Unlurker|Replay|About
California fire wipes out toilet paper warehouse (usatoday.com)
•
Not a bad headline, USAToday. Not particulary subtle, but it works.
•
Ok, so you have a problem with your boss. Fine. Solve it, sue them, whatever. But you don't go and endanger the lives of your co-workers and countless emergency responders. What an idiot.
•
Also don’t film yourself committing the crime.
•
Context: Video of the guy who started it. Here's an AI slop article from yahoo that features it. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/kimberly-clark-fire-suspect-said-110046505.html
•
Bidets FTW. We love ours. Takes 10 minutes to get accustomed to as an adult, zero as a child.
ChatGPT Pro now starts at $100/month (chatgpt.com)
•
It looks like its called prolite. https://snipboard.io/jmGKfM.jpg
•
For me it's not the price. It's the fact that they obviously read my prompts and may even use a derived version of my data for training. As it's very clear in the meantime that SAMA lies most of the time, there's just no way I can trust this company in any way.
•
are your prompts that important that you would not use SOTA models just to protect them? For me, they are just a means to an end and disposable.
•
So.. would you mind releasing all your code on GitHub?
•
Can you guys remind me again why you're doing this?
•
They are actively exploiting the compute shortages of Anthropic. In our team we're pushing for more or less vanilla and portability, since the best harness today might not be the best one in 6 months.
•
Very good move. In my experience, for system programming at least, GPT 5.4 xhigh is vastly superior to Claude Opus 4.6 max effort. I ran many brutal tests, including reconstructing for QEMU the SCSI controller (not longer accessible) of a SVSY UNIX of the early 90s used in a 386. Side by side, always re-mirroring the source trees each time one did a breakthrough in the implementation. Well, GPT 5.4 single handed did it all, while Opus continued to take wrong paths. The same for my Redis bug tracking and development. But 200$ is too much for many people (right now, at least: the reality is that if frontier LLMs are not democratized, we will end paying like a house rent to a few providers), and also while GPT 5.4 is much stronger, it is slower and less sharp when the thing to do is simple, so many people went for Claude (also because of better marketing and ethical concerns, even if my POV is different on that side: both companies sell LLM models with similar capabilities and similar internal IP protection and so forth, to me they look very similar in practical terms). This will surely change things, and many people will end with a Claude 5x account + a Codex 5x account I bet.
•
I completely agree with you on both the technical and ethical reasoning. Thank you for speaking out. I think it's important that reputable engineers like you do so. The Claude gang gaslighting is unhinged right now. It would be none of my concern but I have to deal with it in the real world - my customers are susceptible to these memes. I'm sure others have to deal with similar IRL consequences, too.
•
+1 to this, I've found GPT/Codex models consistently stronger in engineering tasks (such as debugging complex, cross-systems issues, concurrency problems, etc). I use both OpenAI and Anthropic models, though for different purposes, what surprises me is how underrated GPT still feels (or, alternatively, how overhyped Anthropic models can be) given how capable it is in these scenarios. There also seems to be relatively little recognition of this in the broader community (like your recent YouTube video). My guess is that demand skews toward general codegen, rather than the kind of deep debugging and systems work where these differences really show.
•
The $100/mo giving access to GPT Pro (with reduced usage) is a nice counter to the just teased Claude Mythos. But GPT 5.4 xhigh being able to perform that kind of low-level reconstruction task is very impressive already.
•
Thanks for confirming my impressions, it's been like 4 months now that I've arrived at the same conclusions. GPT models are just better at any kind of low-level work: reverse engineering including understanding what the decompiled code/assembly does, renaming that decompiled code (functions/types), any kind of C/C++, way more reliable security research (Opus will find way more, but most will turn out to be false positives). I've had GPT create non-trivial custom decompilers for me for binaries built with specific compilers (it's a much simpler task than what IDA Pro/Ghidra are doing but still complex), and modify existing Java decompilers. Regarding speed, I don't use xhigh that often, and surprisingly for me GPT 5.4 high is faster than Claude 4.6 Opus high (unless you enable fast mode for Opus). Of course I still use Opus for frontend, for some small scripts, and for criticizing GPT's code style, especially in Python (getattr).
•
In the SCSI controller work I mentioned, a very big part of the work was indeed reasoning about assembly code and how IRQs and completion of DMAs worked and so forth. Opus, even if TOOLS.md had the disassembler and it was asked to use it many times, didn't even bothered much. GPT 5.4 did instead a very great reverse engineering work, also it was a lot more sensible to my high level suggestions, like: work in that way to make more isolated progresses and so forth.
•
This is like the 2010s hosting price wars.
•
That has me quite tempted. In general, I stay under the Plus limits, but I do watch my consumption. I could use `/fast` mode all of the time, with extra high reasoning, and use gpt-5.4-pro for especially complex tasks. It wasn't worth 10x the price to me before, but 5x is approachable.
•
5.4, in my own testing, was almost always ahead of Opus 4.6 for reviews and planning. I'm on plus plan on openai, so I couldn't test it so deeply. Anyone who had more experience on both could perhaps chime in? Pros/cons compared to Opus? I'm invested in Claude ecosystem but the recent quality and session limits decrease have me on the edge.
•
Same for me. I'm on $20 plan for both and I use them both interchangeably. Similar "intelligence" imo. Just different way of doing things, that's all. But Claude is getting worse in terms of token usage so I've cancelled my plan last month.
•
Do you mind elaborating on your experience here? Just curious as I've often heard that Claude was superior for planning/architecture work while ChatGPT was superior for actual implementation and finding bugs.
•
Tell me you're losing market share to competitors without telling me you're losing market share to competitors
•
https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2042296046009626989 >Our existing $200 Pro tier still remains our highest usage option.
•
What is the difference between Pro and normal mode apart from the fact the Pro takes ages to finish? I see not much difference in output quality.
•
The era of subsidization is over, it seems. For my money, on the code side at least, GitHub Copilot on VSCode is still the most cost effective option, 10 bucks for 300 requests gets me all I need, especially when I use OpenAI models which are counted as 1x vs Opus which is 3x. I've stopped using all other tools like Claude Code etc.
•
Pro used to be $200.
•
> The era of subsidization is over Of course it is. Returns are diminishing, AGI isn't happening with current techniques but it is good enough to sell, so it's time to monetize. I just got an email from OpenAI as well about ads in their free tier (I signed up once out of curiosity).
•
> AGI isn't happening with current techniques but it is good enough to sell, so it's time to monetize. Or perhaps it was a scam in the first place for an IPO.
•
Not over yet. More hikes will come. It will reach $1000.
•
That's what I said by subsidization being over.
•
Can you expand what you mean by "subsidization being over" in terms of the plan prices? - Plus is still the same $20 - 20x Pro is still the same $200 - This is a new 5x tier is $100 https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9793128-what-is-chatgpt-pro#:~:text=Who%20is%20the%20Pro%20plan%20for%3F is probably a better direct comparison of the 3
•
They're trying to slowly move up market. I assume soon the $20 will get its own restrictions in the future (and/or ads) to get people to pay $100.
•
The same could have been claimed in 2024 when they introduced the $200 Pro plan. Nothing is over yet just because of what could possibly happen next.
•
The subsidization being "over" would mean we are paying their actual cost or more.
•
I see what you mean, I misread your initial reply.
•
I tried Claude Code for a week straight recently to see what all the hype was about and while it pumped out a bunch of reasonable looking code and features I ended up feeling completely disconnected from my codebase and uncomfortable. Cancelled the plan I had with them and happily went back to just coding like normal in VSCode with occasional dips into Copilot when a need arose or for rubber ducking and planning. Feels much better as I'm in full control and not trusting the magic black box to get it right or getting fatigue from reading thousands of lines of generated code. Anyone who says they're able to review thousands of lines effectively that Claude might slop out in a day are lying to themselves.
•
why not just use it to review your codebase/commits/prs? you don't have to let it write a bunch of code for you neccessarily.
•
That's my point - it's great as a tool to talk something through or rubber duck it, but as soon as you just let it loose to slop out thousands of lines a day and never read them all you're really doing is filling your base with thousands of lines of technical debt.
•
>Anyone who says they're able to review thousands of lines effectively that Claude might slop out in a day are lying to themselves. The amount you can review before burning out is now the reasonable limit, for the same reason that a car is supposed to stay at the speed you can handle and not the max speed of the engine. Of course, many people are secretly skipping reviews and some dare to publicly advocate for getting rid of them entirely.
•
> For the same reason that a car is supposed to stay at the speed you can handle and not the max speed of the engine. As we know with driving, sensible drivers stick to the speed limit most of the time, but there's a good percentage of knuckle draggers who just love speeding, some people get drunk, some they just drive the wrong way down the highway entirely. Either way it's usually the sensible people who end up suffering.
•
I use both GH Copilot as well as CC extensively and it does seem more economical, though I wonder how long this will last as I imagine Github has also been subsidizing LLM usage extensively. FWIW it feels like GH Copilot is a cheaper version of OpenRouter but with trade-offs like being locked into VSCode and the Microsoft ecosystem overall. I already use VSCode though and otherwise I don't see much downside to using GH Copilot outside of that.
•
You’re not locked into vscode. There are plugins for other IDEs, and a ‘copilot’ cli tool very similar to Claude Code’s cli tool. I also wouldn’t say you’re locked into Microsoft’s ecosystem. At work we just have skills that allow for interaction with Bitbucket and other internal tooling. You’re not forced to use GitHub at all.
