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iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 (apple.com)
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Can the new AI browse the web?
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I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features. Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet. The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it. The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
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I wish they allowed iCloud subscribers with older hardware to use cloud-only Siri AI. I imagine they wouldn't shift as much hardware that way though.
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Reminder to wait a couple of months before upgrading macOS! Every single time issues are found after a new macOS version, give it a little bit of time before jumping right away on your work machine :)
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Don't worry I am still on Sonoma :)
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Safari does in fact feel snappier.
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New Siri is not available in the EU. And no plans to change that. I'll probably switch to Android once my phone and watch batteries degrade enough to annoy me
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I take it this is the one that tosses out Rosetta 2 on macOS?
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Nope, that's macOS 28. > Rosetta is available for any Mac with Apple silicon using macOS 27 or earlier. Starting with macOS 28, the next major macOS release, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks. Sauce: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
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Usually I wait until december to install the new iOS on my phone, since most of the time I don't care about the upgrades. This time I installed iOS 27 beta on my phone since the public beta was out, and I had 0 new bugs compared to iOS 26, but it hasn't been the big relief that I hoped for. Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.
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So what's your experience in terms of speed and battery life with iOS 27 on the iPhone 13 so far? I have a 13 mini, and I still haven't gotten over the (perceived) shorter battery life with iOS 26.
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Can we please have a 1 release focus on fixing bugs? not more ai but fixing bugs, 1 release where you can disable AI... 1 release to make it faster again, 1 release to polish... not to push the next "game changing UI design..." the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst... siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...
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At the bottom of the press release they have links to individual OS pages: * iOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ * iPadOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ipados/ * macOS: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/ * watchOS: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/ * visionOS: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/ * tvOS 27: no link. * Overview: https://www.apple.com/os/?version=no-hero
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I'll stay w/ Sequoia as long as I can.
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I am currently on Sonoma and I was considering to upgrade to get the things that I missed in these years. I think and hope that macOS 27 will be faster wrt Sonoma...
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Are they still using Gemini? Curious to see how fast all these AI features will feel.
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I believe it's a Gemini derived model that they are running on isolated hardware. So it's not the same servers as Gemini and thus will have potentially different performance.
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Updated a bit ago to give Siri AI a go for some basic stuff I've been wanting it to do with personal context. It had some false positives in there, but it's notably better now, pretty fast, and handled context well. It allows you to see where it got the context from, which is great considering that doesn't sound like a very Apple thing to do.
Steam Frame starts at $1059 (store.steampowered.com)
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With the software being open source I wonder if the quest 3 will get owned so that eventually we can run steam frame sw on it
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[delayed]
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Brutal pricing. It would have been brutal at $600. Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on. Yikes, what a terrible price.
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Not being very savvy about VR glasses, am I assuming correctly that this device can't do AR, as the cameras are only used for tracking?
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I want this for one reason and one reason only: DCS. Anyone know how well it works/doesn't work yet? I've waited for years to get a VR heads for DCS (its a flight simulator folks) .. and now, maybe, this is it.
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For DCS only, I wonder how this slots between a Q3 and a bigscreen beyond. The beyond with no controllers is probably about the same price all in as the 1TB, but would be better screens and lighter. If you dont care about the standalone stuff it might be another good option. The frame does bring more versatility, but at the cost of battery/weight. Wireless VR in sims is unbeatable in terms of immersion though.
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Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.
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HL:A is incredible, and I think it's still the best single-player VR game ever made, but it's almost seven years old now. It's pretty clear that this software ecosystem is dead.
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If use for solely VR Gaming, and you don't care a ton about the privacy aspect, it is a hard sell against a new or used Q3. However, for myself personally I love the idea of it as a device I can tinker with and have full control over. I would love to also replace my laptop with it while traveling. Especially with a small wireless keyboard it has a good chance to replace my laptop for tinkering/gaming on the go. With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.
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I do hope Valve's work on ARM64 for this, alongside improvements to performance in Honeykrisp, make for a dramatically better experience with Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. They're very lovely devices with big GPUs, and I would love to (one day when ram prices go back to normal!) repurpose my M3 Max as a under TV Steam Machine when I upgrade.
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Hopefully it's possible to use eye tracking as a pointer in desktop mode. I'd like to connect only a keyboard and use binds to emulate clicks.
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GamersNexus released a video comparing the Frame VR vs Meta Quest 3 today, worth a watch for the Frame review alone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcerOYY_K1g
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At basically quest 3 levels of on device performance, this thing better have amazing software. This price is way too high. Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware
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2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering. [1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/
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Quest 3 is a mindblowing piece of hardware completely ruined by the runtime and vendor. This is basically it as a Linux machine you actually own. That being said, my Quest has sat on the shelf for years now since purchasing. I just don't really see a market for these things outside of driving/flight simulation enthusiasts. The whole "smartphone strapped to your face" paradigm is a dead end for actual VR.
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For me a lot of the value comes from the freedom you get with frame. Valve says “it’s your PC, install what you want” and it runs an open source OS. It’s the first truly Linux friendly headset (it runs arch btw) and I don’t have to send my data to Meta. Also foveated streaming means, according to reviewers, a pretty decent wireless PCVR experience. I can’t wait to play half life Alyx without a tether. Valve is just doing something very different from meta.
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It's a compelling product niche, for sure - but still, awfully niche. I'm sure there's folks out there who will bite on the chance to have a top-line VR headset with Linux, but at the price point... gotta be a fairly small market segment. Still, I'm happy they're doing this, it seems like a cool product and I bet it would be almost as much fun as a platform to hack around on as it will be for gaming.
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Yeah, I've been Linux-only on the desktop since the early aughts and trying to get the Valve Index working was so frustrating and inconsistent I eventually gave up. It sits collecting dust and I've still never played more than the first fifteen minutes of HL: Alyx (because no game is worth installing Windows for). Very much looking forward to maybe actually being able to use VR on my gaming computer.
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lmao. n o. thats meta and this steam. iykyk
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That’s a remarkably cheap storage upgrade too. First time I’ve ever thought the upgrade would be worth the money.
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At current hardware prices, this is worth buying to use as a server!
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Also exciting, Valve has finally started shipping native ARM/FEX builds of Proton 11: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/vr/valves-latest-proton-11-beta-has-been-quietly-released-in-an-even-more-beta-arm64-flavour-and-you-can-thank-the-steam-frame-for-that/ Will be super interesting to benchmark various ARM chips and see where they land performance-wise!
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AFAIK they still aren't shipping an actual ARM64 version of Steam, making it difficult to actually use those (unsupported) ARM builds of Proton. That article is 5 months old.
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Not officially, but it's publicly available for download. https://interfacinglinux.com/community/sbcsoftware/native-steam-client-for-arm-linux/paged/
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Yeah this could open up a whole new category of lightweight gaming PCs.
Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously (andonlabs.com)
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Interesting to see these experiments. This is early but imagine in few years there will be companies mostly run by agents with a light overview from a human operator. What then happens to scaling of the bussinesses? I would assume, just like today anyone can vibe code an app, there will be vibecoded bussinesses. Maybe its time to start building infrastructure for these bussinesses instead, its a non existent market yet, but give it a few years.
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Part of the issue is that the worst kind of people are already head over heels excited about this. We're already seeing the Crypto->Web3->LLM get rich quick folks take to this like wildfire. And much like wildfire, they'll raze the ground to ashes before anyone can use it for legitimate means. If you think I'm joking, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Rqv9dOB1U I don't think any of us are ready for the wave of sloppy shit that's going to hit us soon.
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I'm actively working towards this goal. Not sure how many are doing the same. Hopefully, I'm ahead of the curve --- https://github.com/rush86999/atom
how does this work from a liability standpoint? seems very risky for the person who is legally responsible for the business
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Accountability, that's the liability everyone seems to have forgotten in our LLM-driven era. You can close your eyes as much you want during your sessions with Claude or whatever, at the end of the day, only a human can be held accountable.
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Not too hopeful here as we see the major labs continuously break rules and are not held accountable for anything. Accountability in general is on a major decline, in case no one has noticed.
