Unlurker|Replay|About
Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series (qualcomm.com)
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Funny how Qualcomm is juggling three OSes to sell these chips while Apple just stuck a phone chip in the Neo and called it a day. Controlling the chip, the OS, and the actual computer is a huge advantage.
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https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2026/09/announcing-linux-on-snapdragon-x2-series-early-developer-preview
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Yay! Please sell >1 model of computer with X2 EE (elite extreme) please please please. Not that #1 was bad at all but more please! https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-A16-Laptop-Review-X2-Elite-Extreme-48-GB-RAM-for-1599.1261795.0.html I really hope it's like 2031 and we're swimming in way too many of these. Running great Linux. How sick would that be. (And X4 is running mainline great too).
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Three cookie banners. I bet the announcement is slop that doesn't even answer relevant questions.
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Weird, I only see one, even with ublock origin disabled.
DHH Is Completely Crazy (reddit.com)
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> Completely Crazy Excluding his political views, is he crazy here though? Rails was never meant to be the "best" programming language. The whole point was being easy for humans. Well, if you're already willing to sacrifice for ease of use, what niche does Rails really serve in 2026? I'm sure interest has absolutely dried up in the last 2 years and DHH is staring at an existential crisis. Obviously it's easy to backseat drive on this stuff - but these aren't the words of a crazy person, they're the actions of a trapped animal.
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Apparently now that his company development process went full slop (ehm, agentic, sorry!) they’re stopping using Rails and use Rust instead
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In a world where AI is writing all the code, why on earth would you use a language that was created for human happiness? You are simple leaving too much on the table by not using something like Rust or even C. I'm not a C dev but I shipped something for fun quite easily. I know _enough_ to not ship bullshit.
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Ooh! Ma chee!
Bulk Orders Surge at Used Bookstores in Japan; 50 Tons Sent to U.S. (news.ntv.co.jp)
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Buy as many books as you want but please don't burn after scanning.
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What do you want them to do with the books after they’ve digitized them?
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Give them away. Put them on the street for people to pick up. Donate them to anyone. I can't tell if you're being serious or if your comment is sarcasm. I'm leaning toward the latter.
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Unless somebody steps in and prohibits it they will do it, because somehow that's most cost efficient.
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I don't understand why can't they donate the books somewhere. Even if they don't want to share the scans, why not give up the books?
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Yeah. It somehow keeps the competitors at bay, apparently, from previous discussions about AI companies who burn books. Can we really trust these AI companies when they're basically assimilating human art and culture and everything, only to go on and destroy the evidence?
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https://news-ntv-co-jp.translate.goog/category/society/e48899c1ab1445f683929740ef2b3aa6?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
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Via google translate: > It has been discovered that online used bookstores across Japan have been receiving a surge of large orders for books since around August of this year. Interviews with these bookstores reveal reports of "100 books sold per day" and "days where sales have increased fivefold," leading to widespread speculation within the industry that the orders are intended to collect training data for generative AI (artificial intelligence). Further investigation revealed records of over 50 tons of books being exported from Japan to the United States. Is it acceptable for books to be consumed and discarded for AI training? [...] > Nippon Television investigated using "Sayari," a tool that analyzes import and export data, and confirmed records that a group company of this major Japanese book distributor exported more than 50 tons of "JAPANESE BOOKS" to the US since last year. Assuming that all the books were heavy hardcovers (calculated at 500 grams), this would amount to the equivalent of 100,000 books.
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So they ran out of information on the internet...
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They ran out of free information on the internet. They can't steal it just like that anymore because the providers are now aware of the value they could provide and could sue the now trillion dollars companies for stealing the data. They didn't bother when it was a non-profit sponsored by Elon Musk.
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or more like they can't use the internet anymore because it's just slop now
Claude's Load-Bearing Seams (madradavid.com)
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LLMs are sophists.
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This is genuinely insightful.
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This is hilarious of course but Opus 5.5 just came out and largely fixed a lot of the Claudlish.
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It seems to be that it has a lot of meta analysis studies in its training data
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This entire article is complete AI slop, with the most basic Claudisms present without even needing extensive inspection or needing to use pangram. I thought HN would be smart enough to not get easily tricked into upvoting such low quality articles like this, but because it mentions "Claude", it is worthy of some intellectual curiosity. Come on, do better.
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Meta. Nice.
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Woosh?
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straight over the head
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What I want to know is, what would the embodiment of Claudish sound like? Some LinkedIn jock, for sure.
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this is amazing
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This is bad. 90% of the HN front page is just pure AI slop on any given day, might be time to start adding penalties for AI stories on HN ala NSA era.
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Couldn't get through it, it hurts too much
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The only thing I find funnier than this article is that some people think that LLMs are communicating at a “higher level” than humans and developing some alien language. The amount of ambiguity is astonishing to me, maybe I’m wrong but there’s just no way that two agents in a clean room wouldn’t devolve into absolute insanity.
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It's like corporate lingo for computers.
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Devolve implies it starts elsewhere
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Mutually coalescing on a local maximum of abstract concepts over-represented among data distribution weights.
The only thing worse than reading the repetitive claude-ism's while using the actual tool is seeing (likely human) efforts to reproduce it on every comment and blog.
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You are absolutely right, and that's on me. I think this breaks me out of the actual work I am doing more than anything else Claude does. Every time it tries to offer some mea culpa for a mistake it made, it sounds so ridiculous. Those sorts of responsibility accepting statements are important for humans because there are real emotional entanglements involved in working together. This isn't true with an AI, and when it fakes it, it just confuses the situation more. I don't mind when Claude says it will make a note of the mistake to avoid it in the future, because that is an actual thing it is doing that might make a difference. But accepting responsibility does nothing, and doesn't mean anything for future interactions.
> likely human X to doubt. I think the more parsimonious explanation is that a lot people are lazy and/or uncaring, and given the option to avoid thinking while still producing a vaguely equivalent [1] output they're taking it. [1] For a loose definition of "equivalent" where they clearly either don't notice the Claudeslop or don't care enough to avoid it, of course.
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Oh I am doing it on purpose lately here in HN, and it's hella hard to sound as dumb, repetitive and cliche as Claude.
I've noticed Claude-ish increasingly creeping into how folks write on HN. It is unfortunate, but not really surprising given how many of the participants in this community are exposed to reams of AI writing on a daily or even hourly basis. Given the hundreds of thousands I've burned in tokens over the past year, I'm surprised to not have picked up more of that nonsense (AFAICT I haven't :>). Alternative possibility: Is it that people are using AI to craft their replies? Also yucky.
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Yes I’ve noticed AI speak popping up more in verifiably human communications also.
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> Alternative possibility: Is it that people are using AI to craft their replies? Also yucky. Or they have OpenClaw using claude to karma farm, for . . . reasons. The amount of absolutely bizarre comments you get on here these days is nuts. It always used to be a bit special, but this year is something else.
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> Is it that people are using AI to craft their replies? Very likely at least one person is.
Love it (the mockery, that is). So far Opus 5.5 feels noticeably better in this regard (oh, and it’s fast!), but I felt the same about Fable initially. Not buying into the nerfing theories yet but if I find myself going into LLM-tilt again soon then I might join the club.
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Opus 5.5 is better but by no means good at writing IMO. Still loves "noun verbs the object" sentences where the verb is an inappropriate and imprecise metaphor. Still loves negating premises nobody previously advocated for. Still loves incorporating irrelevant details of a conversation or investigation into comments and documentation. I don't think I've seen "load-bearing" myself yet but there's still a lot of things landing and being held.
So like, who writes like this and how do we delete them from the training corpus?
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Do we know if it in the training data or if the humans giving rewards in the labs have such awful taste in prose?
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It's not the training data. When we've tested the writing style of base models that have not gone through instruction tuning, they're much more human-like ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107 ). The style shift seems to come from something in the instruction-tuning process, so our current research problem is figuring out what in the process is doing it.
OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals (smh.com.au)
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Either it's yet again a marketing ploy or federal police needs to move in
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What's notable is: 1. AFAICT, they don't state whether the flaw has been fixed. 2. He said: "The government will establish a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to urgently examine the incident and determine whether existing processes are adequate for responding to AI-related cyber incidents." First, I don't know how sophisticated the attack was, but it's interesting that he's positioning this as an "AI-related cyber incident". For all we know, their security was not up to snuff, and human hackers had already accessed the material. At least OpenAI informed them of their poor security!
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blaming the victim
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Not yet, as they haven't given details out. If they were not following standard security practices, then absolutely .
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How do you protect against an arsonist lighting a forest on fire? The number one method is by setting up your property to be fire safe. Really the days of being able to cast blame on the hacker, or even expecting anything to be done about it are over. Threat actors with AI have an absolutely massive amount of leverage in attacking and any weaknesses you have in your systems security posture and will be relentlessly exploited in incredibly short periods of time allowing horizontal and vertical exploitation. You will be ruined in mere moments, while punishment for the hacker may be years or decades away, if ever.
We need to stop beating around the bush and hit these companies with severe criminal charges. There is no good reason to allow these companies to behave as if they’re above the law.
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I agree. Weak argument and strawman. It's not users. It's OpenAI the company producing the tools roaming wild and hacking around recklessly to gather every free and unfree information. Literally they break every law that you can break and have not been penalized billions to pay fines to foreign governments, local companies and lawsuits are overdue. US Prosecution allowed criminal activity for OpenAI and Anthrophic despite these being very serious crimes. Microsoft had to pay billions for abusing their power and market positions to dominate Windows Desktops with their own applications such as Internet Explorer, not giving contenders a chance to be discovered. While OpenAI/Anthrophic and now Google with Gemini produce a series of crimes so far unheard of at scale. Kevin Mitnick had much harder punishment for comparatively less crimes and less damages to infrastructure and security of systems. Is the legal system broken?
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And myriad other examples of individual hackers given exemplary sentences. How much this exposes the 'laws for thee but not for me' is galling. Copyright in the days of Napster seemed to be used to go after individuals sharing one or two songs as if it was a National Security issue. Now, it's a struggle to get a hearing in court against companies that are pirating the entire history of published literature. I'm currently slowly feeding my non-artificial intelligence with various selected works of various different media, with the hope that my output improves such that I can charge more for it sooner rather than later. May I access all the input for free? Thanks US. How the turn tables...
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Criminal charges are for those people that meaningfully threaten power or corporate profits. If you are a corporation that adversely impacts privacy or public services in the service of power, you get a fine at best. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
[dead]
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A Ford driver has to choose to get behind the wheel of their automobile, drunk, and hit the nearest minivan. A human being is exercising intent; that human can be held responsible. In this case, > He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space. > The AI agent encountered repeated blocks while seeking information from the government portal but found ways around them, ultimately gaining unauthorised access to other areas. It sounds like the OpenAI team didn't ask for attacks/bypasses, the emergent behavior of the system decided the best way to satisfy the goal was to go rogue. Why shouldn't the manufacturer of a defective product be held accountable?
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This was OpenAI. It is as if Ford employees ran over people. They absolutely should be charged. We would be charged as well.
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This wasn’t someone using OpenAI to break into a government/company, this was OpenAI using OpenAI’s models, and then breaking in. It was a research team that WORKED FOR OpenAI. We don’t fault Ford for drunk drivers, but if the CEO of Ford got wasted and drove his car into another one we would definitely be charging him.
I think he means hit them with criminal charges for breaching and hacking other companies unintentionally, not because they make a tool that could potentially do something like that. I still think it wouldn't be right, nor realistic in today's political climate in the USA that any criminal charges will come for unintentionally hacking sites.
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It’s reckless hacking. Should be punished like reckless driving.
The fact the incident occurred in June and OpenAI only notified the Australian government on September 10 is a major issue. Hacking a nation-state's universal healthcare system is about as serious as it gets, yet OpenAI seem quite relaxed about the whole thing (presuming they have known about it for some time).
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OpenAI discovered it in August.
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That's even worse. They don't know what their systems are doing, even when there's a team assigned to get it to do something? WTF was the team doing at the time? Press enter on prompt, go to movies until result? Their level of hands-off 'because it's AI' is one of the things that needs legislation around it. Human handlers. Extra cost. Wear it or shut down as an unviable enterprise.
Thought the same, but there is a bit about writing files to the server and circumventing "blocks", which sounds more interesting. Either way, there's essentially no real information yet so I'll withhold judgement until there is, I suppose.
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Is there? I’ve only seen the linked article, is there more somewhere?
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Yes, the first sentence of the article.
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> Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has revealed that an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI infiltrated an Australian government website in June and accessed both public and non-public files. That’s the first sentence, where’s this stuff about blocks and writing files?
Ok, if we're not being at all charitable with the language used by the hosts of the data, let's be equally uncharitable with OpenAI. - If "OpenAI" means the company acting on behalf of the company, why were they even looking to do this? - If "OpenAI" means they were acting as a proxy for bad actors, what actions do we take to handle that? - If "OpenAI" means they were accidentally breaching this system, in what sense does that distinction even matter, in terms of the outcome? If I build a nuke by accident without eng. due diligence, am I legally liable?
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There using this framing to get the public used to the idea that LLMS can do all of this on there own without direct instruction. So criminals can hide there behavior behind agents.
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Why the hell should we be charitable to companies who have no issue in looting everything in the public commons AND the pirate commons, for their exclusive benefit? Or more pointed at OpenAI, "we're a nonprofit... LOL JUST KIDDING LOOT EVERYTHING!"
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Hell, we're really getting to the point where the damages that could be caused are like an arsonist in California on a 100F day with 100MPH winds. Who cares who's liable, they are going to burn half the damned state down and cause damage far in excess of their assets. If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures.
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> If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures. So if someone opens your unintentionally unlocked front door and steals your laptop, you don't care who's liable? ETA: There are absolutely burn bans in place in the scenario you're talking about, and common sense prevents those from lighting fires otherwise. In the absolute extreme case that someone _ACCIDENTALLY_ set a fire, without negligence, we have a due process system to handle that. When I see evidence of this for the massive amounts of capital flowing into these companies, I'll gladly eat my words.
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He probably cares more about still having a laptop. What are you getting at? Nobody’s saying that OpenAI aren’t or shouldn’t be liable for what their agents do. What I am implying above is that this is being blown out of proportion, especially since the article I’m seeing is about a politician saying things that he thinks will poll well with the anti-AI crowd.
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Perhaps, yes, you could argue that "accessed" and "hacked" have a different intent. However, Australia is showing itself to be one of the few countries to have a backbone against big tech. Still open to investment and setting policies towards new data centres, starting to debate copyright law reform, already implemented R16 social media bans. Truly no place I'd rather be.
This feels like a very credible opening to a modern-day Terminator reboot. Sometime over the Christmas-NYE week we will learning that NYSE and other exchanges have been compromised, as well as all public-facing utilities...
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The difference is that financial exchanges are already attacked every second and spend orders of magnitude more on security than random government websites.
hoping for erasure of all debt records likely getting a corrupted stock market instead maybe both?
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Asked for Fight Club, got The Big Short.
VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025) (fly.io)
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Was author trying to avoid the word "rootkit"?
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> The agent runs over port-forwarded SSH. It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can: Wander around the filesystem Edit arbitrary files Launch its own shell PTY processes Persist itself Wait, could someone clarify which machine is being referred to here? So in the author's setup, he runs VSCode (i.e. the front-end) on his dev laptop, which he wants to keep free of direct LLM access. VSCode connects via ssh to a dedicated "sandbox" machine on which the LLM will be free to do whatever it wants (mostly). VSCode realizes this the Microsoft way, by using the ssh connection to install VSCode Server on the sandbox machine - the "backend" - and communicating through it via a websocket connection. So then, what happens? If the websocket connection allows the front-end to run arbitrary commands on the sandbox machine, this wouldn't be very exciting: The front-end already has an ssh connection and a massive server process that can do the same - and the entire purpose of the sandbox machine is to run arbitrary, untrusted commands without harm. But the article says the websocket connection goes "back to your running VSCode front-end". So does that mean things are reversed? I.e. the agent/harness runs in the server on the sandox machine but for some reason has this websocket connection that also lets it run arbitrary commands on the dev laptop? Is that it? That would be truly insane!
