Unlurker|Replay|About
Oracle is building yesterday's data centers with tomorrow's debt (cnbc.com)
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Is it possible that the supply of used GPUs available to home builders will somehow increase as the result of this?
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The only thing that matters is stonk++
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What happens to older datacenter GPUs? Do they have a second life somewhere outside of datacenters? I could see Nvidia adding terms of sale requiring disposal rather than resale.
Omg. Oracle taking greedy bad decisions with tax payer money? No way!
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what taxpayer money?
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TFA says nothing about taxpayer money - this is about Oracle taking on debt...
60 Minutes Havana Syndrome report finds U.S. government tested energy weapon (cbsnews.com)
It does claim the US went to great lengths to dismiss the victims for a decade, while being in possession of the device. That raises the question of what incentives the US would have to deny its existence. To me, that was the story.
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It doesn’t say they had it in their possession for the last decade. It says they tested it for about a year. Not clear when they would have gotten it.
I used to laugh at qanon lol but they were proven right. pedophiles run our government.
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Is there any actual evidence for this?
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Have you read any of Epstein files, or any reporting about them? Serious question - you need to give us where you currently are if you want a productive conversation.
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I spent a lot of time (as a former lit PhD student with an interest in narrative and identity) paying attention to the Q-related (and adjacent) stories. On one hand, once folks are freed from orthodox thought, they might point out some very useful and interesting ideas about the world. On the other hand, (assuming I just haven't figure out how to observe astral-projecting bodies, lumerians, the long-term benefits of consuming adrenochrome and gross manipulation of the electoral system) there are some significant differences between what the actual claims made by the Q-folk and what the actual documentation brings out. Importantly, the Q folks have been horrifically wrong about a number of things as well. It wasn't hard to sort out the (usually fairly pedestrian) truths, and people were doing that work even when Q was in its heyday. Remember that the reality (as I understand it) that wealthy men do abusive things doesn't need a secret satanic cabal to explain it. To claim the q folks were right is roughly (in my understanding) equivalent to claiming that the batshit crazy experiments done under programs like Midnight Climax actually led to "mind control" in the fine grained way that the folks paying for those programs speculated to be possible- that shit was dumb and anyone who has some moderate experience with psychedelics and any amount of maturity should be able to clock that without repeating the "experiments".
Uber reported to the state that I was fired for "annoying a coworker." (anon-ex-uber.medium.com)
To be honest, if they paid me a 6 digit salary, I'd be happy to "answer an email" on a Saturday, it isn't exactly doing an 8+ hour shift at the weekend.
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You're selling yourself too cheaply. To habitually work on weekends I'd need at least a 7 figure salary. Maybe even 8 figures.
All the local lawyers have conflicts of interest? I know someone suing their landlord and he had to find a lawyer 3 hours away because all the local lawyers work with this property management company.
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Whoa, what an interesting variation of "buying the railroads".
The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here. My experience is also that HR is very reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But the thing is that when you have a legit harassment claim, the law is there to protect you . You could make things very expensive for the company in court, and so protecting the company does mean protecting you and treating you respectfully and cooperatively. If HR investigates and finds you don't have a legit case and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you. Your judgment and account of the facts is questionable in that case, and you're a liability from the other side. I don't know exactly what happened in this case, but in the harassment case I've had to handle as a manager, the (male) employee said that the (female) victim had initiated everything and had this weird fascination with him, while the paper trail that everybody could see clearly showed that he was both the instigator and the one behaving improperly. Projection is strong in cases like these. So it's entirely possible we're not getting the full story from this anonymous blog post.
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> and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you. That protects other employees. If you are instigator and then go to complain to HR trying to make them punish the victim, firing you protects everyone around you. And it protects the culture from becoming toxic. HR can play negative role, but this scenario is not one of those.
this cliche is so often repeated that i'm now questioning whether this is even true. unions are counterproductive many times - they serve the interests (only temporarily) for the incumbents while failing to or ignoring the larger consequences like the whole company or industry declining. i wonder if the HR cliche is similar.
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> they serve the interests [...of] the incumbents Yes. The employees. That's the point. > while [...] ignoring the larger consequences like the whole company Good. That is, again, the point - to advocate for the employees when their interests are in opposition to those of the company. You say they're counterproductive - sounds like they're working exactly as intended.
Things I've Done with AI (sjer.red)
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If you are a parent, you know that feeling when your child is struggling with something and gets frustrated, but you keep silent and don't help because you know that the child has to figure this out by themselves. That's the same feeling I get when I hear all those doom and gloom perspectives on how AI is ruining coding :D
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Not enough time, too many projects. Useful projects I did over the weekend with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 (just casually chatting with it). 2025 Taxes Dumped all pdfs of all my tax forms into a single folder, asked Claude the rename them nicely. Ask it to use Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract out all tax-relevant details from all statements / tax forms. Had it put together a webui showing all income, deductions, etc, for the year. Had it estimate my 2025 tax refund / underpay. Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. It broke down all the progressive tax brackets, added notes for all the extra federal and state taxes (i.e. Medicare, CA Mental Health tax, etc). Finally had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc. Desk Fabrication Planning on having a furniture maker fabricate a custom walnut solid desk for a custom office standing desk. Want to create a STEP of the exact cuts / bevels / countersinks / etc to help with fabrication. Worked with Codex to plan out and then build an interactive in-browser 3D CAD experience. I can ask Codex to add some component (i.e. a grommet) and it will generate a parameterized B-rep geometry for that feature and then allow me to control the parameters live in the web UI. Codex found Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) B-rep modeling library, which has a web assembly compiled version, and integrated it. Now have a WebGL view of the desk, can add various components, change their parameters, and see the impact live in 3D.
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I had ai hallucinate that you can use different container images at runtime for emr serverless. That was incorrect its only at application creation time. Hope you dont get audited
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I love the tax use case. What scared me though is how I've (still) seen ChatGPT make up numbers in some specific scenarios. I have a ChatGPT project with all of my bloodwork and a bunch of medical info from the past 10 years uploaded. I think it's more context than ChatGPT can handle at once. When I ask it basic things like "Compare how my lipids have trended over the past 2 years" it will sometimes make up numbers for tests, or it will mix up the dates on a certain data points. It's usually very small errors that I don't notice until I really study what it's telling me. And also the opposite problem: A couple days ago I thought I saw an error (when really ChatGPT was right). So I said "No, that number is wrong, find the error" and instead of pushing back and telling me the number was right, it admitted to the error (there was no error) and made up a reason why it was wrong. Hallucinations have gotten way better compared to a couple years ago, but at least ChatGPT seems to still break down especially when it's overloaded with a ton of context, in my experience.
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I don't know, but I would never upload such sensitive information to a service like that. Local modals FTW, although they might not be there yet for this use case (no experience).
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And like everyone else you trained the AI how to replace you by giving it more insight on how to prompt stuff.
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Yes. I also release almost all of the code I've ever written for free, aside from what I've done at work.
> I’ll continue use these tools with the hope that they don’t make me obsolete too quickly. I'm starting to believe using them is more likely to make you obsolete than not.
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That’s the most craven AI user line I’ve read. Well at least from this week.
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I completely agree. Most programmers work on rather boring and not particularly novel things. If they don't adapt, then they'll be replaced. I do think it'll be a while before LLMs make significant contributions to complex projects, though. For example I can't imagine many maintainers of the Linux kernel use LLMs much.
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And if we do adapt we might still get replaced because less of us will be able to do more. Or we wont because of Jevons Paradox. Linux maintainers on the other hand can code (with and without AI) what I could not (with or without AI). So in a way becoming a more knowledgeable, more skilled programmer is the way? In any case, too much speculation about the future.
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It baffles me that so many people are so willing to pay for the privilege of training their own replacement.
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But are you though? From where I stand this thing is going to provide great leverage to those who don’t simply just write code. I personally doubt the thing will ever get to a place where it can be trusted to operate alone - it needs a team of people and to go super fast you need more people. Moreover, the price won’t be high due to competition. I’ve changed my view on LLMs as being good, as long as competition is fierce.
What did you think of Dagger? I used Earthly a while ago but the one thing I didn't like was that it couldn't parallelize runs, since it only ran on one CI instance. Other than that, I liked that I could run my entire CI pipeline locally, but didn't like it so much that I ended up using it for much else.