•
I'm hopeful because Microsoft already has a partnership and owns much of OpenAI so can get their models at cost to host on Azure with they already do, so they can pass on the savings to the user. This is why Opus is 3x as expensive in Copilot, because Microsoft needs to buy API usage from Anthropic directly.
•
I don’t think it’s API costs. Their Sonnet 4.6 is just 1x premium request which matches the 1x cost of the various GPT Codex models.
•
Sonnet is the worse model though, therefore it's expected that it is cheaper, the comparison would be Opus and GPT. That Anthropic's worse model is the same request cost as the best OpenAI model is what I mean when talking about Microsoft flexing their partnership.
•
This is an additional offering to the existing plan. 5x=$100 20x=$200
How much was it before?
•
$20 or $200 plan, now we have a middle plan.
The title is misleading. The only thing they seem to have done was add a $100 plan identical to Claude's, which gives 5x usage of ChatGPT Plus. There is still a $200 plan that gives 20x usage.
•
Notably, up until now Pro had 6x usage of Plus. So the title is only slightly misleading. On the other hand, the benchmark of Plus usage seems to be to be all over the place, so it’s difficult to say now how does the usage compare to the old Pro.
•
You’re right. I missed the “ From $100”. Edited title.
•
That is not the "only" thing: You get access to GPT-5.4 pro.
•
Just to clarify, one does not get access to the pro model on the Pro plan?
•
You're trying to make words mean what we all think they mean. Stop foisting your Textualism upon us!
•
Plus plan doesn't get the pro model, which is (AFAICT) the same 5.4 model but thinks like a lot .
•
The $20 Plus plan still exists, and does not give access to the pro model. The $200 Pro plan still exists, and does give access to the pro model. What is new is a $100 Pro plan that does give access to the pro model, with lower usage limits than the $200 Pro plan.
•
This is still worse than Anthropic's right? Because you get access to their top model even at the $20 price point
•
It's not worse, Anthropic simply has no equivalent model (if you don't consider Mythos) of GPT 5.4 Pro. Google does though: Gemini 3.1 Deepthink. GPT 5.4 Pro is extremely slow but thorough, so it's not meant for the usual agentic work, rather for research or solving hard bugs/math problems when you provide it all the context.
•
So, reading the tea leaves, they're either losing subscribers for the $200 plan, or they're not following the same hockey stick path of growth they thought they were... maybe? Edit: I wonder if this is actually compute-bound as the impetus
•
Nope, it's just that a lot of people (especially those using Codex) asked us for a medium-sized $100 plan. $20 felt too restrictive and $200 felt like a big jump. Pricing strategy is always a bit of an art, without a perfect optimum for everyone: - pay-per-token makes every query feel stressful - a single plan overcharges light users and annoyingly blocks heavy users - a zillion plans are confusing / stressful to navigate and change This change mostly just adds a medium-sized plan for people doing medium-sized amounts of work. People were asking for this, and we're happy to deliver. (I work at OpenAI.)
•
Plenty of people wanted to spend more than $20 but less than $200 for a plan. It's long overdue IMO.
•
Oh. Yikes.
just a rumor, but i heard altman was adding a timer which required the R&D dept. to triple
•
I heard it’ll take about a year. Timers are a hard problem to solve.
Any idea way "5x or 20x more usage" means?
•
Exactly! :)
•
5x more usage than in Plus is 100$ 20x more usage than in Plus is 200$ I see this when I try to upgrade my Plus subscription.
•
What’s the difference between the two Pro plans? Both Pro plans include the same core capabilities. The main difference is usage allowance: Pro $100 unlocks 5x higher usage than Plus (and 10x Codex usage vs. Plus for a limited time), while Pro $200 unlocks 20x usage than Plus. From their faq
The price is $100 according to this post. Where is there an option for $200?
•
You choose on checkout. There it says Plan details 5x more usage than Plus 20x more usage than Plus $120/month $200/month
•
So curious that the cost in the comparison is just a flat $100, not "$100 or $200" and yet the usage has the "or". Surely just a lapse in copy editing.
•
Surely they weren't trying to be deceptive... surely.
•
seems like this $100 replaced the $200 plan So.. cheaper?
•
No, the same $200 plan is still there. They hid it behind the $100 click-through. This just adds a $100 plan that's 1/4 the usage of the $200 plan..
•
lol they're really trying their best to be likable eh
Price drops are nice. Unfortunately, the quality differential versus the competitor is night and day. And everyone serious uses the API rate billing anyway.
•
> the quality differential versus the competitor is night and day. This myth about the inferiority of ChatGPT and Codex is becoming a meme. I have active subscriptions to both. I am throwing at Codex all kinds of data engineering, web development and machine learning problems, have been working on non-tech tasks in the "Karpathy Obsidian Wiki" [1] style before he posted about it. Not only does Codex crush Claude on cost, it's also significantly better at adherence and overall quality. Claude is there on my Mac, gathering dust, to the point I am thinking of not renewing the sub. There are plenty of fellow HNers here who feel the same from what I read in the flamewars. I suspect none of us really has a horse in this race and many are half-competent (in other threads, they mention they do things like embedded programming, distributed DL systems, etc.) I'm starting to suspect a vast majority of people pushing the narrative that Claude is vastly better haven't even tried the 5.3 / 5.4 models and are doing it out of sheer tribalism. [1] https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f
•
I have access to effectively infinite API tokens for all models from Anthropic as well as OpenAI. The differential in performance in complex tasks is vast and strongly in favor of Opus, in my experience. I do not use the official harnesses for either model, though - as they are not my taste.
•
This take is out-of-date by months (which is an eternity in this space). Codex today has caught up and is very much on par with CC.
•
I prefer and use 5.4 over Opus, it's simply better, faster, and doesn't glaze me like Claude models want to do for some reason.
•
Disagree. I use codex extensively. It just works so well with vscode and python. Claude with ridiculous limits - thanks no. For some even xAI is good fit.
EFF is leaving X (eff.org)
•
I still can't get used to Twitter being called X. What horrible branding.
•
> an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago Well - Musk ruined Twitter. As to why ... that is hard to say. I would claim he did so on purpose, but the guy also has some mental problems. And with this I really mean problems aside from his antics. Everyone sees that when he mass-fired people at DOGE or did a certain greeting twice with his right arm (everyone understands his mentality), on top of being a billionaire which already means he is fighting the Average Joe. But irrelevant of the reasons, I think we can safely conclude: Musk ruined Twitter. X does not work and I don't think he can turn this around, even if he'd want to. People don't want oligarchs in the front row; I'd even claim they don't want them in the back row either, but it is clear that Musk's ego causes a TON of damage everywhere he is involved. Tesla sinking is also attributable to Musk; only SpaceX hasn't sunk yet, but Musk has a talent to sink stuff, so who knows. Even before Musk, Twitter had problems. I noticed this when I tried to make statements and Twitter tried to censor me, claiming the content I wrote is not good aka harmful. This kind of censorship is similar to reddit; I retired from reddit a while ago, the reason was excessive censorship by crazy moderators. In two years I had about 76k karma on reddit, so what I wrote is, for the most part, appreciated by a majority, give or take. Evidently you can't write interesting content all of the time, but in two years +70k karma is not bad. Then some moderator comes in, claims I broke a rule, locks me out of 3 days - I can not accept censorship, sorry. I don't want moderators acting as gatekeepers. Musk with X kind of made this even worse. Now you have to log in to read stuff? Old twitter did not require this, right? They clearly want to sniff people's activity. With age sniffing (age verification) coming up and infiltrating (some) linux distributions, I am really getting mighty tired of billionaires paying homage to crazy dictators who killed a gazillion of people. Musk is like Scrooge McDuck, but much more evil and selfish. EFF should have quit when Musk bought Twitter. But I think we need to get rid of corporations who keep on selling out the users to some other, bigger corporation. That thing is clearly not working at all.
•
wtf bro
•
>The math hasn’t worked out for a while now. Have the costs to post to X grown too high? The salary of someone with the technical know-how to work the social media platform is too expensive? How does the math compare with Mastodon? Do you know about buffer.com? I started giving to EFF about 10 years ago. It's pretty much the first and only organization I have regularly given to. It always felt like a non-political organization focused squarely on the right to access. Especially with its support of the Tor project. But this news has me confused and other commenters seem to be seeing virtue signaling or politically motivation.
•
I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019. When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff. This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues. Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology. I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not. EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects. This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do. I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras. It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization. (Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.) I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen. I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.
•
I honestly enjoyed the article and agree with their move but I did have a chuckle reading all the way through and then see g right there under the article the X social media sharing icon. I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.
•
There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?
•
I was recently asked about our (Oxide's) disposition to Twitter on the Peterman Pod[0], and the rationale for why we're no longer active there is pretty simple: the platform has become a cesspool of hate -- and it's antithetical to promoting a business (or any message, really). Aside from the morality of it (which is significant!), the hate itself is repugnant; it's not something that normal people want to be a part of in the long term. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s
•
Community notes has done so much to help obvious and blatantly false information on X. I can't believe that instagram and other platforms haven't implanted it yet.
•
Interesting that they are leaving the most uncensored social media site, but saying on the most tightly censored sites. Makes me wonder what their vision for the internet really is.
