Unlurker|Replay|About
Ask HN: Is there a reliable way to tell if an image is AI generated?
•
I don't know how reliable this is but one can upload an image to a few different AI's and ask if it was AI generated.
•
I don't see how that would work. Isn't it akin to coping an AI generated text and asking different AI models if the texts were generated by AI? They wouldn't be able to tell. But maybe images have a sort of marker. I don't know.
•
I struggle to tell. And the AI image generators are only going to get better. I fear we are going to spend the next years debating if something is real or AI. I read an online conversation where people said that billionaires like those in the Epstein files would have loved to use the excuse that the implicating images of them were AI generated by Epstein.
Spain has blocked access to freedom.gov (twitter.com)
•
No surprise with that, I would thing other countries will do the same. But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.
•
It is unbelievable how a private organization (LaLiga) has been given the ability to censor an entire country’s internet. Every time there’s a match, countless CloudFlare IPs are being blocked indiscriminately, affecting critical services, like how they blocked globalsign [1]. It’s gotten so bad that you can tell whether there’s a football match going on just by the sheer number of websites that stop working [2]. [1] https://bandaancha.eu/foros/laliga-bloquea-globalsign-com-1759278 [2] https://hayahora.futbol/
•
The most obvious outcome possible.I was never able to load the website myself, but if you centralize things to a specific website, it's trivial to block it. Since I could never load the site, I don't know if they had any plans outside of just putting up a website. If not, this was incredibly stupid.
•
Are they restreaming football?
'Peanut butter' pay raises could cost companies their top performers (cnbc.com)
•
[delayed]
•
It's amazing how far companies will go to not pay their best talent appropriately.
•
The impact for me was I quit and founded a company, got funded. I work with my friends and it's great. Corpos are very sick right now, friends that stayed behind with +8y xp are very burnt out and annoyed having to deal with barely functional employees for a "peanut butter" raise.
•
Impressive, very nice. Now let's see the c-suite comp packages.
•
It's a shit economy and job market, what are you going to do with a shit raise, quit? IMO this is all part of the larger trends with layoffs and RTO to head count, especially for the more "costly" ICs.
•
I moved to a new city for college. I made a friend, who I considered well-off (he was also a bit heavier). One time I went to his place, and he wanted to have some snack, so he grabbed a jar of Nutella and some sliced bread. On a piece of bread, he put on a layer of Nutella that was not thinly-spread at all, that I thought "Oh, I didn't even consider that it's actually possible to spread a thick layer of Nutella on bread. I guess well-off people are different!"
•
A few of my friends and I have joked about something similar. You can tell a lot about a person's family's financial status when they were children based on how they build a sandwich as an adult. Slices of meat, what style cheese, etc.
•
Next step is to skip the bread and eat Nutella from the jar with a spoon.
•
I find dipping a cashew in is even better. The cashew becomes your scooper. The combination is divine.
•
My prediction is that this strategy will work out better for the companies than the article expects. Why? Because firms are actually often absolutely lousy at recognising which of their employees are high performers in the first place.
Factory-built housing hasn't taken off in California (latimes.com)
•
What we're witnessing isn't just an issue of localizing policy failure or even state policy failure but systemic failure. And we just need to look at China for how to do this correctly. China treats housing primarily as providing a place for people to live, not a speculative asset. In the West, housing is largely a speculative asset where everyone from investor companies to individual homeowners become incentivized to make housing scarcer and more expensive at every level. China, on the other hand, makes it more expensive and more difficult to own second and third homes. Now you might be tempted to object and point to things like the Evergrande bubble. And that's actually evidence of success not failure. Xi Jinping quietly changed China's policy, starting around 2014 to focus on living not investment, and Evergrande was essentially allowed to default because housing access is a priority over investors. You really see this plays out with trains. Chengdu has the 5th largest (by rail length) metro system in the world. It didn't exist before 2010 . China standardized rolling stock so there's no time-consuming and expensive procurement process and there are economies of scale. China has spent less than $1 trillion building ~50,000km of high speed rail. They initially bought high speed trains from Germany and Japan (IIRC) but now they make their own. To compare, the California HSR, if it ever happens, is estimated to cost in excess of $130B. The point I'm getting to is that in the West every aspect and level of this is treated as a profit opportunity, which ultimately is a wealth transfer from the government to some company. Procurement, maintenance, track building, land acquisition, track maintenance, station building and so on. These are all state enterprises. Back to housing, IMHO nothing will solve this problem so long as housing remains a speculative asset. There'll simply bee too much resistance to change.
