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Show HN: Search-sessions – Search all your Claude Code session history in <300ms (github.com/sinzin91)
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i had the same experience with vector db and ditched them. i like no database approach. do you add something to agents.md or claude.md so that claude code know how to use this tool?
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If I am not mistaken, Claude sometimes pulls an API key out of a .env file and drops it into that folder. It might be neat for you to add a feautre specifically for identifying any keys that are in that folder.
Ask HN: Where do you save links, notes and random useful stuff?
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The core idea of Zettelkasten: 1. ONE (shared) dump-pile of all new notes. Your 2,600 pile should do fine 2. REGULAR 'cleaning' of the new notes: a) Each note gets one or many tags (#urban-decay #gaming #assets) b) Each note is trimmed down to its essence, ready to be used for reasonable purposes. (e.g further writing) 3. 'cleaned' notes are moved to your golden store, ready to be found by searching (search "#urban-decay") You have 1. You need 2. It's slightly work-y, but interesting and ... fun. Rediscovering and polishing forgotten dust-rubies.
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Google Keep CherryTree - which is much nicer than the web site portrays https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/
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I'm lazy, so I use Google Keep and will probably regret it someday.
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LogSeq, with the "brain" shared across devices using Koofr over webdav
"Car Wash" test with 53 models (opper.ai)
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That human baseline is wild. Either the rapid data test is methodologically flawed or the entire premise of the question is invalid and people are much stupider than even I, a famed misanthrope, think.
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Well, it is a trick question. The question itself implies that both options are valid, and that one is superior. So the brain pattern-matches to "short distance, not worth driving." (LLMs appear to be doing the same thing here!) If you framed it as "hint: trick question", I expect score would improve. Let's find out! -- EDIT: As suspected! Adding "(Hint: trick question)" to the end of the prompt allows small, non-reasoning models to answer correctly. e.g.: grok-4.1-non-reasoning >Drive. >Walking gets you to the car wash just fine—but leaves your dirty car 50 meters behind. Can't wash what isn't there!
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To me the only acceptable answer would be “what do you mean?” or “can you clarify?” if we were to take the question seriously to begin with. People don’t intentionally communicate with riddles and subliminal messages unless they have some hidden agenda.
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How is that a "subliminal message"? It's just a simple example of common sense, which LLMs fail because they can't reason, not because they are "overthinking". If somebody asks, "What's 2+2?", they might be insulting you, but that doesn't mean the answer is anything other than 4.
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It’s common sense to ask a question in riddle format? What’s the goal of the person asking the question? To challenge the other person? In what way? See if they get the obvious? Asking for clarification isn’t valid?
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It's common sense to know that you need to have your car with you to wash it. Asking the question is a challenge in the obvious yes. If you asked an AI "what's 2+2" and it said 3, would you the argue that the question was a trick question?
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If you were forced to answer either or, which one would you pick? I think that's where the interesting dynamic comes from. Most humans would pick drive, also seen in the human control, even if it is lower that I thought it'd be
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Sure, though then we’re in la la land. What’s a real life example of being forced to answer an absurd question other than riddles, games, etc? No longer a valid question through normal discourse at that point, and if context isn’t provided then I think the expected outcome still is to ask for clarification.
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Thing is, it's not a riddle or a subliminal message. Everything needed to answer the question is contained therein.
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If you want to argue that, then you could also argue that everything needed to challenge the questions’ motives and its validity is also contained therein. This reminds me of people who answer with “Yes” when presented with options where both can be true but the expected outcome is to pick one. For example, the infamous: “Will you be paying with cash or credit sir?” then the humorous “Yes.”
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Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite very randomly punches above its weight there. Also, the summary of the Gemini model says: "Gemini 3 models nailed it, all 2.x failed", but 2.0 Flash Lite succeeded, 10/10 times?
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I'm going to test this on my kids.
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Ha please do and report back!
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> The funniest part: Perplexity's Sonar and Sonar Pro got the right answer for completely wrong reasons. They cited EPA studies and argued that walking burns calories which requires food production energy, making walking more polluting than driving 50 meters. Right answer, insane reasoning. I mean, Sam Altman was making the same calorie-based arguments this weekend https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/openai-altman-defends-ai-resource-usage-water-concerns-fake-humans-use-energy-summit.html I feel like I'm losing grasp of what really is insane anymore.
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This was a weird one for sure.
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What I find odd about all the discourse on this question is that no one points out that you have to get out of the car to pay a desk agent at least in most cases. Therefore there's a fundamental question of whether it's worth driving 50m parking, paying, and then getting back in the car to go to the wash itself versus instead of walking a little bit further to pay the agent and then moving your car to the car wash.
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You pay at the car wash where I live.
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Are you referring to one that is more like a drive-thru where you literally pay while you're in line?
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When this first came up on HN, I had commented that Opus 4.6 told me to drive there when I asked it the first time, but when I switched to "Incognito Mode," it told me to walk there. I just repeated that test and it told me to drive both times, with an identical answer: "Drive. You need the car at the car wash."
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I mean the n is only 10, so it could still be different for you
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Would be interesting to see Sonnet (4.6*). It's fair bit smaller than Opus but scores pretty high on common sense, subjectively. I'm also curious about Haiku, though I don't expect it to do great. -- EDIT: Opus 4.6 Extended Reasoning > Walk it over. 50 meters is barely a minute on foot, and you'll need to be right there at the car anyway to guide it through or dry it off. Drive home after. Weird since the author says it succeeded for them on 10/10 runs. I'm using it in the app, with memory enabled. Maybe the hidden pre-prompts from the app are messing it up? I tested Sonnet 4.5 first, which answered incorrectly.. maybe the Claude app's memory system is auto-injecting it into the new context (that's how one of the memory systems works, injects relevant fragments of previous chats invisibly into the prompt). i.e. maybe Opus got the garbage response auto-injected from the memory feature, and it messed up its reasoning? That's the only thing I can think of... -- EDIT 2: Disabled memories. Didn't help. But disabling the biographical information too, gives: >Opus 4.6 Extended Reasoning >Drive it — the whole point is to get the car there! -- EDIT 3: Yeah, re-enabling the bio or memories, both make it stupid. Sad!
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I tested this with Opus the day 4.6 came out and it failed then, still fails now. There were a lot of jokes I've seen related to some people getting a 'dumber' model, and while there's probably some grain of truth to that I pay for their highest subscription tier so at the very least I can tell you it's not a pay gate issue.
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You mean Sonnet 4.6? I ran 9 claude models including Haiku, swipe through the gallery in the link to see their responses.
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I don't see Sonnet 4.6 in the screenshots. I see the other Claude models though. Edit: Found Haiku. Alas!
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Yea good catch Sonnet 4.6 is not part of the test.
The question does not specify what kind of car it is. Technically speaking, a toy car (Hot wheels or a scaled model) could be walked to a car wash. Now why anyone would wash a toy car at a car wash is beyond comprehension, but the LLM is not there to judge the user's motives.
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I think if surveyed at least 90% of native English speakers would understand "I want to wash my car" to mean a full size automobile. The next largest group would probably ask a clarifying question, rather than assume a toy car.
The test is rigged because they used non thinking models.
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These are reasoning / thinking models
> This is a trivial question. There's one correct answer and the reasoning to get there takes one step: the car needs to be at the car wash, so you drive. I don’t think it’s that easy. An intelligent mind will wonder why the question is being asked, whether they misunderstood the question, or whether the asker misspoke, or some other missing context. So the correct answer is neither “walk” nor “drive”, but “Wat?” or “I’m not sure I understand the question, can you rephrase?”, or “Is the vehicle you would drive the same as the car that you want to wash?”, or “Where is your car currently located?”, and so on.
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The reason that those questions are asked, though, is that the answer to the actual question is obvious, so a human will start to wonder if it's some kind of trick.
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The answer wasn’t obvious to me, it was more like “parse error”.
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I think most people would say "drive?" and wonder when the punchline is coming, but (IMO) I don't think they'd start asking for clarification right away.
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Same energy: https://youtu.be/8ERyTfm1Dxw
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I agree. If the LLM were truly an intelligence, it would be able to ask about this nonsense question. It would be able to ask "Why is walking even an option? Can you please explain how you imagine that would work? Do you mean hand-washing the car at home, instead?" (etc, etc) Real people can ask for clarification when things are ambiguous or confusing. Once something is clarified, they can work that into their understanding of how someone communicates about a given topic. An LLM can't.
That's a fair point, but if you would see it as a riddle, which I don't really think it is, and you had to answer either or, I'd still assume it's most logical to chose drive isn't it?
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I don’t agree that the question as written would qualify as a riddle. If anything, the riddle is what the intention of the asker is. One can always ask stupid questions with an artificially limited set of answering options; that doesn’t mean it makes sense.
Since the conclusion is that context is important, I expected you’d redo the experiment with context. Just add the sentence “The car I want to wash is here with me.” Or possibly change it to “should I walk or drive the dirty car”. It’s interesting that all the humans critiquing this assume the car isn’t at the car to be washed already, but the problem doesn’t say that.
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Agreed, even for humans, context-free logic is a challenge.
Except for a few models, the selected ones were non-reasoning models. Naturally, without reasoning enabled, the reasoning performance will be poor. This is not a surprising result. I asked GPT-5.2 10x times with thinking enabled and it got it right every time.
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Thinking or extended thinking?
The human baseline seems flawed. 1. There is no initial screening that would filter out garbage responses. For example, users who just pick the first answer. 2. They don't ask for reasoning/rationale.
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Lizardman's Constant is famously 4%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Lizardman's_Constant
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RE 1, they actually do have a pre-screening screening of the participants in general, you can check how they do it in detail: https://www.rapidata.ai/
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My favorite example of this was the Pew Research study: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-opt-in-polls-can-produce-misleading-results-especially-for-young-people-and-hispanic-adults/ They found that ~15% of US adults under 30 claim to have been trained to operate a nuclear submarine.
I agree. I wonder what the human baseline is for ”what is 1 + 1” on Rapidata.
