Unlurker|Replay|About
One item purchased, Ten emails (joshghent.com)
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In contrast I’m a fan of the overeager messages for actual updates like these presented. It is just when after said delivery that I then end up on a mailing list where I get sent something seemingly daily from a single vendor that I’m less pleased.
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I documented the 13+ emails I received over the course of trying to buy a wallet: https://jfloren.net/b/2022/12/12/0 Everybody just assumes they're the only thing hitting your inbox, like I don't also have "engagement" messages from 3 other stores I bought shit from two years back, plus PG&E trying to convince me to install a meter that can turn off my A/C remotely, plus Nextdoor trying to update me because somebody thinks they heard a gunshot...
A Small Plea to Indie Developers (blog.realvarez.com)
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So, you feel the people who are providing software for free now somehow owe you support as well now that it is so easy to build software? How about making the onus on you to fix the bugs with a PR or two in the open source product you use?
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You've read the post, right? Especially this part: > It is why I paid for your app... this is about closed-source, paid software - no PRs possible there.
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I am not talking about free open source software here. Two things I meant more specifically: - Not every indie product is open source, so “send a PR” is often not an option. - I am mainly talking about paid products. If a developer charges money and asks users to trust them early, I think some basic follow-through comes with that. I have a lot of respect for open source maintainers. That is a very different relationship.
Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D (flight-viz.com)
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Perhaps this should be submitted under "Show".
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The FlightRadar24 app has had this feature for quite some time. I like your implementation though - it’s very easy on the eye.
Claude Managed Agents (claude.com)
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Give me a pause, are we repackaging here the MCP concept under a MCP-as-a-Service concept and calling it Managed Agents?
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As someone who spins up docker containers where I use the Anthropic Agentic SDK to build Jekyll websites for customers, I don’t see much of an appeal. I didn’t find it that difficult to set up the infrastructure, the hard part was getting the agents to do exactly what I wanted. Besides, eventually I might want to transition away to another provider (or even self hosting) so I’d prefer having that freedom.
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This is going to grow into a sophisticated platform, and is what will eventually compete head on with saas. I dont think companies will build their own agents, aside from looping in tools. As the models improve, there will be less hand holding. This could end up competing with AWS/GCP
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Those agents did such a wonderful job making and deploying this page that the testimonials are unreadable because each spot has two of them overlapping.
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Happy to see this launched, particularly today. I own a stake in a small brewery in Canada, and this feature just saved me setting up some infrastructure to "productionize" an agent we created to assist with ordering, invoicing, and government document creation. I get paid in beer and vibes for projects like these, so the more I can ship these projects in the same place I prototype them the better. (Also don't worry all, still have SF income to buy food for my family with)
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i get paid in vibes and chilling as well for some similar agent stuff i do for content creators. quick question, how do you manage these side projects that kinda need to be production ready but aren't you are actual SF job lol? some of these people think they are my actual customer/client but like i do it for fun and to help them out.
Muse Spark – Meta Superintelligence Labs (meta.ai)
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Meta is in a weird spot. They caught up late to the game and instead of releasing llama as a chat bot they open sourced it, precisely because they lost the mind share. They thought chatbot is not their product and I am sure they are regretting it now. Mark is obsessed with becoming the android of something and he poured billions into the metaverse thinking he is first and failed. He then open sourced llama and wanted to be the android of llms. He ended up enabling groq but it didn’t benefit meta directly at all. They have no revenue or mind share path from llms but continue to pour billions into it. The only 1-1 mapping is with the glasses but that is a tough fit for the company given they are extremely allergic to privqcy and security. Not sure what this is now.
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Kinda crazy, it really felt like Meta had the lead in LLMs, especially during the early LLaMa days. What happened for them to fall so far behind? I don’t get how LLaMa 4 was such a big train wreck and they couldn’t correct the course like Google.
So this is why Anthropic rushed the weirdest "pre-responsible-disclosure-totally-not-for-marketing" announcement yesterday? To make sure Spark doesn't steal their thunder? (Spark beats Opus 4.6 on some benchmarks...). Or did I become a bitter cynical old man.
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13 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538795
It's giving "OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)"
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[because it would start an arms race]. The very arms race we're in... They were right
They really weren't horrible. They were ~gpt4o, with the added benefit that you could run them on premise. Just "regular" models, non "thinking". Inefficient architecture (number of active out of total) but otherwise "decent" models. They got trashed online by bots and chinese shills (I was online that weekend when it happened, it's something to behold). Just because they were non-thinking when thinking was clearly the future doesn't make them horrible. Not SotA by any means, but still.
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Wrote longer comment steel-manning this, posted it to a reply, then realized you might like to know they had a reasoning model on deck ready for release in the next 2-4 weeks. Got shitcanned due to bad PR & Zuck God-King terraforming the org, so there'd be a year delay to next release. Real tragi-comedy, and you have no idea how happy it makes me to see someone in the wild saying this. It sounds so bizarre to people given the conventional wisdom, but, it's what happened.
Nah I remember how disgusted I felt trying llama 4 maverick and scout. They were both DOA.. couldn't even beat much smaller local models.
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I'll cosign what you said, simultaneously, yr interlocutor's point is also well-founded and it depresses me it's not better known and sounds so...off...due to conventional wisdom x God King Zuck's misunderstanding of his own company and resulting overreaction. They beat Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro handily on my benchmark suite. (tl;dr: tool calling and agentic coding). Llama 4 on Groq was ~GPT 4.1 on the benchmark at ~50% the cost. They shouldn't have released it on a Saturday. They should have spent a month with it in private prerelease, working with providers.[1] The rushed launch and ensuing quality issues got rolled into the hypebeast narrative of "DeepSeek will take over the world" I bet it was super fucking annoying to talk to due to LMArena maxxing. [1] my understanding is longest heads up was single-digit days, if any. Most modellers have arrived at 2+ weeks now, there's a lot between spitting out logits and parsing and delivering a response.
