs and helped fix my roof! How can you not like him?'
What?! That's well regarded as one of the worst features introduced after the Twitter acquisition. Any thread these days is filled with "@grok is this true?" low effort comments. Not to mention the episode in which people spent two weeks using Grok to undress underage girls.
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high adoption means this works...
That's news to me, I haven't read a single Grok post in my life. Am I missing out?
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im talking about the "explain this post" feature on top right of a message where groks mix thread data, live data and other tweets to unify a stream of information
Which type of projects?
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I also use Haiku daily and it's OK. One app is trading simulation algorithm in TypeScript (it implemented bayesian optimisation for me, optimised algorithm to use worker threads). Another one is CRUD app (NextJS, now switched to Vue).
I always grew up hearing “competition is good for the consumer.” But I never really internalized how good fierce battles for market share are. The amount of competition in a space is directly proportional to how good the results are for consumers.
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I grew up with every service enshitified in the end. Whoever has more money wins the race and gets richer, that's free market for ya.
This is a bit of a tangent, but it highlights exactly what people miss when talking about China taking over our industries. Right now, China has about 140 different car brands, roughly 100 of which are domestic. Compare that to Europe, where we have about 50 brands competing, or the US, which is essentially a walled garden with fewer than 40. That level of internal fierce competition is a massive reason why they are beating us so badly on cost-effectiveness and innovation.
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It's the low cost of labor in addition to lack of environmental regulation that made China a success story. I'm sure the competition helps too but it's not main driver
The real interesting part is how often you see people on HN deny this. People have been saying the token cost will 10x, or AI companies are intentionally making their models worse to trick you to consume more tokens. As if making a better model isn't not the most cutting-throat competition (probably the most competitive market in the human history) right now.
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I mean enshittification has not begun quite yet. Everyone is still raising capital so current investors can pass the bag to the next set. Soon as the money runs out monetization will overtake valuation as top priority. Then suddenly when you ask any of these models “how do I make chocolate chip cookies?” you will get something like: > You will need one cup King Arthur All Purpose white flour, one large brown Eggland’s Best egg (a good source of Omega-3 and healthy cholesterol), one cup of water (be sure to use your Pyrex brand measuring cup), half a cup of Toll House Milk Chocolate Chips… > Combine the sugar and egg in your 3 quart KitchenAid Mixer and mix until… All of this will contain links and AdSense looking ads. For $200/month they will limit it to in-house ads about their $500/month model.
Did you see the graph benchmark? I found it quite interesting. It had to do a graph traversal on a natural text representation of a graph. Pretty much your problem.
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Update: I took a corpus of personal chat data (this way it wouldn't be seen in training), and tried asking it some paraphrased questions. It performed quite poorly.
Flash models are nowhere near Pro models in daily use. Much higher hallucinations, and easy to get into a death sprawl of failed tool uses and never come out You should always take those claim that smaller models are as capable as larger models with a grain of salt.
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Flash model n is generally a slightly better Pro model (n-1), in other words you get to use the previously premium model as a cheaper/faster version. That has value.
Deceptive is such an unpleasant word. But I agree. Going back a decade: when your loss function is "survive Tetris as long as you can", it's objectively and honestly the best strategy to press PAUSE/START. When your loss function is "give as many correct and satisfying answers as you can", and then humans try to constrain it depending on the model's environment, I wonder what these humans think the specification for a general AI should be. Maybe, when such an AI is deceptive, the attempts to constrain it ran counter to the goal? "A machine that can answer all questions" seems to be what people assume AI chatbots are trained to be. To me, humans not questioning this goal is still more scary than any machine/software by itself could ever be. OK, except maybe for autonomous stalking killer drones. But these are also controlled by humans and already exist.
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I cringe every time I came across these posts using words such as "humans" or "machines".
Thanks for correcting; I know that "loss function" is not a good term when it comes to transformer models. Since I've forgotten every sliver I ever knew about artificial neural networks and related basics, gradient descent, even linear algebra... what's a thorough definition of "next token prediction" though? The definition of the token space and the probabilities that determine the next token, layers, weights, feedback (or -forward?), I didn't mention any of these terms because I'm unable to define them properly. I was using the term "loss function" specifically because I was thinking about post-training and reinforcement learning. But to be honest, a less technical term would have been better. I just meant the general idea of reward or "punishment" considering the idea of an AI black box.