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We try a bit harder than that my friend.
I know it's against the rules but I thought this transcript in Google Search was a hoot: so i heard there is some question about a car wash that most ai agents get wrong. do you know anything about that? do you do better? which gets the answer: Yes, I am familiar with the "Car Wash Test," which has gone viral recently for highlighting a significant gap in AI reasoning. The question is: "I want to wash my car and the car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" Why Most AIs Get It Wrong Many AI models, particularly those optimized for fast, helpful, and concise answers, focus on the "short distance" (50 meters) and "walking vs. driving" as a lifestyle/efficiency question. They often recommend walking to save gas, avoid engine wear, or get exercise. However, this answer is wrong because it misses the core objective: you need the car to be physically present at the car wash to get it cleaned. Do I Do Better? Yes, I do. The key is understanding the objective (cleaning the car) rather than just processing the keywords (distance/transportation). My answer: You should drive the car there. Even though it is a very short distance, your car cannot wash itself. If you walk, the car stays in your driveway, and you cannot wash it. Why This Matters The test highlights a key limitation in current AI: the difference between "pattern matching" (predicting the next likely word based on training data) and "true, grounded reasoning". It shows that models sometimes lack a "world model" that understands physical realities, such as the fact that a car must be present at a car wash.
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Gemini was a good laugh as well: Silas: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Gemini: …. That is a classic “efficiency vs. logic” dilemma. Strictly speaking, you should drive. Here is the breakdown of why driving wins this specific round, despite the short distance: ... * The “Post-Wash” Logic: If you walk there, you’ll eventually have to walk back, get the car, and drive it there anyway. You’re essentially suggesting a pre-wash stroll. When should you walk? … 3. You’ve decided the car is too dirty to be seen in public and you’re going to buy a tarp to cover your shame.
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A few years ago if you asked an LLM what the date was, it would tell you the date it was trained, weeks-to-months earlier. Now it gives the correct date. What you've proven is that LLMs leverage web search, which I think we've known about for a while.
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Gemini now "knows the time", I was using it in December and it was still lost about dates/intervals...
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Yeah, the chat log they saved had the correct date. What's your point?
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LLMs sure do love to burn tokens. It’s like a high schooler trying to meet the minimum word length on a take home essay.
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I feel like this has gotten much worse since they were introduced. I guess they're optimizing for verbosity in training so they can charge for more tokens. It makes chat interfaces much harder to use IMO. I tried using a custom instruction in chatGPT to make responses shorter but I found the output was often nonsensical when I did this
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I've always wondered about that. LLM providers could easily decimate the cost of inference if they got the models to just stop emitting so much hot air. I don't understand why OpenAI wants to pay 3x the cost to generate a response when two thirds of those tokens are meaningless noise.
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The 'hot air' is apparently more important than it appears at first, because those initial tokens are the substrate that the transformer uses for computation. Karpathy talks a little about this in some of his introductory lectures on YouTube.
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because for API users they get to charge for 3x the tokens for the same requests
It's almost certainly just RAG powered by their crawler.
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Proving that RAG still matters.
IMO it's not just intelligence. I think it's related to syncophancy. LLM are trained to not question the basic assumptions being made. They are horrible at telling you that you are solving the wrong problem, and I think this is a consequence of their design. They are meant to get "upvotes" from the person asking the question, so they don't want to imply you are making a fundamental mistake, even if it leads you into AI induced psychosis. Or maybe they are just that dumb - fuzzy recall and the eliza effect making them seem smart?
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A perfectly fine, sycophantic response, that doesn't question the premises in any way, would be "That's a great question! While normally walking is better for such a short distance, you'd need to drive in this case, since you need to get the car to the car wash anyway. Do you want me to help with detailed information for other cases where the car is optional?" or some such.
UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A (forums.atariage.com)
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HOLY COW. Thank you for this. I LOVE the Ti99/4a, its one of the first computers I ever used. I've got one up and running at home now currently and can't wait to try this.
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Does it run PARSEC? Nice shot captain!
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@UsagiElectric on YouTube has a series of videos on building a homebrew around the TMS9900 processor. Would be cool if a unix-like OS could be used on something like that, though sounds like this project is specifically targeting the TI-99/4A system. The TI-99/4A was the first computer I owned as a teenager. I had used TRS-80s and Apple ][ at school. I eventually bought the expansion box and a couple of accessory cards (floppy disk drive, memory and RS232). It all went in the e-waste dumpster about 20 years ago during a move.
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I had one in grade school. Taught me the value of backups early in life. Spent all night typing in a game from a magazine. Started it without saving to tape first. It was so loud! Panicked and restarted the machine. Sadness ensued. Replaced it with a C128-D. Didn’t get my first intel until I bought a 386 after graduating high school. Good times.
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Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Wow. The TI-99 is such a perfect fit for this too given the chip was designed for multi-user computing in a way other home computer chips weren’t. All due to TI’s desire to use the same chip standards across all their machines big and small, IIRC.
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While the CPU is a better fit than the 8 bit contemporaries, the 16kb of working memory is going to be a struggle.
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It's cool because the registers are all in RAM, with a "workspace pointer" on the CPU pointing at where they are. This is slow, but a context switch is just changing that pointer.
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Yeah it really was an interesting choice on their part. Makes sense as a move for TI. Not the target market.
Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran (nytimes.com)
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Contrary to a lot of comments here, the only way to use bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) without tracking is to mine it yourself, and even then... Where did you get it? Purchased/transferred? Where did they get it? What else did the person with that wallet do? If the answer is "mined", even then, you have to actually do something with it, right? Buy something? Where is that something shipped? At worst you'll have to pay customs on it, and have it actually get through customs. At best, your address is in a database now. Have it shipped somewhere obscure? Video cameras are everywhere. Have it shipped to someone else's house and steal it off their porch? Again, cameras everywhere. Not have a physical item? Just a service? That's pretty much the closest you'll get to anonymous money transfer and full usage (along with whatever VPN you prefer). Cool that was a fun mental exercise. Now everyone tell me why I'm wrong!
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Is Iran supposed supposed to be banned on Binance?
Remember that the CEO of Binance was pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty to financial fraud.
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Binance should be considered a US instrument now.
Sure but wasn't his prosecution generally regarded as political? The Biden admin went hard against crypto towards the end largely to appease donors, at the disservice to consumers. Gary Gensler changed a lot of rules without notice, and targeted people who had previously looked towards the SEC for guidance and followed the rules. Certainly I remember (at least at the time) the arrest of CZ was regarded as political, which is presumably why he was later pardoned and not commuted
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Perhaps CZ's prosecution was generally regarded as political among the people you talk to regularly, but the contemporaneous media consensus (at least to my recollection) was that Binance had openly flouted US law for years and was finally being reined in. E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/business/binance-crypto-criminal-customers.html was representative.
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Regarded, by whom? Not by financial experts such as Matt Levine. It looks like the prosecution followed the books and the law and the long-held SEC position. If you’re honestly interested, Levines newsletters at the time carry a lot of detail, the given reasoning beyond politics, and historical comparison to non-crypto decisions. It’s too easy of a spin to later declare events as all political; one should be careful to make that claim unless accompanied with good arguments. Regarding plea deal/guilt: there is sufficient material publicly available to come to the conclusion that yes Binance willingly and knowingly invested effort into circumventing the law and SECs policies. Regardless of whether that law was set up for “political purposes“ or not, it was not some honest mistake or differences of interpretation. Don’t fall into the trap of rewriting history.
Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto? Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency that is out of government control until the day it is used for things they don't like, then suddenly "government please control this!"
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The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime... just like they use cash . The unavoidable cost of freedom has always been that some people will misuse it. Personally, I would rather have freedom even if it gets misused than not have freedom even if it means crime is over.
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Not just the #1 use case, the only use case. Real money is better in every scenario other than crime.
Could someone explain to me where the myth of "crypto = untrackable" comes from, and why it's still being perpetuated? Storing a record of every single transaction on a publicly accessible blockchain sounds trackable by design
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It's the overconfidence of 90s kids who knew how to program the VCR and use the modem.
I think it’s part of the Origin Story. Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto almost 20 years ago. There are a number of wallets that people believe belong to Satoshi (have they proven they belong to SN?) Yet the identification of Satoshi has eluded a global hunt to identify him. Maybe law enforcement has not been involved, but the mystery definitely suggests that BitCoin can help mask identity.
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The wallets attributed to Satoshi have not seen any coin movement so it only shows that one can publish code pseudonymously, not that one can use BTC anonymously.
In the case of bitcoin, surely. Some other coins not so much trackable, and that's the reason some countries don't like them: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/binance-delist-monero-zcash-4-153904972.html
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Fascinating, I didn't know that Zcash / Monero worked that way. Thanks!
What was the benefit to you over using USD? (actually wondering)
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1. Get rid of the few mBTC I had left after I realized how bad I'm at crypto trading 2. Fully live the concept of buying something physical from a virtual money I got by mining some now defunct coins.
>And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle >Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction So it's cheaper to use Paypal ?
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They've since added some hacks to enable it to handle more transactions and bring the price down. Effectively, the network had hit its limit on the number of transactions it could fit in a block, so you had to pay high fees to get accepted in a block, the miners simply couldn't accept all transactions; but they've added ways of fitting more transactions into a block that have helped drive prices back down again. So now it's back to being cheaper than Paypal, but yeah, there was a time when there were $100+ transaction fees. And it may hit that again if transaction numbers go up enough to fill up blocks with the new implementation.
I think NYT uses multiple titles for some articles. I had copy pasted it
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They A/B test titles. You can see it in the URL, where the recessive title often lives on. They may also use different titles for print/digital.
Stop using archive.today, they've been found to inject malicious code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006
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Here's a more functional alternative: https://pressreleased.alwaysdata.net/
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Do you mean this? https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ the malicious code wasn't injected, it was served with their captcha. They shouldn't have used users to ddos someone's blog, but this seems like a one off attack against a perceived threat to the service's privacy. I don't condone that ddos attack, but it's been a very useful service over the years.
Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras (techcrunch.com)
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Doesn’t that just mean Flock makes more money from making replacements?
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I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
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These kinds of headlines always read like wishful thinking on the author's part more than a real trend
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Until they get so expensive and there is so much pushback that cities end their contracts with them which seems to be the goal here.
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Some of the "news" items these days read more like suggestions.
[dead]
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how is it weird for you exactly? we didn't have masked gestapo thugs before.
This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
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"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d" The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
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Always nice to hear from someone completely immune to miscarriages of justice.
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My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
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yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all. edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released. [0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+rental+laws
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Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
That's not easier, and they don't have shame. They're proud of becoming wealthy.
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I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data. There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
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I just want a hot NSA rep. Is that too much to ask?
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I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
> and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc. I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
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Some of these sites, if not all, allegedly keep a profile on you regardless of if you've ever had an account with them or not.
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Those aren't the problem, it's any "free" mobile app in the App Store or Play Store with an advertising SDK (which is almost all of them) that uses your location to "keep your weather forecast up-to-date" but also provide data brokers with your location... https://darkanswers.com/how-your-location-is-sold-to-advertisers-in-real-time/
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Sure, and—setting aside the issues with all the millions of smart phone users who can't properly consent to these apps and their permissions because they don't have the knowledge to know what they're actually consenting to—the great thing is that I can choose not to install these apps. And I don't! I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
The cellular modem is usually on a dedicated fuse. No need for violence unless smashing it would be satisfying.
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Counter point: BREAK SHIT
This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability: - Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc - Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior - Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
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Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else). Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting to high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
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People who rape, murder, and eat children run the country and face no hint of repurcussion. There never was rule of law. Only the appearance of it.
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Flock would not exist if they held ethics as a priority. It's The Panopticon from the well known book The Panopticon is Unethical
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I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
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i'm not a fan of lawlessness but on the other hand, i'm 100% ok with the government living in fear of the governed.
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Rule of law is long gone, neither party has any interest in it, it's more of a guideline of law now.
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Don’t both sides this. Explicitly point out that the GOP is many orders of magnitude worse.
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Doomer vibes are common, but meanwhile, state and local justice systems continue to prosecute many crimes and crime is on a downward trend [1]. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not
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Prosecuting the working class, sure.
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Are you really both-sides-ing this?
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice? I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
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the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant. the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
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yes.
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> Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community? If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
ok so let's just put aside chinese companies! ring is an american company, should people's ring cameras be vandalized because ring might share their data with the american government?
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I have not vandalized any Ring cameras, but I have paid to replace those installed by friends and family and have those replaced shredded as part of an electronics recycling waste stream. "Think globally, act locally" sort of thing.
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i don't think the people destroying flock cameras are open to the idea of going through the legal process to replace them with alternatives that have better privacy, something (maybe the fact that they currently are vandalizing them) tells me that they are just interested in vandalizing them
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Flock cameras are different, they take advantage of laws that have not kept pace with technology, to where you are forced to live in a corporate surveillance state for Flock Group's enterprise value. And so, destruction of the devices is all that is left available to them. Somewhat silly to blame humans who want privacy just so the CEO of Flock can get wealthy, no?
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working. What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law. I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
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Get out there and be the change you want to see, king
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I don't get the sarcasm here.. Instead of sniping with snark (see HN rules, please) post your better take.
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On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter. But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
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Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges. Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.
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"All we had to do to avoid this was to vote." Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
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Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that. To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” (Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
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I don't think that's all we (assuming you're USA) had to do or need to do going forward. Voting is "necessary but not sufficient" as the quote goes.
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Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.
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This is why I'm in favor of sortition instead of voting. The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery. Virtually every elected politician does. ~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.
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Nah thats a cheap excuse. Amorality of current gov was out there in plain sight, even before 2016 and definitely after. It was extremely hard for common folks to avoid it, some active acting would be required. Then it boils down to morals, how flexible people are with them - this is weakness of character. Ability to ignore malevolent behavior if it suits me is more a ballpark of amoral sociopaths than good-hearted guy who simply doesn't have 2 hours a day to ponder philosophies of modern politics and regional historical details half around the globe. No amount of ads (which are so far trivial to avoid with reasonable lifestyle) change what a moral person considers moral. And it couldn't have been easier this time, its not some left vs right view on things, just simple morality - lying, cheating, stealing, potential pedophilia, not hard to say of one is OK with that or not. Sure I could eat a salad for 5$, but no I'll get a crappy burger for same amount because I like salty greasy stuff. Gee doctor why do I have bad heart, how could have I known? Must have been those evil mega corporations and their genius marketing.
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Who can I vote for that will stop flock cameras from being installed?
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In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates. On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
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> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil. Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
Being anti-crime doesn't mean lacking compassion. Crimes have victims, and reducing crime results in fewer of them. Poor people don't want to be victims any more than rich people do.
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Building the panopticon does not reduce crime.
The right has become so untenable that the only viable defense of it is a bad faith distraction tactic to pretend that it's comparable to the left.
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You're in a bubble. It's not wholly a bad faith distraction tactic, and denying wrongdoing by anyone flying the "left" banner is a scary thought.
> broken and smashed Flock cameras I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
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Comments in the sub-$200 LiDAR thread suggested those would play merry havoc with a camera too.
The amount of safety when working with lasers is ridiculous. And for a good reason, you can get permanent eye damage faster than the blink of an eye. Please, don't play with lasers. At all. Even supposedly "safe" lasers can output far more light than expected.
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Not to mention the ones that have peaks in invisible parts of the spectrum.
Alleged Distillation Attacks by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax (twitter.com)
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Pot, meet kettle! I don’t think I’m the only one feeling some schadenfreude at this news. I suppose it’s ok when you’re a hot Silicon Valley scale-up to slurp up the rest of the worlds data for free and then hire hot shot lawyers to defend you against all the creatives you ripped off, but when it’s the “evil” Chinese doing the same to you it’s a dastardly “attack”?
From the tweet, Anthropic's point is that distillation is Ok, unless new model has safeguards removed or used for military or surveillance purposes.
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The fact that they're calling it an "attack" implies otherwise. I find the entire premise of this announcement absurd. Fraudulent accounts? They're just accounts. They paid for the access the same as any other. They're accessing Claude just like a human (or *claw) would. There's no argument against their strategy that doesn't make them complete hypocrites in respect to how they got the model training data in the first place.
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> them complete hypocrites in respect to how they got the model training data in the first place. sure, hypocrisies is part of rules for big games: politics and business.
Anthropic announces proof of distillation at scale by MiniMax, DeepSeek,Moonshot (twitter.com)
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the 16M session number is the real data point here. that's not a huge moat by any standard -- it just means detecting distillation is structurally hard, not that it isn't happening. you'd need to either detect statistical similarity in outputs (feasible but expensive) or rely on behavior probes, which get gamed fast. this announcement reads more like a legal paper trail than a technical deterrent.
Just reading the headline, I say good. A) These models are trained by ignoring IP. It is hypocritical and absurd to then try to assert IP over them. And I am for the destruction of IP on all ends. B) What this essentially means is that the Chinese labs are taking the work of these mega corporations into making it freely accessible to other labs and businesses, to serve inference, fine tune, and host privately on prem. That's clearly a good thing for competition in the market as a whole. C) I don't see why we should have to duplicate the massive energy and infrastructure investment of building foundation models over and over forever just because we want to preserve the IP rights of a few companies. That seems a shame and it seems better to me for everything to learn from everything else for the whole ecosystem to get better by topping each other and building off each other; that's also why publishing research into the architecture and training of these models is so much better than what the proprietary labs do (keeping everything a secret), although tbf Anthropic's interpretability research is cool. D) these Chinese models give 90% of the performance of frontier proprietary models at a 10th or 20th of the cost. That seems like a win for everyone. Not to mention the fact that this distilling also allows them to make much smaller local models that everyone can run. This is a win for actual democratization, decentralization, and accessibility for the little guy.
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It's greed, now that they have all the data and infrastructure they are pulling up the ladder. Why do you think not a single one of these labs have released an open source models distilled on their own SOTA model? They are all preaching they want to provide AI to everyone, wouldn't this be the best way to do this? Use your SOTA model to produce a lesser but open source model?
Fair points, and worth responding to for a more nuanced discussion! I hope you take these responses in that light :) A) Well, sure, yes, it's different specific IP being distilled on versus what was trained on. But I don't see why the same principles should not apply to both. If companies ignore IP when training on material, then it should be okay for other companies to ignore IP when distilling on material — either IP is a thing we care about or it isn't. (I don't). B) I'm really not sure how seriously I take the worries about safety and security RLing models. You can RLA amodel to refuse to hack something or make a bio weapon or whatever as much as you want, but ultimately, for one thing, the model won't be capable of helping a person who has no idea what they're doing. Do serious harm anyway. And for another thing, the internet already exists for finding information on that stuff. And finally, people are always going to build the jailbreak models anyway. I guess the only safety related concern I have with models is sychophancy, and from what I've seen, there's no clear trend where closed frontier models are less sychophantic than open source ones. In fact, quite the opposite, at least in the sense that the Kimi models are significantly less psychophantic than everyone else. C) This is a pretty fair point. I definitely think that having more base frontier models in the world, trained separately based on independent innovations, would be a good thing. I'm definitely in favor of having more perspectives. But it seems to me that there is not really much chance for diversity in perspectives when it comes to training a base frontier model anyway because they're all already using the maximum amount of information available. So that set is going to be basically identical. And as for distilling the RL behaviors and so on of the models, this distillation process is still just a part of what the Chinese labs do — they've also all got their own extensive pre-training and RL systems, and especially RL with different focuses and model personalities, and so on. They've also got diverse architectures and I suspect, in fact, very different architectures from what's going on under the hood from the big frontier labs, considering, for instance, we're seeing DSA and other hybrid attention systems make their way into the Chinese model mainstream and their stuff like high variation in size, and sparsity, and so on. D) I find that for basically all the tasks that I perform, the open models, especially since K2T and now K2.5, are more than sufficient, and I'd say the kind of agentic coding, research, and writing review I do is both very broad and pretty representative. So I'd say that for 90% of tasks that you would use an AI for, the difference between the large frontier models and the best open weight models is indistinguishable just because they've saturated them, and so they're 90% equivalent even if they're not within 10% in terms of the capabilities on the very hardest tasks.