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I really like Dagger. I had a _lot_ of weird issues with Earthly, like edge cases. Dagger has been mostly solid. It still has gaps. I don't think they've landed on the right model for CI. Like Earthly, their model is a CI runner + local cache. I believe a distributed cache (like Bazel) makes more sense. If I were choosing between the two I'd personally always pick Dagger, but I think there is a strong argument for Earthly for simpler projects. If you're using multiple Earthfiles or a few hundred lines of Earthly, I think you've outgrown it.
I feel pretty productive myself with AI but this list isn’t beating the rap that AI boosters mostly use AI to do useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI.
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That's a fair criticism of my personal projects. Maybe 3-4 of those could potentially see usefulness outside of myself. At work, I would say I've done plenty of "useful" things with AI, but that's hard to show off given that I work on an internal application.
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I've actually felt the same way about some (not all) but some "productivity" hacks I've seen people post online with their OpenClaw setups. I chuckle when I see some of them because you could achieve the same (or often faster) result by jotting a note onto a notecard and sticking it in your pocket. Most of the other automations running don't really seem to serve any real purpose at all. But hey, if it's fun, have at it.
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Here's what I made: * https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ - A voice note recorder. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot - My secure AI personal assistant that's made my life admin massively easier. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad - A macropad. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand - A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes. * https://pine.town - A whimsical little massively multiplayer drawing town. * https://encyclopedai.stavros.io - A fictional encyclopedia. * https://justone.stavros.io - A web implementation of the board game Just One. * https://www.themakery.cc - The website and newsletter for my maker community. * https://theboard.stavros.io - A feature board that implements itself. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A blood test viewer. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - An email bot to answer common support queries for my users. Maybe some of these will beat the rap.
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Some of them definitely do not. Like a fictional encyclopedia? What is the point of that? That's like "an alphabetical novel". And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the blandest description possible if you're trying to impress people with the utility of your utility.
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Sounds like the goalposts are moving from "not useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI" to "extremely useful stuff".
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Fair. But finally we are seeing what LLM proponents are putting forward. And it’s exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute. But… so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor any continued support for future investment. On the other hand all this stuff is going to drive continual innovation. The more tokens generated the more model producers invest. And we might eventually get to a place of local models.
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> "A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes." Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).
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Maybe, although it's actually giving me OCD, I think. It's really hard to tune out because of the irregular ticking. I implemented a regular mode to combat this, defeating the purpose somewhat.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down (bsky.social)
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This makes sense, they've had a lot of issues with cp and have generally developed a poor reputation for their user-base and bans. It seems more like a systemic issue to me rather than a CEO issue, but I suppose all issues start at the CEO level in some regard
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While I definitely appreciate the sentiments of ATproto and a bit more openness of Bluesky as a platform for development fun and perks like domain verification etc...... having to relive all of the development that we went thru with Twitter for over a decade as they 'build in the open' is frustrating. The network effects are there (which are super important to break out of silos and gain explorability) a bit more thanks to the centralization and hashtags (moreso that the go nowhere Fediverse) but there's a bigger hole: say what you want about daily user numbers, so much mainstream and big accounts are just not there. From news organizations (including the ones that are there that post 'selectively') to politicians, sports like some others have mentioned, entertainment and more. Abandoned accounts, or just not there. A chunk of the conversation (or even the 'fight') and reachability of those entities, even the usefulness of having an official source on the platform for their content, is not there in many instances. And I don't know why this isn't a major focus for growth and legitimacy. Hope there's some more direction on that if you want it to be anything other than an 'escape' for left-leaning people and those looking for a bit more independence over their profiles.
> user-antagonistic communication could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it
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they keep misgendering me
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/05/waffles-eat-bluesky/
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I think Jesse Singal is an awful person, but Jay responded appropriately there.
I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously. Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism. Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an unrelated topic to ask the mods to ban someone you don't like is a tradition as old as dial up BBS. So I'm glad to see the torch is being carried forward to a younger generation.
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> Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism. I was in the invite only cohort of Bluesky users and I don't really think so. I think what happened is after the election a bunch of very online, political news addicted anti-Musk folks migrated to Bluesky and created the current culture. Even though I'm pretty sure most folks on the network shared pretty much the same politics, the culture on the network changed completely within a few days of this.
The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0] [0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-guidelines-equally
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Why do people keep lying about this? He pulled a quote from a publically available affidavit. There was no identifying information whatsoever either.
The central complaint isn't "distaste" because you can't call for someone to be banned because of a "distaste". "Jesse Singal has distributed private medical information on Bluesky without the consent of the patient" translates to publishing a quote from a patient included in a therapist's letter of support for hormones. The problem in this situation is that the complaint itself as well as the whole drama surrounding the person is an exercise of harassment towards Singal . In this context, I don't think that saying "waffles" is out of order. I'm not sure of what else can be done about crybullying, since by its very nature innocent bystanders would be surely affected if action was taken against those complaining.
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Distributing private medical information without consent is a violation of Bluesky's terms. And to me, that sounds like a much more concrete example of someone being a bully.
We already could've done that before, just throw a HTML file on a HTTP server on a cheap VPS
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This is like saying anyone can open a lemonade stand in Mogadishu.
The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever. The only reasonable understanding is that these protocols are for for publishing to the public. It is not possible to reliably retract anything published to thousands of other peoples' computers. We used to try to teach people that the internet is forever , and that's even more true with federated protocols. That doesn't make them a bad idea.
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Actually, yes, it does. Or more precisely, it might. We now have a better idea of how people actually behave and it's not in accordance with "the internet is forever," and I have no interest in blaming them for 'human nature' in that way. And it's all still dangerous. Again, I know the internet is forever, but someone else posting about ME might not. This isn't an individual thing. It's "ecological." And I have no interest in making Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER to build.
As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).
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Twitter/X is thriving, what are you talking about
I’d describe that last six months as ‘sideways’ —- what was that surge near the end of last year?
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My understanding was the end of year time off / holidays, as compared to the dip around thanksgiving.
Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts.
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More IRL time with other people hopefully.
Threads? The twitter clone owned by Meta? Yeah no thanks.
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… most social networks give you a “notification” if somebody follows you or engages with a post but there are two exceptions: (1) is LinkedIn which gives you a double-dose of main feed items you didn’t click on and that you never clicked on anything like ever so it’s a chance to prove their model is right… most social networks play a “ding” sound if somebody likes your post but LinkedIn dings when you post something because their standards are low. (2) Threads posts “notifications” that are somewhere between completely senseless and “political outrage of some kind but I can’t tell if they like Trump or hate Trump”
Mastodon already won, by being used by people. Bluesky also won, by also being used by people. Not sure if this is a "winner takes it all" scenario? As long as you can host it yourself, I don't really mind where people are, both seem to work and have "won" for what they set out to do.
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"Mastodon already won, by being used by people" I'm sorry what
It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are. Mastodon ended up losing its user base to Bluesky during the early Twitter exodus because many influencers and journalists wanted to have an "elite" status and a special relationship with the platform, so they preferred a platform owned by Dorsey to some hippie open-source thing. Bluesky, in turn, ended up losing back to Twitter/X when it turned out to be a place where you mostly talk about how awful Twitter/X is. I want to say that we don't need social networks where we constantly interact with hundreds of thousands of strangers, but I'm writing this on HN, so...
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Sometimes I think more the toxic people who wrote about politics and identity on Mastodon moved on to Bluesky when Trump got elected. I don’t see why it is “zero” sum, nothing stops you from posting to more than one social. I mean, I have relatives on Facebook and no prospect for getting them to change so I cut-n-paste what I posted on Mastodon to Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and all sorts of places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Judgment Allow me introduce you to the inception of enshittification
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The section you linked to says the decision was non-binding, and the next section includes multiple quotes disputing the idea that such a legal requirement exists.
Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom (arstechnica.com)
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Facebook at it again - creating the worst possible image in society of a potentially useful technology by their carelessness and greed.
Anyone wearing these glasses in public should be punched in the face. Especially public transport.