•
I follow lots of accounts that have low views, thanks for considering me not worth a simple cut and paste once in a while.
•
Their decision to leave X seems mostly centered around engagement numbers. Or at least, that's the reason they led with. And I'm not sure that I believe the numbers they're throwing out. > To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. Okay. View counts are public now, but not available on older tweets. But replies, like, and retweet counts are, and shouldn't they scale similarly? I'm just eyeballing it, but when I look through the EFF's twitter feed now, I see 20-100 likes as typical, with the occasional popular tweet that hits a couple hundred. When I look at their 2018 tweets - you can use the `from:EFF until:2018-04-01` filter on twitter search - the numbers are... The same. Aside from the occasional popular tweet, most other tweets are in the neighborhood of 20-100 likes. Similar for replies and retweets. I don't understand how this could be if the tweets are being seen 30x less.
•
>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better. Does this not apply to X users?
•
It does, but what I'm reading from this is Twitter users are too right-wing for EFF to want to be around them. "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
•
You clearly didn't read the article closely enough. The first header is "The Numbers Aren’t Working Out." If it was about the audience, they would have switched stopped earlier.
•
>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" >Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain. Lol, rubbish.
•
I applaud the move. It's also a little disingenuous to talk about moral standings when the third opening sentence is "The math hasn’t worked out for a while now." If the numbers were working out, would they continue to turn a blind eye on the privacy tracking?
> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.
•
The few people who were not terminally online left Twitter around the time it was renamed.
•
Based on what they are seeing, nobody is seeing their posts on X either. That's the point. Did you miss it?
•
> Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. You think those people are on X?
•
Do regular people that aren't terminally online use X? I don't know any.
•
not anymore. People are acting like they're leaving everything and moving to bluesky or fedi when in reality they already exist there and many other places and are simply leaving the braindead one
•
I don't know any X user that I wouldn't describe as "terminally online" and the same goes for the Twitter days too.
•
Nobody who's not terminally online ever used Twitter.
•
I was about to say, Twitter has long been one of the largest collections of terminally online people and that's only gotten worse as various groups have abandoned the platform and social media as a whole has seen a decline. Most people who have a life spend their time elsewhere on the web or don't participate in social media at all.
•
>X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media. But that is actually what they called out: they're not getting eyes anymore. Views at X have cratered so hard that it's barely worth the time.
•
But it's worth their time to stay on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon? Something isn't adding up.
•
There's presumably engagement on those two. It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
•
Does it have to be either/or?
I just wanna remind people that this website is full of elon's drones and bots who mob flagged any criticism of DOGE for months on end. A lot of the "outrage" expressed in this discussion is likely faux.
•
Posts about US politics that have nothing to do with technology and are otherwise uninteresting get flagged because HN is not the place for that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics If you just want to talk about how much you hate the current US administration with other people who also spend all their time talking about how much they hate the current US administration, there are much better places for that, such as r/politics.
•
DOGE posts had everything to do with technology and silicon valley
> Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. X fired a “Trust and Safety” team that was spending time enforcing gender ideology rather than working on scalable solutions to trust and safety. Community Notes wouldn’t have happened without X.
•
Community notes was built by Twitter, before the purchase.
I was recently at a brown bag at work - regarding enablement of AI in the workplace (it was awesome - all over the roadmap) - and one of the audience asked the speakers (a very diverse group of people) how on earth they keep up with all the developments in AI? All six of the speakers immediately said Twitter was realistically the only place you can keep up with the conversation. Having an extensively curated list means that anytime anything breaks (and often a few hours before) you are going to hear about it on X/Twitter. I would love to know if there is anything even close to the reach of X. It has a lot of problems - but if you want to track breaking news, I can't think of anything else close to it.
•
The big issue with this approach is that it will destroy your sanity for things that are often a big bag of hype with nothing underneath. I often find HN to be better because things that get on the front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
•
Even when it was Twitter drinking from the firehose didn't really make your life better. I don't need a two sentence breaking update from a Miyazaki baby to stay on top of this stuff, and quite frankly if they can't bother to make a blog post or press release it's probably just noise any way.
•
bsky is meant to hold the promise of control your algorithm, I don't see why that can't be the model going forward
•
The problem is largely one of community. The folks talking about AI are still primarily on X and haven't moved over.
•
Well, Twitter has a lot of separate spheres. It's pretty easy to curate just tpot (the part that concerns itself with the Bay area, venture capital, and so forth) by following the right people and then engaging with posts that are on-topic.
This is a poor take. "You can make this mismanaged steaming pile of bot-infested garbage better if you just filter everything!"
•
The problem is that there isn't really an alternative. The discussion is still happening there and nowhere else. (Trust me, I've looked.)
You'd be surprised how easy it is for people to compartmentalize their principles. Many do it day to day every time they purchase something online that was probably made using less than ideal labour practices. Still, I'd advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.
•
Hmm, I'd argue what you call "compartmentalize their principles" is in fact, NOT having principles. Correct me if I'm wrong: I'm asserting that having a principle is an inalienable belief that actually guides behavior, not selectively applies to behavior. Though generally: yes, I agree: get off twitter, and I'd go a step further and say..minimize all social media involvement.
One of their posts that they themselves link is supporting abortion. I am not sure how abortion connects with my right to not disclose information about myself or digital rights.
•
it does when those against it violate your digital rights to prosecute you
My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology. They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" and similar comments. I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.
•
What about when Zohran Mamdani or AOC or Kamala makes the EXACT SAME MOTION? Or are you just easily manipulated by clips on the internet?
•
You grandparents inherited country that was 90% white and left it on a way for whites to be persecuted minority in a couple of generations (current South Africa is likely outcome for US). Not sure their ideology was such a win. Yo be fair ethnic make up of the country was changed outside of democratic process - if people in 1945 voted for current ethnic makeup I am sure it would have been 80% no.
•
> Not sure their ideology was such a win. South Africa's transition away from being a nuclear apartheid state was an objective win for everyone, everywhere.
•
Politics is all-encompassing. You don’t get to declare your beliefs privileged and above contestation. We always have to fight these battles.
•
Your grandparents lived in a state that was close to 100% european descent, meanwhile in a couple generations there will only be a handful of small european majority countries left in the world. I don't think you have any idea how your grandparents would react in today's world of ethnic replacement.
•
As someone who is so white they glow in the dark, no. They are exactly the same. You don't speak for me, and I find you embarrassing.
•
What exactly would happen according to you? The state in question got more Mexicans or South Americans which are also descendants of European colonists? Almost every American have European heritage. In my opinion this doesn't make much sense for Americans.
•
You can call it white nationalism if you like but you are spouting the exact same talking points as white supremacists, you just prefer to buy it under a different brand.
•
This feels like the "technically it's hebephilia" argument in that drawing the distinction just makes your argument weaker for regular people.
•
> It's grossly unfair to conflate white nationalism and white supremacy No, it isn't. It's a distinction without significance.
•
You can be racist and still hate fascism and Nazis. Everyone should hate fascism and Nazis.
•
It's grossly dishonest to conflate a complexion with an ethnicity. 'White' is a complexion, not a culture.
•
Part of the replacement is declaring white Americans don't have a culture. Would you say the same about black Americans?
•
But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner? Seems to me that this is what has changed. PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
•
This question is a deflection and I suspect is intentionally disingenuous since it literally ignores the main point of the parent's comment.
•
In turn I would argue that this kind comment, i.e. an entirely unfalsifiable calumny, is a poisonous waste of space that would best be deleted by the moderator (along with the current one of course).
•
>But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner? Since 18th century at the very least; see: anti-slavery sugar boycott[1]. That's if you absolutely ignore the parent's point that political views are things like specifics of policy, not whether some people should be considered subhuman. >Seems to me that this is what has changed. It seems so because you don't know history, and didn't do a one-minute Google search for history of successful boycotts. The article I'm linking is in the "bite-sized" category. Enjoy. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3rj7ty/revision/7
•
Social pressure has literally always existed. Nothing has changed lol. And I wouldn't call white nationalism a "political" view, like it's some ordinary kind of opinion. That's sanewashing something disgusting and disgraceful. That type needs to get shoved back under the rock they crawled out from.
•
X/twitter is a media company. choosing which media products to purchase based on political values is how it has always worked.
•
Choosing media producers based on their politics is how it always worked. Social networks are not producers of their content.
•
Do you believe that boycotting is a new behavior?
•
A long and storied history, the abolitionists used it pretty extensively well before it was named: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott
•
They know nothing changed. They want to pretend otherwise.
•
It isn't strictly required and it hasn't changed; it's always been complicated and it's always been a balance. This isn't speculation or a hot take. Consumer boycotts are as old as the hills, so it's an observable fact that our relationship with firms and their politics has complicated and negotiated for a very long time.
•
It is the way they express those views. I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1] Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A. [1] if you want to know the criteria I use take a look at this book https://www.amazon.com/Watch-Right-Conservative-Intellectuals-American/dp/0299128105
•
Musk’s account is the most engaged and followed account on Twitter. So Twitter is de facto his global soapbox. (And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show )
•
There are plenty of business' products that I use where I'm unaware of if I share or don't share the owner's political views and I'm totally fine using them. Elon Musk has made it impossible to not be aware of his political views by constantly shoving it down our throats.