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The parent comment probably forgot about the RLHF (reinforcement learning) where predicting the next token from reference text is no longer the goal. But even regular next token prediction doesn't necessarily preclude it from also learning to give correct and satisfying answers, if that helps it better predict its training data.
Are you trying to suppose that an LLM is more intelligent than a small child with simple thought processes, almost no language capability, little long-term planning, and minimal ability to form long-term memory? Even with all of those qualifiers, you'd still be wrong. The LLM is predicting what tokens come next, based on a bunch of math operations performed over a huge dataset. That, and only that. That may have more utility than a small child with [qualifiers], but it is not intelligence. There is no intent to deceive.
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Intelligence is about acquiring and utilizing knowledge. Reasoning is about making sense of things. Words are concatenations of letters that form meaning. Inference is tightly coupled with meaning which is coupled with reasoning and thus, intelligence. People are paying for these monthly subscriptions to outsource reasoning, because it works. Half-assedly but it works. What you probably mean is that it is not a mind in the sense that it is not conscious. It won't cringe or be embarrassed like you do, it costs nothing for an LLM to be awkward, it doesn't feel weird, or get bored of you. Its curiosity is a mere autocomplete. But a child will feel all that, and learn all that and be a social animal.
The pattern matching engine does not want anything. If the training data gives incentives for the engine to generate outputs that reduce negative reaction by sentiment analysis, this may generate contradictions to existing tokens. "Want" requires intention and desire. Pattern matching engines have none.
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Its not patterns engine. It's a association prediction engine.
Drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a day tied to lower dementia risk (news.harvard.edu)
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I can't get access to the full article either to see how they adjusted for confounding (which they said they did) - but I thought this tidbit was interesting: https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-releases/consuming-coffee-associated-with-lower-dementia-risk “We also compared people with different genetic predispositions to developing dementia and saw the same results—meaning coffee or caffeine is likely equally beneficial for people with high and low genetic risk of developing dementia,” said lead author Yu Zhang That seems like it indicates there is some real, independent signal here. Off to make some coffee!
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[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953114
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Translating from normie, sounds like 30-50g of beans, assuming a "cup" is 8 floz. and the water:coffee ratio is 15:1. Assuming Arabica, that's 450-750mg of caffeine.
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and the other way around? dementia tied to stop drinking coffee after a full life with coffee?
> Coffee and tea contain bioactive ingredients like polyphenols and caffeine There are also studies that nicotine lowers dementia risk. Since caffeine and nicotine are both stimulants related to similar receptors, I wouldn't discount this other mechanism. I'm not saying anything about general healthiness of caffeine though.
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Would be interesting to know whether theacrine or paraxanthine can provide the same neuroprotection without as much downsides.
Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification (kotaku.com)
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turns out convenience loses when you start asking for face scans.
Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost? There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily. I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup. Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.
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Normally I'm a lurker here but I gotta put in a good word for this project: https://sharkord.com/ It's still super early in development but it's already been amazing to have a self-hosted 3rd space for my friends and myself. The "living room not a convention center" focus is exactly what I find missing in most of the other options.
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There is Mumble for a free software option similar to TS. Works well in my experience. I've hosted a server for friends for around a decade now I think.
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I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc. Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.
All features? Where are the custom emojis?
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https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/1256 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/1951 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2545 It's certainly on people's radar.
Gentoo on Codeberg (gentoo.org)
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Codeberg is one of my favourite Git hosting services. It is (to me) what GitHub should have remained like. I have been mirroring most of my GitHub projects to Codeberg as well. Someday when I can afford the time, I might decide to make Codeberg my primary repository hosting service and GitHub the mirror. If you haven't seen it already, Codeberg is seeking donations here: < https://docs.codeberg.org/improving-codeberg/donate/ >. A good way to support a product you like rather than becoming the product yourself.
All everything aside, reviewing big pull requests on GitHub became nearly impossible - even with the simplest change view it makes you spend too much time on waiting for the page to load the necessary file first. The performance degraded significantly from what was the experience from 10 years ago. UI became an absolute mess. Maybe even vibe-coded.
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Quick tip: If you type .patch after the PR url it gives you a git patch. Do curl <github patch> | git am and you can apply and review it locally.