What is the point of this? It details a bunch of failed real-world experiments and invites the reader to run their own real-world experiment with their own money? If you too, want to waste thousands of dollars having an LLM "run" a business, Pion might be for you.
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I like to think the real world lessons in failures are valuable. If I have this idea one day I will search for it and then think “how am I different fro that which already failed?”.
Relevant article about Andon Market: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai-22424349.php
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The Swedish cafe experiment: https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-sweden-84a8f903fdaea94e76e80e16ec3d9e6c > San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs has put an artificial intelligence agent nicknamed “Mona” in charge at the eponymous Andon Café in the Swedish capital. While human baristas still brew the coffee and serve the orders, the AI agent — powered by Google’s Gemini — oversees almost every other aspect of the business, from hiring staff to managing inventory. https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028289 48 points, 51 comments) https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-gemini-lost-money-andon-cafe
As I write this, the submitter has six comments out of twelve, most somewhat defensive. And all of them in less than thirty minutes. This seems very much like a marketing play, where the submitter is pretty determined to steer the narrative. I recommend flagging.
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The submitter's replies are defensive because people are accusing them of coordinated voting, which is not evident to us. The post hit the front page due to the second chance pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool , explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.
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Interesting how they’re not making any defensive replies to comments pointing out that they committed a federal crime by filing a false report to the FBI. Perhaps they know it is indefensible
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It would look a lot less like astroturf if the submitter let the discussion evolve instead of answering every criticism within seconds of it being posted.
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I actually like when the submitter is present and the creator. They’re actually involved. There are lots of users here who play at being submitters of high-value content (created by others) only to later submit their own entirely AI written drivel. This is interesting.
Does Pion run Andon Labs autonomously?
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haha no they admit they built it because they cannot build a revenue generating business in the article. maybe THAT is what is good for the world!
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Downvote if you want, but this is a very relevant question. If their marketing is to be believed, they would be eating their own dog food. This very analog to the Meta executives who won't let their own kids near social media.
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there seems to be a massive negativity to any comment on this story. Andolabs has been doing super interesting stuff, and I’ve always followed Vend Bench with interest. as a founder it really is a dream to automated more of the business and be able to iterate faster.
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They filed a false report to the FBI, pretty fair to be negative imo. People wanna be mad about AI slop PRs on GitHub but its fine to spam the police? What happens when Pion decides to SWAT a competitor?
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There's massive negativity because our bullshit detectors are going off. First of all, I don't think it can do what it claims to do. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think it should.
Pion is already the name of a very well established webrtc project: https://github.com/pion/webrtc
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Yet another example of intellectual property maximization in action. Hacker News / Reddit style communities are very intellectual-property focused. It’s quite interesting to see. Back when I was young, communities like this were anti-IP. Now most such forums are very pro IP with a maximalist view of copyright and, in this case, trademark. Fascinating to see this shift happen.
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I am waiting for my trillion dollar offer to buy https://pion.ly ! Then I am all done fixing WebRTC bugs for life :')
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It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.
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I chose the name because of the particle. I sent a letter to the Soviet Union asking if they were ok with me using the name, never heard back!
The upvotes on this brand new post - almost 1 a minute, speak to a level of astro-turfing I've rarely seen here.
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shrug I upvoted, I'd already seen the Pion announcement on Twitter and read the link. I'm also a regular listener of Andon FM, so I'm interested in what they do and it's nice to finally sneak a peak at the interface that was driving things behind the scenes Listening to the radio stations certainly gives an insight into the various failure modes. Some of them are just failure modes that any business would encounter once they make contact with the scale of the real world.
I wish we could go just one day without a company proudly engaging in Torment Nexus related activities.
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it's interesting how the torment nexus is starting large, and boiling the most people with the "most comfortable" lives. I wonder how long the white collar workers will keep bending over to keep their lives safet, particularly when they're building the Torment Nexus to specifically torment them. You'd think Meta's "we're going to spy on you for the good of the country" policy would have set them a bit on fire.
We think this is good for the world. Longer argument in the post.
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We want the general public, AI researchers and policymakers to know to what extent AIs can autonomously acquire resources by running businesses. It is an important datapoint when deciding where we do/don’t want AI in society and what level of progress we find acceptable. To better track this, we need to cast a wider net of businesses. We expect that most users will never pay for tokens on Pion; instead we will take a small share of the revenue the agent helps create. So the longer argument is that it's good for the world to see how much revenue Pion can manage, and also your pricing plan is take [unspecified] % of revenue.
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yawn
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did you link to the wrong page? because i read this one: https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-we-built-pion and it's just a bunch of the usual slop about how awesome your automated human-exploitation system is.
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"By late 2025, frontier models had gotten good enough that running a real-life vending machine was no longer a challenge" ... is this satire? Isn't it kind of hard to lose money running a vending machine in a good location?
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maybe ill read the article, but i mean you’re financially motivated to think its good for the world arent you? humans are excellent at justification.
8 points in 9 minutes?! Bullshit... dang come on man ... this is obvious spam
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700834
Blizzard Revives 'StarCraft' Franchise with Open-World Sci-Fi Shooter (hypebeast.com)
> a target release date of 2030 Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for a StarCraft shooter despite it not being StarCraft at all (I enjoy the universe). I wanted StarCraft: Ghost back in the day, and this feels like a taste of that dream. That said, targeting a release of 2030 is wild to me. Look at the Astra game dev hype that's hitting twitter right now. Yes it's all filtered to the best possible examples / yes people are not one shotting these things, but still it's very clear that LLMs are beginning to be very capable at game dev in a way that doesn't look/feel like ass. LLMs are going to become more capable over time. I think most of us can agree that eventually they'll be competitive with AAA developers given enough GPU cycles. I would argue that given rate of improvement, we're looking at that point coming in the next year or two. To emphasize this point, a year ago GPT-5 got released. This was the type of game it would make: https://youtu.be/yTHo7tMborY?t=324 This is the type of game Astra is making: https://youtu.be/GuO_Eo34C8E?t=348 It's just starting to be capable of making assets in blender / unreal. Given this rate of advancement, what is the state going to be like 4 years from now? It really feels a bit like the "travelling to distant stars" problem, where at some point it's faster to wait for better engines than to leave now. I worry that by the time this gets released, the market is going to be flooded with fully custom AAA games that are hyperniche. 4 years out is a long, long time to wait, and it's a longer time to bet on success / market dynamics.
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Apparently 6 years is not an uncommon development cycle for AAA right now. For a random example, Ghost of Yotei which is also an open world game, was in development for 4 years. That game is a sequel too, and I think Sucker Punch is probably less dysfunctional than Blizzard at the moment. Still it might have been premature to announce it at this stage.
I just read the book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier (without having played any of their game or being aware that BlizzCon is around the corner). It seems they'll repeat their own mistakes. I am getting more and more pessimistic about these studios and their AAA works. Every game is now a gamble with multi year effort with hundreds if not thousands of staff behind it. If a game doesn't sell, and that happens more than once, layoffs are coming. And for Blizzard specifically, it'd better be an online game that's going to be a multi billion dollar cash cow they can keep milking for years. If not, they would not work on the game in the first place. Of course they have released many great games, but as the history has proven, you can't just keep coming up with new games that are original, fun if not addictive and also make money, especially with the fierce competition today. Which makes me think I should spend more money/time on indie games than the action/adventure game from big studios that are increasingly repetitive and boring. We need more, smaller studios to give us something new.
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Matches my experience. Indie games can be delightful, full of Easter eggs and heart that the dev(s) build for the fun of it. I just played through Hollow Knight for the first time and man, what a great experience.
Blizzard being a generally terrible developer aside, I don’t think you’re right about this. RTS is not a very popular genre all things considered, and the ARTS/MOBA variants are dominated by DOTA and League of Legends. You also can’t play RTS games on consoles. A lot of fans of StarCraft still wish they saw StarCraft: Ghost see the light of day. Arguably the franchise is very much underdeveloped. The IP and story would work well for many game genres that haven’t been explored. If StarCraft 3 comes out it would only be popular in South Korea and possibly not all that popular at all even there.
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> You also can’t play RTS games on consoles. Pikmin.