I never understood why meta decided to join the race. They don’t sell compute like Google or Microsoft. Why not let others do the hard work and integrate their LLMs in your systems if needed? I assume it’s because they have Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Thread data and feel they should be the ones using them for training, but it’s really not obvious how having a frontier AI lab benefits their business
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Only thanks to Meta we have competitive local LLMs. Without LLama nothing decent would have been released. Commoditize your complements in action.
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> I never understood why meta decided to join the race. I can think of at least two reasons. Price and customizability. If they train their own models on their own data, they potentially have a better model at a better price, and they're not at the mercy of Anthropic's decisions when they decide to raise prices. Additionally, if you use someone else's model, you use it the way they create it and permit you to use it. In a couple years, who has any idea how these models are used. Arguably, a company the size of Meta should be in control of their AI models.
LLMs/Chat-based systems will reach a point where Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, Instagram, etc. are all unnecessary. The idea of opening a browser or a specific app to do a thing will seem antiquated. You can do it all with your chat-based agent. Meta wants to be part of that.
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Sure but they have the platforms, they don’t need their own frontier models for that
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I don't think everyone only wants to talk to machines going forward...?
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I don't want to do it now. But that seems to be where we are being headed, like lemmings running for the cliff.
Because there's a realistic chance this is the only important software technology moving forward, and commoditizes Metas's entire business which is software.
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Meta’s business is human attention, human connections, and all derived data. They can use AIs for their systems, but the question is why do they feel the need to spend billions on training and running their own frontier model
Fourth place means you're not reliant on any of the external providers for internal AI use, which is important for organizational health and negotiating with those other providers.
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I’m not sure it’s useful for negotiating, the capex to build it was surely orders of magnitude more than it would cost to just use one of the other frontier models. It’s like someone negotiating by saying, “I’ll waste even MORE money to build something worse if you don’t give me a deal.” I’m not discounting there may be other advantages to doing it. I just don’t think negotiating is one.
Their new Contemplating mode gives this model a Deep Research ability (akin to existing models from GPT and Gemini) that might make it quite comparable to the just-announced Mythos.
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> might make it quite comparable to the just-announced Mythos Do we have data to substantiate that claim?
Muse Spark: Scaling Towards Personal Superintelligence (ai.meta.com)
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Sarcasm aside, tried it (with instant mode), it's an impressive model. It nailed all the ChatGPT meme gotchas (walk to the carwash, Alice 50 brothers, upside down cup, R's in strawberry, which number is bigger, 9.11 or 9.9?) I guess all that money poaching OpenAI / Anthropic talent went somewhere... Now, would I use "Meta Muse Code" or "Muse CoWork" if I have to have a facebook account to all of my developers? Maybe not. Would I use it via an API key? I might, depends on the pricing!
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Sad to see it's not going to be open source.
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It is unfortunate that they decided to stop doing open-weight releases. What could have been interesting has been reduced to simply another subpar LLM release.
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Looks like a lightweight article. But memory usage went from 316MB -> 502 MB when I hit refresh. Not sure why? Any one have any ideas? Why does it need half a gig of ram in the first place?
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Genuine question: Why release this the day after Mythos? It does not appear SOTA (just based on benchmarks). OpenAI will likely release Spud tomorrow.
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That's a really good question, my sarcastic mind thinks that Anthropic rushed the Mythos announcement of fears of Meta stealing their thunder... (I guess someone leaked that, a LOT of anthropic folks are ex meta... so, you know) Just a speculation, I have no real knowledge about it.
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NOTHING about this is personal! No weights were released!
Personal as in Meta gets your personal data so they can sell you more ads.
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Looooooool
Saying nothing about the actual performance of this model, it does strike me how .... minimal(?) this announcement is. Their safety section is like 2 paragraphs about bioweapons. Go look at the reports for OpenAI and Anthropic's model releases. It's like 50+ pages of tests, examples, reports, and benchmarks across a bunch of safety and wellfare metrics. If Meta wants to be seen as a cutting edge massive lab they need to come across as one instead of looking like a school project version of a frontier model.
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Rumor on the ground is that they expected a much stronger model than this one.
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llama4 behemoth problems?
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Can you elaborate?
lol it literally took me 2s to google search "optimize image for website" and 10s to upload and get a smaller sized image. The result for that specific image is: 500kb. 85% decrease in size
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An indistinguishable JPG is 170KB. An SVG would be 20KB.
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You can even automatically do that on your CDN/delivery/web server layer. Or as part of your web deployment pipeline.
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Yes, but it might be a little too advance for Meta ;)
complaining about sand on the beach
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It's not sand on the beach, it's garbage on the beach.
I am simply offended. By Meta's lack of sensibilities (or ability) towards use of images on the Web while touting their new flavour of artificial intelligence as a product.
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old man shouts at cloud
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more like old man shouts at someone else's computer
The moat is in the compute and the energy access. And further down the line in chips, which is why Elon is building a fab now. There are plenty of capable models on HuggingFace, yet I have no way of running them.
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> which is why Elon is building a fab now At least he says he's doing that. It doesn't really make sense since you're not going to achieve an advanced node from a standing start in a practical time frame and cost. Sounds like more Musk flavored vapor.
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That fab will never be delivered. In five years you might see the manufacturing equivalent of a person dancing in spandex.
I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii (bryankeller.github.io)
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Nice project! Love seeing emulators & ports
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As someone who's been trying to do something VERY similar (port Mac OS 9 to the Nintendo Wii U), all I can say is I'm 1) absolutely impressed, and 2) absolutely encouraged, as my project keeps telling me "this is impossible" at every opportunity.
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This rules. It’s exactly the kind of cursed side quest that sounds fake until you read the writeup and realize you actually did the work.
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They are successfully porting Mac OS onto every kind of modern computer over at the hackintosh subreddit, and I can't understand why there is so little interest for this stuff in the "hacker" sphere. Surely, it must be a better option than Linux if you want to get the most out of a PC computer? At least for 10 more years. https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/
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The approach of using the LED as a debugging tool when serial and video output were both disabled is such a classic embedded development move. When you have no visibility into what's happening, you work with whatever output you have — even if it's a single bit. The dual-framebuffer solution for the RGB-to-YUV conversion is clever too. 60 conversions per second on that hardware can't be cheap — curious what kind of CPU overhead that adds.