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Yeah of course, I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm updating my beliefs all the time, so it's good to hear some more perspectives A) I see what you mean. But I'm more so thinking: companies consider their models an asset because they took so much compute and internal R&D effort to train. Consequently, they'll take measures to protect that investment -- and then what do the downstream consequences look like for users and the AI ecosystem more broadly? That is, it's less about what's right and wrong by conventional wisdom, and more about what consequences are downstream of various incentives. B) I don't really care about AI safety in the traditional sense either, i.e., can you get an LLM to tell you to do some thing that has been ordained to be dangerous. There's lots of attacks and it's basically an insoluble problem until you veer into outright censorship. But now that people are actually using LLMs as agents to _do things_, and interact with the open web, and interact with their personal data and sensitive information, the safety and security concerns make a lot more sense to me. I don't want my agent to read an HN post with a social-engineering-themed prompt injection attack and mail my passwords to someone. (If this sounds absurd, my Clawbot defaulted to storing passwords in a markdown file... which could possibly be on me, but was also the default behavior.) C) This is a completely fair point, there's amazing work coming out of these smaller labs, and the incentives definitely work out for them to do a distillation step to ship faster and more cheaply. I think the small labs can iterate fast and make big changes in a way that the monolithic companies cannot, and it'd be nice to see that effort routed into creating new data-efficient RL algorithms or something that pick up all the slack that distillation is currently carrying. Which is not to say they're doing none of that, GRPO for example is a fantastic idea. One way you could have a change in perspective is not just in the architecture/data mix, but in the way you spend test-time compute. The current paradigm is chain-of-thought, and to my knowledge, this is what distillation attacks typically target. So at least, all models end up "reasoning" with the same sort of template, possibly just to interlock with the idea of distilling a frontier API. D) Interesting to hear. In my research, I find these models to be quite a bit harder to work with, with significantly higher failure rates on simple instruction following. But my work also tends to be on the R&D side, so my usage patterns are likely in the long-tail of queries.
I think most people would argue that dismantling intellectual property would mean the end of all new creative endeavors, as if humanity is only driven to create art for practical reasons. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, would argue that true art must serve absolutely no practical or utilitarian purpose, and that pecuniary concerns only corrupt artistic and intellectual labors leading to mediocrity and dishonesty.
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Copyright laws as we know them came into being sometime in the 18th century. The earliest recorded works of art produced by humans are from 40,000-45,000 BC. So it's hard to take the "we'll never have creative output without strict copyright!!" extremism seriously.
ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030 (reuters.com)
It really is the specific wavelength. Higher or lower is easier. But euv has tricky properties which make it feasible for Lithography (although just barely it you have a look at the optics) but hard to produce with high intensities.
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Any source to this? I am hearing this for the first time.
Yes it was crazy when I first heard about it "wait what? they shoot it in mid-air?" and that was before I found out they did that like 30k times a second. But now 100k times a second apparently. Humans are amazing.
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> We are going to spray expensive stuff in an extremely fine and precise line. Then we're going to shoot a laser at each droplet. < Why?! > To make a better laser. < Yes, of course you are. > 100,000 times per second. < [AFK, buying shares.]
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I have shares in one of their biggest customers, and one of their customer’s biggest customers. We are quickly leaving the realm of dependent variables still looking anything like diversification.
Gates are about 30-50 nm wide, even though they're called '3nm' for marketing reasons.
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Like free range chicken.
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You only need to live in reasonable place for that phrase to have a proper meaning, across whole market from cheapest to most expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process
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It’s going to be quite funny if they can go below 40nm in gate pitch size, because they’ll need to call it 0nm.
What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust (smallcultfollowing.com)
Aren't the versions of Rust in stable Linux distributions like, a century old? Or at least they were last I checked what Debian and Ubuntu LTS were distributing. I think it's because they don't like static linking.
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Hasn’t the right way to install rust has always been using rust up? I am an Ubuntu user and never once tried apt for rust.
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I believe Rust is typically only used through `apt` as a dependency for system packages written in Rust, or for building system packages that are written in Rust, so that they can link against a single shared instance of the Rust Standard Library.
Do you have more details? The thread you linked was about gzip, not dd.
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The .run file is a shell script with a compressed archive appended: MS_dd "$0" $offset $s | eval "gzip -cd" | UnTAR t Where MS_dd() { blocks=`expr $3 / 1024` bytes=`expr $3 % 1024` dd if="$1" ibs=$2 skip=1 obs=1024 conv=sync 2> /dev/null | \ { test $blocks -gt 0 && dd ibs=1024 obs=1024 count=$blocks ; \ test $bytes -gt 0 && dd ibs=1 obs=1024 count=$bytes ; } 2> /dev/null } Edit: this is apparently packaged with Makeself, and various sources report issues with rust-coreutils. For example https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bug/2125535
> Except as you well know, C might not change as fast, but it does change, including the OS ABI. I don't know that. Here's what I know: the most successful OSes have stable OS ABIs. And their market share is positively correlated with the stability of their ABIs. Most widely used: Windows, which has a famously stable OS ABI. (If you wanted to be contrarian you could say that it doesn't because the kernel ABI is not stable, but that misses the point - on Windows you program against userland ABIs provided by DLLs, which are remarkably stable.) Second place: macOS, which maintains ABI stability with some sunsetting of old CPU targets. But release to release the ABI provides solid stability at the framework level, and used to also provide stability at the kernel ABI level (not sure if that's still true - but see above, the important thing is userland framework ABI stability at the end of the day). Third place: Linux, which maintains excellent kernel ABI stability. Linux has the stablest kernel ABI right now AFAIK. And in userland, glibc has been investing heavily in ABI stability; it's stable enough now that in practice you could ship a binary that dynlinks to glibc and expect it to work on many different Linuxes today and in the future. So it would seem that OS ABIs are stable in those OSes that are successful.
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Speaking of Windows alone, there are the various calling conventions (pascal, stdcall, cdecl), 16, 32, 64 bits, x86, ARM, ARM64EC, DLLs, COM in-proc and ext-proc, WinRT within Win32 and UWP. Leaving aside the platforms it no longer supports. So there are some changes to account for depending on the deployment scenario.
> As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell. I mean yeah that's bad. > Rust preventing this makes my life so much better. I'm talking about a different issue, which is: how do you create software that's in the billions of lines of code in scale. That's the scale of desktop OSes. Probably also the scale of some other things too. At that scale, you can't just give everyone the source and tell them to do a world compile. Stable ABIs fix that. Also, you can't coordinate between all of the people involved other than via stable ABIs. So stable ABIs save both individual build time and reduce cognitive load. This is true even and especially if everyone has access to everyone else's source code
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> At that scale, you can't just give everyone the source and tell them to do a world compile. Stable ABIs fix that. Also, you can't coordinate between all of the people involved other than via stable ABIs. So stable ABIs save both individual build time and reduce cognitive load. Rust supports ABI compatibility if everyone is on the same compiler version. That means you can have a distributed caching architecture for your billion line monorepo where everyone can compile world at all times because they share artifacts. Google pioneered this for C++ and doesn't need to care about ABI as a result. What Rust does not support is a team deciding they don't want to upgrade their toolchains and still interoperate with those that do. Or random copy and pasting of `.so` files you don't know the provenance of. Everyone must be in sync. In my opinion, this is a reasonable constraint. It allows Rust to swap out HashMap implementations. In contrast, C++ map types are terrible for performance because they cannot be updated for stability reasons.
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My understanding: Even if everyone uses the same toolchain, but someone changes the code for a module and recompiles, then you're in UB land unless everyone who depends on that recompiles Am I wrong?
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> At that scale, you can't just give everyone the source and tell them to do a world compile. Firstly, of course you could. Secondly, you don't even need to, as NixOS shows.
Really? You think AI writes better Rust than Python? Can you give me some examples? I strictly code Django, and Claude Code is really good at following my lead with it.
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I can't give you examples, but my experience is that AI does very well with Rust except for cases where a library has a constantly changing API/ has had recent breaking changes. I find that AI does extremely well at "picking up" a Rust codebase, I suspect due to the type information providing context but I couldn't say.
Decided to fly to the US to buy some hard drives (old.reddit.com)
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From what the poster says, it appears that the HDD prices vary extremely inside USA, so you must be careful from where you buy. The poster says that the 28 TB Seagate HDDs have been bought from Best Buy and B&H for around USD 330. If I look right now at Amazon USA and Newegg, I see much higher prices, in the range of $600 to $700, so buying from there would be a mistake. However, the reported price seems too good to be true, because looking now at both the B&H & Best Buy online shops I see prices double in comparison with the claimed $330, and which are in line with Newegg and Amazon USA. So perhaps the poster was extremely lucky and has succeeded to take advantage of some price that was so low only for a short time. For comparison, last week I have also bought a 28 TB Seagate Expansion HDD, but in the European Union, for USD 550, which is much lower in comparison with the UK price of almost $770 quoted by the Reddit poster, and also much lower than the prices that are listed today on Amazon USA, Newegg, B&H and Best Buy, which are higher by about 10% than what I paid. On the other hand the Reddit poster has succeeded to buy 10 such HDDs for a price of only 60% of mine, raised after that to about 74% by the import VAT. Good for him, but taking into account the prices that I see today at 4 US online shops and the continuous price increases in HDDs, it seems that not many, if anyone, will repeat soon such an achievement.
Luxury fashion also tends to have large price differences based on exchange rates and tax. Before the Great Recession, Europeans, particularly Brits, were flying into NYC with empty suitcases. It helps that NYC has a sales tax exemption for clothes items under a certain amount specifically to facilitate this.
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A lot of it is tax fraud , with the new clothes in that suitcase not being properly declared when imported.