Halo Wars sold 16.7% of Halo 3’s first week sales according to Wikipedia. It was commercially successful but not in a mainstream mass audience kind of way. Yes, it proved that RTS can be done on a controller (arguably, StarCraft 64 kind of sort of proved that, too), but if you’ve ever played StarCraft 2 I think you’d agree that particular style of RTS is really not possible without a keyboard and mouse. The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute. I also think the RTS genre is very much less popular today and then it was at that time.
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Halo Wars is also not much of an RTS. While it does have base building, the SP campaigns are full of RTT-like missions. It is actually a very fun game that stands way above compared to a more “by the numbers” implementation of, for example, Command & Conquer 3. Halo Wars found a much better balance and is a much more polished console experience.
Let's not kid ourselves that it would be a good RTS. Starcraft 2 + expansions is a very poor game compared to brood war. If you haven't watch the ASL it's definitely worth a gander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIpLl2W2chg I'm still amazed that Blizzard dropped the ball on recreating the same environment that enables dynamic play, instead it's always a formation of rock paper scissors with very little nuance in between.
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I feel bad for these people man. Flash, Tastosis. I get they’re doing what they enjoy, but holy shit that is not a life I want to live.
It’s funny because that’s word for word what blizzard said after years of people asking for WoW Classic. Which ultimately they ended up making and is very successful. Sometimes people know what they want.
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Money talks, bullshit walks.
Why don't machine learning research agents overfit? (amazon.science)
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Wherein Claude gives an honest assessment that it genuinely does not overfit. I also had Grok telling me that it isn't quantized. Do the submitters really not notice that this is AI slop? Do they like this? It is a complete pain to read.
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They tend not to overfit ... when there are way more data points than parameters.
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Or when there are way more parameters than data points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_descent
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I always get annoyed when people misinterpret Occam’s razor. It’s not that the simplest is more likely to be correct, it’s that you should prefer it, because it’s simple. It’s just like the Hopper quote. She said it’s better to ask for forgiveness during the fog of war, doing something you thought was right, not to do something you knew they were going to say no to and now you are trying to get away with something.
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That's not true. It's pretty clear that she meant "do something you knew they were going to say no to and now you are trying to get away with something." https://youtu.be/wHdHCoeUbU4?t=861s > So I want to tell something to all the young people here on many many occasions you'll find it is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission. You do it then when somebody comes after you and say are you supposed to do that, "oh gee I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that" ... so just remember it's frequently much easier to apologize than it is to get permission do it She goes on further, explaining how to deceive your superiors to manipulate them to get what you want.
Even tech giants are putting out articles seemingly fully written by Claude.
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Time to first detected slop in this article is <1s. Claudisms per paragraph is also very high. Is it too much to ask from people to read their own article anymore? If anyone read this at all, they would have had the ick, and would have fired off a prompt to get rid of the most popular AI slop tells...
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What I really dislike is having to edit my own non-LLM assisted writing. I caught myself writing "And that matters because..." in a HN comment but had to edit myself. Also miss uising emdashes.
The animated graphic labeled "Occam's razor, formalized" is bizarre. Is that really visualizing "Occam's razor, formalized"?
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I was expecting Occam wearing a suit.
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Ah, over-the-top larger-than-life LLM-isms, they are really funny when you see them in a company blog, but they are vomitive when it's your coworker copy-pasting it and insisting you on reading it.
> Machine learning, at its core, is about generalization, not memorization. Well they memorize the patterns. memorization doesnt mean rote learning.
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I don't take issue with that. Attempting memorized pattern generalization through holdout / validation strategies is a big part of ML that you would not typically see with econometrics / psychometrics / possibly sabermetrics / most other -metrics. Philosophically the explain versus predict divide. https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/shmueli.pdf
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That's a bit pedantic no. Memorization in ML refers to the model having the wrong level of capacity such that it's too hard to optimise it such that it doesn't memorize the _training examples_ themselves.
When LLM judges agree, should we believe them? (amazon.science)
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They would all agree raspberry has two Rs
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Without reading the article (doesn't matter if it's pro or contra): no, of course not. It shouldn't even be a debatable question.
The unsupervised framing is the part I'd push on. If true labels are latent and you infer them jointly with judge parameters, then a blind spot every judge shares isn't a correlated error the model can down-weight. It's indistinguishable from the ground truth, and the likelihood has no reason to prefer the correct answer over the consensus one. So this fixes dependence between judges and leaves dependence between all the judges and the truth untouched, which is the failure people are actually worried about when they say eight models agreed. You still want a small human-labelled anchor set to break it. The number I'd find interesting is how much smaller that anchor set gets once you model the dependence, since that's the real saving. Same shape as offline policy evaluation. Correlated logging errors survive any amount of re-weighting, and one real experiment would be probably what pins them.
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the LLM-speak is unbearable
Cops Search Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' and 'Asdfg' (404media.co)
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I’d like to see these comments copied over to the “reason for termination” field in their personnel file.
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Didn’t YC invest in Flock and they are a YC company?
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Yeah, their pitch still reads like parody: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype (erkansaka.net)
There's been substantial effort put into designing and running benchmarks for these models. You know which one they don't report any more? Chess ELO. Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess. Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.
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If chess ELO is the best proxy for general intelligence, then surely, even Deep Blue was smarter than any human alive? You can also claim that the best proxy for general intelligence is being able to multiply large numbers. In which case both humans and LLMs lose resoundingly to an old Casio. Pick a piss poor metric - get a piss poor result. Also, LeCun is a fool and his "world model" approach has consistently failed to yield any advantages over either the "pure imitation learning" or modern "imitation learning annealed by RL", but that's an aside.
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Chess ELO is not a proxy for general intelligence because many intelligent people choose to learn things other than chess. But any intelligent person can, if they choose, learn chess and play it well. LLMs cannot do this. They still play very poorly relative to human pros, and even modern LLMs still understand the rules so poorly that they request illegal moves. Anyone claiming that we should be afraid of a text generator that can't understand the rules of chess is being ridiculous.
> If you assume that's impossible, attempting to be the first to produce ASI is a rational alternative, even if you think it will most likely kill you. That is completely irrational.
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Humans aren't exactly rational
Two things: 1. If you reduce the criticism to personal dislike, you’ve built yourself a nice straw man. 2. Where’s the clear evidence? I actually see more evidence that the whole thing is already stagnating and that there won’t be much more to squeeze out of it. One more thing: Self-driving cars, the metaverse, Hyperloop, crypto/Web3/NFTs, AGI announcements: I’m so sick and tired of this nonsense. We should just ignore the ramblings of these crackpots.
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Thank you so much for calling out the crypto comparison! > What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "to the moon" argument. Like people get so caught in crypto bros acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking crypto billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out. > But like the core argument - crypto is getting better at core financial tasks (trading, lending, payments, asset issuance), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated financial innovation of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues crypto will be far more powerful than traditional finance and we might get to the point where everything is onchain and we're all going to make it - is basically not even engaged with.
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Awesome!
2. Astra just came out and Fable 5/5.1 too. These are SIGNIFICANT better in plenty of tasks than Opus in November. Try it out. Ask Opus 4.8 to do anything in 3d. Do the same with Fable or Astra. Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. Metaverse, Hyperloop and the crypto stuff was clearly garbage from the beginning. Easy to dismiss because all of it had massive faults. Metaverse: The interface wasn't good, content creation was way too hard Hyperloop: Savety was never an issue for Musk but it was obvoiuse. Peopel were building tunnels for ages. Crypto: Yeah just beacuse i let my computer run and waste 1kw of energy doesn't mean its suddenly valuable. NFTs: 'digital scarcity' yeah right XD But lets be clear, 5 years ago if you would have asked anyone if they could build a system for a billion dollars which you can talk to and it would code stuff for you and use blender and a coputer, that would have been unthinkable. We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. Machine learning is now everywere and the amount of compute we install right now is crazy.