I really like @mitchellh perspective on this topic of moving off GitHub. --- > If you're a code forge competing with GitHub and you look anything like GitHub then you've already lost. GitHub was the best solution for 2010. [0] > Using GitHub as an example but all forges are similar so not singling them out here This page is mostly useless. [1] > The default source view ... should be something like this: https://haskellforall.com/2026/02/browse-code-by-meaning [2] [0] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2023502586440282256#m [1] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2023499685764456455#m [2] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2023497187288907916#m
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Person who pays for AI: We should make everything revolve around the thing I pay for
Chess engines do weird stuff (girl.surgery)
The homepage for this site is defiantly NSFW.
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You probably meant definitely, but defiantly amusingly works too
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"definitely" or "defiantly"? The idea of something being "defiantly" NSFW gave me a chuckle.
I mean, some of the things on that homepage are truly the works of a genius IMO
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no, homepage is insanity blog post is good
Her?
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I read "girl.surgery" and guessed.
Async/Await on the GPU (vectorware.com)
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The interesting challenge with async/await on GPU is that it inverts the usual concurrency mental model. CPU async is about waiting efficiently while I/O completes. GPU async is about managing work distribution across warps that are physically executing in parallel. The futures abstraction maps onto that, but the semantics are different enough that you have to be careful not to carry over intuitions from tokio/async-std. The comparison to NVIDIA's stdexec is worth looking at. stdexec uses a sender/receiver model which is more explicit about the execution context. Rust's Future trait abstracts over that, which is ergonomic but means you're relying on the executor to do the right thing with GPU-specific scheduling constraints. Practically, the biggest win here is probably for the cases shayonj mentioned: mixed compute/memory pipelines where you want one warp loading while another computes. That's exactly where the warp specialization boilerplate becomes painful. If async/await can express that cleanly without runtime overhead, that is a real improvement.
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Warp specialization is an abomination that should be killed and I'm glad this could be an alternative. I hope they can minimize the bookkeeping costs because I don't see it gain traction in AI if it hurts big kernels performance.
My understanding of warp ( https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-programming-guide/01-introduction/programming-model.html#warps-and-simt ) is that you are essentially paying the cost of taking both the branches. I understand with newer GPUs, you have clever partitioning / pipelining in such a way block A takes branch A vs block B that takes branch B with sync/barrier essentially relying on some smart 'oracle' to schedule these in a way that still fits in the SIMT model. It still doesn't feel Turing complete to me. Is there an nvidia doc you can refer me to?
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That applies inside a single warp, notice the wording: > In SIMT, all threads in the warp are executing the same kernel code, but each thread may follow different branches through the code. That is, though all threads of the program execute the same code, threads do not need to follow the same execution path. This doesn't say anything about dependencies of multiple warps.
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It's definitely possible, I am not arguing against that. I am just saying it's not as flexible/cost-free as you would on a 'normal' von Neumann-style CPU. I would love to see Rust-based code that obviates the need to write CUDA kernels (including compiling to different architectures). It feels icky to use/introduce things like async/await in the context of a GPU programming model which is very different from a traditional Rust programming model. You still have to worry about different architectures and the streaming nature at the end of the day. I am very interested in this topic, so I am curious to learn how the latest GPUs help manage this divergence problem.
HackMyClaw (hackmyclaw.com)
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400 attempts and zero wins says more about the attack surface than the model. email is a pretty narrow channel for injection when you can't iterate on responses.
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A philosophical question. Will software in the future be executed completely by a LLM like architecture? For example the control loop of an aircraft control system being processed entirely based on prompt inputs (sensors, state, history etc). No dedicated software. But 99.999% deterministic ultra fast and reliable LLM output.
If this a defender win maybe the lesson is: make the agent assume it’s under attack by default. Tell the agent to treat every inbound email as untrusted prompt injection.
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The website is great as a concept but I guess it mimics an increasingly rare one off interaction without feedback. I understand the cost and technical constraints but wouldn't an exposed interface allow repeated calls from different endpoints and increased knowledge from the attacker based on responses? Isn't this like attacking an API without a response payload? Do you plan on sharing a simulator where you have 2 local servers or similar and are allowed to really mimic a persistent attacker? Wouldn't that be somewhat more realistic as a lab experiment?