•
Half right. I’d use Singapore or Vienna as the ideal housing model instead. China started off using housing as a financial instrument. People were pouring their life savings into 2nd and 3rd apartments because the stock market was unreliable & capital controls prevented investing abroad. Prices skyrocketed. Now the bubble has burst, and the state is desperately trying to pivot to the Singapore/Vienna model, where the governments buy and own unsold inventory. It’s not going so well.
•
A developer in my hometown tried to build a manufactured/modular housing development. He got the approvals, demolished most of the existing structure that was on the parcel, purchased the modules from a supplier in Quebec and began to assemble them. Everyone was on board. It was a complete disaster. The developer hired contractors who didn't know what they were doing and ignored stop work orders when the city learned of the problems, which included setting the modular units on their foundations without the proper permits and in violation of state building code. A separate fire department inspection deemed the structure "unsafe for interior firefighting or for interior response by first responders." The site has been abandoned for about 5 years, and the development company filed for bankruptcy.
•
Sounds like a sad story, but hard to know what went wrong. Did a safe design collide with regulations that weren't written with modular housing in mind? Did the modularity cause normal approval processes to happen out of order, allowing construction to mistakenly start before fire approval? Or was this simply the often Kafkaesque permitting process actually correctly identifying serious issues?
•
Isn't land use and zoning the real problem? (Interesting that there is no occurrence of "land" in the article.) Who cares how the houses are built when you have nowhere to put them anyway. The most recent housing developments are in the literal fucking middle of a hill where you have to drive for 30 minutes for any signs of human life.
Were the market functioning, there would be sufficient additional housing near jobs that investors could not sit on and rent-seek reselling property near those jobs as a source of profit. The market is not free. It is heavily regulated by what can be built where when. There is a distinct lack of planning and regulation to protect consumers in this market.
•
It's true that there are heavy regulations on what housing can be built where, but I don't think this is primarily driven by "investors" (in the sense of people who make their money by being commercial or residential landlords). I think it's primarily driven by homeowner-occupiers - people who own the homes that they themselves live in, who are not professional investors trying to maximize their rental profit, and who care a lot about the ways in which new construction or the ability of more people to live near them might negatively effect their quality of life in the place they live.
The modern construcion site is a factory. They move the entire factor to the job, but that doesn't mean it isn't a factory.
•
It's sort of a blend. For many houses, the walls and roof trusses are delivered pre-built. Possibly even pre-wired, insulated, and drywalled. They are then stood up on site, and a moderate amount of connecting framing and finish work done by hand. Labor and materials isn't the problem with housing costs. It's permitting and onerous zoning and code requirements.
The nice thing about a factory built house compared to an independent contractor is you don't have to wait weeks between job types, your plumbers are on hand as soon as it's ready for them to get started. With that said, the advantage disappears compared to national builders- the guys who buy up big farm fields and build entire subdivisions all in one go before they even have buyers. They can keep crews rotated between jobs in a fairly predictable schedule, so the only thing holding anyone back compared to the factory is bad weather preventing digging out room for foundations.
•
Even you little homebuilder can do that. the planning is standard and predictable so they line it up as needed. you as a one off can't because the plumber isn't going to give you the priority needed.
Token reduction in labor costs are not going to solve housing to start with. It doesn't cost a 2 million dollars to build a house in California because we pay framers $1,000 an hour, it is property costs and a shitty political class blocking competition to their and their buddy's current investments.
•
It’s wild to hear people scape goat REIT funds and campaign for rent control when the real problem happens to be “average people” owning investment properties. Step 1 of fixing the problem is the immediate repeal of Prop 13.
Green lumber fallacy in software engineering (2022) (chrisbehan.ca)
•
Memorizing algorithms doesn’t really make sense to me. Even the trivial ones have edge cases that you might forget of you try to implement it from memory. You aren’t going to ship it before double-checking a textbook or Wikipedia, right? And who wants the naive implementation anyway? Look up the definition to have a really 100% solid description of the steps, so that you can use that as the starting point for optimization (assuming a tuned library doesn’t already exist). It feels like a strange feedback loop or something. People memorize algorithms to pass interviews, instructors help students memorize them to help them get jobs, then once they get into the jobs they start asking interviewees about the questions to check if they were paying attention in class, or something.