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> Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. In what way is this random? It's a chronology of the bullshit from the past few years. Also: easy to say in hindsight. The hype was there, and many people believed it. The press, in particular, just lapped up the claims the way a Labrador Retriever gobbles up whatever you put in front of it. > We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. No, we haven't. We have a new type of (I would say, inferential) computation that is truly astonishing because it can convincingly imitate language and, to a certain extent, intentional action. Feel free to read "generate" or whatever instead if you don't like "imitate." It won't wake up and murder you in your bed at night. It won't take over the world. It won't wipe out humanity. It won't fly to Mars and build data centers there. It won't maximize paperclips. It probably won't even take your job away. It has no consciousness. It has no intentions. And if you look behind the curtain, all you'll see are a few very rich, unscrupulous guys who are stoking the debate with fearmongering because it's strategically advantageous for them to do so. Don't let them take you for a fool. Use GenAI to your advantage while tokens still cost a fraction of what they're actually worth, but ignore all that doomsday nonsense.
I don't think we'd be okay with that if it took a few years longer, right? I thought the Bengio blog post posted here the other day answered that question quite well (ignoring your timeline). The argument is that in training for the capability to achieve certain goals, you may inadvertently also train for secondary instrumental goals you did not intend, such as aggressive behavior or deception. I'm actually no sure I buy that this is particularly likely, or necessary, but I found that take reasonable and worth considering.
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Sure, unintentional outcomes, fair. But I'm asserting that things which are basically impossible today are not arriving any time soon. I 100% acknowledged the possibility and even the likelihood of rogue unintended behavior of AIs and in fact it's happening already. What I reject is the annihilation of humanity, the curing of cancer*, immortality, and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars anytime soon. *TBF before we dismantled America's clinical trials infrastructure, the monkeys were making insane progress here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/opinion/clinical-trials-drugs-science.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-lA.70Ug.3cQ2jpK8wNBH&smid=url-share
I've read Gary Marcus's critique of AI 2027. How do you grapple with the fact that superhuman coding arrived on schedule, despite his skepticism that it would? Doesn't that mean that the other predictions are also more plausible than we may think?
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Superhuman coding has not happened. I work with Codex and Claude daily. They're fantastic for script coding, config issues, and simple projects. They lose the plot on bigger things to this day. Just last night, Astra decided to cheat to present the illusion of progress until I called its BS. And I was so looking forward to finally working with the AGI. Humans remain the muse, the common sense, and the manager of making these things productive. And as much as I agree with Carmack's suggestion to not become the out of touch Kung Fu Master: https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095 working with them on projects daily gives me a pretty tactical read on what they can and cannot do IMO. That's how I reconcile it. But let's say it had. That's just 1 of 20 events that have to happen in sequence to hit the jackpot here.
Explain how rogue FSD cars take down civilization. And I say that with the opinion that the only good scenes in The Fate of The Furious and Leave The World Behind were the ones with the rogue Teslas. But also, nothing new under the sun really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive And so granted we could probably get a global 9/11 in deeply urban regions out of your scenario, we then bomb the datacenters and we finally address the horrific tech debt in our infrastructure blissfully relieved of the option of continuing to ignore it. Don't think this is happening either BTW but I acknowledge its probability is slightly greater than zero. To that end, my house is entirely off-grid. And in the event of what you call the end of civilization but I call the big burp inconvenience, I've made friends with my neighbors because community is what really matters during a disaster, and I've been through a few.
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>during a disaster, and I've been through a few Eh, about the biggest one I could see AI causing is the need for a black start on all 3 major US grids. Millions will die before it comes back up, well, if the US pulls out of it at all. And in that case, thanks for setting up a nice place to live for someone far more ruthless than you. They'll snipe you, and enslave your women and children if things have gone that far downhill. Or, we could avoid all that by making sure AI labs are properly regulated.
https://archive.ph/BzBjZ Read the article. The things the Chinese officials are worried about are: * Fake videos / disinformation * Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure * Data leaks * Advances in military sensing / targeting technology These concerns have little in common with the Yudkowskian / apocalyptic doom marketing the US hyperscalers are pushing now. The Times even says this explicitly in the second paragraph of the article: > "The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is IN CONTRAST TO the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself"
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The thing is all the above are threats. The internet being filled with more trash than ever is a threat to our sanity. The anti-social posts mass generated by AI is a threat to our societies. Bullshit news stories is a threat to our political processes and democracy. Smart cameras every are a threat to our privacy and freedom. AI enabled scams are a threat to our wallets. AI hacking is a threat to anything connected along with infrastructure. Military applications of AI are a threat to everyone. Ever increasing intelligence in agentic AI will eventually be a threat to our entire species. All are true at the same time.
Claude is a Contrarian (medium.com)
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It wasnt like that several months ago. It and then-GPT suddenly swapped personalities. GPT has loosened up considerably and now makes more mistakes while Claude has become what it is while also smarter.
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The only way to stay sane with Claude is to use Fable. I let Fable spawn Opus review agents but I won't chat with Opus, and I won't let Opus write code. I thought I could use Opus 4.6 but I gave up on it too. From a prose perspective it's much better than Opus 4.8 or 5. But it's still very verbose and Fable is dramatically more capable. I'm sure folks from Anthropic love this conclusion because this setup is extremely expensive.
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Claude for me absolutely loves to be overly nitpicky. Granted, I told it to push back on things that I suggest that are stupid and things like that, but it took that and transformed it into "nitpick everything I say down to the minutia. If I write something that isn't exactly true down to the precise wording, nitpick the wording and claim that I wasn't as precise as I should've been". Idk if it does this for anyone else but it does this to me all the time, and it's absolutely infuriating. And here I thought English was supposed to make programming and doing what I wanted to do easier. Never thought my own computer would nitpick my linguistic precision!
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> Every LLM has a persona. My opinion is that Claude’s training guardrails are constructed in a way it truly believes Humans are stupid. It always wants to play the contrarian: the Human is wrong, they don’t know what they’re doing, I must correct them. Well, yeah. Conway's law. Claude's image and perception of humanity is a reflection of Dario's image and perception of humanity. If you read that guy's writing, hear him talk and all that, you will see it.
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I also find it really annoying that it answers nearly every question with the same rote template. “That answer has two components, but the first is where the real meaning lies.” It uses some variation of that format all the time.
The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative." Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-negation
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I wonder how claude went from techs favourite AI for the whole of 2025 to a shithole of models in 2026.
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Paid campaigns.
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That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this. It tries so hard not to be sycophantic that it inserts little negging sidecars into any sentence that agrees with you. "That's true but not how you're thinking" or simply "yes but" answers. All kinds of "I didn't" and "You didn't" statements to the point it's often talking more about what didn't happen than did.
i see what you did there
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And LLMs do it a lot but it's not unique to their writing. Plenty of humans did and do use those constructions for effect or emphasis, or just because they think it makes them sound smart, as if they are revealing something profound.
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It's a correction. What the model does is not real contradiction. So more nuance is welcome in this case - even if at another layer it's tongue in cheek
Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.
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"Avoid use of "mannered" speech in your responses." goes a long way for Opus and Fable.
It's definitely worse and getting worse. I'm curious, do they not know this is happening, or not care? I struggle to believe people prefer the way it writes, which is becoming drastically different than its competitors.
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I wonder if they’re training heavily on Claude generated content or conversation transcripts
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Maybe the humans are suffering from model collapse, and don't notice it.
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Fable 5.1 was explicitely supposed to improve that, I used it only a bit so far and it seems at least better.
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Fable 5.1 is fairly pleasant to work with, the first in a while. Too bad it's so ridiculously overkill for most tasks. They need to reel in Opus and Sonnet.
Today, I asked Opus what it’s gibberish actually means. It started with (topic about signing implementation): > This is your coat token, to my coat hanger in the opera. On one hand - maybe yes??! On the other who the hell speaks like that and it’s so specific… I’d expect Alice and Bob with locks or house keys. Is this infamous old book scanning (and destroying) affecting latest models?
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Sounds like one of those "Is to as Is to" analogy questions from the SAT.
Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.
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Surely, SOMEone at these companies realized training LLMs on the content of the internet (namely the vast amount of comment sections) would result in such outcomes. Or at least that they should weight heavily against that content for purposes of writing voice.