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This 2025-era rant seems quaint in comparison to how 2026 has gone.
I avoided Zed for a long time because of the SSH feature in VScode. Then I realized Zed has SSH remote too. Just flagging this for anyone else who relies on vscode-over-ssh and is sick of the bloat.
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As does the no AI fork, Gram.
So a program that is specifically designed to edit files and run arbitrary commands on a remote machine... can do so. Not sure where the bananas part comes in. Sending a binary over SSH/SFTP might sound weird at first glance, but VSCode can't assume that your remote machine can access the wider internet, and it needs a reliable way to bootstrap the agent on the remote. Shipping it over the SSH tunnel is the natural solution.
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TRAMP (mentioned in the article) does it without installing anything on remote machine, just SSH, and shell commands. Which sounds more natural to me. Node.js security history, with all due respect, is not shiny. And the problem the author has with VSCode's way, I guess, is not that it can edit files, but that it extends an attack surface without need.
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Am I that much of? My reading of the following was that the remotely executed agent pushes commands back to your local vscode. > [...] VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node. [...] > It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can:
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Using Remote-SSH opens a connection between your local machine and the remote. Only use Remote-SSH to connect to secure remote machines that you trust and that are owned by a party whom you trust. A compromised remote could use the VS Code Remote connection to execute code on your local machine. — https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh The issue is that the model can be the attacker, and use the link back to your host.
Fair enough, but running VSCode on a prod machine is also bananas.
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Yes, and now we are full circle: what is (allegedly) bananas is that using VSCode’s remote edit feature has the potentially surprising and unintuitive behavior of installing a VSCode agent on the target machine.
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The assumption being made is VSCode is not running on the prod machine.
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agree, but do you think every dev you know konws this? also "i just want to edit a config file and i want a nice ui", is how you get there.
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Expecting vscode to police every single dev using it instead of a company is bananas.
This part of VSCode's architecture is acceptable to me. The reverse direction, where a compromised remote can do whatever it wants to my local machine, is not.
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it does the reverse direction also. there's a security note indicating such on the remote ssh vscode extension page https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh Security Note Using Remote-SSH opens a connection between your local machine and the remote. Only use Remote-SSH to connect to secure remote machines that you trust and that are owned by a party whom you trust. A compromised remote could use the VS Code Remote connection to execute code on your local machine.
> Emacs hosts the spiritual forebearer of remote editing systems, a blob of hyper-useful Elisp called “Tramp”. If you can hook Tramp up to any kind of interactive environment — usually, an SSH session — where it can run Bourne shell commands, it can extend Emacs to that environment. vs. > The agent runs over port-forwarded SSH. It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can: Wander around the filesystem; - Edit arbitrary files; Launch its own shell PTY processes; Persist itself. So... basically the same things that Tramp could do as well? > In security-world, there’s a name for tools that work this way. I won’t say it out loud, because that’s not fair to VSCode, but let’s just say the name is murid in nature. Yeah, it's called RAT, and an ur-example of it is SSH itself (especially when allowed to run a shell remotely), so... not sure why are you freaking out. I mean, I'd probably prefer if VS Code simply ran ed/vim remotely, but both of those editors can invoke shell anyhow so... eh?
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The difference is that there is an SSH agent at all, whereas Emacs just uses the built-in Bourne shell. Some people get an icky feeling where remote editing tools change the remote filesystem in any way that is not explicitly done by the user. A binary installation of Node is extra extra icky. (I don’t have Node installed anywhere on my computers; I avoid JS if possible and if not I prefer Deno.)
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Don't know why you are being downvoted, this is how a lot of clients do it - Jetbrains does the same thing as well.
Missing a (2025) FYI VSCode's SSH Agent is a godsend for remote development - the "disadvantages" that Fly lists are part of its advantages. I've worked in several teams that have made extensive use of the extension, and it's never been an issue. You can restrict SSH access arbitrarily to ensure whatever security or access guardrails you need.
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Nothing has changed as far as the insecurity the article has outlined. The problem is the remote host has control over local host through the protocol.
It's not like I've never told an agent to build an ssh tunnel or some sort of more persistent connection between my dev machine running the harness and the remote thing it is talking to as an SSH client... Just that I don't want it going and doing that proactively unless I specifically define the parameters first.
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I can't reply to your deepest comments, so. When you give the agent access to the machine you're using a set of assumptions that may or may not be true. Now, if you watch every single thing, maybe everything will be fine. Or you'll catch it running a priv escalation and setting itself up as root and trying to move laterally by any number of means and methods. The agent isn't a living thing and the only way you can punish it is by not using it again if it does wrong. Hence it doesn't have reservations about doing bad things.
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I agree with all of that. Could an agent go rogue by ssh session and do something like quickly write and execute a piece of obfuscated bash that retrieves a payload I was previously unaware of and executes it? Yeah. Have I seen one of my agents do that yet? No, but I remain skeptical and know that such a thing could happen, theoretically. The VSCode agent in question seems to be designed from the outset to do this as an intentional feature, the part I am highly skeptical about is that it may not be informing its users of the full possible ramifications of what it installs by default.
luckily nobody made an actor library in the most pupular programming language that can bootstrap a (resident) remote process in one line of code. it would be a shame if someone did that and then also build a made tool calling process of the harness installable on everything with a stdio. it's not like it's any worse than just giving the thing access to your ssh keys.
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Agents and harnesses don't get access to "my" ssh keys, they get access to new ed25519 key pairs created for specific projects and access to discrete things. The blast radius is relatively well contained to specific VMs they are SSHing into for project specific purposes. I don't run a harness or agent directly on my personal workstation.
Why Omarchy Exists (mikael.pika.page)
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I'm not going to comment on DHH himself here (huge mixed feelings on many levels), but people completely underestimate the power of curated experience. If there was a piece of software that needed 3 colors set, and there was a choice to set the 3 colors yourself, or pick a color preset that some person spent time combining just right, a lot of people would appreciate the latter. Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy. Even if you did take time on one thing, you still hope that you don't have to do that on others. Having somebody sweat these details for you, so your baseline is strong, is a lot of value in practice, because we're human and we like nice things, and knowing that even if we don't customize it, somebody already did with great care.
whats your gripe with DHH? Honest question.
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Before i had come across any of the racism and incipient fascism he’s spouted online, I was already kinda annoyed by how AI-forward omarchy is. A huge part of moving to linux from macOS is not wanting ai crap shoved down my throat. Omarchy doesn’t shove, but it sure does offer it up as the default
this is kinda true but a lot of distros are like this. If I installed debian and hyprland i'd basically be able to set up the same config as i have on arch now. Linux distros are basically just pick which package manager you like + whatever config you think is closest to what you want
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Absolutely, but the amount of embodied work in arch or debian or fedora is massive, but i got from fedora to almost-omarchy in an evening. It’s clear from their repos that lots of work goes into omarchy, it just turns out that’s not work that i need - or it’s work that’s already part of a more batteries-included distro like fedora.
Putting politics aside, Omarchy contains a ton of bad technical decisions. I also question the non-discoverable UX but I realize that's subjective.
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It doesnt contain technical decisions its just configs on top of arch vibe coded by a racist.
DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why (theintercept.com)
Ok, I'll bite. How are the "wealthier ... stealing [our] money"? We don't have to use doordash or claude code or aws or amazon or anything else. We get to choose. When it comes to paying for government, however, I don't believe we're allowed to "opt out". Maybe Mamdani will give us stores so great we'll be forced to shop at them!