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This solution’s COU cost can be significantly improved by using memory protection. You protect the frame buffer from writes. The first time it is written, you take a fault, and start refreshing every 60 Hz and leave it writeable. After some number of refreshes, you protect it again, the idea being is that the UI may now be quiescent. I do this in my Palm OS port for the same reason.
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My favorite part of this is the detour to ask for the IOUSBFamily src on IRC
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Debugging kernel panics on a Wii in an economy seat is a level of focus I can't even imagine. Most people can't read a book on a plane without losing their place every 5 minutes.
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Congrats, great project and great writeup. That would have won MacHack back in the day. Now that the MacBook Neo has an A18, I wonder if you could get MacOS running on an iPhone? :)
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There is a zero percent chance of that ever happening.
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Or better yet, an iPad!
Wonder if it can happen on the Wii U
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With the extra RAM, higher clock speed, and no need to waste CPU cycles converting YUV -> RGB framenbuffers - I bet it would be!
Not only is this an insanely cool project, the writeup is great. I was hooked the whole way through. I particularly love this part: > At this point, the system was trying to find a framebuffer driver so that the Mac OS X GUI could be shown. As indicated in the logs, WindowServer was not happy - to fix this, I’d need to write my own framebuffer driver . I'm surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was). The I/O Kit abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.
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I guess having targeted multiple architectures and in the case of OPENSTEP also operating systems early on certainly helped.
IOKit was actually built from the ground up for OS X! NeXT had a different driver model called DriverKit. I've never coded against either, but my understanding was they're pretty different beasts. (I could be wrong) That said, indeed, the abstraction layer here is delightful! I know that some NetBSD devs managed to get PPC Darwin running under a Mach/IOKit compatibility layer back in the day, up to running Xquartz on NetBSD! With NetBSD translating IOKit calls. :-)
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There’s a great video of a NeXT-era Steve Jobs keynote floating around—I think the one where he announces the x86 port as NeXT was transitioning to a software-only company—where he specifically calls out DriverKit and how great it is. Steve was not a developer but he made it his business to care about what they cared about.
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Funnily enough, there is a (different) DriverKit in macOS again now ;)
As I remember it, they were basically the same—but IOKit is C++ (with restrictions) because 3rd party developers didn't want to learn Objective-C. But that's a hazy, 20 year old memory.
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From here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006411 "At some stage in the future we may be able to move IOKit over to a good programming language"
Fun post. Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD
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How about a piezoelectric buzzer? That's how the firmware on some iPods were first dumped. https://web.archive.org/web/20050828114013/http://www.ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/
I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.
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100% agree, I find that sometimes I hit a dead end, but the things I build or learn on the way are usable at a later date.
That used to be my thing: wherever our ops manager declared something was impossible, I’d put my mind to proving her wrong. Even though we both knew she might declare something impossible prematurely to motivate me. My favorite was “it’s impossible to know which DB is failing from a stack trace”. I created STAIN (stack traces and instance names): a ruby library that would wrap an object in a viral proxy (all returns from all methods are themselves proxies) that would intercept all exceptions and annotate the call stack with the “stain”ed tag.
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Well you're doing gods work as far as I'm concerned. Conflating difficulty in practice with impossibility in principle is, to my mind, a source of so much unnecessary cognitive error.
If all the AI stories on this site were replaced with amazing stuff like this, the world would be a better place.
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I’m SOO happy but also wistfully sad when I open a post like this that I am desperately excited to read and it’s not muddled-thinking- and LinkedInese-riddled slop.
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I probably have rose colored glasses, but this is what I associate with Hacker News when I first started coming to this site. Truly absurd projects for no reason other than the love of the game and detailed write ups. I'm not an LLM post hater, but it definitely has been a bit draining lately. This is exactly what I love to see here.
Microsoft Abruptly Terminates VeraCrypt Account, Halting Windows Updates (404media.co)
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I'm confused why they can't just generate their own signing key and deploy it alongside the installer. Using arbiter platforms like this sounds like a great way to footgun yourself.
A year ago I used Azure Trusted Signing to codesign FOSS software that I distribute for Windows. It was the cheapest way to give away free software on that platform. A couple of months ago I needed to renew the certificate because it expired, and I ran into the same issue as the author here - verification failed, and they refused to accept any documentation I would give them. Very frustrating experience, especially since there no human support available at all, for a product I was willing to pay and use! We ended up getting our certificate sourced from https://signpath.org and have been grateful to them ever since.
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For what it’s worth, Trusted Signing verification has been a moving target over the last 12 months. It was open for individuals, then it was closed to anyone except (iirc) US businesses with DUNS numbers, then it opened again to US based individuals (and a few other countries perhaps). My completely uninformed guess was that someone had done something naughty with Trusted Signing-issued code signing certificates. Anyway, when I first saw the VeraCrypt thing this morning my initial reaction was “I wonder if this is them pushing developers onto trusted signing the hard way?”
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I'm in Europe and ended up creating an organization since I have my own company, but they messed up the verification of one of the legitimate documents, and there was no way to reach them once they made that mistake. Frustrating, and definitely a lost customer for them.
Microsoft wants to control computers. This is why they came up with InsecureBoot - or ad-hoc eliminating accounts willy-nilly style. Microsoft kind of acts like Google here. It is also interesting that the US government is doing absolutely nothing against this despicable behaviour.
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the US government is owned by corporate interests and has been in some capacity since inception. special mention to the Russians and Israelis and Saudis who also own a piece.
I don't know about executable signing, but in the embedded world SecureBoot is also used to serve the customer; id est provide guarantees to the customer that the firmware of the device they receive has not been tampered with at some point in the supply chain.
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> id est provide guarantees to the customer that the firmware of the device they receive has not been tampered with The firmware of the device being a binary blob for the most part... Not like I trust it to begin with. Whereas my open source Linux distribution requires me to disables SecureBoot. What a world.