•
{Personal experience} many many years when beginning SWE, I used to think the same. I didn't want to admit but it meant I didn't have to learn DSA. There was plenty of evidence to back me up with the same thinking as this article. Life happened and I had to painfully spend time and slowly learn it. Comparing the person before & after, the difference in my software building skills were very tangible. Sadly I cannot point it out and say "I'm wiser and I know how not to make a mess in the codebase, because I learned such & such algorithm and data structures" yet I can fully imagine how the previous person would've been lost in the jungle. {Less of personal experience but more of a anecdotal observation} I see the same pattern in hiring. Those who know DSA, build systems that cost less overal. So maybe it's better not to throw DSA right out out the window, but also not stick to either ends of the spectrum?
•
Thought this was going to be interesting. Turned out to be the same thing that's been said time and time again without a new take nor any realistic suggestions of what to do.
> These test-like interviews mistake the trees (data structures and algorithms) for the forest (building software). Who would want someone who knew nothing about trees in a forester's job?
•
The oil industry? (Only half joking)
I have no idea how well this idea might stand up, but I loved how I was hired in a kitchen forever ago. Someone mentioned me to the boss. I get called in for an interview. We chat for 15 minutes. I’m then “hired” for six weeks full paid work, but by default after those six weeks I was done. No more hours scheduled. Unless he said he wanted me to stay on and I said I wanted to stay on. What I liked is the subtle change in expectations caused by the default to be that you don’t stay hired after some trial/training period. What I did was check in on how they felt about me and got a good feel for if I needed to keep looking for jobs or not. And if I liked working there. I guess you could describe it as a very short contract with the idea that there’s a full time role meant to be filled. I can imagine many ways in which this can be exploited or gets ridiculous with how many months of training some companies need. I think it’s their own loss being so inflexible or untrusting or acting in bad faith.
•
The article also ended by suggesting trial work periods. I believe software engineering basically has these in the form of "internships". At least, at a lot of UK companies, internships lead to jobs (often after graduation). Not the same for senior role of course, but I don't think I've come across any SW company that does trial periods for senior engineers... If I have, I either wasn't aware or don't remember them.
An Unbothered Jimmy Wales Calls Grokipedia a 'Cartoon Imitation' of Wikipedia (gizmodo.com)
•
The thing is, this doesn't come down to merit. Search engines is what made Wikipedia popular, because they sent every other query there. And in the past, there was no alternative, except for spammy mirrors and paywalled sites. Grokipedia is in some respects bad, but it's already showing up in my search results. If it continues to rise, it will become a real threat to Wikipedia even if it's full of errors and LLM-speak. Most people won't know or care. They're already being served AI summaries in search and most folks are loving it.
•
Now when mechahitler needs a source to back that musky is indeed fitter than usain bolt he has a reference
•
In terms of total size, it absolutely has a long way to go. How it ends up remains to be seen. Much of the conversation around it has been disingenuous, focusing on growth percentages as opposed to actual size. Once upon a time, the Parler and Truth Social apps were also at the top of the charts based on growth.
•
Grokipedia is currently: 1) Less accurate than Wikipedia. 2) More verbose, harder to read, and less well organized than Wikipedia. Pick a non-political topic and compare the Wikipedia page to the Grokipedia page. It's not even close. If Grokipedia ever closes the #2 gap, then we might start to see a non-negligible number of users ignoring #1. At present, only the most easily offended political snowflakes would willingly inflict Grokipedia on themselves.
•
Side note, but Kagi has a great feature where you can remove worthless sites like Grokipedia from your results so that you can safely forget they exist. Recommended.
•
For users of other search engines, the uBlacklist extension[0] is a godsend. It'll also apply the same blacklist to every search engine you use. [0]: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
•
They also have a report form for slop sites, but none of mine got reviewed yet (I have 5 reports since November, and the help still says "We will start processing reports officially in January.")
•
That is exactly what it is.
•
Grokipedia is a tool for converting money into improvements in AI (by iterating on it). Any outward resemblance to an encyclopedia is incidental, despite apparently being the intended purpose.
The concept of Grokipedia reminds me of the old (now defunct? won't load) "Conservapedia" project that basically only had detailed pages for topics where observable fact was incompatible with political ideology--so for these topics, the site showed the Alternative Facts that conformed to that ideology. If you looked up something non-political like "Traffic Light" or "Birthday Cake" there would be no article at all. Because being a complete repository of information was not an actual goal of the site.
•
Have you tried Grokipedia yet? Cuz you’ve mainly addressed the concept. But have you read a bunch of articles? Found inaccuracies? Seen the edit process? Cuz, regardless of ideology, the edit process couldn’t have been done before because AI like this didn’t exist before.