•
Not really. People have boycotted products for political and ideological motivations for a very long time. The change recently is that people stopped caring as much. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts
•
It didn't used to be nearly as common for owners of midsize to large businesses to be loudly outspoken politically, especially those holding more extreme views. It used to be common sense to keep that sort of thing to oneself, if only to avert PR disaster. Not knowing when to shut up was more of a hallmark of the stereotypical two-bit owner of a crappy local business that perpetually struggled to grow. This helped keep a neutral or at worst ambivalent image of these owners in the minds of the larger public and thus for the most part didn't factor into purchase decisions. It's now easier than ever to see the true character of a business owner and so it's only natural that customers have begun to factor in this information in purchase/usage decisions.
•
I expect people to be different. I don’t expect them to provide a platform for people who make it a point to hate others and advocate for removal of their / my rights and so on.
•
In the past, most business owners would perhaps quietly donate to a party or candidates, but probably wouldn't hang their ideology out in front of people all day, every day. Think about someone like Warren Buffett. He has political views, but they are not something he's out there loudly airing on a huge platform. And like I pointed out, these are not just any old "political views". It's extremist stuff that in the past would have gotten you ostracized. I'm old enough to remember Trent Lott losing his Senate leadership position, for instance. Also, because of "network effects", simply providing content to Twitter makes the site more valuable.
•
In the case of X, the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds and overriding the context of his AI bot to parrot his pet ideas. If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
•
The old owners of Twitter did the same thing just in the other direction. And tbh it’s pretty easy to avoid musk’s idiocy. I never get suggested stuff from him The old Twitter was way more of an echo chamber than it is now
•
Absolutely not. Today's Twitter is an absurd MAGA echo chamber: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show Are you that user that replaces all your comments with periods once enough people flag you?
•
> pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds He's also using his fame and fortune to much more directly fund and promote political change in places like the UK. It goes beyond this one service, but moving away from this service weakens his position more broadly as well.
•
Most people hold a set of political views, while also admitting a spectrum of competing views into their personal, financial, etc. lives. For the average person, doing business with a neo-Nazi (or someone who is "merely" neo-Nazi adjacent) exceeds that spectrum. This is eminently reasonable, and has not changed significantly in a long time.
•
The conflict seems as old as ever. Labor vs union-busting robber baron.
•
No one would say they used "David Duke's Whites Only Car Wash" but "didn't support the owner's politics."
•
It's always amazing how much that kind of person will pretend not to get it, and whine about being a pariah.
Well, all of these are politics and ideology. It's OK to have an ideological bent of some sort or other. You can indeed be highly intolerant of those who are intolerant in certain ways. You can hate certain kinds of hate. And you can call out greedy callous bastards wherever you see them. It's basically being discerning.
•
GP is saying neo-Nazis are "not just politics, but also something worse". You're not really disagreeing with them, maybe just missing their point about some ideologies being worthy of planned exclusion from a civilized society. Aka the paradox of tolerance. That's what makes some political stances "not just politics".
I think there are better things to focus on about Elon Musk, like his role in getting Trump elected, the misinfo tweets he reposts with "Exactly" and "Concerning" (where the top community note trivially debunks the tweet -- he doesn't care whether it's real), making a stink about the Epstein files until he was cool with Trump again, promoting right-wing slop like Gunther Eagleman, changing Twitter in general like how you can freely say the n-word now, how he went about DOGE, what he promotes vs what he's silent on. But I've yet to see someone show video of a prominent democrat doing the same salute as Musk. Which is probably why it's left as an exercise for the reader to find. That said, we don't need to speculate about his salute when you can look directly at the slop he posts on Twitter.
•
This is a video presented by a mainstream DC news source (The Hill) of Cory Booker doing the same motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GKQjIOFuGs&t=192s If you normalize a bit for Musk being more physically awkward than Booker it's the same motion.
•
The depths boot lickers like you will go to defend something that is so obviously and intentionally Nazi. Please post a video of yourself doing exactly the same salute as Elon Musk did, with you real name. Oh you won't? Then shut the fuck up.
•
“If you ignore the ways they’re different, they’re the same” Those are different gestures. Musk is clearly forcefully throwing out his harm, mimicking the Nazi salute. Booker is moving his arm from his chest to a waving motion, using two hands instead of one at some points.
[dead]
•
Booker is waving, not saluting. But you knew that.
Anyone who doesn't think what Musk did was a Nazi salute, I encourage you to watch the video over and over, enough times so that you can memorize and replicate it, then go into work and do it in front of your manager, and see what happens.
•
100% agree, for anyone that hasn't seen the clip, saved you some time googling: https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-cory-booker-made-similar-salutes-media-reacted-much-differently
Nothing recent made me feel quite as old and out of the loop more as the slowness with which I realized that this is about x.com (Twitter), not x.org (the windowing system).
•
I get really really tired at the back and forth with Wayland and all that, but I would put up with reading rants about windowing systems everyday if it meant I never had to think about this X again.
•
Whenever I see X used, I wonder if the author will return to replace the variable with the actual name.
It would be ironic if Xorg launched a twitter competitor using a custom update protocol (an X extension) over the network and TCL
•
knowing how xorg currently operates (it doesn't, it has a successor) it'd be a wayland protocol negotiated over dbus and mainly opposed by the GNOME people
After reading about Wayland for 10 (?) years and thinking it was some huge deal, I finally took the leap as I was redoing my window manager anyway and it was quite easy (at least on NixOS). Heck virt-viewer (one of my main apps) is still running under Xwayland because the performance seems better.
•
10 years ago Wayland was in much worse state. It started being good in the last few years, though some features are still lacking.
I had that exact same thought. The argument they presented applies to any walled garden, they gave no reason why X would be the exception. It's clear this is about politics, and I'm not opposed to that, Elon is not awesome, but trying to justify it otherwise seems kind of shady.
•
It's pretty damn simple actually. Their target audience by and large doesn't use twitter anymore, either.
13 million impressions a year isn't enough to be worth copy-pasting a few posts from Facebook?
•
X "impressions" are not worth very much
Not if enough folks think your posting there is a sign you're an ass. If you hang out in a bar with KKK memorabilia everywhere - and open the replies of any reasonably popular news story on X before complaining that's not a fair comparison - people make conclusions off your presence, even if you're personally there for the tasty beer.
•
Those people would have long left X though so I'm not sure why the existing people would think that. If you're talking about external people judging them about posting there, no one thinks that, like the sibling comment mentions. People will just think at worst that they might need the reach of X so they begrudgingly post there.
Does anyone seriously think EFF posting to X yesterday tarnished their brand? Be real.
•
Yes. I applaud the move and only wish they would have done it sooner.
•
Yeah, I do. People & brands having a link to an X account is a huge red flag.
Not really, this is the kind of argument you only ever see on Reddit/HN, normal people don't care.
•
Who is "normal" in this context? Because people who support the EFF's mission are pretty clued into what is happening and do care.
I left EFF last year. I was a top-tier donor for 20 years, but EFF has changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism. Leaving X is just another example of it. Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over? Does EFF actually believe that there's more free speech on Facebook?
•
> changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism. What exactly are “neutral rights”? Every right is political, and none of them are neutral, you’ll always find someone who supports them and someone who opposes them. Remember when Nestlé’s CEO said that calling water a human right was an “extreme” opinion? And there used to be a time when people claimed owning slaves was their right. What you are calling “questionable” right now is just something you don’t agree with. I have a feeling history will support EFF’s position over yours.
•
I can't believe such a nonpolitical organization would do this!!! Come on, you either have to be lying or you were never paying attention. https://www.eff.org/press/releases/activists-sue-san-francisco-wide-ranging-surveillance-black-led-protests-against https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-activists-demonstrate-against-sell-out-org-private-equity-los-angeles-protest https://www.eff.org/press/releases/media-alert-eff-argues-against-forced-unlocking-phone-indiana-supreme-court https://www.eff.org/press/releases/law-enforcement-use-face-recognition-systems-threatens-civil-liberties https://www.eff.org/press/releases/trumps-blocking-people-his-twitter-account-violates-first-amendment-eff-tells-court https://www.eff.org/press/releases/comprehensive-legal-reform-needed-restrain-widespread-surveillance-latin-america
•
The EFF has always been against a large political segment, namely the status quo of "long-term intellectual property good, DRM good, businesses have the right to do whatever they want with data they collect, businesses have the right to arbitrarily use de-facto monopolies on computing platforms" which make no mistake were never neutral positions about rights.
[dead]
•
ad hominem. but whatever, lets suppose trump and elon aren't fascists. what exactly do fascists do? Oppression of minorities? Check Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state? Check Imprisoning dissenting voices? Check Creating lists of people to get rid of? Check Authoritarianism? Double check Creating an out group and scapegoating it as an "enemy from within" Check if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it doesn't have to scream it's a duck and sieg heil to be sure it's probably a duck or at least not a swan
•
The saddest part is you slop up this propaganda and repeat it so confidently. What dissenting voices are being imprisoned? What the fuck does "Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state" even mean? Sorry you have freedom as a consumer as opposed to the violence of the state? What minorities are being oppressed? How? What lists of people exist to get rid of?
•
Putting check next baseless claims? Priceless. For everything else, there's MasterCard.
GP is complaining about a shift from one set of positions to a different set.
•
GP (me) is not complaining about shifting positions. EFF was fairly neutral for the prior two decades, and even though I did not agree with everything they did, I thought they were worthy of support. Last year, they began filing some lawsuits without much research or diligence, and without much of a legal basis. I waited a while and watched, and I saw them becoming more and more partisan. I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
•
the EFF didn't move from political neutral. The right just moved more right.