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You can set up custom SecureBoot keys on your firmware and configure Linux to boot using it. There's also plenty of folks combining this with TPM and boot measurements. The ugly part of SecureBoot is that all hardware comes with MS's keys, and lots of software assume that you'll want MS in charge of your hardware security, but SecureBoot _can_ be used to serve the user. Obviously there's hardware that's the exception to this, and I totally share your dislike of it.
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+1 An unsigned hash is plenty guard to against tampering. The supply chain and any secret sauce that went into that firmware is just trust . Trust that the blob is well intentioned, trust that you downloaded from the right URL, checked the right SHA, trust that the organization running the URL is sanctioned to do so by Microsoft... Once all of that trust for every piece of software is concentrated in one organization, Microsoft, Apple or Google, is has become totally meaningless.
It's to serve the regulators. The Radio Equipment Directive essentially requires the use of secure boot fir new devices.
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I happen to like knowing that my mobile device did not have a ring 0 backdoor installed before it left the factory in Asia. SecureBoot gives me that confidence.
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No it doesn't? The factory programs in the secure boot public keys
We dont need to get philosophical here. You(the admin) can require you (the user) to input a password to signify to you(the admin) to install a ransomware when a link is clicked. That way no control is lost.
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What if the cat pictures are an app too? The computer can't require a password specifically for ransomware, just for software in general. The UI flow for cat pictures apps and ransomware will be identical.
#2 and #3 are fearmongering arguments and total horseshit, excuse the strong language. Should either of those things happen the bootloader puts up a big bright flashing yellow warning screen saying "Someone hacked your device!" I use a Pixel device and run GrapheneOS, the bootloader always pauses for ~5 seconds to warn me that the OS is not official.
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Yes. They're making the point that your flashing yellow warning is a good thing, and that it's helpful to the customer that a mechanism is in place to prevent it from being disabled by an attacker.
1. P(someone wants to run their own firmware) 2. P(someone wants to run their own firmware) * P(this person is malicious) * P(this person implants this firmware on someone else’s computer) 3. The firmware doesn’t install itself Yeah I think 2 and 3 is vastly less likely and strictly lower than 1.
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As an embedded programmer in my former life, the number of customers that had the capability of running their own firmware, let alone the number that actually would , rapidly approaches zero. Like it or not, what customers bought was an appliance, not a general purpose computer.
Why would you put Grandma on VeriCrypt in the first place? It's the more 'difficult' option for FDE.
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What's easier, and bitlocker doesn't count. I want my FDE to be based on a password or a keyfile, not simply by some code in the motherboard. I want it encrypted until I, the operator, provide some data to unlock. In my limited experience with bitlocker, the disk is decryptable automatically as long as it's in the original motherboard.
Show HN: BAREmail ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi (github.com/matt-virgo)
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This is the kind of app idea that immediately makes sense if you’ve ever had to do email on trash internet. Optimizing for bad Wi-Fi is way more useful than chasing another layer of polish.
Yes, Marco does this (disclaimer, I'm the solo founder): https://marcoapp.io Contacts populate alongside email threads in search results. If you click on a contact, it will take you to a dedicated contact screen with every thread you've ever had with that contact, as well as every attachment they've ever sent you.
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Not sure if that's intentional, but the entire landing page gets replaced with an error if WebGL is not available: > Something went wrong! > Error creating WebGL context.
Email isn't a protocol. SMTP, POP, IMAP, JMAP are protocols. GMail requires you to enable IMAP/POP to use it and uses proprietary auth protocol or use unsafe application passwords. GMail IMAP also has a bunch of IMAP extensions that are unique to GMail. Point is - primary interface to GMail is REST API that is (again) unique to GMail.
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Fastmail was developing JMAP for a while, it's not gotten a lot of uptake (mostly because Fastmails primary mail partners like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail are all 20 year old legacy dot com companies...did Microsoft spend all day trying to get Fairchild Semiconductor to play nice with them? No, they did a worse is better DOS and the rest is history). But email is a least common denominator, and like how plan9 failed to take over from unix bc unix inertia, JMAP or deltachat IM over email won't take over bc of network effect inertia, I suspect.
Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire (ft.com)
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Smart of them, hardest currency in existence and USD avoided, and no possible issues.
Iran taking USD bribe instead of obtaining nukes made it worse for them in long run.
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A large segment of the Iranian political class bet their reputations on the nuclear non-proliferation deal with the US in 2015. They've all now been utterly discredited and the hardliners proven correct in all of their predictions. They can look at Ukraine who bitterly regrets giving up their nuclear weapons, or North Korea, seemingly invulnerable despite being the most pariah of pariah states. From the perspective of the Iranian state, it would be idiotic and irresponsible not to try to make a nuclear weapon in these conditions.
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I'm not sure I follow your logic, but one could argue this campaign with drones and cheaper missiles taught Iran it doesn't even need a nuclear deterrent anymore. Between this and Ukraine, the logic of a nuclear warhead deterrent might be considered a paradigm relic from 20th century.
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This is false. If Trump had chosen to nuke Iranian cities, Iran would have had no recourse without a proper nuclear bomb.
To define victory, you'd need to know their political objectives, which neither side has declared or otherwise made clear. On the one hand, the USA was unable to completely restrain Iran's ability to wreak local havoc, but on the other, Iran had many of its assets damaged, and now seems completely unable to prevent foreign actors from using its airspace almost at-will. It seems like the situation has shifted, and the result is inconclusive.
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For the Iranian regime, to survive is to win. Nuclear programme can only be stopped with boots on the ground. America’s military is outdated compared to modern asymmetric warfare. Iran may gain income from the strait. It can now pursue a bomb knowing it will be hard to impossible for America to stop it.
Iran can say whatever they want, it doesn’t make it part of the ceasefire terms
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Its the 10-point plan of Iran which forms the basis of the ceasefire. I don't think it can get much more clear that the US lost this war, along with dignity, decorum and the respect of the world.
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Not that anyone is going to listen to Australia, but Australia believes it is part of the ceasefire terms that were agreed to: Asked on 7.30 if the ceasefire should apply to Israel's action in Lebanon, [Australian Foreign Minister] Senator Wong was adamant it should. "Yes," she said. "Our position is that the world expects that the ceasefire should apply to the region." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-08/penny-wong-says-israel-should-stop-actions-in-lebanon/106543962
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"Our position is that it should" is very different from "the text of their statement says". This is Senator Wong's (or Australia's) idea of what would happen in an ideal world, not anything anybody involved recognizes as relevant. (I mean, they may not recognize the text as being relevant, either, but this is a step below even that.)