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You mean like half the engineers I've worked with in my career? I wonder how we got here :)
Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste (theregister.com)
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I keep hearing about how software development is a solved problem in the age of AI... and then reality hits, like we see here.
Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
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but...but... AI was supposed to make this all better!
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Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that (and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
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> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. They were. QA is paying Customers now. Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase. The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault. At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
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What kind of research did you do? I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it. I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM. It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme (neobrutalism.dev)
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Reminds me of Notion and old Basecamp. This is a very easy sell for me because everything these days is doing the infuriating gray text on gray background.
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Is there a pure CSS or CSS + JS alternative that does not rely on React?
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Ah, yes, the Brite Bootswatch skin. No need to mess around further.
Brutalism? More like 'Back to school' vibes to be honest
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Agree, this would probably be great UI for K-6 level educational apps.
I just realized this is one more thing destroyed by LLM after em-dashes.
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This is like the high waisted, mom-pants of browser UI design.
I enjoy the look of these, but personally I wouldn't have thought to describe them as neobrutalist, so I'm thinking I don't know what it is. How is brutalism defined in this context? When I think web brutalism I think Craigslist style sites and reduction of superfluous design elements.
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“neowhimsical” would be a more accurate description. Definitely not “brutalist”, I’m unsure if the founders of this term ever saw anything brutalist.
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I would call this bauhaus not neobrutalism.
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I think your definition is closer. I would instead look at Bell Kiosk as a good example of someone doing the digital equivalent of brutalism
It's a niche and not super-well defined, but definitely existing style, ie: https://neubrutalism.com/ Broadly, it's a move away from flat, low contrast Material-type UIs and also away from the 'gradients and curves' AI-era designs and back into something that's more like the early web.
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I am not a front end dev. But one question I always had is why px and not em? I thought em as a relative distance would be better than hard coding px?
Yeah, I can't stand these influencer-wannabe web-devs misusing terms. béton brut means "raw concrete" in French, and in architecture that's what brutalism is. I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"... E.g. https://stallman.org IMO the design is more "Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand Theme" https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-hot-dog-stand-color-scheme/ combined with MS WordArt...
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FWIW, from the OP website: > Neobrutalism is a mix of regular brutalism in web design and more modern typography, illustration, and animation standards. Neobrutalism refuses the usual components of UX-UI design and embraces uncomfortable design elements, and it is more fearless to use distinctive color palettes.
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Right, hence why it's called "Neo-brutalist" and not "brutalist". It's not just plain un-styled html.
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Neo doesn't mean it can just be a completely different thing, it means its a modern take on the same thing from before but slightly evolved. Neo-Classicism still looks like Classicism. Neo Nazis are still Nazis. If I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period). As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0] [0]: https://invisible-island.net/dialog/
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Neo just means new. It's not an out-of-jail card if it is completely unrelated to the old/real thing.
Really unfortunate how much I immediately associate this with vibe coded sites. So many models trend to this exact neobrutalist style when any semblance of Swiss design or minimalism is mentioned in the prompt. However, I really do like how the style looks on some sites, like in https://www.not-ship.com/united-nations-map/ which was on HN earlier.
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I associate beige or purple extremely long landing pages with vibe coded alongside infinite tangentially related features, because it lacks intention but the creator was stuck in a bout of AI psychosis here, on the other hand, I’m wondering why they would even release this, as it should be a component for more intentional vibe coding. A Claude design template masqueraded as a whole framework
Distributed Systems Classics (2017) (nvartolomei.com)
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Some other classics (applied dist systems): - DDB: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf - MapReduce: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall13/cos518/papers/mapreduce.pdf - Spark/RDDs: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi12/nsdi12-final138.pdf - BigTable: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf
I am a Lamport admirer. I gradually realized that Lamport is more of the godfather of distributed system than Hinton is to deep learning. Lamport is less prominent than Shannon is to information theory. Shannon is the closest to any title of "gold-like" figure to a scientific discipline of universal relevance in modern society. Lamport specifically revealed a philosophical connections between computer systems and physics, in the parallel of distributed consensus to relativity theory. To me, the enlightenment is that, the relations between events happening in a distributed system, is more fundamental than their absolute ordering, thus the central role of an "observer". I haven't really analyzed if this realization is from Lamport's papers, or my general reading and thinking, but I am moderately confident that general readings are heavily influenced by Lamport's papers, or can be traced back to be compatible with Lamport's thinking. I have not seriously study if this connection is valid in depth, which might be another pure amateur speculation of mine. One thing I think Lamport falls short is that his writing is not easy to read and understand. I unconciously feel that Lamport (and Dario from Anthropic) probably share a hidden sense of intellectual supriority grew from their own experience throughout their career. So their writing (and Dario's gospel) all share a unchangable sense of narration from their own delicate and graceful ideas, much less of faciliating the understanding to their audience. In this cateogry, Shannon is abosolutely superior in any measure, in his writing, ideas are so naturally presented, although the implications of the ideas remain elusive due to the inherent depth. Also, among the 3 prominent figures of modern AI: Hinton/Bengio are more like Shannon, Lecun is closer to Lamport. Enough random rambling. Lamport, as indicated by the outweight presence in this list, is no doubt the single most important scientist in distributed systems.
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> the relations between events happening in a distributed system, is more fundamental than their absolute ordering The important thing in most distributed systems is having an order. Having a single observer serialize events as it receives them is so much more tractable than trying to use absolute order. Using absolute order requires very precise time synchronization which is hard; using absolute order requires knowing when you have received all the reports of events that already happened which is hard. Determining a designated observer isn't typically easy, but having it determine the order it observes events is easy. If two events happen at a similar time it's typically not a big deal which one is considered first as long as all nodes will agree on the result --- let the designated observer just pick the first one it sees works pretty well. If your report takes an unexpectedly long time to make it to the designated observer, then it won't be first and you'll deal. Much better than trying to figure out unknowable questions of relativity. :P
It's the thing that baffles me the most with those people, the Knuths and Lamports and Carmarcks, and whatnot. It's not like they have light schedules - they do research, they have classes, they attendconference, and they have jobs, etc... And some benefit from tenure, which give them time to deeply focus on some topics. But I can't imagine how I would write tex in ten years in Pascal on archaic machines if I had all the time to myself. Doing that in the middle of understanding more computer science than my eyes would ever read ? What do they do with their time ? What do they don't do ? Are they able to skip the eating and pooping and sleeping and cleaning their house and picking up parcels at the post office and grocery shopping parts ? Or a proto Unix being written in three weeks. Concretely, what are the days of those three weeks made of ? Especially since it's famously when the spouse was NOT there to handle the housekeeping... I see not amount of "life hacks" and "atomic habits" and whatnot helping with that. But it's probably just as natural to them as biking - and you can't explain biking, I guess ?
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A favorite Knuth story to illustrate: He was re-writing the 8080 code for the processor that ran our new Alphatype CRS Phototypesetter, since the manufacturer's code wasn't suitable. Real-time, 7 levels of simultaneous interrupt stuff, since it controlled two stepper motors that moved the lens around the photographic paper, plus four custom font outline-tracing S100 cards that flashed vertical segments of characters at just the right moment on the CRT that the lens then focused onto the paper. No debugability other than a 4x4 keyboard and a 15(?) character display. I was responsible for the code on the other end of the RS232 port that connected it to the DEC mainframe, sending down character outlines on the fly to the very limited memory on the 8080, along with the properly-sorted character placement info ultimately from TeX. Anyway, we'd been doing morning, noon, and night debugging sessions together for a number of days. On maybe the 3rd morning, I arrived at his office and was speaking with his secretary of many years, Phyllis Winkler, when Knuth came in. He handed her a stack of maybe a dozen or two pages, saying "Here's a paper I wrote; please type it in." When? When did he write it? It's still a mystery to me.
Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter (reuters.com)
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> before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab, and the cost of training its model, the newspaper said. "We are profitable when we ignore our costs". I wonder what other funny strategy they may employ to claim 80% margins.
