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FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors (nytimes.com)
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The tech industry probably shouldn’t be helping Trump and Musk destroy America like this, but eh, whatcha gonna do?
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Here's some local and national reporting I found interesting. 1. The county balked at the cost of flood sirens. [0] 2. Kerr county didn't alert all cell phones of the emergency. [1] 3. Kerr county repeatedly asked the State of Texas for flood help and the state said no. [2] 4. Kerr county was in the bottom half of property taxes in the state of Texas in 2017. [3] [0] https://www.wowt.com/2025/07/11/small-texas-community-where-everyone-survived-flooding-has-sirens-that-warned-them/#:~:text=In%20Kerr%20County%2C%20the%20price%20tag%20for%20a%20proposed%20flood%20warning%20system%20for%20a%20larger%20swath%20of%20the%20Guadalupe%20River%20was%20close%20to%20%241%20million [1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/fema-records-kerr-county-didnt-send-eas-flood-warnings-phones/3882922/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/politics/texas-flood-alarm-system.html [3] https://www.uttyler.edu/academics/colleges-schools/business/centers/hibbs-institute/interactive-graphs/tx-property-tax-by-county/
>Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired. Your classic manager who feels they are so important that hey HAVE TO be involved in X,Y,Z but they are not a responsible enough person to actually do the job.
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FEMA has "Emergency" in the name. Traditionally, it's supposed to come in when the normal rescue infrastructure has failed, due to earthquake, weather, etc. You're not optimizing for cost here. You're optimizing for reliable emergency management -- and that's going to cost money. If you wanted a different agency, like one that prioritized "recovery after 6 months", well, it would help to inform the nation that FEMA is no longer the nationwide emergency management agency. It's up to the local and state governments.
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She was busy with higher priorities this week: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLyjaZ5s51o/
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There were some dogs that desperately needed shooting?
Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone
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Among the neater features of the full-featured uBO is its ability to load userscripts from external sources. While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.
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Moved to firefox and I am glad I did, I want to use a browser that respects my privacy choices
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I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked. I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
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Would it be possible to just look at the videos in a different browser?
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Every browser has occasional big issues. If you haven't seen one yet in (insert browser name here) then you just haven't been around long enough.
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That doesn't solve the issue of ManifestV2 being removed though, Brave will have it removed at the same time as Chrome, when it's pulled from the code base
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Brave have not promised to continue to support uBlock Origin ?
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Firefox is still a great browser with probably the best devtools.
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Advertising company forcibly disables software that stops the spread of malware. Why would they do that?
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Is edge also following suit?
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In the past Microsoft said they would. It would be a large engineering effort to preserve Manifestv2
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so i use adguard in chrome now
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Social Fixer is gone too. What to do?
There's still a way to load it under Chrome 138, but when Chrome 139 lands, that's when MV2 will finally be removed. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate/mv2-deprecation-timeline > Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule
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In current chromium source, it seems still possible to force manifest v2 extensions with `kAllowLegacyMV2Extensions` feature flag? https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chrome/browser/extensions/manifest_v2_experiment_manager.cc
Firefox is still there, but Mozilla is adding AI slop to it too. I’d love to see an extension to disable all that stuff, or ideally get rid of it and make it an extension
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Just use LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on Android. They basically strip out all the anti-privacy, anti-user "features" from Firefox.
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You can use Librewolf, or the Firefox-based browser from Swedish VPN company Mullvad.
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Zen browser is pretty minimal in terms of bloat carried from FF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303974
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How come Zen looks a lot like Arc? https://arc.net/
OpenAI delays launch of open weights model (twitter.com)
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Not sure if it's coincidental that OpenAI's open weights release got delayed right after an ostensibly excellent open weights model (Kimi K2) got released today. https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/ OpenAI know they need to raise the bar with their release. It can't be a middle-of-the-pack open weights model.
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This could be it, especially since they announced last week that it would be the best open-source model.
Am I the only one who thinks mention of “safety tests” for LLMs is a marketing scheme? Cars, planes and elevators have safety tests. LLMs don’t. Nobody is going to die if a LLM gives an output that its creators do not like, yet when they say “safety tests”, they mean that they are checking to what extent the LLM will say things they do not like.
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Especially since "safety" in this context often just means making sure the model doesn't say things that might offend someone or create PR headaches.
PDFs can do this too.
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Twitter does it at scale.
does your CPU, your OS, your web browser come with ~~built-in censorship~~ safety filters too? AI 'safety' is one of the most neurotic twitter-era nanny bullshit things in existence, blatantly obviously invented to regulate small competitors out of existence.