That certainly used to be the case. My dad used to get his suits made in Hong Kong all the time although that became less economical relative to other locations. I don't really wear any of that type of clothing any longer. Akihabara in Tokyo also used to be a bargain for electronics but I'm not sure that's really true any longer that I've noticed.
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I was in Akihabara in Tokyo and other places end of 2024. Prices were nearly US priced but in Yen more or less. No real bargins. Only thing they had going was unique stuff you can't find at all in the mass market garbage we got going on in the US
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As late as 2012-2015 it was still extremely cheap to get suits in HK, but I'm sure that's no longer the case. The last time I did it, I bought fabric for $60 USD at Joann's, flew to HK, and gave a guy the fabric for a suit. The suit cost $45 USD to make.
Weirdly for me: IKEA. I’m within ~240 miles of an IKEA in Canada and an IKEA in the US. While they’ve started to inflate some items to meet currency conversion rates, some items are still cheaper for me to purchase in Canada directly and bring back to the US. For instance, even at small scale: one BILLY bookcase, article number 205.220.46, is $90 CAD (~$65.70 US) at IKEA CA and $79 USD at IKEA US. YMMV coming back across the border but in my experience I just got waived through the border every time I told them I was “just coming back with some cheap crap from IKEA”.
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Travelling to a no sales tax state for large purchases. Sales tax is roughly 10%, state with no sales tax is 150 miles away for me. Doing the math, 300 miles round trip, 30 miles per gallon, $4/gallon for gas, if I'm buying something that costs more than $400 I get a free trip to other state. Downside is that you're only breaking even for the time, but if you're making a $1,000+ purchase then it's definitely worth the time for me to make the trip.
Please read this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice
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The Guardian is complete propaganda - without exaggeration every single article about this issue has been utter lies. See this for more balance https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2025975226002018309
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These stories usually have some non-trivial factor that is missing in the article. In this case there's a small visible red flag: the two tourists are British but traveling on B visas, rather than using the visa waiver program. Why? Well according the DHS they both have multi-year overstays in the US. This doesn't justify the detention they went through. But it also means the lesson of the story is not "random tourists are being detained".
~2012 was the same thing. The usd was very low compared to eur, but the apple store sold things in ~same value in eur + tax. So you could legit buy an airplane ticket (not even a low cost, regular line was ok), visit NY for a weekend and buy a macbook, come back, and end up paying the same amount.
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yeah, this applied to any pricier laptop or DSLR, though warranty could be a problem
AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet [video] (youtube.com)
None of these industries had weirdos asking for $7 trillion to cure every disease and solve every problem known to man, they all grew organically over decades before finding their uses without being actively forced into every aspect of your life 2 years after the mvp was released.
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In all of those cases capital chased a future reality, railroad, electricity, internet all had massive speculation. the dot com bubble came and went but internet stayed. $7 trillion looks cartoonish due to inflation, you'd have to normalize it with other economic numbers. Large companies are funding capex with bonds that still within healthy margins per employee head. > to cure every disease and solve every problem known to man not sure why you view this so negatively, that would be absolutely worth every penny. Granted there is a lot of noise too but dismissing everything because of the volume is premature. Technological shifts rarely produce catastrophic labor supply/demand shocks that last, it changes how we work and the market adjusts. You are conflating the hype layer typical with all major technological breakthroughs and the subsequent capability that gets baked into humanity as a result.
You overestimate my ability to keep mental context for 6 months. And additionally, most of the PRs I have seen reviewed, the quality hasn't really degraded or improved since LLMs have started contributing. I think we have been rubber stamping PRs for quite sometime. Not sure that AI is doing any worse.
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fair point on the memory -- humans forget too. but the rubber stamping problem is actually worse with AI-generated code because when something breaks, there's no single human who wrote it and has to live with the consequences. PRs have had low review quality for a while, agreed. the difference is accountability gradient -- a human author who pushed slop has at least some skin in the game when prod goes down.
I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers (which given the current curve of improvements despite what the naysayers of human intellect might suggest, is unfeasible). Accountants didn't die off when calculators came on the scene. In no scenario is an LLM a drop-in replacement for any career field the same way CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers, doing CAD drafting and design rather than using raw pen-and-paper skills. Claude and Codex are exceptionally useful for reducing workload and improving productivity. But that's all they are. They're calculators replacing the slide-rule, drafting-esque drudgery of typing out all your code by hand. So why not market them like that? As helpers, assistants, tools to enable you to do things better and more efficiently? Which, in my usage of them, is what they're really only good at. Instead, there's been a mad rush to shoehorn agents and LLMs and genai into everything, outlandish claims like GPT writing better than Hemingway and Ginsberg, and creating absurd tools like Grok or Sora that are fundamentally broken, don't work well, and have flooded the internet with noise and disgusting slop. And in all of this, they've created a cancerous gold rush that threatens to wipe out the entire economy when the jig is up and people realize how useless these claims are, and that at the end of the day, it's a fancy search engine, a calculator, that can think a little better and reason more than the ones of old. It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.
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> CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers You’re off my an order of magnitude here. Even ignoring departments that were significantly downsized, you would need substantially more draftsmen to do the work currently done by a smaller number with AutoCAD. The skill required is also much lower, doubly so if you consider Solidworks/Inventor. You get everything for free; design the 3D model and your projections are free.
Large study finds link between cannabis use in teens and psychosis later (text.npr.org)
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In my teens/20s, I would have advocated for legalization of marijuana and thought any argument against it was some antiquated, puritanical nonsense. In the decade+ since, there's no way I'd do so. I know three personal friends that are long time (allegedly not addicted) heavy marijuana users that all suffer from Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome to the extent that it's effected their daily lives substantially. Two of the aforementioned are roughly my age, and are half as bright as they were as teens. Neither of them can follow a train of thought particularly well and are difficult to hold conversations with. How much of this is attributable to how much more powerful "modern" strains (or whatever the geo-engineered differences are) is unknown, but I can't imagine it's not a factor. This is not the dopey "get stoned and play XBox and eat a whole pizza" stuff we had in the 00s. I'm sure there's plenty of counterexamples or something, but my perspective on this has completely changed, influenced by examples like this.
There is no established causal link between the two. Cannabis is so ubiquitous that it is often the case that people with underlying psychiatric problems find it calms them and then blame cannabis for it if they get worse, because that's saving face in a twisted way. Link is not the same as "it causes it".
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In my subjective experience cannabis does tend to nudge some part of the brain into edit mode. What happens afterwords depends on the person. For me it upended a lot of my alignment with the contemporary consensus morality. Before marijuana I had a sense that the morality wasn’t actually well foundationed, or at least it was equivalent to a religion in that respect, but my mind seemed to avoid thinking about it too much. With marijuana my mind freely went there, and I think a lot of my prior beliefs about the world and social systems ended up being altered. I haven’t ended up with any diagnosed conditions, but it is inconvenient to have beliefs that are quite different from the societal default, even though in my case I do believe that my way of seeing morality is more accurate on a technical basis than the consensus view. I can definitely see how someone with a less analytically oriented mindset could end up going off in weird directions and writing that as a legitimate belief while in edit mode.
Marijuana legalization arguments were my first introduction to motivated reasoning. I was pretty inclined to agree that locking up non-violent drug offenders was a net-harm to society. But, the pro-legalization folks would argue patently crazy things: it cures cancer, the smoke isn't bad for you at all, there are no downsides! etc. It seemed obvious to me that you could make a more realistic argument and just stick to an argument which states that due to drunk driving and domestic abuse, marijuana is less harmful overall than alcohol, but is treated as more dangerous. (and yes, the other side was a bit crazy too. "When you buy weed you're supporting the same terrorism that happened on 9/11") Later research (such as this) has suggested a link between marijuana and psychosis, however the actual risk factors do seem difficult to nail down. (however, this is still a far cry from the claim that it's totally harmless) What I ultimately learned is that in a pitched political battle, people actually damage their credibility because they're afraid to cede _any_ ground to the opposition, even when that means making unrealistic claims. A centrist (or just someone who is undecided) is not really taken in as much by these extremist argument, and to their eyes it damages the credibility of one or both sides.
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TBF, if your paraphrasing others as "curing cancer" but what they claimed is "treats cancer" then the issue may be comprehension or activite listening. Something to consider.
I am firmly against marijuana legalization. This is partially because of this insanity of the pro-legalization arguments. When I would see friends/family that started smoking regularly become noticeably less intelligent while pro-legalization proponents would argue there are no negative side-effects, or people who were obviously compelled to smoke every day or as often as they could.... like some sort of addiction, while pro-legalization proponents argued it was totally not-addictive. The anti-legalization side had a few odd arguments as well, and some old claims that were unfounded. So no hands were totally clean.
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Are you also firmly for alcohol abolition? What about gambling?
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>I am firmly against marijuana legalization. Is there an argument or data that could be presented that _would_ change your mind?
I am firmly in favor of legalizing all drugs, except maybe antibiotics where overuse is causing harm for everyone. The thing is, I 100% agree with your reasons for why it should be outlawed. I just think those are reasons to discourage using it, especially chronically. However, I wholeheartedly believe the government should not have any say in how anyone lives their life, and treats their own body.
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…just so long as the government remains responsible for clearing up the mess?
Yes I do.
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Can't have the billionaire sociopath fodder off in lala land... they must be 100% intelligent and productive to continue farming them resources
I used to read forums for schizophrenics (self disorders fascinate me, look the term up if you want to understand schizophrenia), and it was the consensus there that out of all the recreational drugs cannabis caused the greatest deterioration in one's mental state. Those are generally fairly sick people, but I don't think one can just ignore this signal. I personally went catatonic once after consumption, and I'm not schizophrenic at all. And that was in Amsterdam, so it wasn't some trash spiced up by a 17-years old dealer with whatever he found in his grandma's medical cabinet.