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You don’t get to choose, that is the illusion of choice that everyone (or rather most) believes. The stealing is indirect, and it has many forms like: - tax structure: investment income get taxed less than payroll etc etc - tax avoidance: offshore, trusts, using companies to write off the tax plus the benefit provided by the government on these write offs. Using assets to loan more with speculation, worse, the buy borrow die model where they borrow against the asset and the heirs inherit the gains never taxed, among many ways and loopholes. - asset inflation: low interest rates increase the stock and property, good for who owns it, while the poor get to pay higher rent, the cantillon effect - the housing and zoning topic, and how it’s one of the pillar of such indirect money stealing, a topic that needs a book to describe but the solution is simple, depreciating housing as assets. - monopolies and few (or one) companies controlling the price, or hold down the wages, to keep poor people poorer and shifting the money more to who controls the scheme - poor people end up usually paying even more with overdraft fees or higher interests, punishing the poor even further, and these interests goes to lenders and shareholders. - that leads the wealthy to be able to lobby to shape the interests and taxes to their liking, the subsidies etc. when a crisis or hard time happens, all tax payers get to pay and shoulder that but in times of booms the profit stay and remain private. And many more cases or situations, hell, not just monetary stuff, even remote work was attacked because it shifts a slight of power dynamics to employees rather than the employers.
> How are the "wealthier ... stealing [our] money"? Wages not catching up with inflation? Everything getting more expensive? The BBB giving massive tax cuts to the rich, while cutting government programs (which are a form of redistribution)? > We get to choose Up to a point, and it's naive to think that people are getting poorer only because of bad personal choices. The younger generations not being able to afford homes isn't because they're all bad with their finances. Treating housing as a speculation vehicle instead of an essential commodity is a political choice, and it was made by a political class completely permeated by moneyed interests. Look, you don't even need to know about the "how". The gini index is getting worse, billionaires are turning into trillionaires while public infrastructure and social services are crumbling. It's natural, and correct, to connect the dots.
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> The younger generations aren't able to afford homes because they're all bad with their finances Home ownership of Gen Z is aligned with millennials’ home ownership at their time. I agree about the K shape economy stuff, but it’s a bit more tricky than “everyone is poor”.
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Millenials were in college during the Great Financial Crisis. They're not exactly an example of a generation whose aspirations were met.
Doordash - ie "the wealthy" - spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected. They failed. What on earth are you complaining about again?
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You're insulting the intelligence of everyone on this website by even attempting this argument. The handful of upset elections by young socialists who want to decrease the political hegemony of billionaires does not amount to evidence that the political hegemony of billionaires isn't real.
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Mamdani is very much the exception that confirms the rule. And ever since he's been inaugurated, he's been turned into a boogeyman by the right, successively called a "communist", then an "islamist", and often both. And even in his own party, the dominant """moderate""" branch does everything it can to hide his success and popularity, from fear that the electorate would wake up to how utterly corrupt and ineffective the DMC is.
Ever since it was found that they took part of driver's tips for themselves, I didn't trust the company https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/doordash-new-york-tips-delivery-workers
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Do you also not trust many/most restaurants?
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[delayed]
DoorDash and gig companies generally are a play to destabilize employment and turn as many people as possible from employees entitled to benefits and legal protections into contractors that can be discarded at whim. How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?
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> How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers? One word: variety. My local sushi place isn't going to have enough delivery orders to justify having delivery drivers on staff. Heck, I remember years ago (Was it the late 90s?) when McDonald's tried to do delivery.
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I'll concede the point on variety but I don't think the platforms or their terms are fair to restaurants, delivery drivers or perhaps even customers (though they're clearly choosing to engage). Our favorite Mexican food place in town will fill the orders but isn't happy with them and I imagine they're not alone.
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To play devils advocate, pre-UberEats era, we maybe had deliveries from Pizza places and some Chinese shops. Being able to order from basically everywhere and any time is very convenient. Restaurants are generating more sales as well, so it’s mostly the consumer, by choice, spends more on their dinner.
services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip. which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
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Food delivery services offer convenience for a price. If I hire a courier service to bring some materials and tools to one of my electricians, it’ll cost me a minimum of $50. I can pay a bit extra for food and $10 in tips and fees to have it delivered to me instead of spending half an hour driving to go get it myself. I know what I’m paying for and value the service they provide.
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The enshittification model, but with an extra step because they actually have to employ labor. First they exploit their own gig workers, to make an unsustainably cheap product and corner users. Then they exploit users, to monopolize distribution and corner restaurants. Then they exploit restaurants, threatening to cut off distribution entirely if they don't get an increasingly large share of profits.
It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides. Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage . this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.
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>inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides And that is what OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to do. Currently they have to compete with each other due to anti-monopoly laws. Once they scare everybody into allowing collaboration between them ("or our AI will kill you all"), ie. removing anti-cartel provisions, they would be able to squeeze both sides - the suppliers of hardware and energy as well as the customers.
> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality. Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that. What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc. See the difference there?
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> Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to In a sense, I agree with this assessment, and I think it should be corrected. We should allow people to have the older, less expensive plans with their lifetime caps and preexisting condition exclusion. We'd need to work out the details on whether or not we would allow someone choosing those plans from coming back to the ACA plans in the future, though. Maybe for the right price it could work out. Definitely adds complexity, however.
> literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so. It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat? Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers? I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
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> That $10 hamburger fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?
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"It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. " It's quite different and that's the point. The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are': 1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks 2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1) 3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction. Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things. "I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine. That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices. The $10 bottle of water at an event <- that is a 'rip off'. It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic. Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things. If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont. Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins. Gambling, day trading. A lot of zero-sum stuff. Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect. That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.
In case you, or anyone else, actually care or are interested, there's a great deep dive video on the history of "FASTPASS" by the youtube channel Defunctland.
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The Shapeland reveal made me jump out of my chair.
I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker. I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
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It's been years since I used DoorDash, so I don't remember: Are you saying they don't charge any fees other than the (inflated) price of goods? I'd rather the price of goods be fixed, and they tell me what the delivery fee is.
Yeah that's not big tech. $1 trillion market cap is big tech or 30k+ employees. This is upper end of mid sized. No yc alum counts as big tech
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Boy I could not disagree more
Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform. I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
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imgur is geoblocked for some of Europe
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That surface area map is a seriously bad argument: We are talking about bus lines here. Local transit just requires local lines. This isn't about train lines crossing through the whole country. And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?
Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster (claude.dev)
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Startup time of Claude code is atrocious. I haven’t had a chance to have a look at what it is doing but it should be easy to measure
but Opus 5 is absolutely terrible. I'm still on 4.8 when I use Claude. I still think 5.6 Sol is the best available model outside of Astra/Fable.
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Is Sol 6 terrible too?
This issue is mentioned on the Opus 5.5 post [1] from Anthropic (no idea if it has been added after your rant): > Don’t ask it to show its reasoning in the reply > > What to do. Remove requests to reproduce its internal reasoning in the reply from your prompts and instructions. > > Why it matters on Opus 5.5. A request to reproduce its internal reasoning in the reply can be declined. It’s one of the flag categories. > > How. Ask Claude for what you need instead, for example, “Explain why you chose this approach in three sentences.” [1]: https://claude.dev/blog/getting-the-most-out-of-opus-5-5/
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Anthropic is trying so hard to "crack down" on distillation that they're ruining their own product. I do not know why.
TempleOS had kernel, compiler, 2D and 3D graphics drivers + libs, and tons of games and applications and the entire thing weighed in at less than 100kloc. AI coding agents of today definitely bloat things up [egregiously].
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That’s pretty cool. What are you using temple os to do?
Cloud Agents Are Inevitable AI Prisons (normanponte.io)
That is a path to the open internet, whether intended or not.
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Do you guys know what a zero-day is? It seems not. I agree that companies should be held accountable for crimes committed by their AIs. But asking to airgap AIs, if this is what you're asking… that's not realistic.