Iran stated that it needed to be. I know Israel/US said it isnt, but that isnt how a ceasefire works. All sides actually have to agree to the terms of a ceasefire to have a ceasefire. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/08/lebanon-attacks-israel-iran-ceasfire
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I can't understand how it is possible that when such ceasefires are agreed there isn't a designated third party who has the signatures of both parties and can say, and prove, if it's been violated.
So if both sides do not agree to that request it’s not part of the ceasefire, pretty simple.
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If both sides don't agree on the terms of a ceasefire you don't have a ceasefire.
I think Trump and the Iranians agreed to two different ceasefires and now both pretend they won.
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Seem now like both are also saying that the other side has now broken the ceasefire. Two different ceasefires are not a very stable ground.
Honestly, it’s a good counter to get both sides of the coin. At the moment you’ll find BBC, CNN, NYT et al on one end and Al Jazeera on the other. I also look at DW for a more balanced approach. Don’t consume from one camp!
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Fair call on CNN and DW, but the NYT has always been at least somewhat aligned with Al Jazeera, and the BBC switches around with whatever the current government is.
No? Sources? It's possible that Qatar's government has some editorial control over the Arabic content, but my understanding is that the English operations are separate.
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It's the same company, English operations can't be separate. https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/should-i-trust-al-jazeera-how-to-verify-its-international-reporting-1eadb9 https://apnews.com/article/b39b94d6847f4ee6acafd6ad2da7e963
I believe the only stablecoin that is "uncensorable" is the old MakerDAO DAI (pegged to USD with vaults overcollaterised with other tokens). Not sure if there is a lot of liquidity left. Its successor USDS has implemented all the mechanisms to censor some addresses but if I remember correctly this hasn't been activated yet. All the other ones: USDC, USDT, EURC and the ruble one can be whipped out easily. So more risky for them than good old dollars. Please correct me if I missed something.
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You can issue any stablecoin via bitcoins taproot asset protocol. Transfer even over lightning. Thus it is uncensorable. USDT has this enabled.
I’ve heard a lot of discussion about them accepting payments in Chinese yuan. I wonder if there’s a stablecoin pegged to it.
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Tether has one on ethereum but same problem if the US gov tell tether to whip their address it is game over. China has probably one on another blockchain but I am not sure how easy it is to exit their ecosystem or convert it to anything else...
I think this war will be the moment that historians mark as the death of Pax Americana. The US failed to change the Iranian regime, failed to open the strait, and now a previously international waterway will be tolled in a currency other than the dollar. I wish it need not have happened in my time
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The toll is not going to happen. Iran has plenty of demands regarding the ceasefire and will get almost none of them.
Very Large Crude Carriers carry ~2 million barrels of oil. Ultra Large Crude Carriers double that. If oil went down to $50/Bbl, that $2 million fee amounts to a ~2% tax per ship, given their cargo capacity. It's not particularly exorbitant, especially given that the entire reason they proposed this toll was to fund their rebuilding efforts (Americans and Israelis did a lot of damage that's been under-reported and ignored) This conflict has been an interesting case of watching mass hysteria interact with propaganda in the newform, rapid pace of media that exists in the internet age. The amount of wild conjecture, speculation, misinformation is the most extreme I've ever seen it, eclipsing even the 6 months of nonsense that was spurred on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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If that’s right, 2% indeed doesn’t sound bad. Especially since it’s supposed to be split with Oman.
pipelines, railway, etc. had the US had any real plan to empower the Gulf states against Iran there would already be backup routes
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None of those have near the capacity to replace what was flowing through the Straight and will not replace the Straight for a long time. That's the whole problem. If there were viable alternatives to the Straight, the US would have attacked Iran decades ago. Every US administration has had people in the wings desperate to "Fix" the Iran situation, but only Trump was stupid enough to try it. Meanwhile, the actual production is meaningfully damaged, and for at least a couple years. This is an energy crisis.
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess (aphyr.com)
> I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda. Someone asked Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, his thoughts on LLMs and how easy it was to create fake news, ai slop etc. His response: "People creating fake stories is nothing new. It's been going on for centuries. Humans have always dealt with it the same way: by creating institutions that they trust to only deliver factual information" This could be government departments, newspapers, non-profits etc. A personal note on this: There is a Christmas card my grandfather made in the 1950s by "photoshopping" (by hand, not the software) images of each member of the family so it looked like they were all miniature versions of themselves standing on various parts of the fireplace. The world didn't collapse due to fake media between the 1950s and today due to people having that ability.
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Individuals with Photoshop making obvious fictions for entertainment is different from funded entities producing clips at scale and passed off as real.
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I see this kind of take a lot, and I don't think it's convincing. To me it's similar to saying that the water frame and the power loom won't change anything, because people have been able to make thread and cloth for millenia.
> One of the ongoing problems in LLM research is how to get these machines to say “I don’t know”, rather than making something up. To be fair, I've known humans who are like this as well.
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This is a limitation of the training data. If you were uncertain about something, you wouldn’t write a book about it. The kinds of people you’re talking about tend to generate far more text in their lives than others, because they can spend more time generating - writing books, blogposts, whatever - and less time thinking and working and actually doing things. The models never say they’re uncertain because we never say we’re uncertain, or at least we don’t write it down anywhere.
Here's the opening paragraph of chapter 2 with "people" subbed out for terms referring AI/models/etc. "People are chaotic, both in isolation and when working with other people or with systems. Their outputs are difficult to predict, and they exhibit surprising sensitivity to initial conditions. This sensitivity makes them vulnerable to covert attacks. Chaos does not mean people are completely unstable; most people behave roughly like anyone else. Since people produce plausible output, errors can be difficult to detect. This suggests that human systems are ill-suited where verification is difficult or correctness is key. Using people to write code (or other outputs) may make systems more complex, fragile, and difficult to evolve." To me, this modified paragraph reads surprisingly plainly. The wording is off ("using people to write code") and I had to change that part about attractor behavior (although it does still apply IMO), but overall it doesn't seem like an incoherent paragraph. This is not meant to dunk on the author, but I think it highlights the author's mindset and the gap between their expectations and reality.