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It isn’t. This is dismissive without first thinking through the difference of application. AI safety is about proactive safety. Such an example: if an AI model could be used to screen hiring applications, making sure it doesn’t have any weighted racial biases. The difference here is that it’s not reactive. Reading a book with a racial bias would be the inverse; where you would be reacting to that information. That’s the basis of proper AI safety in a nutshell
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As someone who has reviewed people’s résumés that they submitted with job applications in the past, I find it difficult to imagine this. The résumés that I saw had no racial information. I suppose the names might have some correlation to such information, but anyone feeding these things into a LLM for evaluation would likely censor the name to avoid bias. I do not see an opportunity for proactive safety in the LLM design here. It is not even clear that they even are evaluating whether there is bias in such a scenario when someone did not properly sanitize inputs.
This is analogous to saying a computer can be used to do bad things if it is loaded with the right software. Coincidentally, people do load computers with the right software to do bad things, yet people are overwhelmingly opposed to measures that would stifle such things. If you hook up a chat bot to a chat interface, or add tool use, it is probable that it will eventually output something that it should not and that output will cause a problem. Preventing that is an unsolved problem, just as preventing people from abusing computers is an unsolved problem.
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The society has accepted that computers bring more benefit than harm, but LLMs could still get pushback due to bad PR.
Devil's advocate: (1) Execute yes (with or without arguments, whatever you desire). (2) Let the program run as long as you desire. (3) When you stop desiring the program to spit out your argument, (4) Stop the program. Between (3) and (4) some time must pass. During this time the program is behaving in an undesired way. Ergo, yes is not a counter example of the GP's claim.
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I upvoted your reply for its clever (ab)use of ambiguity to say otherwise to a fairly open and shut case. That said, I suspect the other person was actually agreeing with me, and tried to state that software incorporating LLMs would eventually malfunction by stating that this is true for all software. The yes program was an obvious counter example. It is almost certain that all LLMs will eventually generate some output that is undesired given that it is determining the next token to output based on probabilities. I say almost only because I do not know how to prove the conjecture. There is also some ambiguity in what is a LLM, as the first L means large and nobody has made a precise definition of what is large. If you look at literature from several years ago, you will find people saying 100 million parameters is large, while some people these days will refuse to use the term LLM to describe a model of that size.
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Thanks, it was definitely tongue-in-cheek. I agree with you on both counts.
The maxim “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me” comes to mind here. That said, I think this misses the point that the LLM is not a gatekeeper to any of this.
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I find it particularly irritating that the models are so overly puritan that they refuse to translate subtitles because they mention violence.
$5 million was the gpu hour cost of a single training run.
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Exactly. Not to minimize Deepseeks tremendous achievement, but that $5 million was just for the training run, not the GPUs used they purchased before, and all the OpenAI API calls they likely used to assist in synthetic data generation.
"Actually the majority of Google models are open source" That's not accurate. The Gemini family of models are all proprietary. Google's Gemma models (which are some of the best available local models) are open weights but not technically OSI-compatible open source - they come with usage restrictions: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/terms
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You’re ignoring the T5 series of models that were incredibly influential, the T5 models and their derivatives (FLAN-T5, Long-T5, ByT5, etc) have been downloaded millions of times on huggingface and are real workhorses. There are even variants still being produced within the last year or so. A yea the Gemma series is incredible and while maybe not meeting the standards of OSI - I consider them to be pretty open as far as local models go. And it’s not just the standard Gemma variants, Google is releasing other incredible Gemma models that I don’t think people have really even caught wind of yet like MedGemma, of which the 4b variant has vision capability. I really enjoy their contributions to the open source AI community and think it’s pretty substantial.
OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google (theverge.com)
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> Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, [...] Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology. [...] Google didn’t share how much it was paying to bring on the team. OpenAI was previously reported to be buying Windsurf for $3 billion. Why not an acquisition? How did Google get Windsurf and investors to agree to this maneuver that decapitated the leadership and key talent, without a big exit event for everyone? My read of the article: "Here's x% of what OpenAI offered you, you waive legal challenges while we cherry-pick your people and license the tech in their heads, and you can keep the company, and everyone left behind can promote themselves to fill the vacancies."
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If they acquire a company they might need approval due to anti-trust. If the people instead just quit their jobs and start working at Google … nothing to see here.
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This whole situation feels shockingly close to the Meta/Scale situation, where founders and specific employees were plucked out, and effectively gutted any future prospects for the company. At least in the Scale case there seemed to be some form of payout to employees and equity holders, but this takes it a whole lot further by just throwing out all other employees. There is supposed to be the concept that “all common stock is the same”. These fake-acquisitions completely undermine that.
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I don't know if you noticed but cursors language server aspect that runs the coding edits and stuff like that from a server to the workstation is a lot better than windsurf. Windsurf phone's home on every code edit that you have and takes on 30% load on your servers or on your workstation depending on what you're running. I would strongly discourage the use of windsurf on your systems. Case in point their AI model that they just built.
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nonexclusive proprietary licensing at its zenith
Just curious - would this negatively affect OpenAI's ability to acquire companies in the future?