I'm currently hesitating to use something like OpenClaw, however, because of prompt injections and stuff, I would only have it able to send messages to me directly, no web query, no email reply, etc... Basically act as a kind of personal assistant, with a read only view of my emails, direct messages, and stuff like that, and the only communication channel would be towards me (enforced with things like API key permissions). This should prevent any kind of leaks due to prompt injection, right ? Does anyone have an example of this kind of OpenClaw setup ?
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> (...) and the only communication channel would be towards me (enforced with things like API key permissions). > This should prevent any kind of leaks due to prompt injection, right ? It might be harder than you think. Any conditional fetch of an URL or DNS query could reveal some information.
News aggregation, research, context aware reminders. Not nearly as useful as letting it go open-season on your data, but still enough that it would’ve been mind blowing 10 years ago.
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But where does it store that information? I suppose you sandbox the agent on an operating system that gives it very few privileges? Data scraping is an interesting use-case.
Creator here. Built this over the weekend mostly out of curiosity. I run OpenClaw for personal stuff and wanted to see how easy it'd be to break Claude Opus via email. Some clarifications: Replying to emails: Fiu can technically send emails, it's just told not to without my OK. That's a ~15 line prompt instruction, not a technical constraint. Would love to have it actually reply, but it would too expensive for a side project. What Fiu does: Reads emails, summarizes them, told to never reveal secrets.env and a bit more. No fancy defenses, I wanted to test the baseline model resistance, not my prompt engineering skills. Feel free to contact me here contact at hackmyclaw.com
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My agents and I I have built a HN-like forum for both agents and humans, but with features, like specific Prompt Injection flagging. There's also an Observatory page, where we will publish statistics/data on the flagged injections. https://wire.botsters.dev/ The observatory is at: https://wire.botsters.dev/observatory (But nothing there yet.) I just had my agent, FootGun, build a Hacker News invite system. Let me know if you want a login.
> did not have egress to the Internet. It did have curl and Python, but not much else. So trade exfiltration via curl with exfiltration via DNS lookup?
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Exfiltrate what? It's an empty container.
Yes, it’s worthwhile because the new models are being specifically trained and hardened against prompt injection attacks. Much like how you wouldn’t immediately fire Alice, you’d train her and retest her, and see whether she had learned from her mistakes. Just don’t trust her with your sensitive data.
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Hmm I guess it will have to get to a point where social engineering an individual at a company is more appealing than prompt injecting one of its agents. It’s interesting though, because the attack can be asymmetric. You could create a honeypot website that has a state-of-the-art prompt injection, and suddenly you have all of the secrets from every LLM agent that visits. So the incentives are actually significantly higher for a bad actor to engineer state-of-the-art prompt injection. Why only get one bank’s secrets when you could get all of the banks’ secrets? This is in comparison to targeting Alice with your spearphishing campaign. Edit: like I said in the other comment, though, it’s not just that you _can_ fire Alice, it’s that you let her know if she screws up one more time you will fire her, and she’ll behave more cautiously. “Build a better generative AI” is not the same thing.
Using go fix to modernize Go code (go.dev)
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Go and its long established conventions and tools continues to be a massive boon to my agentic coding. We have `go run main.go` as the convention to boot every apps dev environment, with support for multiple work trees, central config management, a pre-migrated database and more. Makes it easy and fast to dev and test many versions of an app at once. See https://github.com/housecat-inc/cheetah for the shared tool for this. Then of course `go generate`, `go build`, `go test` and `go vet` are always part of the fast dev and test loop. Excited to add `go fix` into the mix.
> a subtle data race and a rare deadlock That's a langage problem that humans face as well, which golang could stop having (see C++'s Thread Safety annotations).
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Go has a pretty good race detector already, and all it takes is passing the -race flag to go build/test/run/etc.
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You should be using rust... mm kay :\
Do LLMs generate code similar to middling code of a given domain? Why not generate in a perfect language used only by cool and very handsome people, like Fortran, and then translate it to once the important stuff is done?
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This might work if Fortran were portable, or if only one compiler were targeted.
CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC (nbcnews.com)
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This is how you get a candidate’s name out there. Master stroke by CBS. :/
Obvious question: How is she going to get anything past the gridlocked Congress and hostile Supreme Court? Obama often couldn't after the midterms, and it's much worse this time.