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What's your point? The ostensible benefit of LLM's is that you combine a computers' exactness and broad knowledgebase with fluency in human language. A random human picked off the street is indeed bound to be difficult to predict and chaotic at a broad range of tasks, which is why I wouldn't trust them to, say, summarize google search results or rewrite a codebase they are unfamiliar with.
There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. But with the help of machines, a small number of people were able to completely deplete parts of the earth. We had to invent giant legal systems in order to determine who has the right to do that and who doesn't. We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm. We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale. This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up.
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If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google Maps listing to be correct even though "a faceless corporation is going to hoover up my work and profit off it without paying me for my work" and I might pick up a Lime bike someone's dropped into the sidewalk even though "a faceless corporation is externalizing the work of organizing the proper storage of their property on public land without paying the workers" or so on. I just think it's nice to contribute to the human commons and it's fine if some subset of my fellow organism uses it in whatever way. Realistically, the fact that Brewster Kahle is paid whatever few hundred thousand he's paid for managing a non-profit that only exists because it aggregates other people's work isn't a problem for me. Or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin became ultra-rich around providing a search interface into other people's work. Or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did the same through a different interface. This particular notion doesn't seem to be a post-AI trend. It seems to have happened prior to the big GPTs coming out where people started doing a lot of this accounting for contribution stuff. One day it'll be interesting to read why it started happening because I don't recall it from the past. Perhaps I just wasn't super plugged in to the communities that were complaining about Red Hat, Inc. It's not that I don't understand if I sold my Subaru to a guy who immediately managed to sell it to another guy for a million times the money. I get that. I'd feel cheated. But if I contributed a little to it, like I did so Google would have a site to list for certain keywords so that they could show ads next to it in their search results, I just find it so hard to be like "That's my money you're using. Pay me!".
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You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore. I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make money from it would be devastating.
You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well) > We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.
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Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.
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Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose. Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”
Right, but we played the scaling card and it worked but is now reaching limits. What is the next card? You can surely argue that we can find a new one at any time. That’s the definition of a breakthrough. I just don’t see one at the moment.
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better tooling and integration
> I just don’t see one at the moment. Did you see the one before the current one was even found? Things tend to look easy in hindsight, and borderline impossible trying to look forward. Otherwise it sounds like you're in the same spot as before :)
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That’s what I’m said. Breakthroughs happen. No doubt about it, and they are unpredictable. Hence a breakthrough. But right now we’re using up runway with nothing yet identified to take us to the next level. And while sometimes breakthroughs happen, sometimes they don’t.
Modern LLMs are fairly good at that as well.
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But that is bolted on and is not a core behavior.
"Hey ChatGPT. How would you describe me?" https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69780-ae58-83e8-a41c-7d10a5f29841 It has no conversations and no memory of me. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but there's no basis for it.
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This is not falsifiable, I don't buy it. Do one where we all know is false please?
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"Hey ChatGPT. I've recently grown horns and I need some care advice. Should I polish my horns before going to have them trimmed or will the horn trimmer polish them for me?" https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69b18-d1c8-83e8-bc47-8f315a1b55d1
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I specifically asked you to use the thinking version. Here is the result with thinking https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69dd6-fb50-838d-863c-4e1eda5d088b I suggest you try it yourself to be convinced. Try it in incognito mode if you wish. Or not.
Why do you insist on reading and commenting on these articles that bore you so much?
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Oh I don't know, maybe because I like to give dissenting takes a chance? Because from time to time they do make some new, decent points? You know, basic intellectual rigor? Do you imagine me being a clairvoyant by the way, or how do you expect me to know a post is of low quality before I read it or at least skim it? This one did happen to be a part of the vast majority that doesn't offer much of anything. It's a redundant rehash of all the usual rubbish anyone can come across any day.
Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between what it thinks is the reality and what is.
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people can and do confabulate, but generally I trust my intern to tell me "I don't know" and "I think it was X but tbh I have no fuckin clue" the LLM will just lie to me "Good idea! You're totally right, we should do Y"
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The test isn’t whether humans also create bullshit, but whether an honest actor knows when they are doing this and doesn’t do it on purpose. As the article points out, LLMs don’t say “I don’t know.” If you demand they do something that never appears in the training data, they just forge ahead and generate words and make something up according to the statical probabilities they have in the model weights. A human knows that he doesn’t know. That seems missing with current AIs.
If it bullshits so much, you wouldn't have a problem giving me an example of it bullshitting on ChatGPT (paid version)? Lets take any example of a text prompt fitting a few pages - it may be a question in science or math or any domain. Can you get it to bullshit?
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To me it’s the other way around. It’s difficult to trust (paid) ChatGPT‘s output consistently. When I need exact, especially up to date facts, I have to constantly double check everything. I split my sessions into projects by topic, it regularly mixes things up in subtle and not so subtle ways. There is no sense of actually understanding continuity and especially not causality it seems. It’s _very_ easy to lead it astray and to confidently echo false assumptions. In any case, I‘ve become more precise at prompting and good at spotting when it fails. I think the trick is to not take its output too seriously.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
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I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take.
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Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender. The main community and learning resource is at http://aagenielsen.dk .
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Gamey Boy / Modretro Chromatic / LSDJ / Dirtywave M8 / anything F# / MiniDisc community
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Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles. Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.
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I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows". Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself. Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation. So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look! [0] https://xlights.org [1] https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg
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Almost everything is a "solved problem". What's the point of woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun. Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.
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Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex. There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction. Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls?
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Six months deep now into analog computing. (I have a modular, hobbyist analog computer wrapping up—just writing the manual). Going to have to do something on the other end of the spectrum after this. Maybe RISO printing…
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I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past - 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own - lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people - Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)
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I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document. I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that. I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved. [1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Quest-for-Concurrent-DOS-Part-1
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Create custom software for non profits is pretty rewarding. They cant afford anything and have process flow needs that are completely unmet. The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve
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I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough. It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family.