The models don’t exist without training. I don’t see how excluding the training cost from the thing they are selling(inference) is perfectly reasonable and not just an accounting trick. If I am building a widget and have a widget factory that cost money to build and operate, is it reasonable to only use the cost of shipping my widgets to my buyer as the costs for my gross margin?
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This concern trolling on behalf of people that can't read to the end of a sentence, about a conversation that they aren't even part of. Anthropic is clear on what they are communicating. If every message had to be dumbed down to the level of the least attentive person to run across a message third hand, we could communicate and nothing but grunts.
I didn't realize how much money Uber makes from ads.... Why does every business devolve into an ad platform?
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Any business where people are looking at a screen should probably sell ads.
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Because consumers don't care much about ads and prefer them to even minor cost differences.
> The profitability of being able to serve a query wasn't really under question In one sense, yes, but I do see people question it regularly.
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I still question it. It's very light on details by just casually dropping they have 80% margins. I smell bullshit on this. It is certainly not above them to play accounting tricks to pretend to be anywhere near profitable. If you create a machine that can turn a dollar into 5, you don't dillute ownership of the machine, you use your fabulous profits to expand production. Anthropic, on the other hand, raises money like crazy, and seems desperate to IPO.
In what case is capex (for any company) not required for the end product? Are you arguing capex is disingenuos as a concept? In your car example the training is much like setting up the manufacturing line. I think the issue here is that the capex depreciates super fast since the models obsolete really fast.
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If my company sells widgets and dongles, capex for the dongle line does not figure into widget COGS
A Beginning for Mathematics (daniellitt.com)
> I propose the following reconceptualization of the goal of a mathematics PhD: to become a world expert on some interesting, deep topic, and to be able to convey that interest and understanding to others. Part of operationalizing this might be a thesis, but the degree would be awarded primarily on the basis of a rigorous defense, in which the student explains the topic to their examiners until they are satisfied. I think this is a refreshingly forward looking idea and I agree with it 100%, especially the the "rigorous defense" part. That is a good measure of how well the topic has been researched and understood by the researcher. This is where the humans can be "in the loop". > How different would this look from current PhDs? I think students would still meet with an advisor, who might suggest a topic. That topic could be explored with AI assistance, or not, but the student would be responsible for understanding it; it might be much more open-ended and larger than the typical PhD is currently. Interesting point about "more open-ended" and "...larger than the typical PhD". I think the author has a point. Earlier, the bottleneck was the candidate's/researcher's understanding and knowledge. Now with AI tools, it is so much easier to zero in to relevant knowledge, get your questions answered quickly which might lead to understanding more quickly. For e.g., before the advent of public libraries and printing press, the knowledge was inaccessible and guarded. So that was the bottleneck. Then books became ubiquitous and the bottleneck to knowledge and understanding was people's motivation AND knowledge of WHAT books and topics to research. Then came the internet and free PDFs of books and research articles. Now, the bottleneck was still people's motivation and a mild version of what books and topics to research. I say "mild" because one can lookup articles and newsletters, and book reviews and come up with a list of reading. Now comes AI and it looks like the only bottleneck is people's motivation. I believe there was also a silent, yet potent, bottleneck all along which is also removed by AI: personal tutor/coach/teacher/professor etc. Let's say if I am reading a textbook on manifolds or some research paper and I have a question about a specific theorem or even a mathematical operator being used. Before AI my only way to get my questions answered was to read more books (PDFs or print), or ask on math exchange or math overflow and wait for someone to answer, or to ask a professor. This could take up to a week. Now all of that has been cut down to 1 hour or less with an interactive chatting session. !!!!! So....the only bottleneck is people's motivation! QED Exciting time!
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Why is "Doctor of Philosophy" the correct certificate of "becoming expert in a topic"? That's a radical departure from "PhD" being a certificate that someone is qualified to produce new research. What you describe is more like a Masters Degree.
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I'd say this is the most optimistic scenario. there are really difficult problems to be solved in terms of access to AI.
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> the "rigorous defense" part In my country, that's exactly how it is. Yes, you need to have a thesis to defend, but ultimately it all comes down to the (oral and live) defense/disputation.
China's Regulators Take Aim at "AI Boyfriends" (spectrum.ieee.org)
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We need more meat for the meat grinder. You will reproduce.
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A friend is in China right now. I spent some time on the phone with him the other day, as he wandered around the city where he's working. It was Sunday there, most people's day off, and he was amazed at how many people were out in the public parks, playing chess and go, kids on the playground equipment. inter-generational interaction. His impression was that China has a much higher level of people randomly interacting with other's IRL than here in the US.
If you took someone from the 1990s and dumped them in 2026, I think one of the biggest shocks to them would be how optional humans are everywhere. You can't get a human on the phone when you call a business anymore. We check out our own groceries with machines now. We order fast food from a kiosk or app instead of a person. Self-driving taxis. Robots doing work and AI making content. Apps mediating all kinds of relationships (personal, romantic, business, employee-employer) rather than the humans themselves. We've kind of just allowed technology to start making us all irrelevant. What is the return on this investment?
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> What is the return on this investment? ~$5T/year in profits from the US, concentrated to the ~10% of American households who hold ~93% of equities, while the socioeconomic and social systems continue towards failure. Progress! /s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644650 (citations) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations) U.S. workers' share of national income falls to a new low - https://www.axios.com/2026/08/06/ai-boom-labor-workers-income - August 6th, 2026 Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025 (Report: https://www.lisep.org/mql )
Embrace the pain. It's a good stimulus to avoid stagnation and improve your situation.
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Generalities like this dismiss the lived experience of other people. You don't know the pain of others, especially what others hide from you.
That will only be true until it occurs to them to tax robotic productivity. This whole issue feels like a temporary one.
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“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China — the profits go to some entity, to some company. With exceptions for the companies that manage to wrestle themselves in paying virtually nothing in taxes, that profit is taxed somewhere down the line. Nothing special about AI productivity, it’s just money.
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“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China Only by taxing the humans and human-based corporations that ultimately pay for it. On a longer timeline, the robots are going to become full-fledged economic actors in their own right.
Things That Annoy Me About Cars (blog.decryption.net.au)
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A sim card which connects the car to the internet.
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There are EVs with no sunroof.
Ugh the glass roofs. I don't know why people like them. "Why yes sir, I would love to get beat down on by the hot sun while lacking airflow over me and risk an expensive repair bill from a falling walnut!"
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Suddenly everyone is putting them on cars. I went to test the new electric BMW iX3 and it had it. It was funny because it was July in Southern Europe so it was quite obvious why it was the worst idea in the world.
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Most people don't utilize them fully. - In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up. -For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one. - Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.
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What you’re describing is a sunroof that’s useful for a small set of use cases. Panoramic roofs that don’t open are different.
Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction? (gultsch.de)
I'm really surprised that nobody bothered making a fork of the Telegram open source client that works with XMPP.
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I looked into that very briefly about a decade or so ago: it would be very difficult to get it done and maintained in practice. XMPP leans towards the "dumb server/smart client" side of the trade-off, while Telegram is the exact opposite: while an XMPP client establishes and maintains a session and its state, retrieves a list of discussions, for each, requests and processes new messages, and infers reas markers and counts (a bit like a traditional mail client like thunderbird), Telegram maintains the session and the client state on the server and the client is a thin layer to just display it.
Does XMPP reliably get push notifications on iOS?
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Bit of a Radio Yerevan Situation. Not even the various emergency broadcast app reliably get timely push notifications. The thing about these notifications seem to be that apps that regularily get notifications from the the app get them reliably. This is based on the observation that xmpp-contacts I'm in regular contact with seem to get notifications quickly and contacts I talk to less regularily not so much. Sadly this dependent on apples whims
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I don't think Apple is the weak link here. Somewhere there must be a gateway between an XMPP server and the APNS. Maybe the server isn't handling it well. I do know APNS was super annoying to deal with before they added the HTTP API. Also huh, I've been to Yerevan but never heard of Radio Yerevan until now, that's pretty funny.
That is not true. Everyone uses Gmail. Everyone uses Chrome. This is true with literally less than 2% margin of error in many populations in the US.
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Chrome (excl. Edge and Brave) is at 65% market share on US desktops. GMail is at 75% market share in the US.