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Violence isn't the answer. Handheld IR/non-visible-wavelength LiDAR systems that permanently fry CMOS image sensors are. If state laws permit the capture of light, let them capture light. Light has no spectrum allocation laws, no license required to emit, and as long as you're not disturbing anyone (e.g. with deliberately obnoxious use of visible wavelengths), you're not breaking any laws. LiDAR operators do not have a legal duty to protect image sensors around them.
"using the bathroom" will be the least of what they're watching people do. Anyone wearing these glasses (or similar) should know that all of the audio/video picked up by the glasses will be watched and analyzed by others, likely by AI as well. Just like the entire point of facebook is to spy on people and profit from that data, the entire point of these devices is to spy on people in ways that the facebook app doesn't/can't and profit from that data.
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Great if I wear sunglasses at the public pool people think I'm a nonce filming kids.
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Sunglasses, no. Meta RayBans, deservedly.
Do we really care what it is that will cause the visceral reaction? If I said it might reveal ways/means or private IP or any of a million other examples, few would really care as not everyone is involved in that. However, everyone goes to the bathroom.
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I care a little bit - I think it's genuinely disappointing that your privacy can be so thoroughly compromised by interesting uses of metadata... but I also won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It'd be great is people truly understood the dangerous of invasive monitoring outside their physical forms (a, imo, relatively minor privacy to have compromised compared to your behavior) - but if it gets folks riled up I'm all for it.
And now realise the same is true for your robot vacuum, car camera, doorbell camera, etc etc We consumers have no protection against big tech
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>We consumers have no protection against big tech Stop buying it. You are not a robot that is forced to purchase a video doorbell or a robotic vacuum cleaner or a smart thermostat. You have free will. If you do not like a commercially available product, don't buy it, don't use it. It's that simple.
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I think it's a reasonable ask that when buying a product, it has reasonable levels of safety, security, and privacy. Especially with products that might change over time because of software updates. Yes, there are ToS, but it's fine for us as a society to say that consumers deserve more protection against big tech so we aren't a TOS update away from having everything shared or be used for something that wasn't promoted. > You have free will. If you do not like a commercially available product, don't buy it, don't use it. Caveat emptor. But lemon laws exist, too. And, a commercially available product now might not be the same a year from now.
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There's compelling reasons for all sorts of home devices to be connected to the internet[1] but the rub is that ToS flexibility and software updates make this a backdoor waiting to happen. I feel like our legal system has significantly failed us by not empowering the consume to say "I accept your device with a wifi antenna for the purposes of updating and I reject any exfiltration of personal data from it to your servers". You can have such a contract written - but this is really a place where something like a consumer advocacy board should step in and make sure those rights and sanely guaranteed. 1. It'd be great to ease the method for updating, it'd be nice to be able to easily monitor the device especially if it could become active in some manner while you're absent (I don't want the stove turning on to broil right after I leave on a three month vacation)
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At least the vacuum does not try to start a civil war for add impressions..
Oil is near a price that hurts the economy (wsj.com)
It also tilts the economics toward extracting from more expensive oilfields if the price stays high long enough.
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Sort of. There’s a bullwhip effect with starting and stopping production from those marginal fields, whereas clean energy and storage deployed due to these fossil energy price levels will remain in service for at least the next two decades. For more research on this topic, keywords are “restart logistics shut in well.” https://cyrusashayeri.substack.com/p/restarting-fieldwide-shutdown-for
This only works up to a certain volume. The world economy requires about 38 billion barrels of oil per year. If you processed 100% of all grain, sugar crop, tuber and oilseed on Earth into liquid fuel, leaving zero for food, you'd get about 6 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in liquid fuels. Since it has to compete with food, the actual number would be much lower. It's not even close to being able to sustain our civilization.
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There is absolutely enough coal to make liquid fuel for the current civilization. But if oil/gas would not exist, then electrical cars would be on the road much earlier as burning coal to produce electricity is much more efficient then converting it into liquid fuel to burn in a car engine. As electrical cars produces roughly the same amount of CO2 when using electricity from coal as ICE car running on gasoline, the climate impact would be roughly the same. Then in a hypothetical scenario of 20th century without oil/natural gas nuclear energy would be much more widespread at this point and CO2 impact would be lower.
I think that may be insufficiently factoring in energy costs. If energy costs a n order of magnitude or two more for an extended period, you just get a whole lot less economy generally, and therefore a whole lot less of everything an economy can provide. Walking more sounds great, but I'm not sure it compensates for what could be an order of magnitude less health care generally.
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Health care is more efficiently delivered to higher density populations. Low density populations increase the time to access health care, which increases the risk of delivering emergency care but it also encumbers access to primary care with the associated access time. Suburban areas are a great deal more expensive in terms of health care delivery. Consider that in the absence of suburbanization there is decreased demand for energy. Higher density housing is cheaper to service overall, but also provides greater efficiency in accessing services. The reduced efficiency of suburban residences _requires_ the existence of high density forms of readily accessible and consumable energy; it simply isn't viable to build an American suburb without cheap energy, because it is a hideously inefficient model. But other models _do_ exist, and _are_ successful. The suburb can die and society will be better off for it.
Coal was certainly a problem; we have the word "smog" for a reason. But we were already on our way to electrified transport, via street cars and similar, when the automobile surged to popularity.
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Respectfully, from reading all your other comments all over this thread, I don't think you understand everything that modern technology stands on top of. You're handwaving away enormously difficult, complicated things and processes with "just use hydro". It doesn't work like that. Your heart is in the right place and I sympathize with you about car-oriented development in North America. But I think you have a massive blind spot. Fossil fuels were good and necessary for the modern world. Their owners have perpetrated heinous lies to keep us tied to them for far longer than was good or necessary.
Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US (dexerto.com)
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Only women can request women drivers? Ok. Will trans women and intersex people be allowed to request women drivers? They are an especially vulnerable group. What about women drivers? How will the boundaries of these classifications be determined, and what happens when someone tests these boundaries?
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“What about women drivers?” The headline is… “Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US”
The most effective way of combating this for Uber would be to start doing deeper background checks, live interviews, in-depth assessments, customized testing on their drivers. Mandate video and audio recordings in the car that's streamed to them. Impose harsh penalties on harassment, including immediate dismissal and mandatory police reporting. You know, act like a real employer. Right now they have all the reasons in the world to be as hands-off on their checks as they can be. They don't behave like a business with employees. It costs nothing to accept almost anyone and then just weed out the worst of the worst to avoid brand damage. But making these changes would cut into the bottom line too much. They want all the unemployable and dangerous people to work for them because they're so desperate that they'll accept the meager pay. So instead of making any deep, difficult structural changes, they ask the software team to add a checkbox to the app. The checkbox itself is fine by me, but it's just them taping over an issue that stems from the way they do business.
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That sounds like a great solution. In the time between now and when that gets implemented, I'm more than happy with the stopgap. Dear readers, if you wish to get rid of the stop gap, advocate for this.
Uber could ask for it but the customer does not have more information
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Uber is also the one deciding to offer a rideshare service where mens are banned for working for them. Uber has the choice between vetting their employees and doing discrimination based on a correlated proxy. They choose the latter, and this discussion is about whether that is legal.
Show HN: The Mog Programming Language (moglang.org)
Also for a * b + c ? I know clang tidy wants me to do this but I think it is overkill.
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I would usually. Sometimes if it's like 2 * x + b, I would not, but personally, I hate chasing down bugs like this, so just add it to remove ambiguity. Also, for like b + 2 * a, I will almost always use parentheses.
Doesn't need to be its own language.
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I feel like a small language designed specifically for LLM's should/will exist someday. Certainly I've found I really like simpler compiled languages with more complete memory models, I would imagine a language designed for LLM's and agents could improve workflows someday.
I generally agree. TypeScript is a great language, and JS runtimes have certainly had a lot of money and effort poured into them for a long time. I would add WASM to this category, as probably the closest thing to Mog. Write a program in some language, compile it to WASM, and load it into the host process. This is (probably) nice and safe, and relatively performant. Since it's new, Mog will likely not yet beat existing systems at basically anything. Its potential lies in having better performance and a much smaller total system footprint and complexity than the alternatives. WASM is generally interpreted -- you can compile it, but it wasn't really designed for that as far as I know. More generally, I think new execution environments are good opportunities for new languages that directly address the needs of that environment. The example that comes to mind is JavaScript, which turned webpages into dynamically loaded applications. AI agents have such heavy usage and specific problems that a language designed to be both written and executed by them is worth a shot in my opinion.