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I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9 Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw
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I've been pretty obsessed with FSRS in general (tldr: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/ABC-of-FSRS ) It's a fantastic new-ish scheduler for spaced repetition - basically a machine learning model which adapts to you, and schedules flash (or anything, really, it's an algorithm) cards according to how well you are personally performing - surfacing data like retention, stability, recall, etc. It's a massive jump over previous "learning algorithms" like For the past 60d I've been using Anki (a flash card program) and it's FSRS setting to learn my French deck (5000 most common French words) and I'm absolutely zooming. I can already follow a fair chunk of conversational French. I've also been using the same system to learn Chess more deeply (endgames, tactics, openings) through Chessable and a few other websites that offer FSRS. It's levelled up my chess game a lot Basically - the thing that hooked me was the data. Being able to see how many cards I've reviewed, how many cards are at 90/80% retention, the stability of every piece of that knowledge, the decay rate, etc... It's really cool.
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Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread. There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf. I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient. Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour. Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality. Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting. The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it. I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations. I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle. With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.
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Is buying hopefully broken electronic test equipment at the flea market, fixing it and then blogging about it a niche hobby?
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Not niche, but photography has a way of opening doors because you push yourself to get to places you might not otherwise. Maybe learn a new language that isn't European or Japanese. If "niche" matters to you, anything currently receiving any type of investing (ML etc) is probably not gonna work.
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I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19). Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.
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I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such. Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later. I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings.
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Holograms! It's fascinating how they are made and how they can serve as a metaphor for how the universe might work.
I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest. Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.
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+1 for martial arts in general. Depending on the art it might not be niche (I'm sure karate and taekwondo are too big for that). But things like HEMA, iaido, eskrima, all kinds of archery, ... are great fun and typically come with smallish & fun communities. Edit: before you think these arts are immune to tech, I once had a student who built a (truly awful) sword fighting "robot" to help train deflecting strikes. Not quite up to par with Dune's robot swordmasters.
I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc…
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Nice to see people discovering these games. I wouldn't really say it was niche until BG3 though, there were plenty of highly acclaimed games long before that. You might like this blog, the author plays through CRPGs in chronological order. Currently they're at the mid 90s. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
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I always meant to go back to Wizardry 7 I think it is. (Or 5, I forget) I was convinced that a party of all Ninjas and Samurai would be unstoppable, but I never could make it work. I recall leveling up to a point where a high enough character would get 3 attacks per turn, and then when hit counterattack twice. Multiply this by the whole party. But realistically, at some point this flurry of attacks every round just fell over because you need better magic users for enemies with certain weaknesses. My memory is fuzzy, but it also may have related to the increasingly large hordes of enemies which would dilute the effects of so many attacks.
I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.
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Me too! I love the view up there.
i've always been interested in para-motoring. how safe or unsafe is paragliding? do you think about that aspect before going out for a flight?
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I’ve been flying since 2012 and I always think about safety. Safety is relative but if you do the things the right way you will be ok. A good common sense is super important, and then keep on your progression, there’s no need to skip steps. Knowing the air is a lifetime journey so there is no rush. Also I feel paramotor is kind of safer because you get to fly with light wind or not wind at all, mostly early in the morning or near sunset. In my personal experience this sport change my life.
I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing. This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.
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Ooh! What kind of capsules?
Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done. It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences. Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.
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Really fun! I used to do it too, and I miss it. How do you combine it with work? Where I live in NL, there are few days where I’m able to go kiteboarding and I probably won’t know until the day off if it’s possible or not. Very hard to schedule!
FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people. Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there. My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'. also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal ; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean? the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things. If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous. Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least.
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I knew a guy who found an interesting 3d printing niche: 2 way radios for professionals (mainly SAR crews) are always getting fetched up on clothing, and you're often finding the radio turned off because the knobs got moved. Dumb problem, should have been solved by fundamental engineering years ago - but whatever. He built a 3d printed shroud for a variety of popular radios, and now makes a living selling these. He's a tech guy, but no engineer. He saw the need (he works on a SAR team), saw the solution and made it happen. Inspiring, really. I do a bit of 3d printing stuff myself. Personally, I'm attracted that it's getting more professional. I can use it as the impetus to learn real engineering/CAD, etc. Not in an "I'm an engineer" way, but still using real principles to make better things. You don't have to be intimidated if you keep your identity small and let it inspire you instead.
I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn. I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving. I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive. I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe.
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GUE Fundies is on my bucket list. I don't think I'd be interested in cave diving or deep stuff where I need helium, but the level of skill that tech divers show is something I want to be able to do.
Put it down over winter but just picking it back up. Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer ) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc. I'm using an AudioMoth currently ( https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth ), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.
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really cool, data pipeline alone sounds like fun challenge
I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy. Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons
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I am 2/3x more productive on days that I get a powerlifting session in before work. There is no better feeling than overcoming a plateau through hard work and dedication.
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I do powerlifting 3x a week but I don't otherwise view myself as obsessed with it. I don't have a coach, I don't enter competitions. I know my PRs in my head but I don't keep spreadsheets or stats or have any kind of real programming. I don't video my lifts, I don't post about it on social media. I'm just content with getting stronger. I really don't get obsessed with anything, which might be a fault as that seems to be a trait of people who are really successful in what they do. On the other hand, it's the one type of exercise I have actually been able to stick with for any length of time. Started about 5 years ago at age 55. So never too late to try it, even if exercise has never been appealing to you.
one of my favorite parts of powerlifting, opposed to hiit or other fitness lifting, is the lack in physical change. i feel like i look the same but can point to numbers that show im much stronger
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When I started stronglifts, I didn't tell anyone and people noticed just from my physique after like ~5 weeks of training. Noob gains are insane and definitely cause physical change.
Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild." A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole. For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways! And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others.
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Sounds fun! Do you have resources to get started? I do gundog work, it would be fun to do the tracking together with the dog. (I don’t hunt, it would just be to make some walks more interesting)
Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making. Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :)
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Or smoke it…
My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way. You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too. These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best.