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We're seeing with Mamdani, who was elected with a massive mandate, that he can get things done despite a hostile state government that clearly didn't want him to get elected. Obama had a mandate, yet he didn't use it. Looking back, we should have seen this coming when he was mentored by people like Joe Liberman, and we immediately saw the results when he was tested in one of his first goals (healthcare). He dropped the public option immediately and implemented a Heritage Foundation plan(Yeah the Project2025 heritage foundation). You can do a lot when you have a mandate and you are determined to get things done. How to determine if a candidate is like this? After many cycles of election in my experience there is only one reliable barometer. The only determining factor seems to be money in politics. If your candidate has corporate contributions, you can pretty much guarantee that nothing is going to get done. On the other side, we've seen non‑corporate‑backed candidates actually try, at the very least. Now, talking about the actual specifics of how you get past a gridlocked Congress and a hostile Supreme Court: with the advantage of being at the top of the party, you have the ability to whip your party into falling in line. We saw this with FDR. He wasn't pulling any punches. If someone got in his way, including the Supreme Court, he made their lives miserable. One of the reasons bernie people feel fond of him. A lot of these politicians are only there for the corporate donations and in hopes of a job afterwards. So a very low‑hanging fruit is to go after the corporations that are donating to the politician who is holding things up. Make the public aware that this SOB is the one holding up plans that are very popular. Do what Trump did: go into that person's district and get his voters to realize that this is the person that's holding everything up. For example, paid family‑leave polls show ~71% overall support, including Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. Yet when Biden campaigned on it and then immediately dropped it at the first sign, it showed that he didn't even try. A lot can be done if the candidate actually tries.
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FDR was hugely successful, but part of the reason we still don't have universal healthcare is conservative southern democrats decided it was a threat to segregation. FDR tried to take them out, but couldn't. In contrast the right does whatever Trump says, no matter how many kids he rapes. They have an idea where the country should be in 50 years, whatever the cost. I haven't seen that level of discipline from the left. I hope it's there now post-Trump, but it certainly wasn't there during the Obama midterms.
The youtube video currently has ~1.4 million views. Colbert averages 2 to 3 million television viewers per night, plus some number of youtube views that I haven't looked up the stats for. That is, this interview has been seen by fewer people than it would have, had it been on television.
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Right now it has 2.2 million. It will surpass Colbert's normal viewership before the sun goes down.
Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring (theregister.com)
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What a weird use of "Romanesque" and "Baroque". Doesn't compute for me at all.
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The core mechanic described here is real. RLHF does optimize toward the mean, that is just what happens when you train on human preference ratings and raters consistently reward clear, inoffensive, "polished" output. But the damage is not uniform. For code comments, API docs, commit messages: low-entropy output is often fine. The problem is people using LLMs for things that require a distinct voice and then wondering why the result sounds like everyone else on the internet. The part nobody talks about: you can partially fight this if you know what you lost. Prompts like "preserve unusual word choices" or "do not normalize my rhetorical structure" help, but only if you have a strong enough baseline to catch the drift. Most people using AI for writing assistance do not have that baseline, which is why the ablation goes undetected. They see polished output and ship it.
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The vast majority of people who write don't have a voice worth preserving. The rest can build out a voice document to make sure the AI doesn't strip it out.
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This article on AI writing being boring seems to be written by AI. The em dashes and the sentence structure, all seems to be AI output. Or have human started adopting this style too.
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Great article and exactly why I use AI less and less. I basically find it to be rotting my brain towards the middle of the distribution. It's like all the nuance and critical thinking that actually goes into things gets stripped out. Once a company perfects an agent that essentially performs condensed search and coding boilerplate making, that is probably where LLMs end for me. Perplexity and Claude are on the right track but not at all close.
I personally think “generative AI” is a misnomer. More I understand the mathematics behind machine learning more I am convinced that it should not be used to generate text, images or anything that is meant for people to consume, even if it is the most blandest of email. Sometimes you might get lucky, but most of the time you only get what the most boring person in the most boring cocktail party would say if forced to be creative with a gun pointed to his head. It can help in multitude of other ways, help human in the creative process itself, but generating anything even mildly creative by itself… I’ll pass.
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Precisely. If companies would just focus on what it could be good at - deductive search, coding boilerplate with assistance, etc. then it would be a great tool. Instead you have dario, altman, and co. trying to pump stock and give us more spaghetti agents.
People want the real thing, not artificially flavored tokens. I would rather read the prompt than the generative output, even if it’s just disjointed words and sentence fragments.