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Wasm is explicitly not designed for interpretation ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01183 )
Wasm is definitely designed to be compiled, either ahead of time or JITed. Wasm interpreters are few and far between.
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Huh you're right. I had worked with interpreted WASM before, which is why I thought that was more common. WASM is a great system, but quite complex -- the spec for Mog is roughly 100x smaller.
Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional (cbs12.com)
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https://www.law.gmu.edu/pubs/papers/ls15_36
After reading the 21 page order, I do tend to agree with the judge The judge frames the red light camera scheme as a revenue generating scheme, not a public safety measure. Additionally, "A distinctive feature of the statutory scheme is its assignment of guilt to the registered owner rather than the driver of the vehicle". and "If there are multiple registered owners, the citation is issued to the 'first' registered 'owner'". and the person whom the citation was issued to must sign an affidavit that includes the name, address, dob, of the person who was actually driving. The judge says this "...abandon(s) centuries time honored protections of hearsay as substantive evidence.". "It is a foundational rule of constitutional due process that the government must prove every fact necessary to constitute an offense beyond a reasonable doubt before a person may be adjudicated guilty of a crime". "Although nominally civil, traffic infraction proceedings retain every substantive hallmark of criminal prosecution..." "under Feiock, such proceedings are sufficiently criminal in form and function to invoke the full protections of due process..." - that's probably the core of the reasoning here. "Section 316.074(1) provides in relevant part that "The driver of any vehicle shall obey..."" - the driver, not the registered owner. I highly recommend reading the order. It's easy to follow and aligns with my understanding of the law within the USA.
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>"The judge frames the red light camera scheme as a revenue generating scheme, not a public safety measure." In my own experience, when they took down the red light cameras in my area now people are not afraid to run red lights ~2 to ~3 seconds after it's red. See this kind of thing on a regular basis. Every now and then there's a serious accident.
California's new speed camera pilot (AB 645) explicitly solves for this. Tickets issued by these cameras are civil penalties issued to the owner of the vehicle, like parking tickets, rather than a criminal moving violation. This means the tickets are just as constitutional as parking tickets. It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance. Hopefully other states can follow this pattern. Consistent, low-impact enforcement is better at preventing unwanted behavior than the rare and severe but also capricious enforcement performed by human police.
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Consistent, low-impact enforcement is better at preventing unwanted behavior than the rare and severe but also capricious enforcement performed by human police. It can also give permission for unwanted behavior. Cf. the Haifa study, where the rate of late pickups increased when daycares added a fine. One explanation is the fine turned a complex moral obligation into an ordinary financial transaction.
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Sure. Then the bill requires that all those fines you pay go towards street calming infrastructure, eventually making it physically impossible (or at least very uncomfortable) for you to continue speeding. Kind of like if enough parents paid the late pickup fee, eventually the daycare could afford a van for dropoffs.
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As the great patio11 said: > Raise the prices. Then raise the prices. Then when you're done with that, raise the prices.
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Yea, that would be great then I can completely ignore them as I am not poor. It just turns speeding into something you can buy.
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While I agree with your sarcasm, this proposal is a least bad scenario: no enforcement is worse as there’s less incentive to respect the lights. Sadly money and power buying freedom of law isn’t restricted to road rules.
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I would argue such enforcement does not need automation and such automation is often for revenue generation vs saftey focused. Also, I am a bit biased here after working at flock.
If people routinely run the red light, it seems like an easy case to post an officer to do traffic stops and issue tickets. AFAIK, tickets issued by a sworn officer are broadly constitutional.
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There's a literal police station at the intersection and they don't pay any attention at all.
I people are routinely running a red for a particular intersection, it seems likely that there is a design problem with the intersection or the signaling. Improving safety would be fixing the underlying problem.
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It's actually pretty common for some people to just run red lights when the road is really clear, especially at night. Best that could maybe be done would be to reduce visibility of cross traffic, so that the drivers can't tell from afar that the road they'll cross is clear - but this is likely to cause other kinds of risks.
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They do it when the road is busiest actually. Just following the bumper in front of them instead of looking up.
there is no state where a moving violation is criminal misdemeanor. some moving violations may be CM but there are myriad of moving violations whose class/degree is not CM. CM is serious class/degree that if you are charged with it you better get yourself an attorney.
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That quote is from the judge's decision: he considers that moving violations are quasi-criminal proceedings, and as such, that the protections for criminal prosecution apply, unlike in purely civil cases.
If someone used the car without permission, they are guilty of theft. If they used the car with your permission, you should either be responsible for what they do with it, or be able to point to the person who was using it.
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> If someone used the car without permission, they are guilty of theft. Sure, but I still don't know who they are, so I can't give their name over for either investigating the theft or reassigning the speeding/red light/parking fine.
When subpoenaed, you'd be obligated to tell the court who you gave the knife to. But if you'd like to tell the fall, I'm sure some prosecutors wouldn't dig too hard to find the guilty party.
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It seems in this case they’re not asking, they’re accusing and saying I need to prove otherwise. I think that is substantively different Edit: subpoena is not a criminal charge afaik is what I’m saying
I know this is not related to the legal merits of the case being discussed, but who runs a red light? In my experience, this is an infarction that occurs very infrequently. Speeding or illegal parking happen all the time, but running a red light? Most people are not suicidal. Edit: Nevermind, I think crossing on yellow and catching a tenth of a second of red counts as running a red light. If it does, it’s something I did myself a few times (of course, all in the distant past, the statute of limitations has pased now …)
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I mean I’ve run red lights but only because I live in a city and there are times where it would be impossible to turn left due to oncoming traffic. So you poke your nose out a bit so the other directions see you and turn when incoming stops but before new directions start.
Running reds is a favorite pastime of Boston area drivers. Enter just after the yellow and buzz the pedestrians waiting, lurk in the middle of the road and make a left turn once oncoming traffic is stopped for the red, or just blow it for the hell of it.
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[delayed]
nah thankfully we are expanding speed cameras as they are proven to work (at least where i live in the bay area), unlike whatever right wing fantasy world you live in which they don't. good luck with your delulu world though
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They’re only proven to unnecessarily slow the flow of traffic and create inconvenience for the majority of people, and revenue for mismanaged local governments. That’s not a right wing thing, it’s just reality. Not to mention I’m not sure how you’re drawing this weird political association here in the first place.
Having driven in the UK and coming back to the US I miss all of the roundabouts. Any reason (aside from contractor profits) towns use 4-way traffic light systems vs a roundabout and some yield signs?
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A perpendicular intersection uses way less area than a roundabout. That's the basic reason. Roundabouts have better throughput than a busy 4-way stop, but less throughput than a signaled intersection if the timing and sensing is reasonable (many signaled intersections don't have reasonable sensing). Roundabouts also have some pretty nasty worst case wait times; I'm really not looking forward to the state installing one near me on the approach to a car ferry; it won't be fun to wait for 200 cars to go by before you get a turn to go, and I expect long ferry lines to result in impatient people in the ferry line blocking the roundabout. Sometimes there's two hours between ferry loadings. Going to be some fun times. Personally, I find it challenging to both look ahead to the right to confirm I have room to enter the roundabout, look to the left to confirm there is no traffic that I need to wait for, as well as looking far left and right to ensure there are no pedestrians crossing soon. Signaled 4-way perpendicular intersections have worse outcomes when a participant doesn't follow the signalling, but indication of right of way makes it easier to confirm at a glance if it's safe to proceed.
Let's say your friend borrow your car and drives through a red light. You don't have to tell the court that it was them, but as the car owner you'll be held responsible for what the car was used for if you don't.
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here's the thing about that: it's absolutely not true at all. once again, in the place where this ruling took place (and, therefore, the place we're talking about) the people who accuse you of a crime have to prove that it was definitely you that did it. an accusation doesn't put the burden of proof on you to prove that you didn't, or to find who actually did. this isn't a phoenix wright game, or an argument with your mom. if the state can't prove that it was you, then it wasn't.