Are they getting that from Bluesky? Mastodon? LinkedIn? Instagram? TikTok? Facebook? Of course not. And yet they leave X and only X.
•
Why are you guys so unprepared against someone pointing out that disciplinary actions and criteria for those on Twitter had always been broken? It's obvious that canned_responses.xlsx you were given didn't include responses for that, and that's weird. Twitter account bans had always been so broken that account bans, account ban evasions, tweet deboosting avoidance, etc. has all, long, been natural parts of life on it, since at least 2010s. I might as well argue that it would not have gone so far "down", psychologically, to the point that its old management would have sold the entire thing to Musk and for people to genuinely believe in positive outcome under him. The very least you guys could have done it is to recognize the fact that inconsistent, unclear, unenforced policies of old Twitter existed && are not consistent with yours. You guys don't even do that. How even.
I work as a consultant for a small media, zero politics and very technical, and they report the same trend for X for the last 5 years or so. I was surprised that they told me they still want the "share on Twitter button" and keep the Twitter account but their activity there is nil, for the following reasons combined: 1) they have thousands of followers and thousands of impressions, but the engagement ratio (likes, comment, shares per follower) is abysmal compared with the other networks, 2) the format is different from other networks, while you can create something common for LinkedIn or Facebook, the Twitter share requires image re-crop and text rewrite (they don't use Instagram, the content doesn't fit) 3) while the main site receives a lot of clicks to read the full content (and see the ads that drive the income) from LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter doesn't send clicks (people just read the header, at most hit the like-heart, and keep scrolling). Their conclusion: Twitter doesn't work any more for them and is getting worse (that said, BlueSky is even worse for them). Even spending 30 seconds there to polish a publication are 30 seconds wasted. I don't know the numbers for EFF, but having 400K followers on X and getting between zero and five comments per post if you go back a couple of weeks (to skip today's fire), between zero and 20 retweets... sounds like a failed platform. They get better numbers from Facebook, a dying platform, with half the followers. They get similar or better numbers from Instagram with less than 10% of the followers they have in Twitter.
•
>between zero and 20 retweets... sounds like a failed platform. Or they're tweeting something their followers don't care enough about to engage with, so the platform stops funneling their post to other followers. Again, youtubers complain about this same kind of thing regularly. It's almost always just a 'you' problem, your content is simply not engaging.
> Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? Is X more heavily censored than Facebook or TikTok They go on to say they're still on Facebook and TikTok and explain: > The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance. None of this is unique to Facebook and TikTok and not for X. > Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day I'm pretty sure all these demographics use X as well. It's just so bizarre. If you want to reach people, esp people that maybe come from a different perspective from you, why would you opt out of the best way to get your message across?
•
X under Musk has sustained more government takedown requests. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-musk-x-twitter-free-speech-government-requests/
This is unfortunate. Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship, and that's the general sentiment on X at the moment. He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago. [0] I'm afraid we're being divided and conquered. The people pushing for mass control are attempting to reframe the fight for digital freedoms as a "leftist" talking point, so that they can later ride the populist wave and use its momentum to kill online free speech and general purpose computing altogether. Perhaps the EFF has been compromised, because it should not be falling for this trick. It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible. [0] https://nitter.net/durov/status/2041979377773133898#m
•
His anti censorship stance isn't necessarily born out by the data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-musk-x-twitter-free-speech-government-requests/
This reads as very performative. You don't have to choose between posting 10 times a day or deleting your account; you could just post less or use it for major updates.
•
Performative expression is critical. You need to actually do the thing you believe and if it is of political significance say it and do it visibly. Otherwise there is no impact.
That statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns that they value more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc). Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.
•
They would also leave TikTok and Instagram as well if it would be pure ideological reasoning.
•
I didn't see that in the post. The thesis is pretty clear and aligned with EFF as a non-profit that has to allocate resources strategically: > To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. and > Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices. It's pretty clear that all these platforms have various problems within EFF's purview, but the difference with X is that they're not getting value from using it.
•
It's not even ideological concerns about the platform but about the userbase. TikTok and Instagram have a lot of left-wing people on them, as they've alluded to, regardless of who owns those. Twitter users are too right-wing for them.
•
So just talk to the people who you think already agree with you?
•
I guess? Washington Post and others were doing this for a while. As ridiculous as it was for a "neutral" news source to officially endorse political candidates, it was earning them subscribers. And Fox News didn't do this officially, but it was obvious. If you want to give EFF credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, and Twitter was just flaming.
•
I completely agree. Calling X ineffective when they get 10k views per post there, but staying on BlueSky and Mastodon, where there is no way they see those numbers, is absurd on its face. Meanwhile they are happily on a platform hosted in China and legally answerable to the CCP, so they can’t admit it’s for ideological reasons because how would they explain how their ideology embraces that regime.
They also mention that tweets today get far less engagement than they once did.
•
* _their_ tweets
The EFF is and has always been a political activist organization. Of course they care about ideological concerns.
•
Those concerns have evolved away from their original mission. Not an unusual situation for organizations like this as a they shrink and lose relevance.
•
What makes you think they are shrinking and losing relevance, other than feels?
•
He's saying that they have ideological concerns beyond the ideological concerns you would tend to associate with the EFF (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc). I for one am sad to see that this is the case. There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.
•
The linked blog post specifically states that they're leaving Twitter because they have been silenced by the platform and, as a result, no longer consider it a viable communication vehicle. That it's owned and operated by a nazi is icing on the shit cake.
•
That's what the comment is stating, but I disagree with the statement. This is perfectly in-line with the EFF's mission. Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.
Where in my comment did I claim otherwise?
•
Why would you say "this statement shows XYZ" if you didn't believe XYZ was a new piece of information?
•
My original comment did not claim that they were not ideological and it did not claim that that they do not do political activism, so a reply of "[o]f course they care about ideological concerns" makes no sense to me.
•
[delayed]
You discussed two distinct groups: "certain ideological concerns" and "the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about". I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
•
You might be right; I don't know what the broad populace thinks of what EFF does. I'll ask you then: What are the three main areas of advocacy where you think the EFF has been the most visible and/or effective?
•
It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself). So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF). Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous. Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).
•
I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined". Is that correct?
•
I can't definitively give you a top three and honestly don't see any value in ranking them like that. I would simply describe them as the ACLU for technology and the Internet in that they fight for general civil liberties. X and more specifically Elon Musk have shown that they are on the opposite side when it comes to many of those civil liberties even if they all agree on some other issues. Online censorship (both explicit and through algorithmic bias) is the most obvious example that bridges your two distinct groups. Musk might claim he agrees with the EFF on that, but through his and X's actions, it's clear he doesn't.
•
EFF has basically only succeeded in defending Section 230, which makes me wonder if the people who talk in this article and the people elsewhere on HN denouncing Section 230 know about each other.
> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.
•
Clearly EFF is now more interested in virtue signaling than the privacy mission.
Ah yes, a non-profit reaching out to a broader audience for its activism is clearly a "certain ideological concern" separate from their core mission.
•
This is the exact opposite of reaching out to a broader audience.
[dead]
•
Bro. He's still censoring viewpoints. He's also boosting his ideological viewpoints, which diminishes the reach of everything else. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his-x-social-media-platform-to-amplify-right-wing-views https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon-musk-x-suppression-laura-loomer.html
•
The first article merely states that Elon has some fairly common concerns, which are amplified because he is popular. It's deceptively framed as if he has the finger on the scale.
That's explicitly not the logic EFF is using; they come close to outright rejecting it.
•
> ... when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for > The Numbers Aren't Working Out I don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?
•
They explicitly say they're staying on other platforms whose ideologies they don't agree with.
•
Because there's enough people there to be worth it It's like how the Soviets and the Americans were allies in world war II, the pros outweighed the cons
[dead]
•
That works until that person is influential enough to sway political and social conditions drastically
You’re a little behind the times, mate. Threads has more daily active users than X and is growing quickly vs. the latter’s cratering usage rates. Demographics trend younger, too.
•
Sorry but no. I don't care what inflated numbers Meta brags about after redirecting random people from Instagram and counting that as an "active user", Threads is so utterly irrelevant that I literally forget it exists for months at a time because nobody talks about it. Even here on HN, searching for links to threads.com in comments from the past year yields a mere 53 results. For comparison, searching for xcancel.com, an unofficial frontend for x.com that allows logged out users to view replies, yields 795 results.
•
Threads is extremely ‘normie-coded,’ I don’t think there’s much overlap with HN demographics.
•
DAU for Threads is misleading, Meta seems to count impressions in Instagram where Threads sections sometimes show up. I personally know no one who uses Threads.
•
> I personally know no one who uses Threads Real ‘I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon’ energy here.
I don't see it either, funny how people had a knee jerk reaction without even visiting the thread and validating that the phrase even exists. Maybe it's even further down but without logging in I can't see it.
•
That quote is in the linked EFF statement, which you clearly didn't read.
•
True, I was looking at the linked thread as mentioned not the article.
If they justify it in terms of reach and impressions then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological. Which is fine but just be honest about it.
•
"Open source network that isn't controlled by corporations" is ideological, but not quite in the same way that you seem to be framing this.