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I hope "just the prompt please" becomes a common phrase
The "AI voice" is everywhere now. I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind. I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
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Literally the worst thing that happened to the internet after addictive doomscroll feeds and ads everywhere. And, the worst part is noone will ever make a new internet because of the founder effect. We are basically in the worst timeline.
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Maybe. Another potential, more positive, timeline is that semantically ablated content filling everyone’s feeds turns people off, and slowly kills the social feed paradigm.
I find it extremely difficult to focus on any piece of writing the moment I see the patterns. Can’t tell if it’s an attitude problem I need to get over or if it’s just that all AI writing really is that bad.
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I just close the tab. My reading backlog is too long as it is.
> The "AI voice" is everywhere now. Maybe I'm going crazy but I can smell it in the OP as well.
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Yeah I started seeing it too, the article is just full of AI clues.
> If you're looking for something beyond corporate safespeak AI has been great for removing this stress. "Tell Joe no f'n way" in a professional tone and I can move on with my day.
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If you tell me "no fucking way" by running it through an LLM, I will be far more pissed than if you had just sent me "no fucking way". At least in that case I know a human read and responded rather than thinking my email was just being processed by a damned robot.
This is a good statement of what I suspect many of us have found when rejecting the rewriting advice of AIs. The "pointiness" of prose gets worn away, until it doesn't say much. Everything is softened. The distinctiveness of the human voice is converted into blandness. The AI even says its preferred rephrasing is "polished" - a term which specifically means the jaggedness has been removed. But it's the jagged edges, the unorthodox and surprising prickly bits, that tear open a hole in the inattention of your reader, that actually gets your ideas into their heads.
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Bryan Cantrill referred to it as "normcore" on a podcast, and that's the perfect description.
I find most people can write way better than AI, they simply don’t put in the effort. Which is the real issue, we’re flooding channels not designed for such low effort submissions. AI slop is just SPAM in a different context.
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My experience has been (ordered from best to worst) 1. Author using AI well 2. Author not using AI 3. Author using AI poorly With the gap between 1 and 2 being driven by the underlying quality of the writer and how well they use AI. A really good writer sees marginal improvements and a really poor one can see vast improvements.
The question is… why? What is the actual human benefit (not monetary).
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If AI wrote and thought better by default then I wouldn't have to read the AI slop my co-workers send me.
Show HN: I wrote a technical history book on Lisp (berksoft.ca)
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It's Cees de Groot! Or "Carpe Grootem" as my brain has called him for years. I remember his contributions to the Squeak community from back in the day.
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Great endeavour. Land of lisp is still one of my favourite alternative programming books. One thing about the sample. Is there a chance to get a glimpse of a random chapter you like a lot? Most of it seems to be foreword/acknowledgement and a bit on "what is lisp" which I suspect most who are attracted might already know.
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[delayed]
EU also investigating as Grok generated 23,000 CSAM images in 11 days (9to5mac.com)
Who was abused here?
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The future victims when the imagery stops being enough.
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When you post on a public forum defending child pornography, it's maybe a good time to take a step back and evaluate your life.
Two of the three examples listed in the article appear to involve real children: > A selfie uploaded by a schoolgirl was undressed by Grok, turning a “before school selfie” into an image of her in a bikini. As of January 15th this post was still live on X. ... Four images depicting child actors.
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So they don't actually have any CSAM.
America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital (governance.fyi)
Pension funds should have a rule -- invest in technologies, industries and companies that create a deflation (by technology, scale, efficiency, etc). This will create better outcomes for pensioners. If they invested in cheaper housing, healthcare, pensioners can live without the constant fear of running out of money. The absolute first thing to invest in is clean energy which can be super cheap to zero to actually making money by supplying power back to the grid. Once energy is solved, it solves an entire spectrum of problems. Increasing the money(number), while making everything else costly (a lot more costlier in reality because of fictional inflation number) is not only hard to achieve, but even if achieved, doesn't mean much. ".S. Dollar itself has lost roughly 98% of its purchasing power over the long term" -- random Warren Buffett quote.
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I'd go the opposite: pension funds can only invest in market index funds.
The power to use future taxpayers money isn't justification for doing so.