It seems like that is not the case in Florida according to this judge.
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it's not true anywhere in america, at the very least.
Why not just drive under the speed limit and sober instead of giggling about avoiding penalties while endangering us all? Note that not once did you mention that you were innocent.
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> and sober Why would you presume GP was drunk? Also, it's completely common and safe to drive slightly over the speed limit in some circumstances, and in many parts of the US it's exceedingly rare for people to drive below the speed limit as you suggest. In many places the tickets are essentially written more for not seeing the cop and slowing down than for actually doing 78 in a 65.
In America, we have the fifth amendment, and the right not to divulge any information whatsoever unless we're granted immunity. It is enough to say absolutely nothing, and request the government to prove its case. If someone shot a person with my gun, I would invoke the fifth amendment, and ask the government to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt.
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Note that in civil cases, such as a traffic ticket, the fifth ammendment doesn't apply to the same extent, and the standard of evidence is typically not "beyond reasonable doubt", it is "a preponderance of the evidence". Now, per the judge's ruling in this case, red light tickets are actually quasi-criminal, not purely civil, so the standards of criminal law might need to be applied.
Is that just?
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Yes, vehicle ownership is a level of responsibility, I believe it is just to be accountable for what happens with it.
DARPA's new X-76 (darpa.mil)
Running exclusively off jet power would require an extremely (impossibly?) strong compressor stage coupled a powerful APU to generate lift. It's definitely not light enough to take off without tiltrotors.
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The concept is the compressed air sent through slits in a thruster, creating negative pressure that draws in surrounding air, resulting in increased thrust, there’s a concept already of this, check the above reply.
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From that link, "the system delivers 10% more thrust [...] than a small turbojet." They are still very deeply limited by compressor technology, regardless of whether they use combustion or electric propulsion.
It will need blades to VTOL.
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They do exist, WIP, a bladless VTOL https://newatlas.com/aircraft/jetoptera-bladeless-hsvtol/ > Jetoptera is developing VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft that use a "Fluidic Propulsion System" (FPS) instead of traditional rotors or propellers, acting like "bladeless fans on steroids". These systems use compressed air and the Coanda effect to generate high-speed thrust, promising quieter, more efficient, and faster flight (up to Mach 0.8) for aerial mobility.
Design remings me of something... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_V-22_Osprey
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The Osprey has a reputation, for sure, but it's mid-pack. They called the F-104 the widow maker for a reason, for example. And the F-16 has a fairly high accident rate, too, slightly higher than the Osprey. Though I think the F-16's history is a bit more lopsided, they made some changes after early production airframes proved pretty accident prone.
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The Osprey's accident rate is not that bad, and the US Army have ordered a new smaller tiltrotor, the v280.
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They officially named it recently to the 'MV-75'.
I’d go for simplicity and do a tail lander.
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These days my vote would go to a quad. Impeller fore, impeller aft and one in each wing. Behind doors, obviously, like the bays for retractable landing gear - this is a solved problem. They don't have to be efficient, because how much hovering time would you really need? Battery could even exist only in mission specific pods (internal perhaps, when it's a cargo carrier), trade-off as needed.
It looks like a maintenance nightmare with those clutches to decouple the blades and the mechanisms to have them folded during cruising. Does it even improve substantially in anh metric over the V280 to put money into it?
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All military aircraft are maintenance nightmares. They're also extraordinarily loud and devour fuel. These are not intended to entire commercial service where they need to turn a profit for the operators.
I've had to eat some humble pie and moderate my assessment of the F-35. It still does have a lot of issues, for sure, but it turns out if you divide an eye wateringly large number by another impressively large number, the result can be a lot better than I thought it would be. It's lot more about operational costs and project deliverables than plain sticker shock, and it is turning out to be a capable platform.
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> I've had to eat some humble pie and moderate my assessment of the F-35 Same for me. I was surprised to hear that it actually competes favorably on price. And aside from early griping that it couldn't beat an ancient F-16 in a dogfight, it seems pretty capable in that regard too. Saw a demo at the last airshow I went to and that plane was defying physics. I love the 16, always will, but I definitely don't think it would hang with an F-35.
The sticker price is competitive but the cost per flight hour and the availability factor is pretty horrifying. Factoring in the cost of flying and the availability makes the Grippen about half the cost. I wonder if the flight hour cost of F 35 includes the maintenance it's undergoing when it's not available.
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4th generation platforms like Grippen are not survivable in a modern air defense environment without complementary 5th generation platforms to establish air superiority. You can't avoid having a fleet of something like F-35 to gain control of the airspace.
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> modern air defense environment Wildly dependent on your definition of "modern", which mostly depends on your potential adversary. The Russia/Ukraine, and the new war in the Gulf have shown numerous ways in which 4th generation jets, and more importantly cheaper missiles and even more cheap drones can perform supression of enemy air defences and/or air support. Unless you're fighting the US or China, 4th gen jets are plenty. And even against US and US defended locations, cheap drones and missiles have been able to influct some pretty serious damage to critical infrastructure (like extremely expensive and rare radar systems). An adversary not crippled by extreme sanctions and corruption for decades might have been able to achieve even more, even with the total lack of airpower.
This administration doesn't really prioritize anything that has to do with intelligence, so advanced research was obviously going to fall by the wayside.
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https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs
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What are you saying? Do you think my claim was that all US research programs have closed up shop?
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No search results for "Salt Typhoon" as the query. This nation really is fucked.
JSLinux Now Supports x86_64 (bellard.org)
If anyone is interested, I made some modifications last month to get TempleOS running on the x86_64 JSLinux: https://ring0.holyc.xyz/
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Wow, thanks for this, this is exactly what v86 was missing! Runs faster than my demo: https://zb3.me/qemu-wasm-test/jspi-noffi/ Even though it has no JIT. Truly magic :)
Check out Jeff Lindsay's Apptron ( https://github.com/tractordev/apptron ), comes very close to this, and is some great tech all on its own.
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It's getting there. Among other things, it's probably the quickest way to author a Linux environment to embed on the web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOHvWArOOE Apptron uses v86 because its fast. Would love it for somebody to add 64-bit support to v86. However, Apptron is not tied to v86. We could add Bochs like c2w or even JSLinux for 64-bit, I just don't think it will be fast enough to be useful for most. Apptron is built on Wanix, which is sort of like a Plan9-inspired ... micro hypervisor? Looking forward to a future where it ties different environments/OS's together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGBeT8lwbo0
Is that even remotely relevant to JSLinux?
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If you'd clicked the link, instead of just reading the title, you'd have known it was.
I've always been fascinated by this, but I have never known what it would be useful for. Does anyone know of any practical use cases?
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Some sort of web based archive of applications/etc where you can boot them up in your browser.
My college professor used it to teach us the Linux command line We have Windows PCs in the classroom.
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Similarly I've used it for technical interviews.
Jolla on track to ship new phone with Sailfish OS, user-replaceable battery (liliputing.com)
The absence of eSIM is a deal breaker for me. I need to travel to the US for work and last time I was there I was having a hard time to find a physical SIM for the phone I had then.
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Would highly recommend not taking your actual phone to the US anyways
Are these non Google non Apple phones viable any more? Considering you almost can't do banking, and in some places interact with the government, without a locked down phone...
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I just switched to a Fairphone 5 with e/OS, which is a de-googled Android (it uses microG), and am pleasantly surprised how well everything works. My banking apps work, contacts and calendar lived on nextcloud already, the learning apps I use work. The two things I have to get used to is not having google maps, but the map app on there has also worked fine for me so far. And casting to a Chromecast doesn't really work for me, but I can live without that.
fifteen years ago I use to do mobile pentests for banks and when we could not find anything significant for the reports we could’ve always count on “lack of rooting detection” and pin the risk on some vague mobile banking malware threat pushed by marketing. I am sorry I contributed to this nonsense. 100% security theater, and here we are.
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It's understandable; I would maybe expect to undergo an extra step in verification for a sensitive app like, "we noticed this is the first time you are using this system that is not locked down; please type in the token we have mailed you". But locking users out (which may not directly be the bank's fault for relying on OS's security APIs) seems anti-competitive.