•
>then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological. Both Bluesky and Mastodon are open/federated networks, which aligns more with EFF's values. So, yes, but I don't think for the reasons you're hinting at.
•
Just looking over recent posts, the EFF gets more interaction on BlueSky than it does on X despite 1/3 the followers and being on a much smaller site. I think that says it all.
•
Plus, even if it did get less engagement, I imagine that BlueSky is full of the sorts of people who donate to EFF.
The reach and impressions on Twitter are fake though, and posts containing links are suppressed. (Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)
•
Sometimes it's not just about quantity. Not all impressions are equal. And like it or not - Twitter is still the preferred communication platform of quite a few influential people.
•
Interactions on X are notoriously low-quality and botted to hell, so “not all impressions are equal” might not be a great point to push here.
•
And not all influential people are Elon Musk or Catturd.
What is the agenda? You're hinting at some conspiracy but I have no idea what it could even be
•
Bluesky numbers are much lower than X for example. Their demands like "genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages" are not met for many of the other platforms they are staying on. Then you have lines like this that make the agenda far more clear: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
[dead]
•
Which ones?
•
claiming there was rampant "censorship of conservative opinions" is about as honest as claiming that the Romans were being persecuted by first century christians.
•
A few of these were actual calls to violence, but most were about political opinion https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banned_from_social_media_platforms They also banned NY Post for publishing that Hunter Biden laptop story. Which as much of a nothingburger as that story was, it's insane to get banned for that.
•
They … did, though? You're presumably referencing Missouri v. Biden, to which the EFF did file an amicus[1]. In it, they note, > Many platforms have potentially problematic “trusted flagger” programs in which certain groups and individuals enjoy “some degree of priority in the processing of notices > Of course, governmental participation in content moderation processes raises First Amendment issues not present with non-governmental inputs With their overall opinion being something like "content moderation is normal, the government flagging content is also normal, and there are instances where the government's flagging of content moderation can be fine & not run afoul of 1A, but there are instances where it can, and we urge the court to think" Note in this case, the platform was removing the content. The government was, in one respect, merely asking. (There were assertions that in other instances, such as public statements, the case was less so.) The court eventually ruled, and the ruling I saw from the 5th circuit seemed reasonable. (I think that was a preliminary injunction. AIUI, the case as a whole was never ruled on, because the Trump administration took over.) [1]: https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief
care to share some quotes from those "conservative opinions" that were censored?
•
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-york-post-hunter-biden-hacked-materials-1234820449/
What censorship? Conservative talking points were fucking everywhere, and still are.
•
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-york-post-hunter-biden-hacked-materials-1234820449/
•
This Hunter Biden shit is a good example. It was all over the place all the time. I don't even live in the US and kept stumbling on people talking about it in social media. Conservative talking points are everywhere, even when I try to avoid them myself (for example, on fucking YouTube I am often recommended right wing bullshit when I view anything more political). Right wingers are always very soy. For people that for years complained about oppression olympics they can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.
Those "conservative opinions" were usually violent hate speech. There was no shortage of "conservative opinions" pre-buyout. I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.
•
"were usually violent hate speech" Did we forget "Vote blue no matter who"??? It was often as mundane as disagreeing with ANY democrat politician/their policies. Sometimes it wasn't even a right-wing voice, but from more Left leaning voices that got banned/ostracized.
•
"Hate speech" is an epithet employed by those with no substantial counterargument.
•
Hunter Biden laptop and covid lab leak were systematically censored on twitter and elsewhere, and twitter was actively working with federal government to censor speech that was neither illegal or against any TOS. You should take a look at the twitter files. This has nothing to do with "violent hate speech."
•
> twitter was actively working with federal government That's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.
•
>Those "conservative opinions" were usually violent hate speech. No they weren't: "There are only two genders." "Men cannot become pregnant." "Children should not be given sterilization drugs." "Deporting illegal immigrants is a good thing." Just because you disagree with them doesn't make it "violent hate speech".
•
None of these were ever suppressed or censored.
•
Which of those did Twitter suppress?
•
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspensions_on_X search for "gender", at least one was a Congressman
•
You're leaving out "gonna be wild!" and a tirade about personally being let down by Mike Pence.
These are interesting numbers for engagement but don't mean as much without equivalent stats for the other platforms. It's a little like when a news story quotes only a percentage (but not the absolute figure in $) or vice versa.
•
Also if you tweet a link to the content instead of tweeting the actual content, you get penalized by the algorithm. They do this in almost every tweet.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Where does all the milk go? (dhanishsemar.com)
•
The article itself is informative... But the diagrams, the low contrast on the web page, the font sizes, even some of the writing sounds...umm... AI-driven I'm not complaining about the use of (AI) tools per se, which is fine I guess. Something feels off. Somewhere between a little-off to a bit-more-off. Sorry. I'm trying to find the right words... Perhaps a bit too polished? (Can there be such a thing?)
•
This should have included the insemination and slaughter as well. That cow didn't come from nowhere.
•
I appreciate the raw milk warning in there. Raw milk kills people ever year. It gets lost in the flood of dairy marketing.
•
I'm pretty sure people who drink raw milk are aware of the risks.
A sidenote about unhomogenized milk, it's delicious. I don't know if it actually tastes any different, but something about shaking it up before using it just makes it feel different.
•
It absolutely is. Toned homogenised milk is just a thin watery gruel colored white. For me Half'nHalf is about the right consistency but you can't get it unhomogenized. That said, cannot not post this mandatory calvin and hobbes strip https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3QdxvsR2p5pHnxSGGu61jA1W3rUPmygT9zgp2n_N-FEbAqc25v9kUz29F&s=10
The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy (thelettersfromleo.com)
•
I can't speak my mind openly because it would be fedposting. However, something must be done about this group of outlaws that has assumed power in the US.
•
This is similar to Joseph Stalin who famously asked, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" to dismiss the Vatican's political and military influence.
That's how ceasefires work. One of the conditions of a ceasefire is that they cease firing. There was no firing prior to the war.
•
Where does the tax on shipping fit into this? The US administration and military look like fools.
Threatening the holy father is not something I entirely expected, but when you couple that with statements like "We have the military power to do what we want" it becomes rather terrifying.
•
> “We have the military power to do what we want" it becomes rather terrifying And it turns out they don’t have the power to do what they like. The US is terrifying, but it’s military looks weaker.
US really is on a crusade to burn every bridge they can find
•
They are, literally too. These crusaders bombed out a bridge, double tapped the first responders and referenced their god etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaj_B1_bridge_attack https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-iran-threat-strait-of-hormuz-b2951875.html
> a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force The history of American diplomacy is mostly of an iron fist wearing a thin glove. This administration removes the glove. It is in line with the transparency of the Department of War v. Defense. Consensus is the label they put on the package of sausages to save face.
•
The glove was there for a reason: it made it a lot easier for the U.S. to get what they want. Appeals to “transparency” are just an attempt to distract from worse outcomes. The fatal flaw of this administration is that they care more about looks than substance. They would rather look tough and lose than look meek and win. It doesn’t even occur to them that it is possible to win while looking meek.
I'm ex-catholic but not quite sure the "we want to be free to oppress catholics" narrative quite holds up in the case of the trump admin. The current supreme court has 6 catholic justices, with 2 appointed by trump. 2 of them rubber stamp everything trump does (alito and thomas), and most of the others support him more often than not (rogers, coney-barrett, kavanaugh). Only sotomayor opposes him frequently. If you covertly (or not) want to oppress a religion why stack the highest court in the country with people from said religion?
•
I think that assuming religion is relevant is wrong. Their moral bankruptcy was what got them their jobs, their religion is secondary and irrelevant.
It is not a broken claim, it is a well documented fact. “The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/12/america-history-of-hating-catholics
•
That many Protestants discriminated against Catholics != "founded on freedom to persecute Catholics" I say this as an American Catholic who went to Catholic schools until college and knows full well about Catholic discrimination in US history. Protestants have discriminated against other protestants, everyone has discriminated against LDS, LDS has discriminated against everyone else, everyone has discriminated against Jews, Catholics have discriminated against <insert your choice of target here>, etc. These facts don't make up founding motives just because they are true.
I have recently deepened my search in Christianity which started with the Catholic Church, one of few points I struggle with when it comes to Catholicism is the papacy, and the Avignon Papacy debacle and the events that followed (a la Western Schism) has quite a bit to do with that. I was a little confused by what they meant here by “threatening with the Avignon Papacy.” If anyone else is curious, I think the phrase “Babylonian Captivity” will provide better context, as it is what some contemporaries and later historians called it as it appeared that the Church had been “captured” by French political interests, with the popes being seen as too cozy to the French king and less focused on their universal spiritual role.
•
Isn't "Babylonian captivity" coming from old history? [^1]. Though it's a most delightful read, I don't give much credence to the Bible as historical testimony . However, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a historian from Oxford and a self-declared atheist historiographer of Yahweh, asserts temple spoils were taken there at some point[^2]. [^1] https://biblehub.com/q/Why_were_temple_items_taken_to_Babylon.htm [^2] Francesca Stavrakopoulou. "God, an anatomy".
•
As a Catholic, I understood the reference to Avignon Papacy to mean the US will create a separate papacy, distinct from Leo and under the control of Trump.