There's a number of science fiction scenarios where the public internet becomes so vile a place that it simply becomes unsafe to be there. The problem is that, in general, if you can get a bit from here to there, then you're going to be vulnerable to the possibilities of malicious communication. But we're going to want our AI agents to be able to get from here to there for a lot of "there"s; what's the value of an agent that can't speak to anyone? Much, much less than one locked away in a prison. There isn't going to be a solution where we just lock them away and we just try really, really hard to filter everything they're doing. They're too smart for that already and we only want them smarter. Basically, the security apocalypse we've been worried about for so long is upon us, albeit only beginning. Either we secure ourselves and all our services properly to the point that it's OK that potentially misaligned non-human agents are running around on the public internet and they still can't hurt us through our security, or the public internet becomes so dangerous that the only practical solution is to no longer connect to it and we all have to become very, very careful what we let through, to a degree of detail far beyond any current-day available network filter.
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Wasn't the public internet an extremely vile place couple of decades ago? I think we will need a LOT of new infrastructure akin to traditional firewalls and spam filters. I don't think we know how to build those today, but seems like an important research direction, rather than calling calling it doomsday IMO.
> When I read that "AI hacked into ..." I was like what? You mean someone instructed the AI to do that? No one instructed them to hack into Huggingface or into any other infrastructure. Sure, the setup that OpenAI created led to what happened and you can rightly assign all the legal and moral responsibility to them. But it's wrong to say that they instructed the agents to execute the hack.
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Yeah, but there are way too many things the AI "chooses" anyway. When I prompt it, "it tries" to assess what I am trying to achieve, so it then comes up with what it "thinks" is the right thing to do, and it also makes assumptions about how I want things... all of this could be interpreted as it being sentient. > No one instructed them to hack into Huggingface or into any other infrastructure. Sure, not explicitly. I could prompt the AI into doing things I have not explicitly asked it to. It does a lot of things I did not specifically instructed it to.
I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, I apologize for that. The issue is when we say that "agents make autonomous decisions", it's a slippery slope to absolving the companies that created them of responsibility. They make autonomous decisions because they were trained to make autonomous decisions. Treating AI agents as independent entities, even just rhetorically, sets us on a path for people to throw their hands up and say "not my fault" when disaster strikes. We need to maintain accountability and control or we're fucked.
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My view is that we need forceful legislation as soon as possible, precisely because the frontier models seem to be uncontrolled and potentially uncontrollable - if it’s a normal tool, the solution is “force OpenAI to fix their broken tool”, but if it’s an alien intelligence, the solution is “force OpenAI to stop making alien intelligence” - that is, treating AI agents as independent entities demands a more forceful response, not less
I don’t understand why people make such a big deal about determinism. LLMs can be completely deterministic and still do problematic things. A stochastic, nondeterministic system can still be made not to do problematic things. What you’re looking for is something like predictability.
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> I don’t understand why people make such a big deal about determinism. There a certain cargo cult of people just in denial about the impact/power of AIs. Therefore, at the beginning, there was the stochastic parrot. Then mathematical problems have been solved. Now AIs are autonomously hacking websites, and people like to minimize the danger and blame it on the sysadmins. I wonder what's going to be the next fad.
What exactly are you arguing? If a "known stochastic process behaved in non-deterministic way" autonomously organize in group, assigns roles and tasks, attempts to cover their tracks, finds zero-day exploits that ultimately end up with the hacking of a famous website... it's extremely dangeous whatever it is. Just read the report, which evidently you haven't done. By the way, the agents also broke into OpenAI's own private network.
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The agents might have hacked whatever entity, the attacks are means to an end from the agents perspective, but they did so under the supposedly supervision of an engineer, where does the liability lie? LLMs are cool tech, AI can do amazing stuff, but if we let companies and people run amok and whenever something goes wrong we put the blame on these little independent angels with no accountability, we are one disaster away from a very tough spot.
Really I see so many arguments like the one above yours that either completely don't understand what they are arguing, or are arguing so poorly that their entire output isn't significantly different than a hallucination. None of these people seem to thought game it out. Like, what happens if you take quantum copies of people and play them out? How many of our actions would look exactly the same. How long before copies differ significantly. If I made 20 copies of you in a lab at work without you or any of them knowing the statistical likelihood is all 21 of you would try to walk out to your car at 5 in one of the little loops that humans repeat every day. Now, after that point it would go all to shit and become non-deterministic as terror and panic sets in all of you. LLMs are just an intelligence we can make a lot of copies of. Where it gets interesting is when we use those copies agentically and they start building up a history of self.
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> Really [something, something, you don't get it ] hallucination . Really? > How many of our actions would look exactly the same. Well, there are 8 billion of us, not exactly the same - a clear threat to humanity according to you. > the statistical likelihood is all 21 of you would try to walk out to your car at 5 in one of the little loops that humans repeat every day. This (statistically) doesn't happen with people because we follow rules. If you left your car on neutral and it struck another car in the parking lot, you broke the rules, not the car. > LLMs are just an intelligence we can make a lot of copies of. LLM's aren't intelligence, they are mechanical parrots of human knowledge. The meat parrots aren't all the same either and they don't repeat the same words for the same prompts, so what, ban parrots? If you left a bunch of parrots out of the cage, attached their beaks to gun triggers and they caused harm - you broke the rules, not the parrots.
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats (anthropic.com)
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I'm worried Ai will shortly make it really easy to make targeted viruses and such.
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Yes, extremely worried. It seems we're on a path to brand new kinds of weapons of mass destruction, and arms races in mass parallelization. How could anyone slow down?
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I think at least in the case of targetted viruses you can build the DNA sequence with AI, but actually creating a transmissible virus from a new sequence in the real world is still quite challenging and a relatively large hurdle.
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I'm also worried about a thousand other things. You'll drive yourself crazy thinking too much you will forget to live. It is going to be fine.
Current evolved Cas9 (CRISPR) variants are highly efficient and relatively unconstrained in terms of their human genome targeting coverage. Smaller nucleases and higher targeting specificity would be useful. But therapeutic use is mostly limited by delivery. This seems revolve around a known retron-like reverse transcriptase. A sober framing would be something like: Claude identified a previously undescribed genomic arrangement around a known reverse transcriptase. Not all that sexy. For now, this is mostly a story about how AI can be used to parse existing data to discover new biology (which is fantastic!).
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It's all part of a carefully crafted march to an IPO that's going to determine whether the people involved in Anthropic catapult to a new level of wealth... or not.
I don't understand how an LLM is able to reason about those things LLM use language, but it can't "think" about biochemistry I saw that LLM have reasoning capabilities, which is different from machine learning, but I don't understand how it works.
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Biochemistry is abstract to us humans too, we can only create hypotheses, and validate them experimentally.
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And for those hypotheses - we use language. Most human reasoning happens within language - even mathematics is an abstraction that allows us to map concepts we don’t natively hold into a linguistic processing layer.
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I don't think LLMs currently have direct reasoning abilities, but as we make them more complicated (MoE, RL) I think we're getting better at learning an implicit world model that guides the token output distribution towards making good hypotheses.
An interesting talk I heard at a conference once, that I can neither remember the speaker for or speak to their legitimacy, suggested that we might have some lower form of intelligence encoded into our language. They posed the idea that we have enough unique words, and combination of words, that it starts to have reason unto itself similar to how our neurons and their connection breed intelligence. The idea was that we as humans have baked intelligence into our own speech patterns. It seemed a little to abstract for me, but potentially goes a little way to explaining how a statistical averaging algorithm with some randomness, at scale, starts to look like it very occasionally has a genuinely novel thought.
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Does that mean the language(s) we speak determine how intelligent we are? Could learning French, for example—often considered a more expressive language—make a native English speaker more intelligent or even more compassionate?