Would you bet your company on that happening soon? :)
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Ha! Well, not right now ! Previous to the last year or so, this wouldn't have escalated to the current situation where we're actively having to be wary of fending off Big Brother or blatant power grabs. However, given that we're talking about a European phone, I'm willing to bet that this type of effort goes hand in hand with decoupling from American-backed services (at least for those who've seen the writing on the wall and understand the risk to their sovereignty if they put all their eggs on an American basket).
I dispute your assertion: Sailfish's UI is WAY ahead of iOS and Android. It's simple, consistent, and intuitive; a complete contrast to the mess of iOS and the clunkiness of Android. As for stability, native Sailfish apps on my Xperia XA2 seldom, if ever, crash. And, to my eyes, it simply looks better.
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I won't dispute you. Maybe it evolved into more usable state, but the beginings had many problems and rough edges.
Yes but that was not from Jolla, but some random Twitter user. They were also shitting on it earlier in December, so GrapheneOS is probably run by some teenagers going through problematic puberty https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115685433938468549
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>Yes but that was not from Jolla, but some random Twitter user. So if a random auto blog was saying how Tesla FSD was "ULTRA reliable", it wouldn't be fair for Waymo (or anyone else) to reply back and point that out?
Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020) (rs-online.com)
Nobody misses the terrible optical mouse with the blue metal mouse mat though! You are right, the keyboards were great.
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I do. At my first job it looked so technical! Sure they were a bit rubbish but at least you didn’t have to pick all the hair and gank off the rollers and balls all the time.
A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.
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I don't have any nostalgia for old machines, I understand the 5- or 6-figure price tags were ridiculous, but I'm curious - in what way did Unix machines back then work poorly?
There is an irony that Wine is the most stable linux ABI for GUI applications in 2026.
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That means nothing when everything it's either RHEL bound, Ubuntu LTS or docker containers among standalone services written in Go which are everywhere. Serious GUI software will be written in QT5/6 where the jump wasn't as bad as qt4->5. Portability matters and now even more. Software will run in any OS and several times faster than Electron.
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft (writings.hongminhee.org)
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Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
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As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc. identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.
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AI models have already looked at the source of GPL software and contain it in their dataset. Adding the minecraft source to the mix wouldn't seem much different. Of course art assets and trade marks would have to be replaced. But an AI "clean room" implementation has yet to be legally tested.
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The big question is: if copyrighted material was used in the training material, is the LLM's output copyright infringement when it resembles the training material? In your example, you are taking the copyrighted material and giving it to the LLM as input and instructing the LLM to process it. Regardless of where the legal cards fall, this is a much less ambiguous scenario.
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You will probably run into design patents.
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I’ve often thought that the key to fighting this is through this exact method. Turn the tool against them
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without discussing copyright, I don't believe any of this is copied. Which I think should be the argument that actually matters. I downloaded both 6.0 and 7.0 and based on only a light comparison of a few key files, nothing would suggest to me that 7.0 was copied from 6.0, especially for a 41x faster implementation. It is a lot more organized and readable in my armature opinion, and the code is about 1/10th the size.
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LPGL is dead, long live the AI rewrites of your barely open source code
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From the article: > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. From GPL2: > The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. Is a project's test suite not considered part of its source code? If the test suite is part of this library's source code, and Claude was fed the test suite or interface definition files, is the output not considered a work based on the library under the terms of LGPL 2.1?
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It's transformative, so no. Legally, using the tests to help create the reimplementation is fine. However, it seems possible you can't redistribute the same tests under the MIT license. So the reimplementation MIT distribution could need to be source code only, not source code plus tests. Or, the tests can be distributed in parallel but still under LGPL, not MIT. It doesn't really matter since compiled software won't be including the tests anyways.
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Google v. Oracle ruled that use of APIs are fair game and could be argued that test cases are strictly a use of APIs and not implementation.
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Google vs Oracle ruled that APIs fall under copyright (the contrary was thought before). However, it was ruled that, in that specific case, fair use applied, because of interoperability concerns. That's the important part of this case: fair use is never automatic, it is assessed case by case. Regarding chardet, I'm not sure "I wanted to circumvent the license" is a good way to argue fair use.
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Actually I don't mind. And I'm using this ability to make sense of a large chunks of foreign code, or messy decompiled code, or broken code that no longer compiles on anything, and translate it to something I understand and is written in modern way and can run on Linux, to my advantage. :) Eg. I needed to use a completely nuttilly complex C++ mess of a code that somehow somewhere implements parsing of Xilinix bitstream (from project x-ray). I just needed to parse the damn bitstream to figure out what registers it initializes and what they are so I can debug a Kintex accelerator board, and X-Ray project has it but I can't compile it on Arch Linux, because C++ and tons of outdated dependencies, and even if I did manage it, would I be able to dump the bitstram in the understandable way anyway, or is the parser just used internally? So yeah, after an hour of trying to just build this mess and fighting dependencies, I gave up and just copied the key code/headers to claude, and told it to write simple linux C program that dumps bitstream header to stdout. Worked on the first try. Very nice clean C program, that just walked a file in the most straightforward manner, and printed what I wanted. The same goes for freaking closed source code that either is buggy, or doesn't do what I want, or is unmaintained old or incompatible, or only for windows, or produces/consumes file formats/protocols I want to understand, or I just want to know what it does. Decompile it completely to a single C file with my fav decompiler, remove fluff and apparently FOSS opensource libraries that it statically links (LLM already has them trained in anyway and they'd just eat context for no reason), and tell the LLM to rewrite it as a clean Linux C program (and maybe tell the LLM what FOSS libraries it's using and copy some key .h files from those, to help it up). Bam, pretty much working replica, much better starting point than just staring at Ghidra and trying to figure out the basics, which I would anyway, but after 100x more hours spent. Same for idiot companies who distribute Linux without source code. Every Linux build contains function names/symbols, unless they really try hard to get rid of them. You can use tools to convert decompressed linux image dumped from somewhere to elf with symbols that is simpler to decompile, and then decompile and just extract specific key HW specific drivers and initializations that you don't have source for. Throw the hand-picked subset of the whole mess into a LLM and tell it to produce a driver for modern Linux kernel, and in a matter of days you have a freaking running Linux 7.0 on a shitty MIPSEL SIP HW phone that was until now running some Linux blob from 2.16 era, with almost full support for every peripheral component on the PCB. That you can have this kind of "rewrite this into that" functionality of LLMs comes at a cost that you can use this against FOSS projects, too, but companies that want to be scummy and steal from FOSS projects, will do so anyway. It was always just too easy. It was not easy at all to do it in the reverse, until now. And personally I think that's more important, and it's great, and worth preserving and celebrating. IoT shit that I had hard time reverse engineering in the past is now reverese engineerable in like 1/50th of the time and effort. :) It's now a weekend project to bring full modern Linux support to some simpler IoT garbage that is sold out there. Even if companies provide Linux source for their IoT shit, it will be some 2.16 era or 3.0 era thing, that is obsolete and insecure, not DT based, and it will have quite messy or needlessly complicated written drivers. LLMs can rewrite this too, to fit the modern Linux standards, remove fluff, etc. This is great for bringin old HW to life, or freeing it from incompetent/overworked (or both) hands of original SW developers and their overlords, who can care less about security or privacy. I hope people who have hard-won experience with reverse engineering from the "before" days have already realized how insanely easy current LLM models make this for people with that experience.
I think the missing thing here is that the license violation already happened. Most of the big models trained on data in a manner that violated terms of service. We'll need a court case but I think it's extremely reasonable to consider any model trained on GPL code to be infected with open licensing requirements.
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You might wish that were true, but there are very strong arguments it's not. Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use. But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that. Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not going to be around the principle of fair use itself or whether training is transformative enough (it obviously is), but rather on the specifics: 1) Was any copyrighted material acquired legally (not applicable here), and 2) Is the LLM always providing a unique expression (e.g. not regurgitating books or libraries verbatim) And in this particular case, they confirmed that the new implementation is 98.7% unique.
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I agree there has to be a court case about it. I think the current argument, however, is that it is transformative, and therefore falls under fair use.