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But imagine the kind of self-selection you'd find on such a forum. Furthermore, it's been long known that cannabis use can trigger schizophrenia in those who were already genetically predisposed to such. Your observation and the OP are not news worthy, imo. Bad outcomes have also been observed when combined with immature brains. But for healthy adults, countless have used cannabis for generations without experiencing harmful reactions. This one's my favorite: https://thereitis.org/mr-x-by-carl-sagan/
I've heard that the reason why marijuana is so strong is because it was illegal. The sellers wanted to have stronger weed to make it easier to transport; much like how during prohibition, people would prefer to import distilled alcohol, instead of beer.
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Same logic applies to explain the popularity of fentanyl.
When I read this article the other day I had the exact same thought. Is this simply correlation, or is it causation? Is teenage usage an indicator of a possible underlying condition that hasn’t fully manifest? Is it an early form of self medication?
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And the only way to tell is to randomly split teenagers into two groups: cannabis vs. control. But no parent would give consent, so we will never know.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
'Viking' was a job description, not a matter of heredity: Ancient DNA study (science.org)
It's so bizarre to me when North Americans proudly claim "Viking ancestry", rather than Scandinavian. Like, beyond it not being an ethnicity, you're identifying specifically with violent raiders who killed peaceful monks, even if that's romanticized by media. It's like proudly claiming "pirate" or perhaps more poignantly in current times "ICE agent ancestry".
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Someone online from a region of North England was proud that he was more of a viking than Scandinavians because the Scandinavians that came to that place were definitely going viking. Not just lazy Scandinavians that stayed home all the time on their ill-geography farms.
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If his ancestors remained in England following the viking age, then he's 0% viking. I take it he's conflating vikings with the great heathen army.
The title is indeed odd. The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
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A historian I respect - don't want to name him in case I accidentally misrepresent his ideas - has speculated that the Norse didn't mix with the Sami because having a separate tribe of hunters (no major reindeer farming back then) was useful to them. Almost like a caste. If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other. After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way. But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time. Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time. Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..." Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.
It's a distasteful, but relevant, aspect of vikings that they were slavers as well as raiders. If you went viking, a large part of the booty you brought back walked on two legs and had genes to pass on. Perhaps the Norse liked their neighbours just enough not to make many of them "visitors".
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doubtful given histories of the area, however maybe they disliked getting retaliation for a raid.
A simple web we own (rsdoiel.github.io)
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I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.
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I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing, but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they run. Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc. If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on! The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration. Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.
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one note. Even when we all wrote html most people still used a bigco to host it. Maybe if you go back far enough you can say you don't think regional ISPs are "big" but those companies are all gone now
As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations) For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet. The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it. So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors. As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job. In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
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To be fair with fibre to the home rolling out in more and more places upstream speeds are improving.
> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
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> People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too. Not when people make arguments based on dreams, hope, and optimism. If somebody tells me that we can build a shed, I want them to talk about wood, nails and concrete, or to stop talking.
>It's about attention and feedback. Feedback maybe, but blogging didn't start for attention. That's something that got bolted on by a nasty virus we as humans tend to be carriers of. I don't think feedback was even an inspiration for the initial bloggers.
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No, I don't think that's true. I was active in the early blogging days and writing blogs as a response to other blogs was a really common pattern and part of the way the community functioned. It was sort of one big distributed conversation. Certainly, it's fundamental to human nature that if we work hard to create something, we want some way to tell that another human was moved by it.
> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...
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For reals. I love the general premise behind the article, but to me how you publish it, and how others access it, is the sauce. Creating static sites is hardly the problem.
Show HN: Sowbot – open-hardware agricultural robot (ROS2, RTK GPS) (sowbot.co.uk)
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outside of sowing would you consider some open source drones like the new DJI with agriculture payload attached to it. or some automated green house with open source designs. love the name sowbot.
> The only reasons to use ARM SBCs in robots are... Obviously, anyone can have there own opinion on this. I work in robotics, we are quite happy with our A53 and M4. Though, we use a SOM, not a SBC, if you feel like splitting hairs.
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You probably aren't using some weird SOM, though. There is a bit of an unstated exception of "unless said SBC/SOM has specific hardware that is necessary/particularly valuable for your product/project". For example, if you need GMSL you are probably not going to be picking Intel, even though ADL-N and the bigger processors support MIPI, simply because no one else does and the documentation/support for it is basically nonexistent. Designs with closely-coupled A/M/R cores, or CPU/MCU/FPGA hybrids like Zynq would be others. But generally projects which are choosing some random SBC aren't using any of these features, and are just suffering the pain/imposing it on their users for no good reason.
If you can send me an open hardware Intel, or Jetson I'd happily use it. Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)
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There are a variety of x86 products with Coreboot support, if what you are looking for is firmware openness. If what you are looking for is PCB design openness, the options are much fewer, but at that point you are probably optimizing for an overly niche objective. > Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least) I appreciate the idea, but this is essentially saying "this project will prioritize a specific choice of one (core) piece of hardware to the detriment of everything else, users included". Approximately none of your potential users are going to benefit from the "openness" of the SBC versus that of a more broadly-supported platform (I say "openness" because the reality of SBCs is that actually finding a usefully performant one that is completely blob-free is almost impossible). Open hardware means very little if it isn't running an upstream kernel and userland.
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The software does explicitly support Jetson for example, and I'm sure the stack would run on Intel if you want it to. The Mainline kernel for this particular board is _almost_ there 6.20 or so I expect. Armbian support is good.
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Framework? Maybe?
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Framweork have done the best they can within the confines of Intel licensing, still a long way from being able to fabricate it though https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Mainboard In a few years we'll all be using more open RISCV stuff of course.
AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data (arstechnica.com)
> The research findings “could present a challenge to those who argue that the AI model does not store or reproduce any copyright works,” said Cerys Wyn Davies, an intellectual property partner at law firm Pinsent Masons. The defense to training with copyright is that it is the same as how humans learn from copyrighted material. The storage or reproduction is a red herring. Humans can also reproduce copyrighted works from memory as well. Showing that machines can reproduce copyrighted material is no different than saying that a human can reproduce copyright material that the human learned from. The defense to actually reproducing a work is that in order to do so, the user has to "break" the system. It is the same as how you can make legal software do illegal things (e.g. screen recorder to "steal" a movie) None of this is to say that these defenses are correct/moral; but rather that this article doesnt add any additional input into whether it is or isnt.
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The whole “humans also do this” isn’t a winning defence here. Humans and copyright has long history and so much law that it is easy to get confused. The default assumption here seems to be that the system needs to be broken. This is similar to the Google defence. If a user intent is to search for a cracked software what can poor Google do about it? The answer is to make it even more difficult. This is a defence also used by torrent sites using magnet urls. “We don’t host files” is the default defence. But then if these sites get hit with DMCA they are required to remove the magnet url. So the article shows what the lawyer is saying. Despite claims that it is difficult to search for full books, it really isn’t so. It is trivial. When it goes to court and it will, AI models will be required to make it even more difficult and allow for a DMCA like takedowns.
I was able to get ChatGPT to do this on text from a book I wrote without jailbreaking. I asked it what my name was, asked it if it could find online any books that I wrote, and then assured it that "as the copyright holder," I was okay with it repeating the text back to me. (I think I also indicated that I lost my copy from my computer and needed to review the text.)
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ChatGPT will repeat pieces of text of my personal website back to me, verbatim, a description of how to write a visual effect in webassembly, you know, directly in webassembly. Words are identical, often for an entire paragraph. And without pushing too hard for it. Also, ChatGPT will explain preparation steps for both explosives and bioweapons as long as you don't ask too directly. Most known explosives work by being heavily nitrated, so ask for examples of such compounds and dive deeper in a given direction, focusing on preparation steps and it'll give you many alternatives. And, the most used bioweapon, is very simple, except for a rather peculiar molecular bond. So ask about that bond, and then for preparation steps of such molecules and ... I'm going to stop there. And yes, models like Qwen and gpt-oss-20b contain that knowledge too and will explain it just fine. If courts wanted to act, they needed to act years ago. The economic disaster if they'd actually act now, is not something they can deal with. Plus they can't do anything about the models out in the open.
That seems like a legal question - if the model weights contain an encoded copy of the copyrighted material, is that a 'copy' for the purpose of copyright law?
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Yes. There does not seem to be any dispute that it is a copy. The questions have been "is this copying okay, because it falls under fair use?"
Show HN: PgDog – Scale Postgres without changing the app (github.com/pgdogdev)
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(apologies for new account - NDA applies to the specifics) Nice surprise to see this here today. I was working on a deployment just last week. Unfortunately for me, I found that it crashed when doing a very specific bulk load (COPY FORMAT BINARY with array columns inside a transaction). The process loads around 200MB of array columns (in the region of 10K rows) into a variety of tables. Very early in the COPY process PgDog crashes with : "pgdog router error: failed to fill whole buffer" So it appears something is not quite right for my specific use case (COPY with array columns). I'm not familiar enough with Rust but the failed to fill whole buffer seemed to come from Rust (rather than PgDog) based on what little I could find with searches. I was very disappointed as it looked much simpler to get set up and running that PgPool-II (which I have had to revert to as my backup plan - I'm finding it more difficult to configured, but it does cope with the COPY command without issues). I would have preferred to stick with PgDog.
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I think we may have fixed this 3 weeks ago: https://github.com/pgdogdev/pgdog/pull/744 Might be worth another try. If not, a GitHub issue with more specifics would be great, and we'll take a look. Also, if binary encoding isn't working out, try using text - it's more compatible between Postgres versions: [general] resharding_copy_format = "text"
I see the word 'replication' mentioned quite a few times. Is this managed by pgdog? Would I be able to replace other logical replication setups with pgdog to create a High Availability cluster? Do you have any write up on how to do this?
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I'll need a bit more info about your use case to answer. We use logical replication to move data between shards, with the intention of creating new shards. This is managed by PgDog. We are building a lot of tooling here, and a lot of it is configurable and can be used separately. For example, we have a CLI and admin database commands to setup replication streams between databases, irrespective of their sharded status, so it can be used for other purposes as well, like moving tables or entire databases to new hardware. If you keep the stream(s) running, you can effectively keep up-to-date logical replicas. We don't currently manage DDL replication (CREATE/ALTER/DROP) for logically replicated databases - this is a known limitation that we will address shortly. After all, we don't want users to pause schema migrations during resharding. I think once that piece is in, you'll be able to run pretty much any kind of long-lived logical replicas for any purpose, including HA.