Besides the political slant of Grokipedia, it's true that a lot of work that needed to be crowdsourced can be now packaged as work for LLMs. We all know the disadvantages of using LLMs, so let me mention some of the advantages: much higher speed, much more impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns; truly ego-less editing and debating between "editors". Grokipedia is not viable because of Musk's derangement, but other projects, more open and publicly auditable, might come along.
•
> impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns Yeeeeah, no. LLMs are only as good as the datasets they are trained on (ie the internet, with all its "personality"). We also know the output is highly influenced by the prompting, which is a human-determined parameter, and this seems unlikely to change any time soon. This idea that the potential of AI/LLMs is somehow not fairly represented by how they're currently used is ludicrous to me. There is no utopia in which their behaviour is somehow magically separated from the source of their datasets. While society continues to elevate and amplify the likes of Musk, the AI will simply reflect this, and no version of LLM-pedia will be a truly viable alternative to Wikipedia.
•
LLMs are only impervious to "groupthink" and "organized campaigns" and other biases if the people implementing them are also impervious to them, or at least doing their best to address them. This includes all the data being used and the methods they use to process it. You rightfully point out that the Grok folks are not engaged in that effort to avoid bias but we should hold every one of these projects to a similar standard and not just assume that due diligence was made.
"higher speed" isn't an advantage for an encyclopedia. The fact that Musk's derangement is clear from reading grokipedia articles shows that LLMs are less impervious to ego. Combine easily ego driven writing with "higher speed" and all you get is even worse debates.
•
It's not an advantage for an encyclopedia that cares foremost about truth. Missing pages is a disadvantage though.
NanoClaw Moved from Apple Containers to Docker (twitter.com)
•
I can't believe the solution is creating uncompatibile branch and forcing users to use cladue for resolving merge conflits. Why not bake int the dual compatibility?
•
Sensible, this broadens our hosting options.
They're "always" running, so they can notify you out of the blue, without you having to initiate a conversation. It's really nice UX to get a message from my assistant saying "hey, it's time to leave for the gym, and don't forget the supermarket bag because you're picking up milk on the way back, as you've run out".
•
Hmm, Google Gemini has access to my Google Tasks and can set reminders. It's also asked me if I want it to check something at "tomorrow 9am", and when I said yes, it managed to do that.
•
But have you had consistently good experience with Google Gemini and Google apps? Or read the mixed reviews? For me, Gemini has been hit or miss and somehow less useful than Assistant was 2+ years ago.
•
Yeah, that's kind of like it. Agents just have many many more integrations, so they can do many more things. For example, it knows all my preferences, and can search for flights and say things like "this one is more expensive, but skipping the morning wakeup is worth the $20".
How do people afford this?
•
Claude max $100 is way more usage than I need. And yeah its not running all the time, just has a heartbeat file telling it how to check something and run
Yes. That's why you don't put a Clown behind the steering wheel.
•
Tesla Robotaxi says hold my beer
I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard (hawksley.org)
•
A project, ZerryBit, are working to do something similar - albeit on a far smaller scale physically than what you’ve done here. Might be of interest to OP or others though - further info at https://zerrybit.com/en-us (I have no link to them bar placing an advance order)
•
This is cool. I bought an Inkplate for this and got as far as writing a custom image format suitable for e-ink sort of things (4-bit RLE; trivial to decode, but good compression for diagram/text type images). Where I got stuck is calendars... Unfortunately Google Calendar doesn't seem to provide a nice API where you can just say "give me the events for these days", instead you can only download all of your events in iCal format. It's then extremely non-trivial to convert that information into "what is happening today".
•
Wall-mounted dashboards are a huge life-hack, especially if you have a family. We got a 37-inch touchscreen one, running DAKBoard. We have several kids and have been organizing our daily todos and calendars on it for several years. We used to drop the ball quite a bit due to a hectic schedule and the dashboard has helped us tremendously. Since it is mounted in the kitchen, being able to pull up recipes is a plus.
•
Very nice, looks great
•
Information radiators are basically 80% of the reason I try to keep tabs on wireless power delivery. Then a Kia and Hyundai vendor thought they were going to get their wireless charging added to the EV6 and Ioniq vehicles and that’s the other 20%. Essentially they removed the transformer from the PSU and moved it to the air gap between the charging coil and the vehicle to halve the parasitic losses. You’d have a car you didn’t even need to plug in. I’ve been following Information Radiators since practically the beginning, and wiring has always been one of its problems. First networking and now power. In homes, but also in office spaces. The best locations for radiators are often the worst for wiring. And rink displays move the needle because you have a device that can go completely to sleep between updates, which means it can trickle charge.