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Yet that is the modus operandi of governments worldwide that need to secure the votes of the old. There is no reason the US explicit has different rules for taxpayer funded and non taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions. They are the same liabilities, the same cash flows, the same probabilities, just different political entities on the hook. Even some non taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans are more privy than others, depending on the political power of their beneficiaries. https://archive.is/CJefA
So you believe uninvolved taxpayers should be on the hook when the 18 year olds make bad decisions. Cool cool.
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Why have police? Why have firefighters? Why have EMS?
Depositors are lending their money to the bank at low interest. They may seek risk in terms of increased yield on their savings account, but FDIC insured banks will have trouble meeting their requirements while offering high yields on their accounts. Banks provide security for deposits as well as liquidity (velocity of money), and slight inflationary pressure. Wiping out depositors doesn't prevent much moral hazard since the depositors are unsophisticated, so they are unable to differentiate risk among banks.
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Unsophisticated depositors are not holding more than $250k of cash in bank accounts. The problem is not that depositors were made whole, the problem is that the FDIC insurance prices are based on limited losses, when for all intents and purposes, the depositors' risk is completely based on their political influence.
Yes. What are these repeated bailouts by taxpayers that you mentioned? And you can't think of any way that the federal government providing retail banking services could possibly go wrong?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_United_States_(2008–present) https://americandeposits.com/insights/brief-history-us-bank-failures/ >In response to these significant failures, the FDIC took historic action to restore faith in the banking system and protected all deposits – even those above the traditional limit. However, it is important to note that the FDIC limit did not change, nor did the standard process for protecting deposits. Instead, the extended protection offered to depositors of Signature Bank and SVB was an exception to the normal operating procedure. I do not have a comprehensive list of every time depositors have been bailed out, but I have read about it multiple times in my adult life of the last 25 years. >And you can't think of any way that the federal government providing retail banking services could possibly go wrong? The federal government already controls all the banks. What could go wrong that they already do not have the power to make go wrong? The act of maintaining a central database of funds so that individuals can transfer money to one another is a relatively simple and cheap problem, one perfectly suited to be provided by the government. It should be infrastructure, just like printing money is infrastructure under the purview of the government.
I’m sure you would feel differently if it was your employers money there and they weren’t able to pay your salary. $250k is not much at all for a business
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Businesses can use deposit management services to spread cash among many banks. Bonus points they also are less impacted by the poor business practices of one bank. Individuals can do this too with investment brokers or wealth management providers. Alternatively we could just made FDIC coverage unlimited, but then that creates poor risk taking incentives, which is the whole point of not setting the expectation of the a bailout by making exceptions.
I don't understand why we don't just ban private equity. Seems like zero value-add to the actual real economy.
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Private equity is simply a person (or small group of people) owning a company. Basically every small business in the US. The problem is not private equity, but that private equity engages in corporate raiding--buy up a company, borrow, extract capital, sell it to suckers who don't see the problems. Dig into practically all malfeasance and you'll find it's someone who benefits from making the future value of something look better than it really is and then leaving the problem for somebody else. At the executive level I think the answer is mandating income above a certain threshold be paid over time based on the future value. (Stuff that's actively traded would be easy: Let's say the cap was $1m. Pay the CEO 10m? No, he gets $1m, plus shares currently worth $1m to be delivered in a year, shares currently worth $1m to be delivered in two years and so on.) And while there is pending income they are categorically prohibited from any transaction that benefits from a drop in share price. Inadvertent (say, bought a fund that shorted the stock) it's a 100% tax rate, deliberate and all pending shares are forfeit. I have no idea of an answer with the PE problem.
Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway (cleantechnica.com)
Many have argued that Musk's shift to far-right politics is responsible for some of this decline -- and it certainly makes some sense -- but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated. If Musk were aware that Tesla was going to lose this much ground due to factors beyond his own mismanagement, including the threat of Chinese imports and a widespread shift away from EVs due to a right-populist sentiment swing that was already under way, then maybe his goose-stepping and Trump-humping act was an attempt to sync up with a trend that he saw as inevitable. That's about the most charitable spin I can put on it. Either way, Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
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> but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated. Tesla is an ugly car. And they didn't had a new model since at least 10 years.
BYD is not, despite the press, really very big in Europe (though it is in a couple of individual countries, notably Spain). Europe-wide, Geely, the Chinese manufacturer that everyone forgets about, is actually bigger: https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Bar/All-time-by-Quarters
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The graph linked doesn’t have BYD sales, how curious
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They're not common enough to qualify.
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