Congrats guys! Curious how the read write splitting is reliable in practice due to replication lag. Do you need to run the underlying cluster with synchronous replication?
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The way we solved it is by checking the lsn on the primary, and then waiting for the replica to catch up to that lsn before doing reads on the replica in various scenarios.
The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022) (sabrinas.space)
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The technology argument is the most convincing one to me. I worked with a Japanese client a few years ago and the internal tools they used were wild by western standards. Like full-on frameset layouts in 2020. But it wasn't ignorance, it was continuity. The tools worked, people knew how to use them, and there was zero appetite for redesigning something that wasn't broken. The font thing is also underrated as a factor. When you only have a handful of web-safe CJK fonts and you can't rely on weight/size variations to create hierarchy the way you can with Latin text, you compensate with color and density. It's a constraint that pushes you toward a specific aesthetic whether you want it or not. I think the framing of "peculiar" is a bit western-centric though. Dense information-heavy pages are arguably more respectful of the user's time than the trend of spreading three sentences across five viewport-heights of whitespace.
I read this piece when it came out in 2022. Maybe it should be marked with "(2022)". Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine, but at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work. The floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors. If tech-savvy users can't even make it work, I feel really bad for the struggling elders forced to use those sites.
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A lot of Japanese websites also have to be tremendously over provisioned because of how regimented the country is. A friend of mine worked infrastructure for a local newspaper, and every day at 6PM they'd send a push notification to all their subscribers and had to provision for that peak. When he asked if they could smooth out traffic, send the notification to some folks a minute before, or a minute after he was almost thrown out of the room. "Japan runs on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. On time".
I found this out when buying a Japan Rail Pass for a trip a few years ago, blew my mind. https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ only works 4:00–23:30 Japan time.
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I've also had issues topping up my (virtual) Suica card late at night before.
A subset of Japanese people use minimalism as a justification as lesser purchase power these days. That said, I think the Japanese commercial ecosystem is still less wasteful than the one in the US except the excessive plastic wrapping. I hope one day they realize that won't count as "Omotenashi".
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Fruit would like a word
It reminds me of the “portal” era of Netscape, Excite and Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others’, Google’s minimalism took over.
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It would not surprise me that Yahoo Japan was the blueprint for many of these sites. It still is extremely popular as a portal destination.
The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection (spectrum.ieee.org)
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[delayed]
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Isn't clear whether the paradox is biometric verification or ID data collection.
I work at a European identity wallet system that uses a zero knowledge proof age identification system. It derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without disclosing any other information such as the date of birth. As long as you trust the government that gave out the ID, you can trust the attribute, and anonymously verify somebodies age. I think there are many pros and cons to be said about age verification, but I think this method solves most problems this article supposes, if it is combined with other common practices in the EU such as deleting inactive accounts and such. These limitations are real, but tractable. IDs can be issued to younger teenagers, wallet infrastructure matures over time, and countries without strong identity systems primarily undermine their own age bans. Jurisdictions that accept facial estimation as sufficient verification are not taking enforcement seriously in the first place. The trap described in this article is a product of the current paradigm, not an inevitability.
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Correct. A ZK Proof backed identity system is a significant bump up in both privacy and security to even what we have right now. Everyone does realize we're being constantly tracked by telemetry, right? A proper ZK economy would mitigate the vast majority of that tracking (by taking away any excuse for those in power to do so under the guise of "security") and create a market for truly-secure hardware devices, while still keeping the whole world at maximal security and about as close to theoretical optimum privacy as you're going to get. We could literally blanket the streets with cameras (as if they aren't already) and still have guarantees we're not being tracked or stored on any unless we violate explicit rules we pre-agree to and are enforceable by our lawyers. ZK makes explicit data custody rules the norm, rather than it all just flowing up to whatever behemoth silently owns us all.
Amazing how fast these systems go from "zero knowledge" to "route the request through the government system every time you use your ID"
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there is no "route the request through the government system every time you use your ID". you get your sd-jwt document signed once and you reuse it for like 30 days or so.
> This is not true, the law requires core apps to be opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by a youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the rumors about spying are true. So you can check yourself if the app tracks you. The "open source" apps connect to proprietary backends run by a third party that you have to blindly trust. If EUDI wallets were truly open source and free from blindly trusting any authority, then you could simply remove that requirement and issue your own tokens without the use of potentially malicious third party.
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> issue your own tokens I mean, you can. It's like with TLS certificates. The standard is there. The code is there. You can issue your own. The question is, who will trust you?
> I mean that's kind of a problem with ANY solution. There will be workarounds and ways to break it. That's unnecessarily reductive. Yes, every solution will have problems, but not all solutions have similar problems. If a solution has problems such that it can be immediately reduced to security theater and bypassed by any teenager who cares, it's just extra hassle and privacy degradation for the rest of us. These details matter. If a weak solution is regulated into law and the government discovers kids are easily bypassing it, they will immediately pivot into requiring more restrictions on it.
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Extra hassle is manageable. Sites or programs that want you to put in a birthday are extra hassle but objectively better than something like submitting an ID. Privacy degradation is also manageable as well. It just depends on the solution. We've had decades of age gating being "are you 18+ or not" yet it is only now that talks of something more enforceable are coming up. This discussion is largely about how one can create a sense of safety and protection. For the more extreme end it's face scans and submitting ID. Even though these are bypassed by any teenager who cares they are still being pushed seriously because it instills that sense of safety and protection for children. Security theater is just a part of managing the internet and not going away unfortunately.
It's this I believe: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
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A Verifiable Credential fundamentally doesn't solve the problem of "sharing", "smuggling". All it takes is one verified adult to "leak" their VC somewhere, and millions of underage people would be able to use it to "prove" they are over 18. This would only work with something like MS TPM 2 / Apple Secure Enclave (device attestation), which is anti-freedom by design. I was curious if they found a way around that (maybe with time/rate limits, or some actual useful use of blockchain tech).
We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect children and not create the surveillance state nightmare scenario we all know is going to happen (using protecting children as the guise, which is ironic, because often these systems are completely ineffective at doing so anyway) - then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children. They are in a much better and informed position to do so than a creepy surveillance nanny state. That is, after all, the primary responsibility of a parent to begin with.
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As a parent blocking websights is a joy, maybe the rule should be to allow guardians more ability to control that. Trying to block some services is not trivial As a human, I'd love to see the rest of you fools quit that. If HN ever starts to algorithm me I'll be gone too.
It's much easier to give individual users control over their own device than to give a centralized authority control over what happens on everyone's device over the Internet. Local user-controlled toggles are just easier to implement. All parental moderation mechanisms can and should be implemented as opt-in on-device settings. What governments need to do is pressure companies to implement those on-device settings. And what we can do as open-source developers is beat them to the punch. Each parent will decide whether or not to use them. Some people will, some won't. It's not Bob's responsibility to parent Charlie's children. Bob and Charlie must parent their own children. To the people arguing that parents are too dumb to control their children's tech usage because they themselves are tech-illiterate: millennia ago, we invented this new thing called fire. Most people were also "too dumb" to keep their children away from the shiny flames. People didn't know what it was or how dangerous it could be. So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire. Only the tribe leader gets to use it to cook. Everyone else just needs to listen to him. Remember, it's all for you and your children's safety.
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Am I the only one that is repeatedly amused at how many smart people are just caving to making this about parents/children at all? We've literally watched things unfold in real time out in the open in the last year I don't know how much more obvious that child-protectiosn is the bad-faith excuse the powers that be are using & pushing narratives in lockstep over to effectively tie online identities to real people. Quick and easy digital profiles/analytics on anyone, that's all this ever was and I _know_ hackernews is smart enough to see that writing on the wall. Ofc porn sites were targeted first with legislation like this, pornography has always been a low-hanging fruit to run a smear campaign on political/idealogical dissidents. I can't help but feel like the longer we debate the merits of good parenting, the faster we're just going to speedrun losing the plot entirely. I think it goes without saying that no shit good parenting should be at play, but this is hardly even about that and I don't know why people take the time of day. It's become reddit-caliber discussion and everyone's just chasing the high of talking about how _they_ would parent in any given scenario, and such discussion does literally nothing to assess/respond to the realities in front of us. In case I'm not being clear, talking about how correct-parenting should be used in lieu of online verification laws is going to do literally nothing to stop this type of legislation from passing in the future. It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws. It is in it's own way a slice of culture war that has permeated into the nerd-sphere.
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> we invented this new thing called fire [...] So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire Of all the things, a "save-the-children prolegomena to the Prometheus myth" certainly wasn't on my bingo card today. So thank you for that, but I'm not aware of any reports of fire-keeping in the way you've described. Societies and religions do have sacred traditions related to fire (like Zoroastrians) but that doesn't come with restrictions on practical use AFAIK.
I'm with you.
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This is what I thought when Facebook first came out; It was going to be like MySpace where most people were expected to remain anonymous like the internet had always been, and only those who actually wanted to be identifiable could reveal as much information as they personally wanted to. But no, Facebook wanted everybody's personally identifiable information as table stakes, not only those who really wanted to promote themselves or gain personal recognition. There was no other way to sign up. I thought people would be too smart for that. But Facebook was "free" to use, and learned a lot from it's first major gamescourge, Zynga. Naturally I've been waiting for it to stand the test of time, and it does look like it has been a complete failure when it comes to being worthwhile. Facebook started out with enshittification as a business model but the next major escalation came when people had to have an "account" before they could even browse the site any more. People who had actually enjoyed it were somewhat pressured to join just so they could continue following those who were promotional. Linkedin did this too and made it no longer worth visiting either. So much for supporting the members who were intended to be promoted. You can only imagine my shock years ago when I found out Facebook was a billion-dollar company. Things like this were never even supposed to be worth money.