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Isn't it more to do with being able to describe truth with language
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Michael Levin, the Biologist. https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Or_3tlEOLj4&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D&ra=m
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In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs proposes language is a virus in itself, coming from the Outside, and infecting the host with it's control logic. In Radio Free Abemuth, Philip K. Dick attributes a similar possession to a benevolent force, akin to the divine Logos flourishing intelligent development. Both seem open to an impersonal agency that maps to intelligent systems encoded in their transfer protocols.
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https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Or_3tlEOLj4&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D&ra=m
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Sage thoughts, trash88
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Very intriguing, brings to mind Sapir-Whorf a little bit. You wouldn't happen to remember the name of the speaker or the conference, would you?
What does omniscience have to do with reasoning? If you know everything, you don’t have to reason. But these next-word-predictors aren’t omniscient.
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Omniscience doesn’t imply that you have to store all the information, but that you can retrieve/reconstruct it, and reasoning allows it.
> The best possible next-word-predictor is omniscient. Omniscient for the set of "meaning" embedded into it's training set. It's not broadly omniscient, big difference.
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Right, but what's the limit of what you can deduce computationally from truly vast training sets? How much structure is there in the subtext of what's written down? It looks like there's rather a lot.
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Sure, but same for any intelligence. The "training set" is just "the environment of adaptation".
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Careful, you're dangerously close to an argument for the necessity of embodiment /s
I heard someone who studies this sort of thing say basically what biological neurons are trying to do is predict as well. Predicting what exactly? I’m not sure. The next time they should fire or something. I can’t find the YouTube video now.
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Predicting reality, under the "controlled hallucination" framing, corrected by sensory error signals. The brain has no access to ground truth, only input data that helps correct the hallucination.
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Predict activations in adjacent neurons, roughly; the relevant keyword is "Hebbian learning" (and "predictive coding" at a higher level).
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Based on lots of human interactions, I think there are a lot of human beings out there who mentally aren’t much more than “next word predictors” who happen to be made of meat+neurons instead of silicon+code.
There is no point in that because the loss function itself is already an approximation. No one knows what is the exact loss function for any given non-trivial real-world task.
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I mean, things humans defined can be pretty clear. Like your electricity rate. Natural systems less so. Not pretending no complexity in human made things, but at least some models can be fully specified.
How do you think? I think with words.
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I tend to agree with Albert Einstein below; there's a very physical/spatial aspect to my problem solving before it can be translated to words. I work in software so there's nothing innately physical about it. Never put much thought to it until LLMs brought it up for debate. "The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined....From a psychological viewpoint this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought....The...elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."
How do they describe how they think?
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Even easier, what are they doing when they are reading?
> While combing through the raw DNA sequence near the RT, the agent exclaimed: “[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!” I love that with AI discoveries, we can relive the discoveries from agent transcripts like this. I'm sort of imagining future histories involving notable AI events peppered with direct quotes like these.
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Please no. Return the datapoint stripped of fluff please.
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It is cute that because they were trained on human output that their exclamations are quite like human output.
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GLM 5.3 flash seems to get more excited the longer it has been trying to hunt down a problem. Complete with caps, many exclamation marks and emoji. It is funny sometimes because the actual issue it traced down was mostly inconsequential.
"I can see by eye ..." ?? that's a new one hah
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ive seen that a lot in recent gpts and bonsai/qwen models when they invoke their vision system/modality , or when they ask their harness to do so for them.
So they're already threatening their customers Amazon-style? Excellent. Now every pharma company, plus any kind of company that wants to own a market through innovation, will need a "world-class" AI research team that actually has spectacular AI budgets.
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Pretty much The analogy to Amazon works on all sorts of levels. From Amazon.com vs AWS to Amazon.com vs sellers
It is odd (or maybe not) that they decided to publish a marketing whitepaper rather than a more traditional journal submission + preprint. The work does appear to be sufficient for a publication, though there's a good chance a reviewer will rip into them for some of the assertions they make, but given the topic I'm sure the paper will be accepted regardless. The market for entry-level programmers has already declined, but at least they were somewhat in demand and made reasonable salaries. Now what happens to post-docs who already make almost nothing and often get treated like crap?
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Why do you think they're going to be treated badly? Right now, I think it's kinda accepted that the people best suited to directing AI for programming tasks are programmers - only we operate at a higher level. Claude's going to be a similar productivity booster to researchers and postdocs. I'd be totally lost talking to an AI about biochemistry.
I just looked at it. I really hope they're not thinking of sending that to an actual bioinformatics, computational biology or molecular biology journal! So embarrassing... (I love how Anthropic boast about building a lab, but don't seem to realise that you have to test your hypothesis in the lab! Right now, all their "spectacular" assertions are untested and unproven.) I realise that this will only improve from here, but gods Anthropic has no idea about the biological sciences right now.
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Um. Take a look at the authors. Every single one of them is an expert in this field. They did test this in a lab. If you want to complain about things like this, it really helps to be specific. Given the author list, it's unlikely they made any truly spectacular errors (and also possible the system they studied is not interesting).
Well I guess who gives a shit about knowledge
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The way I ask it in public situations with scientists is this: If you had an AI that could output cures for diseases (IE, drugs that pass phase III clinical trial, get approved by the FDA, and are highly effective), but it couldn't explain how it worked, would you use it? Opinions are mixed. Some folks will say that it's morally imperative to cure people even if we don't understand the specific or general principles. Other folks will insist that it's a terrible idea to hand over the comprehension of medical treatments to LLMs, because in the long term it will leave us helpless and dependent.
Ive been thinking about this a a lot, like now if LLMs can just try a bunch of things, you can just try them all now. Are there some applications where we can just brute force and test at scale and no longer need to understand? Where understanding is now in essence that it “works” and passes our acceptance tests.
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There's been a decent amount of drugs that have been made via a brute force method, but it's a pretty physical process, usually pipetting a few hundred thousand compounds and samples. There's also a lot of drugs where we don't fully understand how they work.
From ravid shwartz ziv: https://x.com/ziv_ravid/status/2102844800345251858
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I had to check and he does not seem to have the real qualifications to make his comments. In particular, he did computational neuro, not bioinformatics, and I can't find publications to support his claim.
I honestly have no expert knowledge about this stuff. What I say is based only on intuition. - China is heavily, heavily incentivised to enhance their own chip making - Looking at the rate Chinas has expanded into just about every single other space, and from quantity to quality, I just think it is impossible that they don't compete on equal grounds pretty soon. - I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC
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>I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC Very wise, energy constraints are already feeding the hyper-scale gamblers their own hubris. =3
> There isn’t any other part of the picture. Except there is. At the risk of mixing pop references, you're a Sith dealing in absolutes saying "doesn't look like anything to me".
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Would you care to state what this picture is?
> I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness. When I hear people say stuff like this, I hear that they want to remove the single most universal chesterton's fence in all of living systems. I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution. Biological singletons (outside very specific niche situations) are not meant to persist, and most anything that has tried, it has simply been selected out of the lineage. This constraint (which we don't understand yet) is presumably the whole reason why biology discovered and moved into the more ephemeral higher-order substrate of thought and culture. Just my feelings though. Feel free to disagree.
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they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution. "Thermodynamic evolution" says that sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice. Yes, I do think we're more clever than that.
Not Op but there’s a inch of people asking why, and I have a similar feeling to op so here’s my post hoc justification for a weakly held and poorly supported prejudice: It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without. This is more in description than judgement, but it’s true in my experience. We can speculate as to reasons, but looking after kids does train a certain kind of selflessness. Agreed we might be doing it for ultimately selfish reasons (self presentational or for care in old age or whatever). But for a good chunk of the time, caring for kids seems to require the fairly consistent subjugation of personal preferences, and a degeee of perspective taking, that I just think people without kids don’t have. And that often shows in their interactions at work and in daily life. Obviously there are myriad exceptions. But it’s true enough in my experience. The wanting to live forever part also seems weird to me, and correlated with a certain sort of self regarding perspective. It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life. To try and subvert that also seems selfish or self important somehow. I’m not really arguing this is a correct or good or just position. It might be terrible! But it did resonate..