•
This is really cool, thanks for sharing the journey so far. One potential idea - it might be worth looking at overseas manufacturers to see if they can offer a similar display at a better price point. I did a bit of digging on Alibaba, for example, and found a 25" E-ink display with the same resolution as the Boox for around $1000 (and the price goes down to $500 if you order 100 units or more): https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/25-3-inch-e-paper-display_1601451061504.html Seems like they offer a color E-ink display option as well, which could be worth exploring. Note: I don't have any affiliation with the above company, it was literally just the first one I found when searching. I'm sure there are many other options available as well.
•
This is really awesome! Dream home project for me as well, but can't justify the cost of large e-ink displays so far (was shocked at the nearly ~$2k sticker price of that Boox Mira Pro!)
•
This is awesome but I still find it funny that he said he wants a healthy relationship with technology then goes and fits his entire house out with technology. It doesnt seem like any of this would really be useful as you'd have to enter all the useful data manually(calendar). For example the washing machine. You dont need real time information because you know how long it takes since you've done it 1000s of times and it beeps. All these things are just managed in our heads subconsciously.
•
~3000€ to show information in some random places in the house even though the household members have a device with a screen called a smartphone next to them 24/7 ? Well, it's cool, but the usability of it all is below average. Declutter your life and don't install any more screens in your home ;)
•
Alternative: just keep your phone on your charger in your room and declutter your life by using just the one screen in the kitchen.
•
That is one interesting experiment, also hoping for cheaper and larger panels. Here is my ~75euros ESP32 eink panel experiment: https://github.com/riston/eink-assist-screen/tree/main
•
I'm actively looking for someone who wants to create B2C devices like this for an app that I built. Email in my profile!
•
Maybe the folks at TRMNL? https://trmnl.com/
•
I’m always surprised how much people seem to want to constantly know the weather.
•
I had Windows^(TM) installed in my house when it was built. We're on the top of a 700' hill, so The Weather is pretty accurate.
•
Ooh that reminds me of my weather rock.
•
Same. You can always tell how is going to be the weather by yourself. Depending on how much time have you lived in the same place you can predict the weather for the day when you get up or, if you are a completely stranger to the environment, at least half an hour before.
•
Agreed. Especially the current weather conditions. That's mostly useless info. Knowing the weather forecast for tomorrow or this weekend is actually useful. It's strange that pretty much every weather widget assumes you want to know the current weather conditions and not the forecast.
•
Eh, depends. If you have a dog, and live in a place with actual seasons, February requires frequently checking the current conditions before you head out—at least where we live, it could be anywhere from -10°C to +12°C right now, raining, snowing—annoying to put on a light jacket because you let the sun fool you, and discover it's freezing and starting to rain once you're on the field. That said: I seem to get by pretty well with a lowly smartphone so far.
•
It could be that they live in an area with more variable or more unpredictable weather than you. Or that they are much more outdoorsy. Or something else altogether. I'm surprised by your surprise. People live wildly different lifes and have correspondingly wide-ranging needs and preferences.
•
This may due to geographical differences, not sure where you live versus OP but I have lived in at least 7 different cities throughout my life and in some of those I had to deal with really unpredictable weather whereas in others it was easier to just wing it and not regret leaving with a jacket or umbrella for example.
•
I think with more outdoor activities, it's important to know what is waiting you in a few hour. For cycling example wind and rain information is rather good to know.
Why is e-ink still so expensive?
•
The prices on Ali Express for e-ink are not that bad, but certainly can't get anything as big as the Mira Pro. The Boox premium is plug and play compatibility, high fidelity/refresh rate and support.
•
Patents
•
Really? Feels like there's a bunch of companies
This is super cool, and I wish something like this existed at my place, as it enables information sharing without the need for phones/actual screens that shine in your face when the lights are low or tempt you to doomscroll. That said, the large primary display this uses is $2000. That's very hard to justify for any "normal" household, and that's without any mounts, backend, services etc.
•
I have a similar setup at home with a homemade dashboard. It's less polished and I've never implemented smart home (don't use any smart home devices) but it's calendar, weather, air quality and subway alerts. I also took the tack of building the UI with Bootstrap 3 so that it will run on any of my ancient devices like a gen 2 ipad air. I did it as much to usefully recycle old screens as anything else.