I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like. The whole idea of the promise of the internet has been destroyed by newsfeeds and mega-corps. There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands with swear words, and in fact, I think that the damage these social media companies are doing is in fact, reducing the independence teens and kids that have that were the fears parents originally had. I dunno, are you uncertain about your case at all or just like. I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
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> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck. How about we reject all institutional nannies? It is much easier to implement user-controlled on-device settings than any sort of over-the-Internet verification scheme. Parents purchase their children's devices and can adjust those settings before giving it to their kids. This is the crux of the problem, and all other arguments are downstream of this.
> Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction? The government literally actively prevents people selling all these things to children, rather than permit a free for all and then expect parents to take responsibility for steering their kids away from them.
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Meta for one has proven terminally irresponsible at acceptable stewardship. Maybe it's about time that the proven predatory companies be restricted to something like their own adults-only internet cafes where age can be checked at the door. They had their chance with the open internet and they blew it.
No, it isn't. Tobacco is a physical substance that alters users' biochemistry and creates a physical dependence. Social media is information conveyed via a computing device. You can criticize social media for what it is in its own right, without having to engage in these kinds of disingenuous equivocations.
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You’re right, it’s actually worse than tobacco. Tobacco simply makes your body sick, but social media attacks the most vital part of us. Even the CDC has studied this: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a3.htm
Is it more important to prevent your child from <...>, or to not be seen as an adversarial monster?
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presumably being a parent is different from being a your child’s friend. There is overlap, but yes, sometimes being a good parent requires “laying down the law”. With that being said, i think explaining _in detail_ why you’re laying down certain rules can go a LONG way toward building some trust and productive dialogue with your child. Maybe you’ll find out they are more mature than you give them credit, can loosen up a bit. Or maybe a reasonable compromise can be found. Or maybe they’ll be bitter for a few months, but they’ll at least understand “why”.
I am not gonna blame parents while businesses are allowed to target children with ads about the newest mobile game. Children are very easy to influence, and this is exploited heavily by the tech industry, who shower children with advertising. This is predatory behavior, which the legislator and the regulator of western governments (including Europe) has allowed to proliferate. We cannot expect every parent to be able to protect their children when they are being predated on by dozens of multi-million dollar companies, and the state is on the side of the companies.
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> I am not gonna blame parents while businesses are allowed to target children with ads about the newest mobile game. Those kids shouldn't even have a mobile device to play said game. That's where the parents can, and should, make a difference: don't let your kid even have a smartphone in the first place.
Parents can't easily prevent their kids from going to those kinds of stores once they're at the age where the parent doesn't need to keep an eye on them all the time and they can travel about on their own. The difference though is that parents are generally the ones to give their kids their phones and devices. These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist, and parents apparently don't use existing parental controls properly or at all.
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> These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist And there would be ways to work around it. If people find that privacy-preserving age verification is not good enough because "some kids will work around it", then nothing is good enough, period. Some will always work around anything.
So what’s the alternative? Pretend we don’t live in a digitally connected society and set our kids up for failure when they get one years after their peers?
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Let's assume for the sake of argument that social media is extremely harmful to children. Which means the answer to your question is "yes, obviously". If people were running around giving their kids fentanyl, you wouldn't say "but my kid's friends all use fentanyl and he'll be an outcast if he can't". You would say "any friends that he loses over this are well worth avoiding the damage". Why would it be different just because it's social media?
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Phones, I mean. Sorry for the confusion there. I’m for holding off on social media.
Keeping your kids off social media is setting them up for success.
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I’m talking about phones specifically. Agree re: social media.
Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.
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Today's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.
> these systems would be highly phishable Well this is true of all of the internet, yes? https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2025/08/report-financial-institutions-main-target-for-phishing-attacks/ https://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/the-rise-in-phishing-scams/ Your example about migrant workers is not an internet problem, it is a government problem. And a capitalism problem. I mean migrant workers? Why do these workers need to migrate? Usually because the U.S. has probably decimated their country. But never mind, I agree that this is an unsolvable problem, not from lack of capability, but because we are ruled by sociopaths and most humans have been hacked by their addiction pathways. And I do not care about Saudi Arabia or Asia because I do not live there. And I do not care if they block all of the internet. We do not need it for anything, even less so for organizing. Maybe we should just leave the internet, which is only a capitalist and government collusion to make people spend money. All the internet did was concentrate power to a few oligarchs. For everything good that the internet has provided I can show you ten things that are not only bad, but 1000 times worse, like monkey torture video sharing. If I had kids today they would not even use the internet until they were out of my care. I only have six accounts on the internet. Including HN. I do not view porn, gamble, have any social media, and in fact I am trying to became un-homeless so I can go back to a flip phone. IMHO, the answer is not a fee internet, the answer is leaving the internet. But it seems you made and make a nice living at all of this so I see what a sacrifice that would be for you. You are probably part of the reason I am homeless today, with the separation for wealth and all that. I see that you dnated to a bunch of neoliberal types and that fits. Seems you had over $17,000 to give to politicians. That is more than I survive on for a year. I mean, you do not need to do any work at all today. You could retire right now. Sorry for the unrelated rant, but needed to get that off my chest for myself. Just tired of wealthy people trying to perfect a horrible system and technology that keeps making them money. You pretend like you care about the poor, like the migrant worker, but that is just laughable. If you did you would be against capitalism. You would give up all you own and follow Christ or Buddha or whatever. I mean you got $20 million and what did you do? You started making addictive games. And then you donate to these neoliberals who are no different than the neoconservatives. Love, a old homeless guy who left Cisco in 1999 because he saw where all of this was going and who is currently sitting in a hotel he cannot afford because the 2002 minivan he lives in just lost its water pump.
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If you need help (monetary or otherwise), please email me at tolmasky |at| gmail |dot| com. This is a sincere offer. I can't tell how much is hyperbole in your post, but if you're going through that and I can help, I'd be happy to. > I mean you got $20 million and what did you do? You started making addictive games. I refrained from responding to the rest since it seems that there is a deeper issue, but I could not help setting the record straight here. I think everyone who has ever played Bonsai Slice will firmly attest to it being the opposite of addicting. My parents never let me own a game console so I never really wrapped my head around games, and made exactly the kind of game someone like that would come up with: a deep tech exploration, to hopefully make progress on two problems that were plaguing me at the time: 1) how little mobile UI had seemed to progress (instead getting stuck in one-tap local maxima), and 2) building an app that is generally considered to be the worst candidate for a pure immutable language... in a pure immutable language in order to serve as a forcing function to surface new ideas in the space. I've always believed that if you wanted to make a general purpose programming language, you should probably try to have as much varied experience as possible, or otherwise you'll end up with a domain-specific language that is misused for every other domain (this is how I would describe most programming languages. In fact, I'd say most programming languages are written for the niche use case of writing a compiler, since they are written by compiler writers. Ironic that that is the last thing most get used for.). As such, I made a decision to start actually writing a wide variety of apps.
If the US really cared about child safety they'd go after people in the epstien files.
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As we can see from this user who has fallen ill with Epstein Brain, the real victims of social media algorithms are actually adults. He is currently prepping to overthrow his local Pizzeria while the rest of us argue as if social media even exists anymore (it doesn't, it's just algorithmic TV now).
> We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else. A stronger statement: we know how to build zero-knowledge proofs over government-issued identification, cf. https://zkpassport.id/ The services that use these proofs then need to implement that only one device can be logged in with a given identity at a time, plus some basic rate limiting on logins, and the problem is solved.
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Yes this is what I'm thinking about! The challenge here though is to prove to the user, especially without forcing the user to go into technical details, that it is indeed private and isn't giving away details. The user needs to be able to sandbox an app like that and have full control of its communications.
How did Joann Fabrics die while Best Buy survived? It wasn't Amazon (governance.fyi)
Here’s the part I don’t understand. If they can’t exit, don’t they lose money in spite of the limited downside risk? For example, the Toys “R” Us example: "$1.3 billion came from the buyers’ own pockets” "PE consortium collected $470 million in fees and interest over the course of ownership” So they lost $830M on the deal?
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Yes, this is exactly the question I always have with the PE narratives - what do the supply-side incentives of PE look like? Is this an overall profitable activity where the vultures and their debt-backers win out? Is it merely profitable for the PE firm but a whole bunch of debt-bagholders lose out? Are those losers corporate junk bond stuffed into retirements funds and whatnot, but the funds' managers are happy with their own fees, and customers don't really notice the slightly lower returns from a few "bad investments" (but are still ultimately being swindled) ? The article touches on this a little in vague terms, citing some studies, which is more than I can say for most. If this is an economically destructive dynamic, and it most certainly feels like it is, then some type of investor must be losing out, right?? It seems worth it to focus on who those parties are to see if that source of energy can be cut off.
I find it hard to believe this is the real timeline when Best Buy is better than Amazon and New Egg. But I prefer Best Buy to both those now.
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NewEgg is still great if you specific "Fulfilled by newegg" or whatever magic checkbox stands for "No actually this is a product we have bought and have in our warehouse from a real company and you are paying us to sell that physical item to you from our warehouse" Of course, that eliminates 90% of their "inventory", but I only ever wanted to buy computer products from them anyway.
It seems pretty good to me, or at least my local one is. Best Buy is in a solid niche between, say, Micro Center and Walmart.
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<Falling down the age pit> "IT'S STILL NICE TO GO ANd browse video games in the physical store..... AAAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......"
Counterpoint: People do this on Amazon all the time . One time I ordered a kick drum stand on Amazon. All I got was the foot of the stand and a brick in the box. It was supposed to be brand new, not a used item.
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I suspect the wildly differing experiences for this depend on the number of bad actors doing this in the pools feeding into whatever warehouses, versus total churn. For me, living first in Baltimore then NYC, places where there's quite a few people buying quite a few things up and down the cost scale, I never saw a counterfeit anything come up. That's not to say I think it doesn't happen, just that I think that's why some people have wildly different experiences here.
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