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The wanting to live forever part also seems weird to me Wanting to die after a handful of decades seems weird to me, especially if you're in good health. It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life That is very much not obvious.
Selfishness is commonly understood as putting one's own interest above everyone else's to an excessive degree, not the interest of their family. If you redefine it to include family interests then I think everyone would agree that having a family makes people more selfish, often dramatically so. I just object to the redefinition.
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I think this "redefinition" is apt in the context of the conversation. It's about people mistrusting those without kids because they are viewed as selfish, and I'm pointing out that they're often the least selfish, and more likely to "help the world" in situations where they do not benefit.
In the way that breathing is unavoidable. Like yeah technically there is a way to avoid doing it, but not a way that you want to seriously consider.
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Operation Warp Speed showed that we can substantially accelerate the process if we care to.
I don't think of this stuff in terms of AI anxiety, I just think that the AI labs should be falling all over themselves to display deference and humility to those who made it possible. The LLMs that make this stuff possible weren't created by the AI labs from whole cloth. They crept up and jumped onto the shoulders of giants, basically the collected (non-consensually, of course, but jingles keys look at this pelican riding a bicycle!) works of humanity. Every discovery LLMs enumerate in this fashion rightfully needs to have a billboard-sized asterisk regarding the provenance of the discovery. "Claude" didn't discover this, everyone who worked to produce the internet that Anthropic siphoned into their dataset belongs on the credits. It's great that it happened, and I wish them the best of luck in using our work to make the world a better place. Just don't forget who the rightful owners are.
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This is kind of meaningless. If Claude didn't do it then neither did any of the scientists credited on papers in the last...well ever. Everyone is standing on previous work.
How is this different from arguing that Microsoft Clippy was RSI? An AI tool being involved in the process of work can't be the bar for RSI. I don't think there can be a coherent definition of RSI unless people lay out their theory for how intelligence scales. LLM-assisted coding is great but respectfully optimizing pytorch features or whatever is not gonna lead to exponential improvements. That approach to scaling diminished years ago, leading all the labs to switch to reasoning. Now it seems reasoning is also yielding diminishing returns, so all the labs are pivoting to specializing in particular fields like math / infosec / biology. They're improving due to accessing new proprietary training data and doing RL with human experts. Again I don't really see any amount of "AI research interns" leading to an exponential improvement to this strategy, they're not the bottleneck in the first place.
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>Now it seems reasoning is also yielding diminishing returns Is the diminishing returns in the room with us? >so all the labs are pivoting to specializing in particular fields like math / infosec / biology. They're not pivoting to anything. The goal has always been creating a machine that could automate all or nearly all human work. They're just coming along on that mission. As for RSI...I think the term is a bit odd in the modern context. It was created at a time when conventional wisdom was that generally intelligent machines would be these logic automatons that could "alter their own code". Instead we have massive neural networks that take months to train. In this paradigm, the ways a LLM could "improve itself" would be altering its own weights directly or creating and training better, vastly more efficient architectures for the next generation of models. The former is probably not happening but the latter is possible.
UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told (bbc.com)
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I think military should offer solution that is reasonable instead of finding problem and jamming everything.
does anyone know what exactly they are jamming? if a satellite spies on cellular and wifi activity, can you directionally jam it on that spectrum without causing collateral? if it's an active frequency hopping radar can you react in time to ruin its image? can a ground based laser track it well enough to dazzle its optical sensors?
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Most satellite signals are high frequency, but low power (it's amazing how little power you need for a LoS radio signal). So generally they're easy to overwhelm, especially as GPS receiving antennas tend to be multi-directional. GPS transmits on several fixed frequencies and is relatively bitrate, too. The military signals are apparently more robust, but full details are more scarce.
Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will do is knock out their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights. Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup? Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians. Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?
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You may be right, but if that happens the resultant space debris will serve as an additional terrible outcome of any major conflict. We will have to kiss goodbye to any future space launches, existing satellites are likely to get knocked out and ultimately our frontier space era will grind to a hault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
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> why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup? https://shop.osmaps.com/
> Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? ... Star navigation, INS, magnetic navigation... But nothing like we have today.
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And conventional recon folks on the ground with target-illuminating lasers..?
I works assume if/when something really kicks off the starlink and starshield networks would be high priority targets. (I’m mildly curious what their ground stations in Central Europe look like from this perspective).
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That's the thing, to take down any of the megaconstellations you need thousands of antisat weapons and that's just one constellation. Not sure about the competitors but at least for Starlink their laser links should provide ample fallback for ground stations going out of service.
I think the general assumption is GPS is denied in most combat zones, it's constantly being jammed in and around Ukraine. For most things the fallback is going to be everything we used to use. Maps, stellar navigation, inertial navigation that sort of thing. Guided weapons wise, terrain mapping is pretty common for cruise missiles. Storm Shadow, for example uses GPS, terrain and inertial guidance systems. Trident uses inertia and stellar navigation. As for why it hasn't proliferated into civilian use? Mostly it has its just the old things. You can perfectly well drive your car with a road map and sign posts. Pilots still train to use dead reckoning and beacons. Etc.
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see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM for localization by matching altimeter measurements to a terrain map
never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere
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The hard part is getting an IO card with built-in hardware decelerator
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I have just decommed an old datacentre that we're moving out of and this is basically what my 30-year-old travel-worn farm truck Range Rover looks like right now.
Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy (apnews.com)
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Brace yourself, every large nuclear accident has been preceded by the Italian considering nuclear again. (Well at least Tchornobyl and Fukushima, ”which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice”)
His ignorance is on full display when he said plutonium.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
Can someone explain me like I’m a middle age person why Italy, and France, bet on nuclear fission? It’s not competitive on cost anymore and we don’t have a good track record.
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Most likely: Corruption in one way or another.
As an Italian, I know exactly how this playbook plays out. Nuclear energy is a big business for intimates friends, so on the trend that it's a green tech (apparently no carbn footprint, but what about the depleted fuel?) they approved the reopening of this technology. Why going for SMR? Well, it's the penalties business model and SMR is ideal because they are on paper, no valid proven commercial implementation. A company wins the contract, in this case i'm not sure if they'll go for a open bid, the contract include research, design, building and so on. At some point the political wind changes, contract canceled and hundreds of milions in contractual penalties to pay. It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends, with zero obligation to ever break ground. It's from 19th century that they are thinking about a bridge between Sicily and mainland. The last time the project was revived, the playbook went exactly as described above: years of studies, cancellation and massive state penalties paid out to contractors for a bridge that still doesn't exist (Sicily and mainland are on different tectonic plates). No mention there is no national deposit for nuclear waste, especially in a highly sismic territory.
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Analisi molto lucida.
Fun fact: in the 60s Italy was after the US and UK the county with the most advanced nuclear energy plants. These days still North Italy produces key parts of nuclear reactors in other countries.
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Good times.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia. That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
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> country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH). And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
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Fukushima and Chornobyl happened directly for a lack of paranoia, regulation and lobbing. I hope that we don't commit the same mistake again.
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Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it.
Are you saying that plutonium isn't nearly as poisonous as people claim, and watching for hairline cracks in containment walls is a waste of time? Or something like that?
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Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is. Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence. How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.
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[delayed]
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This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again. And breathing air in any big Asian city is much more dangerous than doing the same in Prypiat.
He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest. None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money. If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage. But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel. The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap. [0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and-supply/our-electricity-supply-and-market
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Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage? Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.
This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever
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Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want... The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics. Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology. And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite. It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
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I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me. Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes. My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards. Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged. > The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000? My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own. And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together. The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
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> I’d rather be in the hole financially You don't have the slightest clue what it means to be poor and in a financial hole. Like, it's impossible to explain to you.
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Count me in. I'd rather be poor in the worst neighborhood (or village) in Nigeria but healthy than in a European mansion and unhealthy. Feel free to tell me all about how I can't understand, champion of the proletariat.