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This isn’t a great look for OpenAI, but acquisitions fall through all the time. The issue isn’t an acquisition not working out, it’s that the founding/exec team felt it appropriate to arrange their own exits and abandon their team before even communicating that their “successful exit” wasn’t actually happening.
IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less $$$ to develop than forking an entire IDE. - CC is dead simple to onboard (use whatever IDE you're using now, with a simple extension for some UX improvements). - Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins (and middlemen like Cursor) in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue + training data access. What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) - Some UI niceties like "add selection to chat", and etc. Personally I think this is a harbinger of where things are going. Cursor was fastest to $900M ARR and IMO will be fastest back down again.
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> - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor’s tab completion model? I’m still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and occasional chat.
> CC at like a 500% loss Do you have a citation for this? It might be at a loss, but I don’t think it is that extravagant.
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Before they announced the Max plans, I could easily hit 10-15$ of API usage per day (without even being a heavy user). Since they announced that you can use the Pro subscription with Claude Code, I've been using it much more and I've never ever been rate limited.
Is there a cheap version for hobbyists? Or what’s the best thing for hobbyists to use, just cut and paste?
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Claude Code pro is ~$20USD/ month and is nearly enough for someone like me who can’t use it at work and is just playing around with it after work. I’m loving it.
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I've been enjoying Zed lately
Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab completion up to near parity, very little reason to use Cursor.
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Just to offer a different perspective, I use Cursor at work and, coming from emacs (which I still use) with copilot completions only when I request them with a shortcut, Cursor’s behavior drives me crazy.
Non competes aren’t enforceable in California but the company owns the IP so I’m curious about this license loophole they are using.
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Non competes can definitely be enforceable in California for executives and those with fiduciary responsibilities to a company. They’re just not enforceable against “rank and file” employees.
Preliminary report into Air India crash released (bbc.co.uk)
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I know that the switch had to be operated deliberately, but still a UX fail on a modern aircraft if cutting off fuel to the engines does not result in an audible alert/alarm which both pilots can hear - especially at that altitude.
It's safe to state these fuel cutoff switches aren't to be touched in-flight unless the word 'fire' is said beforehand. Even then, you only perform fuel cutoff for the flaming engine. If the copilot was busy with takeoff, there is exactly one other person in the entire world that could have flipped both switches. We may never know which one flipped them back.
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Fire isn't the only instantly severe problem with engines. Another is violent shaking if, say, part of the rotating assembly came off.
Even if the plane had no power, why couldn't they have glided it down safely?
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Speed can be traded for altitude, and altitude can be traded for speed. If you have neither, you're dead. Engine failure shortly after takeoff is a major cause of fatal accidents.
I can't put my car into reverse gear while driving down the freeway.
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Remember the "surging" incidents where the driver insisted he was stepping on the brake but was actually stepping on the gas?
Then why do we see the pilots notice the cutoff, move the switches back, and the engines respond as expected? The switched cannot move themselves. We’d expect to hear more commentary and confusion if the cutoff was active and the switches still in Run.
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There would have likely been an indication on the glass cockpit displays that the fuel had been cut off, perhaps the pilot flying noticed this and asked the captain.
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Yes, there is, but the reaction to that would be to look at the position the cutoff switches were in. We didn’t hear “wtf, they’re in Run” - the report says they just moved them from Cutoff to Run and the engines responded as expected. I think you have to really reach to make this not pilot error. I know it’s appealing to call this a Boeing problem, but the evidence just from this prelim report is very compelling. If you think it’s not pilot error, you can make some fake Manifold dollars: https://manifold.markets/JohnHughes/what-will-be-the-official-causes-of?r=cm9icGVyeQ
And then 10s later the switches magically fixed themselves? The likely not electronically connected switches since that would compromise engine redundancy?
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The rodents were remorseful and fixed the cables in the meantime. /s
There are reasons they don’t. This is a deceptively difficult problem Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations) And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor Coverage (different constellations have different coverage, which means planes would not have transmit guarantees depending on flight path). So you’d have huge gaps anyways There have been alternative solutions posed, some of which are advancing forward. For example, GPS aware ELTs that only transmit below certain altitudes. But even that has flaws Anyways I think we’ll see it in the next decade or two, but don’t hold your breath
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> Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations) You get free Starlink on several airlines now, so won't that be a solved problem soon?
> EDIT: Why is there no Cockpit Video Recorder? The days of limited storage are over. Pilots unions are dead against it.
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And Pilots end up dead because of it.
Fourth? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Murder-suicide_by_pilot
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We dont know about that one at all.
Sixth (and this one is pretty indisputable): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAM_Mozambique_Airlines_Flight_470
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Skimming this list I think it's 8 if you discount incidents with small body counts (under the assumption those are suicides where some ground crew were killed accidentally), except the 2010 Austin incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#List_of_declared_or_suspected_pilot_suicides
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