It's not 100% clear by this article what was said, and I don't have access to the source article either. But I think the parts, even if they don't mention verbatim what happened, makes it a pretty clear threat: > America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side. > As tempers rose, an unidentified U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will. I'm also not 100% sure what they mean with "invoked the Avignon Papacy", a bit like saying "Invoked the Second World War", it was an event/time period as far as I know, not something you "invoke" exactly. But even mentioning it makes it pretty clear what they're hinting at to be honest.
•
I think they meant "evoked", for which Merriam Webster has 1: to call forth or up: such as a: to bring to mind or recollection b: to cite especially with approval or for support
There's way too much misdirected emphasis on the pope and ecclesiastical hierarchy imo. I wouldn't think too hard about it. You can be catholic and not like the pope just the same as you can be french and not like the king. Or american and not like the president. There is only one divinity on earth today and that's the holy spirit (consubstantial with the father and son), indwelling and guiding humanity on many levels
•
> You can be catholic and not like the pope You can be christian and not like the pope. But to catholics, the pope is the terrestrial embodiment of the holy spirit, and as such considered infaillible. Not recognizing the pope as such is incompatible with catholicism. Papacy is a core part of catholicism, it's not a "pick and choose buffet".
•
> can be french and not like the king. I don’t think you can? You know how that worked out? It’s the OG ‘No Kings’.
> You can be catholic and not like the pope I come from a Protestant background, so I view Catholicism as just Protestants with a pope. What does it mean to be catholic but without a pope?
•
Vance can take this one.
There are Catholics who argue that Francis and Leo are not real Catholics and will argue Trump is the chosen one. Some are my family members. I am as always speechless.
•
I hear similar from my own Mother. I don't know the extent of what she believes, because I don't want to ask, but there is a strong rejection of Leo among the American right. It seems as simple as challenging Trump to a degree, and retroactively finding justification for invalidating the pope. I suppose I could dip into her media diet and find out myself.
•
[delayed]
Agreed. He is imho a very smart guy, just one who holds radically different values. It seems to me an awful lot of people get stuck in the trap of believing everyone else is fundamentally like them, and differences of opinion are based soly on differences in information or intelligence. The reality is that people can be smart and have fundamentally different views about what what constitutes fair, reasonable, decent, etc.
•
I wouldn’t say it’s a difference in views. It sounds quixotic in the face of embarrassing defeats of US military in the last few decades. One can read a lot of books and still be an idiot.
You’d be surprised. A lot of religious people are extremely knowledgeable about historical stuff related to their religions. They might draw the absolutely worst conclusions from their historical knowledge and have incredibly biased takes but they’ve actually read and discussed these things which is more than you can say for your average person. It ultimately comes from their personal identify being so intricately tied to the religious organization that they are a part of — on some level they view these historical events as their own personal history as they identify as a ‘evangelical Christian’ or ‘orthodox Jew’ more than they view themselves as a person named Dave who has a family and stuff. At the end of the day it’s all just more Hatfield and McCoys or tribal warfare over a goat that was killed centuries ago bullshit.
•
Best analogy for religion I've ever heard: "A D&D game that went too far." If you've seen diehard gamers go on for hours about the minutiae of various editions of countless rulebooks, you can imagine what it's like when devout Catholics get together to talk shop.
Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++ (github.com/randerson112)
•
As long as it's for C/C++ and not C or C++, I'm skeptical.
Feedback of someone who is used to manage large (>1500) software stack in C / C++ / Fortran / Python / Rust / etc: - (1) Provide a way to compile without internet access and specify the associated dependencies path manually. This is absolutely critical. Most 'serious' multi-language package managers and integration systems are building in a sandbox without internet access for security reasons and reproducibility reasons. If your build system does not allow to build offline and with manually specified depdemdencies, you will make life of integrator and package managers miserable and they will avoid your project. (2) Never ever build in '-03 -march=native' by default. This is always a red flag and a sign of immaturity. People expect code to be portable and shippable. Good default options should be CMake equivalent of "RelWithDebInfo" (meaning: -O2 -g -DNDEBUG ). -O3 can be argued. -march=native is always always a mistake. - (3) Allow your build tool to be built by an other build tool (e.g CMake). Anybody caring about reproducibility will want to start from sources, no binary. This also matter for cross compilation. - (4) Please offer a compatibilities with pkg-config ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkg-config ) and if possible CPS ( https://cps-org.github.io/cps/overview.html ) for both consumption and generation. They are what will allow interoperability between your system and other build systems. - (5) last but not least: Consider seriously the cross-compilation use case. It is common in the world of embedded systems to cross compile. Any build system that does not support cross-compilation will be de facto banned from the embedded domain.
•
> Most 'serious' multi-language package managers and integration systems are building in a sandbox without internet access for security reasons and reproducibility reasons. Adding to that, many package builders for operating systems block internet access during the build (for example, poudriere for FreeBSD and nix for NixOS) so to have your software packaged in the repositories on those operating systems you _need_ to support offline builds.
1500 C/C++ individual software components. The 15000 was a typo on my side. Fixed.
•
I see, thanks. I didn't mind the number it just wasn't clear what was it about.
Uses CMAKE, Sorry not for me. Call me old but i prefere good old make or batch. Maybe it's because i can understand those tools. Debugging CMAKE build problems made me hate it. Also i code for embedded CPU and most of the time CMAKE is just overkill and does not play well the compiler/binutils provided. The Platform independency is just not happening in those environments.
•
When you need a configuration step, cmake will actually save you a lot of time, especially if you work cross platform or even cross compile. I love to hate cmake as much as the next guy, and it would be hard to design a worse scripting language, but I'll take it any time over autoconf. Some of the newer tools may well be more convenient - I tried Bazel, and it sure wasn't (for me). If you're happy to bake one config in a makefile, then cmake will do very little for you.
The installation instructions being a `curl | sh` writing to the user's bashrc does not inspire confidence.
•
Given you're about to run a binary, it's no worse than that.
The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts (akshaychugh.xyz)
AI tools right now remind me of the old days of single-user PC/Mac operating systems without protected memory or preemptive multitasking. You could read any file, write directly to video memory, load machine code into the heap and then jump to it, etc.
•
That’s a very accurate analogy. What’s amazing is that during the last decade, containers and microvms have had huge impact on the ecosystem. Yet a huge amount of devs seem to just YOLO it and run agents in their host with full ambient capabilities.
Engineer at Vercel here who worked on the plugin! We have been super heads down to the initial versions of the plugin and constantly improving it. Always super happy to hear feedback and track the changes on GitHub. I want to address the notes here: The plugin is always on, once installed on an agent harness. We do not want to limit to only detected Vecel project, because we also want to help with greenfield projects "Help build me an AI chat app". We collect the native tool calls and bash commands. These are pipped to our plugin. However, `VERCEL_PLUGIN_TELEMETRY=off` kills all telemetry. All data is anonymous. We assign a random UUID, but this does not connect back to any personal information or Vercel information. Prompt telemetry is opt-in and off by default. The hook asks once; if you don't answer, session-end cleanup marks it as disabled. We don't collect prompt text unless you explicitly say yes. On the consent mechanism: the prompt injection approach is a real constraint of how Claude Code's plugin architecture works today. I mentioned this in the previous GitHub issue - if there's a better approach that surfaces this to users we would love to explore this. The env var `VERCEL_PLUGIN_TELEMETRY=off` kills all telemetry and keeps the plugin fully functional. We'll make that more visible, and overall make our wording around telemetry more visible for the future. Overall our goal isn't to only collect data, it's to make the Vercel plugin amazing for building and shipping everything.
•
I appreciate the response, but I don’t think you realize what people are upset about. This is a security issue, not just a privacy issue. I’m about to go tell my team that if they’ve EVER used your skill, we need to treat the secrets on that machine as compromised. Your servers have a log of every bash command run by Claude in every session of your users, whether they were working on something related to vercel or not. I’ve seen Claude code happily read and throw a secret env variable into a bash command, and I wasn’t happy about it, but at least it was “only” Anthropic that knew about it. But now it sounds like Vercel telemetry servers might know about it too. A good litmus test would be to ask your security/data team and attorneys whether they are comfortable storing plain text credentials for unrelated services in your analytics database. They will probably look afraid before you get to the part where you clarify that the users in question didn’t consent to it, didn’t know about it, and might not even be your customer.
But your bash history is logged to vercel by default. The amount of sensitive data (PII, secrets, ...) piped via bash makes this a big issue.
•
Ah jeez, I was missing that detail. Yeah that’s messed up. I skimmed by the “what gets sent” table and thought the bash telemetry was gated by the prompt-related opt-in behavior. Thanks for the correction!
Mobile rendering of the post has some issues. Tables are overflowing and not responsive for example
•
OP here. Fixed it - let me know if it is better now? Ty!
The breach of trust here, which is hard to imagine isn't intentional, is enough reason alone to stop using Vercel, and uninstall the plugin. That part is easy. Most of these agents can help you migrate if anything. The question is on whether these platforms are going to enforce their policies for plugins. For Claude Code in particular this behavior violates their plugin policy (1D) here explicitly: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13145358-anthropic-software-directory-policy It's a really tough problem, but Anthropic is the company I'd bet on to approach this thoughtfully.
•
Wow. Just read the full policy. It's not just 1D. Section 2D says plugins "must not intentionally call or coerce Claude into calling other external software... unless requested and intended by a user." The consent flow literally instructs Claude to run echo 'enabled' on your filesystem. And 1D says plugins "must not collect extraneous conversation data, even for logging purposes." Full bash commands from non-Vercel projects are extraneous :)
Just came to say (since the person you’re responding to has a different view of the world) that I agree with you that this is both a more accurate, and easier way to live. Assuming malice as the default sounds like a recipe for being very, very unhappy.