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Yea, a finding that training is transformative would be pretty significant and it's likely that the precedent of thumbnail creation being deemed transformative would likely steer us towards such a finding. Transformative is always a hard thing to bank on because it is such a nebulous and judgement based call. There are excellent examples of how precise and gritty this can get in audio sampling.
The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints.
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If you think about creative outcomes as n dimensional 'volumes', AI expressions can cover more than humans in many domains. These are precisely artistic styles, music styles etc. and tbh not everyone can be a Mozart but may be a lot more with AI can be Mozart lite. This begs the question how much of creativity is appreciated as a shared experience
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Nothing changes for drug patents regardless of whether an LLM was used in the discovery process.
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It might unravel intellectual property, just not in a fair way. When capitalism started, public land was enclosed to create private property. Despite this being in many cases a quite unfair process, we still respect this arrangement. With AI, a similar process is happening - publicly available information becomes enclosed by the model owners. We will probably get a "vestigial" intellectual property in the form of model ownership, and everyone will pay a rent to use it. In fact, companies might start to gatekeep all the information to only their own LLM flavor, which you will be required to use to get to the information. For example, product documentation and datasheets will be only available by talking to their AI.
Total digression but yeah, that layout is stupid and the way those words are dropped in using Romaji makes no sense. That's not how Japanese people lay out pages on the web. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese web page laid out like a book like this, and in general I'd expect the English proper nouns and words that don't have obvious translations to get transliterated into Katakana. Smells like automatic conversion added by someone not really familiar with common practices for presenting Japanese on the web.
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He also has a Korean vertical layout that lays out Latin-character words the same way. Is this common in Korea when vertical layout is used? The author seems to be Korean. Looks like Wikipedia has an example of Traditional Chinese vertical layout with the Latin letters rotated as in TFA's layout ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts#/media/File:Hebei_Wen'an_jin_fasheng_dizhen_-_Beijing_you_zhengan.png )
If the clean room re-write was done entirely by Claude, then the result cannot be copyright in the USA, and thus there is no license at all. And if he was in fact more involved (which he appears to deny) that it's a bit weak to say that someone with huge familiarity with chardet could choose to reimplement chardet without the result being derivative.
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So if I read any LGPL code in my life, I can never think about working on something similar in my life?
When learning is sufficiently atomized and recombined, creations cease to be "derived from" in a legal sense. A lego sculpture is copyrighted. Lego blocks are not. The threshold between blocks and sculpture is not well-defined, but if an AI isn't prompted specifically to attempt to mimic an existing work, its output will be safely on the non-copyrighted side of things. A derivative work is separately copyrightable, but redistribution needs permission from the original author too. Since that usually won't be granted or would be uneconomical, the derivative work can't usually be redistributed. AI-produced material is inherently not copyrightable, but not because it's a derivative work.
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Token prediction is a form of "learning" that is reinforced by the goal of reproducing the correct next token of the work, rather that acquiring ideas and concepts. For instance, given the prefix "Four score and seven years", the weights are adjusted until "ago" is correctly predicted, which is a fancy way of saying that it was stored in the model in a lossy way. The model "learned" that "ago" follows "four score and seven years" exactly the way your hard drive "learns" the audio and video frames of a movie when you download a .mp4 file. I dispute the idea that token sequences reproduced from the model are not derived works. I predict, no pun intended, that a time is coming when the idea that it's not a derived work will be challenged in mainstream law. The slop merchants are getting a free ride for the time being.
shall we now have to think about the tradeoffs in adopting - proprietary - free - slop-licensed software?
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We should just use LLMs to free more software and HW. Make it work against the system.
> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse" Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. The premise is that he prompted Claude to reimplement it, without using his own knowledge of it to direct or steer.
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>This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse" IANAL, but that analogy wouldn't work because Mickey Mouse is a trademark, so it doesn't matter how it is created.
No, because (most) people don't work on OSS for vanity, they do it to help other people, whether it's individuals or groups of individuals, ie corporations. It's the same question as, if an AI can generate "art", or photographers can capture a scene better than any (realistic) painter, then will people still create art? Obviously yes, and we see it of course after Stable Diffusion was released three years ago, people are still creating.
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I don’t know what a world without copyright does to corporate sponsored open source. It certainly reduces it because there are many corporate sponsored projects that monetize through dual licensing. My guess is in a world where you can’t even guarantee attribution, it’s much harder to convince your boss to let you open source a project in the first place. So ignoring people who are being paid by corporations directly to work on open source, in my experience the vast majority of contributors expect to be able to monetize their work eventually in a way that requires attribution. And out of the small number who don’t expect a monetary return of any kind, a still smaller number don’t expect recognition. If this weren’t the case you’d see a much larger amount of anonymous contributions. There are people who anonymously donate to charity. The vast majority want some kind of recognition. Obviously we still see art, if you greatly reduce the monetary benefit to producing art, you’ll see a lot less of it. This is especially true of non trivial open source software that unlike static artwork requires continual maintenance.
>that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it Well, no. They fed the spec (test cases, etc) into a tool which made a new program matching the spec. This is not a copy of the original code. But also this feels like arguing over the color of the iceberg while the titanic sinks. If you have a tool that can make code to spec, what is the value in source code anymore? Even if your app is closed-source, you can just tell claude to write new code that does the same thing.
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Everyone writes as if he just fed the spec and tests to Claude Code. Ignoring for now that the tests are under LGPL as well, the commit history shows that this has been done with two weeks of steering Claude Code towards the desired output. At every one of these interactions, the maintainer used his deep knowledge of the chardet codebase to steer Claude.
So, let's say that rather than actually touching any copyrighted material, a human merely tells an AI about how to go onto the internet and find copyrighted material, download it, and ingest it for training. The AI, fully autonomously, does so, and after training itself on the material deletes it so no human ever downloads, consumes, or shares it. If we are saying AI is "more than a tool", which seems to be the case courts are leaning since they've ruled AI output without direct human involvement is not copyrightable[0], then the above seems like it would be entirely legal. [0] https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
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Someone would likely get prosecuted if they instructed AI agent to run say a pump and dump scheme... Even if the final output doesn't have copyright protection it might still be copyright violation. I think it could be reasonable to have work that itself violates copyright when distributed even if it does not have copy right itself.
LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The fact they can recite training data is a defect not a default. You can understand this more simply by calculating the model size as an inverse of a fantasy compression algorithm that is 50% better than SOTA. You'll find you'd still be missing 80-90% of the training data even if it were as much of a stochastic parrot as you may be implying. The outputs of AI are not derivative just because they saw training data including the original library. Then onto prompting: 'He fed only the API and (his) test suite to Claude' This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?
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I find the "compression" argument not very strong, both because copyright still applies to (very) lossy codecs (e.g. your 16kbps Opus file of Thriller infringes, even if the original 192khz/32bit wav file was 12,000kbps), and because copyright still applies to transformed derivative works (a tiny midi file of Thriller might still be enough for the Jackson's label to get you)
> AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon. Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?
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Open models do exist. They’re nowhere near aa good as frontier models, but they’re getting better all the time. It’s probably only a matter of time before open models are as good as Claude code is today.
> Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright. There is some precedent for this, e.g. Alchemised is a recent best seller that had just enough changed from its Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised (I avoided the term “remove copyright” here because the new work is still under copyright, just not Harry Potter - related copyright.)
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That's apparently a different story with different plot, so that's not comparable.
> LLM as the main weapon LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation. Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet. There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. Edit: I guess the conclusion I come to is that LLM's are good for 'getting things done', but the context in which they are operating is one where the balance of power is heavily tilted towards capital, and open source is perhaps less interesting to participate in if the machines are just going to slurp it up and people don't have to respect the license or even acknowledge your work.
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>Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet. Right now, we can get local models that you can run on consumer hardware, that match capabilities of state of the art models from two years ago. The improvements to model architecture may or may not maintain the same pace in the future, but we will get a local equivalent to Opus 4.6 or whatever other benchmark of "good enough" you have, in the foreseeable future.
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> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. When the FSF and GPL were created, I don't think this was really a consideration. They were perfectly happy with requiring Big Iron Unix or an esoteric Lisp Machine to use the software - they just wanted to have the ability to customize and distribute fixes and enhancements to it.