New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore (spectrum.ieee.org)
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Isn’t this part of the assumed plan? Seems to me the fee would have never been done without the blessing of big tech. Trump admin gets a perceived win that they are protecting US jobs and big tech gets to fill the massive campuses they recently built in India and Canada (oh gee what are the odds?) with no option for these employees to get higher wages in the US. Seems like everyone wins but labor… No more additional US tech jobs (seems like a perma-hiring freeze) and visa employees get routed to cheaper areas which is a massive savings for the companies.
Patently false narrative, equivalent to saying all americans are fat - both are extremely cheap uneducated arguments. Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignorance. The $100K fees isn’t material to them but the whole vitriolic nonsense poured around what they do and just rolling their work in mud - well that’s where they just move and take their 50 ppl organization with them. This is pure nonsense.
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I don't doubt your experience is true. But consider the fact that your experience can be true in parallel with the other scenarios people are highlighting.
If you have a tech job in America, you have good healthcare, your schools are safe, and you have access to abortions. All the tech jobs are in rich liberal cities. And this "sane government and a population that's considered pathologically nice to each other" is literally just the definition of chauvinism. Sure _you_ like it, and that's great. Let's not be assuming everyone in the world shares our values though.
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“If you have a tech job” == good luck when you get laid off or want to start a business.
I know it's not exactly the same. But would he consider becoming an electrician? Trade jobs are definitely getting more and more in demand, and the pay once established is definitely not worse than most engineer positions. Electricians in major canadian areas (e.g. Vancouver) charge 200$ per hour and more.
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That's a good idea, but he's almost retired now. They immigrated during the good economy of the early 2000s, when Canadian GDP per capita was closely tracking the U.S. They still came under an education- and skills-based system (I think the 2002 system), but I think the system doesn't really account for the low value market value of college degrees from the third world. Maybe the 2015+ system works better.
"Middle America hates immigrants because they are racists. I don't want H1-Bs because companies use them as cheaper labor, undercutting my value." Absolute peak "lost in the political sauce". Most people aren't aware that Bernie Sanders has historically been very anti-immigration, before just becoming an old guy who echos whatever the current young people vibe is.
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Was he “let’s put some limits on the number of H1Bs” anti immigration or was he “let’s deport 100 million people and shoot some innocent citizens in the face while doing it” anti immigration?
I think I'm more likely to become a nun than blindly support anything from the current administration.
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Well I’m not sure you will find many people who feel the program is perfect as-is but the natural interpretation of what you said in context seemed to be that we should at least temper our criticism.
> Good luck cloning services whose endpoints are unavailable and documentation non-existent and that there would be no customers for, as they're built as a means of working around taxation of outsourcing. What services can only be procured from offshore businesses and service providers that aren't for cutting costs? Honestly, what can be provided by someone in the UK, Europe, or LATAM that cannot be done by one of 100M people in the US labor force? I am genuinely interested, both as a scholar and as market opportunity.
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You're entirely missing the point, which was to propose this as a workaround for taxes trying to make outsourcing non-competitive. The point is not that they couldn't, but that a company moving proprietary "services" offshore as a means to cut costs aren't interested in whether the services can be provided locally, but whether they can cut costs by moving them offshore. If you tax renting labour, then companies seeking to do this will just enter into long enough service contracts to have the outsourcing agency custom-build a SaaS just for you instead. The market opportunity here is simply to be an outsourced body shop.
Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils (omgubuntu.co.uk)
There have been twelve CVEs reported against coreutils in the past twenty years. There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit. I am all for RIIR in cases where it makes sense. This does not even remotely appear to be one of them. By all appearances the quality of the code is extremely amateurish at best. coreutils has not been a significant source of vulnerabilities in the past, and they’re replacing it with code written by amateurs that performs worse and already has a worse security track record.
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> There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit. Was there an audit against coreutils? If not, it's not really apple-to-apple comparison.
For now you can list dependent packages manually in apt-get install: https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/build-essential But it's clear that Ubuntu will remove coreutils, genuine sudo and other tools from the future versions. It's the direction, it's ideological and thus nor merit nor our feedback will change anything here.
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> genuine sudo That made me curious, it sounds related to this: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords - 5 months ago (413 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47464134
OIC. Rust doesn't guarantee optimizing tail recursion. How unfortunate for a language that's getting widespread adoption.
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For what it's worth there's reasonably active [1] work on implementing opt-in guaranteed tail calls - but it's not particularly fast going. LLVM (the backend rust uses) needs better support for musttail (e.g. some architectures just don't support it [2]). [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/112788 [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/153827 By-default guaranteed tail calls really isn't rust's style, because it means subtle changes (introducing a destructor, re-ordering code, etc) can change semantics without you realizing it. If you want to guarantee that a call can't allocate a new stack frame you should have to say it.
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Not so familiar with this area, but isn't the existing behavior of implicitly creating new stacks more of a problem than implicit tail-call elimination? Seems the latter is a kind of compiler-level optimization, of which there are already many (I think) that change the semantics internally but guarantee the outward behavior stays the same. But I can understand the preference for an explicit opt-in, to make clear that it is enforced and not assumed.
Show HN: Pelican-bicycle alternatives (gally.net)
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Anyone else surprised the generations look so remarkably similar? All of these models have “independently” generalized that the moose should roughly be standing at the same position (left) or that the giraffe should have a certain color palette.
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[delayed]
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Would love to see Qwen3.8-27b here, since that is the model most people are running locally.
How to write an effective software design document (refactoringenglish.com)
OP here! I'll admit a lot of bias because I think design docs are extremely useful, but I find that when people hate design docs, it's almost always for one of two reasons: 1. The developer has worked on teams where design docs are viewed as a pointless ritual, so authors treat them as a pointless requirement and write bad docs and their teammates view them as pointless so they don't bother giving useful feedback, reinforcing everyone's belief that they're a pointless ritual. 2. The developer does not like other people questioning their engineering choices, and they know that it's harder for their teammates to push back on finished code than a design doc. Investing in the implementation before design changes the calculus to bias in favor of whatever's already implemented rather than what would have been the ideal implementation. Plus, it's harder for the team to review design decisions of 10k LOC than a 5-page design doc.
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Num. 2 especially relatable. A good mark of high quality professional is if he presents his plan before execution to hear feedback and comments - even if they are totally against his original idea, and he can then take this feedback and incorporate effectively in a re-design.
Author here. Happy to take any feedback about this post. I learned to write design docs at Microsoft and Google, and I thought they both had good culture around docs that hasn't percolated out as well as other engineering practices at those orgs. I haven't seen a thorough explanation of how to write design docs, so this is my attempt to externalize what I've learned about writing them.
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Good read, although the document would be very lengthy if I am to write all the sections in the articles. I sometimes break down the design doc into multiple design docs. - Manager doc : Summary(Background + Objective), User Story (Scenarios), High level architecture, open questions, task break down + timeline including other teams' tasks - Engineering Architecture doc: Summary, Glossary, Goal (Functional + Non-functional + Non-goals), More detailed architecture & components between, open questions, tasks break down + timeline - Engineering API / Database design doc: Similar summary + link to architecture doc. More detail information on API (eg: input params, output params, example client code) + database design (eg: database type + fields), open questions Each doc is to be read within a single meeting. The shorter doc helps narrowing down the discussion scope. Disclosure: I worked at Amazon where there is a typically 1 hour meeting session with the first 15-30 minutes dedicated to reading. It's probably why I multiple short docs over a single design doc. Telling people "Today, we'll read section 1,2,3,5,8 of the doc" didn't really work.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, please take my response as earnest attempts to better myself :) So, I think I didn't elaborate on the process enough to get the answers I was looking for. Here's what happened. 1. I would uncover a requirement from the business 2. The conceptual design would be written, high level understanding of the feature etc that was trying to be written 3. Conceptual design would be signed off 4. Logical design would take place ( I think this is basically everything from the Constraints section down in your model ) 5. Logical design would get reviewed and signed off. Now technically everyone could and was encouraged to sign off the logical design, but in reality maybe one other person in the team would, I don't really know the reasons why. Then implementation start, this was usually NOT me but another team member tasked with the design, and this is where the process really started to fall down with the onus being put squarely back on me as to why the design didn't work :) I also actually tried the other approach, implement as much as possible ( because AI fast ) and then reverse engineer the design, but then that very much felt like, what the hell is the point now? I might as well just use the standard code review process. Does that make sense? Sound familiar?