You can make smaller ones for much much less. I’ll post pics of mine a bit later but waveshare 7.5” display in a photo frame and almost any ESP32 dev board and you are set for less than $100 (along with suitable HomeAssistant and ESPhome infrastructure to support it). The original article is a very slick bit of work, so well done
•
The article also mentions using jailbroken kindles which I assume should be the cheapest way to get a decent sized epaper screen with builtin connectivity. edit: https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver
•
Yep, it’s super cheap. I wrote about mine here:: https://franz.hamburg/writing/kindling-e-ink-dashboard.html
Show HN: Local-First Linux MicroVMs for macOS (shuru.run)
•
Use OrbStack. It’s faster than Virtualization.framework because it has its own hypervisor.
•
Not true, OrbStack uses Virtualization.framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189550
•
OrbStack is great but it is solving a different problem. it's a full Docker Desktop replacement. shuru is just a thin layer over Virtualization.framework for spinning up throwaway sandboxes.
•
Why was using straigt containers not enough?
•
containers work fine for a lot of this. shuru is just what felt more natural to me. less config overhead and i wanted to learn by building it.
What does local first mean in this context? Does it just mean local? Like, the software runs locally?
•
yeah, it just means everything runs on your machine. there are services like E2B, sprites.dev and others that give you sandboxes in the cloud. shuru runs VMs locally using Apple's Virtualization.framework, so nothing leaves your Mac.
Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser (pieter.com)
•
Look at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
•
Just a black screen for me.
"For the best experience, use Chrome." That's not Windows 3.11. That kind of thing is circa 2000, and a state none of us should want the Web to return to.
•
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
Altman on AI energy: it also takes 20 years of eating food to train a human (old.reddit.com)
•
So he's comparing a human being to AI, finally showing what our AI overlords think of humanity: we're just wasteful resources to be replaced by more efficiency tools.
How much energy does it take to feed, clothe, house, entertain, and transport that human to 18? Probably $500K worth.
•
> Probably $500K worth. What life standards do you have!?
How many people is he willing to let starve for the sake of his ego power and wealth?
•
It's, okay, we can just eat cake instead!
Chouinard?
•
Chuck Feeney Also I stand corrected, Chouinard is the other instance.
Amazon, Meta, Alphabet report plunging tax bills thanks to AI and tax changes (finance.yahoo.com)
The top companies (and the wealthiest for that matter) already pay the majority in taxes. This doesn't include the jobs created to support everything (and the taxes paid from these jobs). We should be allowing businesses to write off research and development. This promotes forward-thinking and almost always adds new jobs during the investment phase and after. More tax money just gets wasted at the top. California is a good example of this. They pay more in taxes than any other state and have almost nothing to show for it but a failing education system, crumbling infrastructure, and high crime. The main issue is that those companies should be require to hire US citizens and not outsourcing, for these jobs. The tariffs Trump had in place were a good start.
•
> The top companies (and the wealthiest for that matter) already pay the majority in taxes. First, not true. Second, even if true it wouldn’t be surprising, if you have most of the wealth you pay most of the tax money. It’s surprising that that’s not even the case. Third, it explains California. Of course the state with the highest GDP has also the highest tax income
> The top companies (and the wealthiest for that matter) already pay the majority in taxes. When you hoard far more than just a slim majority, paying a majority isn’t unexpected and it can still be unfair. But I think you are talking about federal personal income tax not corporate tax. > We should be allowing businesses to write off research and development. They already do in various ways. > More tax money just gets wasted at the top. California is a good example of this. I agree California is wasteful. But we can tax and just give the money directly to people. > The main issue is that those companies should be require to hire US citizens and not outsourcing, for these jobs. Not even close to the main issue. Why not just redistribute the gains instead of playing games with these other schemes?
•
Do you live in California? I mean sure it might be wasteful (name one entity private or public that doesn’t suffer from assholes and corruption), but the quality of life here is far better than in Texas or any other state. We have labor rights, environmental protection, hell even the ethical farming practices like how eggs are produced. Life here is objectively better for the people. It’s obviously more expensive. There’s demand for people to live here. Even if some people leave more want to move here or wish they could. Shitting on California is 90% of the time some form of cope for many people. They know they could never make it here so the best they can do is complain about it from whatever **hole they’re in.
•
I don’t disagree with what you are saying. But the rise in spending per capita, even if you adjust for inflation or population growth or other factors, doesn’t make sense. I agree the demand drives up certain costs like housing. But those are in the private markets. But I don’t understand is what the state government and local governments are spending all of the money on. And there are certainly some prominent wasteful programs such as the high-speed rail project or various programs for homelessness. I expect there’s more of those kinds of waste. In the end, I think simply giving people money is an effective way to make society better. I’m not against the taxation as much as the low return for the additional spending that has happened in the last few decades.