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Write explicit rules about dogs. Many "weirdos" just like their boundaries and basic hygiene. It is hard to socialize, over barking contest and rar dog humpimg your leg. It will save both sides a lot of time.
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Sounds like a really cool idea. How do you organize the meetup and promote it to people if it ends up being random people? Do you set it up on meetup.com and have a theme at the minimum? I've been to a lot of meetups and it's definitely hit or miss and obviously depends on the sociability of the people that show up. The better ones I've attended are generally ones where people aren't trying to network for work purposes and are there literally to just socialize. The networking ones I find very dull as it's people just talking shop and career and if you've nothing to offer them on the career front, they move on quickly.
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> ones where people aren't trying to network I have literally never been to any kind of organized gathering where this wasn't the objective of most of the people there. Family and children's events excluded (sometimes).
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That’s crazy, you’ve never been to a party?
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Sure. Most people are there with an agenda.
It has been my experience that social deduction games are very attractive to folks who have problems socializing in day-to-day life. You can see them almost come alive when they are given the permission.
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I think a lot of people need prompting for something to talk about. They have no confidence that topics they bring up will be interesting to anyone else. So any kind of gathering that takes that pressure off will be attractive.
US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology (cnet.com)
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>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters. At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored? The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237 [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-202 ... [3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf [4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed ( https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/ ). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides. [5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-misreads-2026-3 >misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
Agreed. I live in a city that's top 5% of safest cities in CA and these cameras have sprouted up everywhere. I reached out to my cities representative about it and he ignored my outreach (nice thing about instagram - that "read" indicator!). The most blatant is one that just points into the Home Depot parking lot. I don't see them at target. It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox News all day probably loves these things because they've been brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from reality.
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I believe home depot themselves put up these cameras.
You didn't ask for data... You asked: "In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people?" That requires a specific example, which you were provided with. This reads to me as a pithy response that doesn't want to wrestle with the ways this can be misused.
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By this same argument ANY police makes life hard for regular people because they sometimes fuck up, so let's just get rid of police too. What's the worst that could happen.
Your question was: > In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? I provided an example. Are you only accepting peer-reviewed studies?
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Single example is worthless. Is there a pattern of this happening far more often? Overall, do fewer people get incorrectly arrested or detained as a result of this technology, or more.
Likely: Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call with an infrared camera. Or scan all of the license plates and faces of people along the way. Possible: Perhaps crash into someone? Or worse.
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> Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call with an infrared camera. That's unconstitutional. Use a regular camera and it's fine for some reason.
How so? I ask as a paramedic of 14 years, now retired. If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone. At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet). FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc. Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.
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> If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone. The point is that the drone is fast enough to arrive first, and do the searching so that you don't have to. It's just one of many possible scenarios. I totally understand the argument that this might not be the most effective use of money, but I honestly don't understand the lack of appreciation for the number of places this could be used effectively.
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
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It's probably the neighborhood HOA that pays for it. My HOA got Flock cameras after a string of thefts, and has similar signs up. The HOA encourages homeowners to submit their car license plate info so that if a crime is reported, it's easier to identify cars that don't belong to homeowners. Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a decade in federal prison. It seems like only a few people are responsible for the majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up drastically improves quality of life for everyone else. Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.
I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million cameras. You get safety by building a community with context that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s version of "what happened".
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I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet don't network and build communities. In an actual societal breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become loot drops for others who actually band together.
They're Made Out of Meat (1991) (terrybisson.com)
This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat, probably kept the original meat safe in a corner of the galaxy too.. The universe were quite uniform in character. Galaxies, stars, they are very predictable and essentially the same everywhere, across billions of years (both time and distance), can't see why that doesn't apply to life too in a general sense. Maybe different RNA building blocks and genetic chemistry, but probably work out similar to meat and organic stuff.
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> any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.
Thanks for doing a "well AKTually" on a piece of amusing fiction.
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There's no refutation of anything here, I seriously thought about the possibility of evolution without meat, but you should be convince me otherwise if you can show me how it can arise naturally after big bang. It's a discussion of reality stemming from an inspirational fiction. The whoosh apply to you.
It's amazing how consciousness remains a mystery given all the scientific progress over the last 100 years
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Is it surprising? It seems likely you could build a complete working model of the universe with no provision for consciousness at all. As far as modern science goes, it's an intractable problem
They are clearly familiar with meat-based animals: > “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.” > “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.” And indeed sentient species that are partly made of meat: > “Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.” > “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
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I get your point but I don't think that those quotes establish familiarity with meat based animals. Familiarity with animals would be something like "yeah, sure, we know about that planet with cows but this is something else entirely!" (Also humans wouldn't be so surprising if they knew about things like cows). Their references are not to creatures that are meat through-and-through but fictional alien races that have a kind of incidental relationship to meat that doesn't establish meat-based cognition as normal the way that animals would.
Well, actually, probably not. If you say we're made out of meat, you end up with the hard problem of consciousness. I'm imagining a purple cube in this moment. Is the purple cube made out of meat?
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This is the funniest possible place attempt to open a hard problem of consciousness conversation, but also fitting because it makes it as ridiculous as I feel it actually is. On another level even this clarification kind of misses the mark because many/most versions of the HPOC still treat physical substrate as a necessary condition, just not a sufficient one, sometimes will appeal to radio receivers, or the mental and physical being two aspects of the same underlying thing (sometimes called neutral monism). I personally think that view is mistaken and deeply confused, but even so, it's a view that ties consciousness to the substrate of "thinking meat" without reducing it, and would probably be a moot point from the aliens perspective.
It's electrical signals... Inside your meat
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So the power grid is having experiences? Computers too?
This American Life also did a good narration of this in Act 2 of episode 803 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803
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Bad URL, but this YouTube clip works for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4
Well, if you think you can do a better job, make it happen. Make the film you want to see.
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Why? Surely one can criticize a movie, book, videogame, etc, without being required to create a better one in turn. I didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why. One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices. --- [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6803046/
You've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
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Oh yes. But never dressed up as X! :D More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
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