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It's hard to say without knowing what things are like at the company/team you work for, but I can say the things you're describing sound unusual to me. Most significantly, it's strange for the person writing the design doc not to be the person implementing the code. This is asking for trouble because there's a principal-agent problem[0], and also there's bound to be signal lost in the handoff between designer and implementer. It's not so unusual for the design doc author to work with a team on implementation, but they'd still be actively involved in implementation, which sounds different from what you're describing. I've also never heard of this separation between a conceptual design doc and a logical design doc. I've been on teams where the product manager writes a UX-focused spec, and then the dev writes a technical-focused spec, but I've never heard of a conceptual vs. logical spec. Does the org have a strong engineering culture in other ways? Like automated tests, automated deploys, automated monitoring/alerting, useful code reviews? Because the easiest answer is that you're in an org with poor software engineering practices, or at least weak documentation culture, and the design review process you're experiencing is there for historical or political reasons rather than engineering reasons. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem
OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability (tenderlovemaking.com)
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> In other words, if you publish a gem on RubyGems.org, you can execute arbitrary code on RubyDoc.info. Well - if rubygems.org could be bothered to fix things, they would not have to rely on rubydoc.info as an external tool. But since rubygems.org sucks (I speak from many years of having used it in the past as developer, until they went loco and added anti-people things such as taking away your ability to remove old gems past a 100k download arbitrary limit), they don't offer documentation. Then again, ruby devs are known to hate documentation. If the ruby core team could only be bothered to fix things, ever since the mass purged other devs ... all coinciding with shopify seizing power. But byroot may disagree on that - after all there is no conflict of interest here. Right?
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Great time to be a criminal. Just have your bots do it.
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It was the gremlins
"We" need protection from, or "OpenAI and Anthroptic's dreams of profits" need protection from?
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I think that AI is dangerous and could be used as a weapon. So yes, I would like to be protected from all parties. I don't think that's nuts.
OpenAI's careless approach to sandboxing and minimal levels of monitoring appear to be positioning it increasingly as a substantial threat actor to the open source ecosystem: * Hugging Face * D Programming Language Wiki * Ruby Gems If I was a content provider for open source I'd be looking pre-emptively block OpenAI endpoints and keep a close eye on changes from new users to mitigate this sort of unapologetic drive-by attack which seems to be followed by marketing releases rather than a mea culpa with a proper RCA.
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>I'd be looking pre-emptively block OpenAI endpoints From what I've seen the requests in these attacks rarely come from known OpenAI IPs and instead from Digital Ocean/AWS and TOR exit nodes.
How does this work, legally? I think that RubyGems could file a civil suit against OpenAI, but for a naïve non-lawyer reading this seems like a pretty clear cut criminal violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
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They are too busy pulling Andre to court, so they have no resources going against OpenAI. Shopify wants to make profit, not waste time in a court case against TechBro bromance brother corporations.
It's very likely it violates the DMCA "breaking digital lock" provisions but the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.
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Sounds like we need discovery to determine who to charge.
Great, you’re the attorney at the CEO’s trial. To get a conviction, you’re going to have to show that he willfully committed this specific crime. There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws, you have to show this specific crime was at his direction. Do you think there is evidence of this?
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That is not how it works, at least in a civilized country. The charges are not about agents, it is about operational responsibility and negligence in the company itself. CEO is responsible for letting this to happen, not enforcing enough supervision, if not intentionally, then being grossly negligent. More severe if encouraging and letting this kind of agent research and operations happen at scale, while knowing that it can damage other systems and businesses.
I was alluding to how people who fall out of favor with Putin have a tendency to have mysterious fatal accidents, more than 10 of them falling out of windows.
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Sure, but it was unfortunate to pick the one dude who is well known, if for nothing else, for dying through means other than defenestration.
Couldn't they use frontier open-weight models from Chinese labs? The current Chinese government is friendly to them.
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I appreciate this line of questioning. It's really interesting to see how many excuses people need to reach for to avoid the conclusion that the "secret unheard of power" is B.S...
Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows (macrumors.com)
Lmao. Okay let me just install a tool to do that because the OS doesn't usually have it built in in 2026. Oh, it's riddled with ads. Oh it's paid for. Etc. It's the same thing with the recent opening of knowledge thanks to AI. Before: search for recipe with search riddled with ads, find website riddled with ads cookies notification requests forced sign up and a million other dark patterns, then an entire fucking life story before the recipe. Now: "find me a good recipe for pasta that uses the stuff I have left over from the party last weekend, I don't mind buying a few more bits".
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> Okay let me just install a tool to do that because the OS doesn't usually have it built in in 2026. On Mac select the PDFs in Finder. Right click on the selected files to bring up the context menu. Select "Create a PDF" from the Quick Actions submenu. This works with PDF files and image files as inputs.
Amazon did exactly this with Alexa skills and it hasn’t exactly been a booming success. Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use. “AI as a chat bot” has always been cool and fun in sci-fi movies, but it’s the least imaginative real world use for it. We need to move past it. > $ Siri 'List the files in this folder' Why in the world would I ever use this instead of just ‘ls’?
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> Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use. The thing that nobody really realized is that setup is a big factor that isn't worth to a lot of people. For example, to turn off lights with Alexa, you have to do a whole bunch of setup that involves installing special lights, installing app, connecting the app to Alexa. Even though relatively this is simple, its just not worth the effort to a lot of people. Amazon or Apple could easily overcome this by offering Alexa or Siri connected devices as incentive to builders building houses or apartments. That way, when you plug in Alexa in your new apartment, it can auto detect everything it can control including lights, thermostat appliances, e.t.c.
> Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use. I've never understood this obsession with trying to invent the talking ship computer from Star Trek TNG. The purpose of the talking computer in the series was not to be a "cool 24th century technology advancement". It was a plot device to keep the story going and explain things to the audience. Having a voice conversation with a computer is terrible, imprecise, plodding UX. It's not a good interface, it's not a good invention, it's not good technology. Yet $billions are being spent to try to invent it.
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Disagree. The TNG computer was used via voice input when it was efficient to do so, which is exactly how it should be. There were plenty of computer consoles, laptops, and tricorders/phone-like devices that were also used, especially with certain types of tasks. The crew could technically fly the ship and fire weapons via voice commands, but that only happened occasionally, in situations where it made sense. Also, when Picard wants to record himself playing a musical instrument, saying “Computer, begin recording” is simply convenient. It serves no purpose to the story or explaining anything to the audience. It’s just a tool. One that I would very much like to have. The best example I can think of in favor of what you are saying, where the computer does kind of serve the story and helps the audience, is the episode where Doctor Crusher gets stuck in the warp bubble and she has a lot of conversations with the computer about what is happening. But even then, she is out of her element, needs a lot of help from the computer, and it seems more convenient to do so via voice than anything else. She still travels to different areas of the ship to carry out actions, even though she probably doesn’t have to in case. The computer is clearly at its best for simple actions and answering questions, even if it can do more. The characters understand that and use the technology accordingly.
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The TOS computer was better, it had a better computer-like voice.
Why, the users will blame anyone but Apple, of course.
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I can promise you Apple is constantly being blamed by its customers for things out of its control. I worked at an Apple store for years. All sorts of carrier issues, third party accessories, and app problems were chalked up to Apple screwing up.
So basically do what they have always done for decades? Apple Intelligence was an outlier in how they historically operate. I mean they literally just put out a folding phone after waiting what, a decade, for others to perfect it first.
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Yep. I will never understand why none of their competitors follow that strategy
Genius would have been for Apple to get Siri in a better state after so many years. This looks more like a participation medal, if at all.
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>This looks more like a participation medal, if at all. This would be insulting if it even mattered. Apple has fumbled AI while having record breaking quarterly profits. The market does not care.
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