Fix your tools (ochagavia.nl)
I recently got assigned to enhance some code I've never seen before. The code was so bad that I'd have to fully understand it and change multiple places to make my enhancement. I decided that if I was going to be doing that anyway, I might as well refactor it into a better state first. It feels so good to make things better instead of just making them do an extra thing.
•
Just be careful that 'better' doesn't just mean 'written by me'. I've seen that a lot too
There is simply no general recipe for this. Sometimes I put my little tools and libraries in order and then I'm very productive with them and looking back it seems to have been the key enabler to the actual thing getting done. Other times I go dirty mode and just hardcode constants, copy code files under time pressure and looking back it is clear that getting to the same result with the clean approach would have taken months and the benefit for later tasks would be unclear. I know some are tired of AI discourse, but I found AI can help to sharpen the tools but at the same time I find that my scope grows such that dealing with the tools takes just as much time but the tools have more features "just in case" and support platforms or use cases that I won't often need, but it feels easy enough to just do, but then as I said it still takes long in total. It's all mostly an emotional procrastination issue underneath it. Though that can go both ways. Sometimes you procrastinate on thinking about the overall architecture in favor of just making messy edits because thinking about the overall problem is more taxing than just doing a small iteration, sometimes you procrastinate on getting the thing done in favor of working on more tightly scoped neat little tools that are easier to keep in mind than the vague and sprawling overall goals.
•
What looks like "wasting time on procrastination" may be actually "spending time on thinking". Thinking takes time. Making messy edits is a bet on previous code quality. If you have paid off enough technical debt, you can take another "technical loan" and expect the rest of the owl to still function despite the mess being introduced. If things are already messy, there's always a risk to make the fess incomprehensible and failing in mysterious seemingly unrelated ways, with the only way to fix it being to git reset --hard to the prior point, and do a more right thing. But the time would have been wasted already. My approach is usually to timebox it, and cut the losses if an acceptable solution is not yet in sight when the time runs out.
Weird. I happen to be watching Malcolm in the Middle and I find a link to Malcolm in the Middle
•
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4HQyqc-aVU
We hid backdoors in ~40MB binaries and asked AI + Ghidra to find them (quesma.com)
•
Very nitpicky but because I spend a lot of time plotting data: don't arbitrarily color the bar plots without at least mentioning cut offs. Why 19% is orange and 20% is green is a mystery.
in the article they explicitly said they stripped symbols. If you look at the actual backdoors many are already minimal and quite obfuscated, see: - https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/BinaryAudit/blob/main/tasks/dnsmasq-backdoor-detect-syscall/environment/build/backdoor.patch - https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/BinaryAudit/blob/main/tasks/dropbear-brokenauth-detect/environment/build/backdoor.patch
•
The first one was probably found due to the reference to the string /bin/sh, which is a pretty obvious tell in this context. The second one is more impressive. I'd like to see the reasoning trace.
Why, though? That would make sense if you were just trying to do a comparative analysis of different agent's ability to use specific tools without context, but if your thesis is: > However, [the approach of using AI agents for malware detection] is not ready for production. Then the methodology does not support that. It's "the approach of using AI agents for malware detection with next to zero documentation or guidance is not ready for production."
•
You can solve any problem with AI if you give enough hints. The question we asked is if they can solve a problem autonomously, with instructions that would be clear for a reverse engineering specialist. That say, I found these useful for many binary tasks - just not (yet) the end-to-end ones.
Things are pretty brutal and some categories are more affected than others. A/D seems to be somewhat less affected.
•
Brutal as in, heavy AI usage? What sort of categories are more affected?
Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums (popsci.com)
•
How long before there is a claw controlled network of robot/device spies and soldiers?
I wonder if Claude could do a good job or setting this up for someone not technically inclined
•
Until it can disassemble a robot to attach a programmer to the mainboard, it cannot.
I had a Q Revo Edge that had a mic (it responded to "Hey Rocky" commands) and I could remotely view my house through the camera. Are you thinking of the S8 line? That's the one with the MaxV model.
•
No, I'm thinking about the Q Revo line which does not have cameras as I mentioned.
Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown (bbc.com)
Based on independent journalists in Iran, the protests were related to economic problems. The violence came from people with smuggled weapons who organized with satellite telephones. These people were planted by Mossad and CIA. This was promoted by Israel and the US itself. So even if we do not trust those other journalists, there is strong evidence that we are seeing propagandized news. We also know that Iran has been a target of Israel and the US since 2001. The political situation has become far less extreme over time. But the news is manipulated to make us think that it is as bad as Saudi Arabia. Israel is far more extreme. They do have nuclear weapons. Their president is kept in power with eternal war. And they have an Apartheid system. And they are actively depopulating the original population. Israel is openly manipulating politicians and creating fake news to start this war with Iran.