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How close are we to good enough and who's working on that? I would be interested in supporting that work; to my mind, many of the real objections to LLMs are diminished if we can make them small and cheap enough to run in the home (and, perhaps, trained with distributed shared resources, although the training problem is the harder one).
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Maybe a good open source idea is to "seti at home" style crowd-source training, assuming that's possible.
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.
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> running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware What async tasks could a local LLM accomplish on Intel 11th gen CPU with 32GB RAM?
New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates (twitter.com)
This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not lab grown or suffering. Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
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This is whitewashing to make consumers happy and less concern. Nothing is humane about murdering an animal to sell its body parts for profit. Thats just marketing.
Many, many people disagree with you. It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage. And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely related to "treat like a human." It means "treat well, view with compassion", and similar. We talk of things being "humane" or "inhumane" in how we treat each other , too. [0] Humans have been raising meat animals with compassion and treating them well during their lifetimes for longer than we have had written language. Veganism/vegetarianism is not even physically an option for many people, excludes many cultures' traditional practices, and very, very often requires (or at least tends toward) supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humane
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As unethical as purposefully murdering animals? I don’t think you can call it a compassion when you own an animal with sole purpose of efficiently growing it and then killing it so its body can be dismembered and sold off. This is treating animals as property, that produces profit.
> supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices That's the first time I ear about supplement being unethical, let alone "compared to factory farming". Stretching the usual arguments, it may be almonds' water or soy in brazil ? I'd be glad you clarify your point.
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The harvesting of a number of the common foods used to supplement vegetarian and vegan diets—eg, soy, agave, quinoa—are variously destructive to the environment and based on labor practices exploitative enough that they sometimes verge on slavery.
Many farm animals aren't bred specifically for killing them. Think egg-laying hens and ducks, milk-producing cows and goats, etc. Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
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What do you think happens to a cow, when she stops producing milk? She is kept constantly pregnant, what do you think happens to most of her male offsprings? In the end, almost every single cow’s life ends in violence.
You really have nothing productive to say in this thread, you sound irrationally angry. This is a pretty milquetoast philosophical question. If someone asks whether humanity is a net negative environmentally and your only response is to call them whiny losers, maybe you'd be better off on Twitter. I mean I know you understand what an abstract argument, is but you've chosen to interpret it in the laziest way possible for maximum rage. There are better ways to spend your time. Extra points for calling yourself a vegan atheist to appeal to credibility.
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I'm not angry, just disdainful. Some abstract philosophical positions are unworthy of respect.
The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future (europeancorrespondent.com)
German chancellor Friedrich Merz ... lashed out at German workers to “simply do a little more,” Germany literally pays people to do nothing. A friend of mine, an engineer who works in the German car industry, recently told me that nowadays he has a lot of free time. Because the company he works for has so few orders that the company is granted "Kurzarbeitergeld" - the government pays 60% of the salary if the employees work less. That blew my mind. If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.
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The worker who’s put on this reduced salary instead of being fired doesn’t have orders nor he has a product. He works for a wage.
They are on par or better than their Chinese counterparts but they are a hard sell being 30-50% more expensive.
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The same new VW ID.3 in China costs less than $20K, while in EU more than $40K. Not the BYD or noname EV, the same model.
> It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future As a technology, ICE is pretty much close to its peak. It's very hard to imagine significant improvements in ICE as far as efficiency, weight, and power output goes. The same cannot be said for batteries and electric motors. We are still quite far from technological limits for the platform. It doesn't seem disputable at all that a platform that can still evolve and improve with significant room for growth will eventually overtake one that has peaked.
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False dichotomy. What ICEs are or aren't has zero impact on whether BEVs are the future.
Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw (github.com/DenchHQ)
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I find it amusing that one of the main things to do with OpenClaw and other similar tools is create a Web Interface on top of it so that users can click on buttons when the entire promise of the technology is that you don't have to do any of that because it transcends standard UI. I mean, ultimately why would you even need a CRM if not to sell something? And if you are going to sell something ultimately you want to get that done without any additional layers of abstraction. So the interface is the definition of the goal and the output is measured in results. "Hey claw, I want to sell my product. Go figure it out!" You don't need a UI for that.
the crm isnt the hard part, the hard part is that most sales teams have a workflow problem disguised as a tooling problem. local first is smart but id focus on opinionated defaults for pipeline stages because thats where 90% of founders building their own crm get stuck, they model their process wrong then blame the software.
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> created 17 minutes ago Is this a bot lol, use words not buzzwords
Bruh it's not botted, the 500 stars came from Garry Tan's viral tweet.
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Would also be a good cover up...
The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19 (lesswrong.com)
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This article is answering a different question to what it is asking. It's asking "What is the most effective strategy to freeze your eggs if you're absolutely certain you will need to". The reason women freeze their eggs in their early 30s is because they still have a good chance for it to be effective and they now have a strong idea they'll need to. You don't have that second piece of information at age 19. Or to be specific: What is the size of the cohort of women you are expecting to freeze their eggs at the age of 19, who will use those frozen eggs. How many of them will give birth to children without the help of IVF, and how many will choose never to have children. I think this article is a good example of rationalism. Which is basically getting very mathsy about 1 specific very of the data, without viewing the data in the context of the decision that is being made. For example, what is the percentage of women you expect to freeze their eggs at age 19, who you then expect to be unable to afford the $500 every year to keep those eggs frozen over the next decade?
Since having kids is so tiring in the early years and often lead to a divorce, it is better to have them early when you are still fresh and handle better the lack of sleep, divorce early and then enjoy part time parenthood when you are still youngish. I feel I am a better parent now that I am sharing custody of my kids and can better balance personal life and hobbies and parenthood. A cheaper option would be to find someone looking for kids with no romance and agree on having shared parenthood.
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I’m vastly happier having had kids in my 30s rather than my 20s. Greater emotional and financial stability as well as a strong foundation for my marriage were boons.
Apparently the harvesting procedure typically (but not always?) involves general anesthesia. That alone is never entirely risk-free. In this context, the temporary loss of bodily autonomy could be particularly problematic. All that comes on top of the required hormone treatment. It's not a trivial procedure. On the other hand, it may be a useful tool to resist expectations to become a mother until it becomes socially acceptable to say no. So it might be important even if the eggs are not getting used.
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There's no way it's a worthwhile investment to invest thousands of dollars and take on significant risk and discomfort just for a tool to "resist expectations." You should invest that in a therapist. Or moving to a different state.
I went through it with my wife too and expecting a 19 y/o women to go through the IVF process as an insurance policy is a bit insane to me. In our modern, western society, this is age is still solidly childhood with not much definitive thoughts of future family, marriage, etc. Governments need to make COL more affordable, birth rate will go up naturally
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Calling 19 "childhood" is crazy. Most teens have an understanding of what they want their life to look like.
Doesn't that just make it a cheaper policy to implement, since very few will take advantage of it?
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It's not only hard and painful, but potentially damaging to the woman's body and could leave them with permanent hormonal issues. So, no. It's not a good policy.
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Then it's not a very good population policy.
I honestly don't look forward to the day that we can do that. It may redefine our very existence more so than even automation.
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That's exactly why I look forward to it!
I'm always reading about amazing stuff like this with modern medicine. Things that work great in lab settings: cures for cancer, organ scaffolding, regrowing teeth, etc etc. Never hear about it again after the initial news.
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"Regrowing teeth" started human trials last June. Development takes time. And there is no single cure to cancer.
If I'm understanding that right, it cost $25k per run, and you did 3 runs, so $75k total? Or was it $25k for the full thing? Did insurance cover anything?
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I went through this with my partner and it cost around CAD $30K all-in. Thankfully it was 100% covered by insurance (for the drugs) and by a provincial program (for the procedure). The drugs for stimulating follicle growth cost around $500/day and the first cycle didn't result in enough mature follicles to be worth attempting the egg harvesting. In the second attempt, the duration was extended after a scan to let more develop. Every extra day, is an another $500. If it weren't for the government program we were seriously looking at going to one of the many clinics in Mexico offering these services. We weren't so lucky with the numbers though; here's significant attrition at every step and if you aren't starting with a good number it can look like: 5 follicles > 4 mature eggs > 2 embryos > 1 child
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