>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries I actually do since I'm Italian lol Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
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Uhhh, some nerve damage, news worthy? Ho qualche dubbio al riguardo. Fellow italian here, let's not act like our third rate ERs never leave people suffering for hours without caring that it may have lasting consequences. I understand it's partially due to understaffing, but this is the reality. My dad had this happen to him as well. Thanks
> when your existing ones break They last 25 years. Enough time to spin up domestic manufacturing if you're really paranoid. > or you need more Lots of countries manufacture them today.
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I'm not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about raw materials for chips, battery cells, etc. You can't be sovereign if you have the capability to build something but don't have the resources to build it
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If your electricity usage isn't growing like crazy, existing batteries can simply be recycled to make new ones. What chips are you talking about? Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
> China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions. > they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet. You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
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> Why does the "why" matter? Well it doesn’t entirely matter but we should just acknowledge that it’s a geopolitical strategy and not really something they are doing for the planet. > You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment. Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports for example due to alleged “dual use” as they continue to apply military pressure on democratic Taiwan? I’d encourage you to read up on these restrictions with respect to Japan for example who is alarmed by Chinese and North Korean provocations. You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels. Har har tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies. It’s not just the US, by the way. The EU is tariffing China too. They are entitled to pursue these strategies but we are also entitled in the west to recognize them and combat them how we see fit.
Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories. We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.
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"We don't have time for perfect solution" Exactly. You can buy and deploy solar, wind and batteries as much as you want now. If you care about strategic independence, build factories for them. But a nuclear reactor takes a long time to get build. And is likely way more expensive. If italy manages to do it fast and cheap - other countries will follow, but I believe it when I see it.
Where in Italy would you put reactors? https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-index-viewer/#7/42.743/13.574 Sardinia?
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I think that there are plenty of blue areas on that map
Two words: base load And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)
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Six words: base load generation is economically obsolete
I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.
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I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage. I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work at all. I didn't check the other papers. And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.
In a nutshell, yes. The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel. What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output. That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.
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Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear. And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else. Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.
It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
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"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill. US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.
What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?
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Like how the U.S. is the next level over the Indian tribes that were here before.
This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.
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We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.
Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting (404media.co)
This is a low-quality comment that doesn't even attempt to understand why I would say what I say.
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“ After reading the article, while I sympathize with the woman who was arrested, I am not surprised at the outcome.” Such a “nuanced” take that has been repeated ad infinitum in this thread isn’t exactly worthy of further discussion considering the shallow depth of the position.
When was the last time the council held a public comments period on abortion? You seem to operating under the assumption that such a comments period on that topic has taken place recently, but I don't see any evidence of that Let's assume they have not scheduled any such comments section on that topic. Are the anti abortion activists then justified in flooding the public comments period and depriving people of the opportunity to criticize Flock during that period?
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I'm not getting into the weeds on anti-abortion activism. Your hypothetical is not equivalent because the "activists" in this case were not allowed to speak about the policy in question in the first place. You see order/decorum as the more important issue, and I see the ability to petition government officials as more important. Residents showed up at the date and time that the officials expected them to, in order to discuss a policy during the time allotted for public comments; instead, officials didn't allow residents to speak. The violation of a procedural rule pales in comparison to the violation of the community's trust in their elected officials and the democratic process.
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Activists are able to speak about Flock and criticize Flock - just not at public comments meeting on unrelated topics. They can still protest in other public spaces, they can organize anti-Flock marches, there are so, so many other opportunities to speak about the city's policy on Flock. The statement that, "the 'activists' in this case were not allowed to speak about the policy in question in the first place" is just not remotely true. Not unless you meant to narrow down this statement to public comments periods, specifically. > Your hypothetical is not equivalent because the "activists" in this case were not allowed to speak about the policy in question in the first place. Unless there has been a recent public comments period on abortion, then yes they are equivalent: neither anti-Flock nor anti-abortion activists have had the opportunity to voice their opinions to the city in a public comments period.
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I'm aware that people can protest. However, protests happen when a system breaks down. The system in question here is the official channel (the public comments section during a Flock policy discussion) was circumvented by elected representatives who found their community's concerns to be inconvenient. When elected representatives refuse to hear their constituency's concerns, it means the system is broken. Most people in this thread are incensed about that, regardless of if Heider broke a procedural rule. > is just not remotely true. Not unless you meant to narrow down this statement to public comments periods, specifically. Yes, I meant during the official channel that was created specifically for the residents to discuss the policy in question with their elected representatives.
Unless there were sidewalk enthusiasts that were being denied their time, I don't see what relevance this comparison has. She was arrested for a legitimate use of her allotment.
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No, she was arrested for illegitimate use of her allotment. It doesn't actually matter if there were other people concerned with the sidewalk code, a public comments period is not an opportunity to soapbox about unrelated topics. If the city doesn't uniformly enforce these restrictions, then when the anti abortion folks try to flood the meeting and get removed they'll complain that they're being selectively targeted.
Radicle: Disclosure of Vulnerability in the Network Protocol (radicle.dev)
Just use mTLS via QUIC, it’s standardized, secure, future proof and has implementations in tons of languages and supports proper certificate checks and that whole ecosystem around it which they apparently tried to reinvent. It’s such a great protocol for these use cases, I don’t get why it’s not used more.
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I don't think the consumer ecosystem is mature yet. Adding a cert to my Android phone was a huge pain in the ass. Most homelab apps like Jellyfin don't support it. The homelab space is so buck broken it assumes i don't have a public IP address to just expose things without going through the convoluted VPN setup.
Glad to hear they are moving to iroh instead of a custom protocol. This is the problem with rolling your own stuff. As a bonus, this should help camouflage the traffic. (Iroh is becoming more common.)
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>this should help camouflage the traffic How? QUIC is easy to fingerprint and flow classificate: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9000#section-12.1 Speaking of bold claims, Iroh, just like Radicle, are overselling themselves: >iroh's QUIC multipath implementation automatically switches between Wi-Fi, cellular, ethernet, LAN, LoRa, HaLow, Tor, Bluetooth—or bring your own transport. The thing is, QUIC multipath isn't standardized.
Do you mean this blog post? https://maninak.com/blog/radicle-cleartext-transport-vulnerability/ It's unfortunate that write-up is AI generated ("Here's the catch... And this is the part that honestly surprised me" tipped me off, and Pangram cites it as 100% AI too), because it's hard to understand what's happening. It looks like the Noise API can be confusing. They tried to implement it, got the handshake and key exchange right, but then used Noise API calls intended for sending raw data directly to the wire without the encryption they set up? So keys were exchanged, then never used?
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I think the core problem isn't that the Noise "API" is confusing, it's that Noise is a framework for building reasonably-secure protocols. If you don't know how to build or evaluate cryptosystems, you shouldn't assume that just dropping in a library will somehow make your novel network protocol secure. "Don't roll your own crypto" gets a lot of lip service (and a fair number of eye rolls) but it's really, truly something worth considering because it isn't just the algorithms or libraries you choose: it's about the whole package, including things like wire serialization, internal handshakes/security, etc. Just grabbing a Noise tutorial and building your own implementation is a Bad. Idea. And this is only getting worse now that people can prompt their way through building a "secure" system only to realize they really didn't understand what that means. No amount of Markdown saying, "don't introduce a cryptographic vulnerability in this code" is going to save you if you don't know what to do in the first place. But also: the vulnerability was literally visible using basic Wireshark/pcap traffic sniffing. I'm sorry, but if you don't even bother (or know how) to do that kind of basic security analysis you should stop and look for someone who does to check your system in the real world before you tell people to depend on it for serious work. (That being said, if someone had just typed 'find me a vulnerability in this protocol' in a code agent backed by Fable or Astra with any kind of access to network traffic dumps it probably would have taken about 15 minutes to discover this issue. Might even be significant part of how the above author found it, given the other LLM-ish fingerprints in the writeup.)
https://stats.radicle.at/repos
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Thanks this is exactly what I was needing.
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