•
> Based on independent journalists in Iran, the protests were related to economic problems. The violence came from people with smuggled weapons who organized with satellite telephones. These people were planted by Mossad and CIA. The funny part of this narrative that I'd expect pro-protest journalists and anti-protest journalist to like it. It shifts responsibility from both parties to some outside parties. But still for pro-government journalists the narrative is more convenient: government just likes to blame outside players, it just can't resist it. So my bet is the journalists you refer to are working for the government. > Israel is far more extreme. They do have nuclear weapons. Their president is kept in power with eternal war. Changing the topic by pointing at someone who is presumably worse is a classic technique of propaganda. It is the technique people learn to use in kindergarten, trying to shift responsibilities and to distract adults from their failings. It is the technique Adam and Eva used when trying to shift responsibility and to distract God from their own failings. The technique so simple, that propagandists just can't stop using it. So my bet, that you are from the same group as journalists you mentioned. Maybe they and you are the same person, really.
The definition of genocide has been fluid lately. Can you clarify what you mean, exactly?
•
> The definition of genocide has been fluid lately. Has it? Interesting. Wasn't aware of this phenomenon.
The only mass protests in Iran I saw video evidence of have been the millions of Iranian people in the streets in the PRO-governments protests that were against the foreign intervention. The will of the Iranian people is clear: The don't want to become slaves of Western Imperialism. Do you really think we we Iranian government would be able to keep in power despite a brutal economic blockade, despite foreign agents constantly trying to spread unrest if it were as competent, cruel and unpopular as the Western media tell you? It wouldn't last weeks. > 36'000 people were killed in just two nights. You are completely delusional if you believe that number. Just the logistics of killing so many people would be insane. You are falling hard for Western propaganda. Funny how you are not crying for the end of the Israeli regime that is committing the best documented genocide in history. How you are not criticizing Western allies like the UAE for fueling the bloody civil war in Sudan. But Iran, yeah you got an opinion on that.
•
I have an opinion, because I was there and saw it with my own eyes. Because my friends and family members died.
Are Iranians supposed to believe that after Israel destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza? Insulting. The IRGC is under every brick and pebble.
•
Generally the IRGC has everything to do with the current state of Gaza, as it was involved in planning and training for the October 7th attack. This was a masterstroke of Iranian strategy, while it initially looked they have yet again encouraged the Palestinians to commit national suicide on their behalf, in two years it looks like this is going to end with a national suicide of the Islamic Republic
Even still, that data does not refute the parent's point that you are making a false equivalency. Polling Israeli or US citizens on the extremist groups they support would be similarly dishonest; organizations like ICE, Blackwater and Irgun cannot be fairly conflated with their respective populations regardless of how the majority feels.
•
In this context, “support” doesn’t mean “I like these guys”, it means concrete political support, as in “I’d vote for them”
Don't say sadly. Don't further the indoctrination that violence is bad. It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad. States are the most prolific users of violence (even more when you also count potential/threatened, not yet materialized). Anyone who wants to claim that violence is bad has to oppose the existence of states. Violence is risky, dangerous, unpredictable, costly, etc. But those are practical and legal, not moral, concerns. Violence is also necessary, as you say, against governments or other actors which cannot be deterred, stopped or punished using other means. Violence is also most effective when it's certain and overwhelming/indefensible. If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators. Not because they'd all end up dead but because nobody would dare try becoming or supporting one. This is why we have to publicly support _proportional_ punishment of dictators and their supporters, both now and after they've been removed from power. Good people have to use the same tools as bad ones (after all, they are just tools, not good or bad).
•
Violence is a sometimes necessary tool. The problem is that it is routinely misused (especially by those who have overwhelming power), and the cases where it is really needed are really, really, really rare. Even in cases when it appears that the use of violence is justified, the long term consequences (e.g. on culture and mentality, and hence ultimately on normal daily life) are usually such that it would have been better to avoid it in the first place. At the moment you regularly shoot/drone the dictators, the one deciding who is dictator warranting such violence is the most scary dictator of all. This talk about good/bad people is such naive childish ploy, are we adults here or what?
Why "victim" and not "target"? What are the input variables which dictate the morality of an action (generally or in this particular case)?
•
Because 'target' dehumanizes the victim and makes the violence easier to justify?
 Top