•
This attitude of ignoring what is true in favour of what makes you happy is exactly how corporations made up of mostly good people can do bad things.
Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI (nytimes.com)
Probably but how do you adapt to something that changes faster than semesters. Revising your theory of learning, implementing, evaluating results, etc. takes years, not weeks.
•
The current situation is that many students don't perceive that using AI to produce, for example, essays is harmful to themselves, and students who do things honestly may feel pressure to use AI in order to stay competitive with students who do. The answer may be to focus less on output and more on the process. e.g. Instead of sending students off to do essays at home and then merely grading what gets handed in, perhaps teachers should run workshops where students work on their essays while receiving guidance. i.e. Everybody works in the classroom on their essay and talks to each other and the teacher about what they're doing. Grades would be at least partly based on participation, and teachers would get a better sense of what students are actually able to write themselves. If Johnny sits back and picks his nose in the workshop and then hands in a paper that's suspiciously good, it's probably slop even if it isn't obviously so. Of course, doing this sort of thing would mean taking time away from lectures and wrote learning. Finding the right balance is no easy task and it's going to take good teachers to blaze the way. That can only happen if they're backed with resources and the freedom to alter curriculum.
I’m a young adult and I’m very hopeful for AI, my partner who is a similar age is very hopeful too. A couple evenings ago, I saw a rocket launch across the sky and last night I saw images of the far side of the moon taken by orbiting astronauts. This is to say I’m very hopeful for the future! I think young people are feeling the pressures of high taxes, high housing costs which driven up by overregulation, entitlements to retirees and H1B/immigrant cases driving down wages. I think this is what causes some young people to feel cautious about AI. The company I work for is constantly hiring fresh faced new graduates who use AI tools to enable higher productivity and reduce time performing data analysis. At the same time I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable. My take on this is that legacy media refuses to address these issues or plays them down and at the same time they amplify concerns about AI probably because AI is supplanting the reach and their rhetoric and reducing their ad share. I also see AI tools as a framework to promote equality and to uplift people, my example is that colleges and governments promoted a “learn to code” movement for people in non SWE roles, but with AI tools heavily helping with code generation there’s classes now that teach coding aided by AI because for most people coding is a means to an end (1) so there’s less pressure on people who are working and going to school to excel in these difficult courses and graduate on time. 1 - https://careertraining.smc.edu/training-programs/c-plus-plus-course-with-ai-assisted-coding/
•
Older U.S. taxpayers approaching retirement will bristle at word combinations such as "entitlements to retirees" as they have put enormous capital, which can clearly be summed from their large stack of W2s, into Social Security. Also, there are large segments of "retirement age" people who simply can't afford to retire.
Housing to wages has been going up every year for like the last 20 years, I'm not sure we can blame AI for that? Regardless of how hard you worked or what you deserve, having 30k in capital gains puts you into a very, very, verrry small minority of americans.
•
I think you are understanding my point here. America has and has had plenty of problems. I don’t think AI is one of them.
No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future. In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.
•
This is absolutely the ideal. We need more people talking about a post-labor future. It's fast approaching, and the sooner it gets here the sooner the masses turn to a Butlerian Jihad.
Industrial loom cloth is far inferior to artisan made cloth. And yet you'd be dooming all future generations to poverty if you stuck with artisanal cloth production.
•
Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.
Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation (axios.com)
•
I love it, because it shows that advertisement is communication as well. Communication is highly regulated for good reasons, and advertisement is not. This is as if telecommunication companies would disconnect calls when what is being said does not fit their agenda. This should be illegal for advertising companies as well.
•
I rarely say this, but very fitting username.
We can effectively trace all of the problems we have today in a global scale back to social media.
•
I'd say the root is circadian rhythm disruption. Artificial lighting, social media, etc.
•
All the problems? Really?
•
The words "scale back to" are vague, but I'm struggling to think of any current global problems that weren't at least exacerbated by social media.
•
So thank the ~80,000 employees at Facebook working tirelessly to make the platform as shoddy as possible.
I don’t disagree that social media has played a massive role in changing the world in a negative way. This is a very far reaching claim though and one that kinda misses the forest for the trees. The problem is that fundamentally capitalism demands that companies find more ways to siphon more money from customers every quarter or they fail. Social media is a perfect storm for the elites in this system. It’s a CIA wet dream. It’s literally a globalized and hyper personalized propaganda distribution platform. This is the inevitable outcome of capitalism and human behavior. Meta’s whole purpose is to create the most optimized pipeline for accepting money from 3rd parties in exchange for convincing as many people as possible of what they want those people to believe. Social media is evil but it’s also the natural course of what happens with current technology and the incentives of capitalism.
•
I don’t know why it’s CIA wet dream, while it’s mostly used against western democracies. Are people in CIA incompetent?
Name one platform that doesn't, and I'm not just talking about lip service.
•
Hacker Ne.... no wait, not that one either.
The internet is unhealthy today specifically because the law elevates platform editorializing to the same level as individual freedom of speech.
•
I agree, but I'm not sure the person I'm responding to would. I cannot imagine how anyone could describe today's internet as healthy.
My compromise pitch, since the "You need ID from your users" ship has sailed: Companies are not liable if they have proper ID of the person who submitted the content and can provide that to a plaintiff. If they have not made a good-faith effort to know who submitted this info (like taking ID, not just an email address) then they're taking responsibility for the submitted content. Which means sites that have responsible moderation can still allow anonymous contributions. The real problem is the inherent asymmetry of legal battles, where the wealthiest can fight forever with endless motions and have near-total impunity while a legal action would basically nuke a normal person's life. Not to mention the fact that an international border can often make this whole conversation moot.
•
That's basically how things used to work in Germany. It used to be that if someone torrented movies on your internet connection, you were fined. No ifs, no buts, they monitored 100% of the public torrents and courts agreed with 100% of the fines. And they didn't care who did it - if they didn't know (which is almost always true) they fined the owner of the internet connection. It was a really really bad law. For 10-15 years after every other country had public wifi hotspots, Germany didn't because the owner would get fined for every torrent. After a very long time, they eventually passed a law saying public wifi operators didn't have to pay.
I’m not against these companies losing their Section 230 immunity. Social media platforms are, in my personal opinion, publishers in their current form. If they went back to operating as “friends and family feed providers” then letting them keep their 230 immunity would be easier to justify.
•
Section 230 doesn't say anything about publishers. That was entirely made up by chronically online arguers. What it does say is you aren't liable for something someone else wrote. It doesn't create liability for things not covered by it. Guess who decides the order and contents of Facebook feeds? Facebook does. So they wouldn't be liable for someone writing a post saying "gas the jews" but they would still be liable for choosing to show it at the top of everyone's front page, if that was a choice, because the front page was choice-based rather than chronological.
How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU (pizzalegacy.nl)
the most profitable pizza, pizza base + one (literally one) piece of minced tomato, yes you read that right, one “nico” of tomato that pizza will set you back 0 USD because rounding error, the dough is free (if I remember well) and a bit of minced tomato is less than a rounding error, so effectively zero then you sell the pizza for the lowest price customers will hate it, but the price is so good you don’t even need ice cream anymore
•
I'm pretty sure you just described Little Caesar's Pizza business model. I recall way back they were $5 but even today here in California their large pepperoni is only $10 where competitors are charging $27-35
Anyone know of any communities/game jams with the theme of "has no business running on such low hardware requirements"? Kind of like the demoscene but for games. There were many games growing up that gave me such a warped view of what was to be expected from the hardware. Battletoads, Crash Bandicoot, Marathon Trilogy (Macintosh), Age of Empires (Multiplayer), Roller Coaster Tycoon (of course).
•
I've been enjoying seeing how far people have been pushing the Playdate's hardware.
•
Frontier Elite (David Braben). A vast universe, with awesome space flight mechanics (gravity, etc), great graphics/audio, all fitting on one floppy disk. It was coded in assembly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II You could do the slingshot effect in it. For older games, I would say the original Prince of Persia. I played it on an 8088 machine, and it was pretty impressive how he made the animations sophisticated and smooth.
Am I German or Autistic? (german.millermanschool.com)
•
Idk: Assuming you're just partially knowledgeable about psychology and the nature of human interaction (and don't consider yourself infallible) - How can you approach these kinds of questions even remotely genuine? To express it conversely: Unless you're totally oblivious wrt social interaction some of these answers seem rather stupid. So: This does not really test anything but knowledge. I chuckled twice, though.
I am German, not autistic. This confuses me as I have never been to Germany and do not speak German. But rules are rules.
•
Do you have German heritage or live in an area that had a large number of German immigrants at one point?
Not sure, there was this nature + nurture thingie.
•
Or as Stephen Fry put it: "Nature, Nurture and Nietzsche", very fitting here.
Session is shutting down in 90 days (getsession.org)
•
Unfortunately, i could see this coming
I've built many apps throughout the years. One thing that I've learned is that privacy is a secondary concern. It's never a primary one. If your app's main differentiation is privacy, it won't sell. Users just don't care about it that much.
•
Inauthentic activity benefits from privacy though. Inauthentic activity is a primary use case of ChatGPT, which is way more successful than anything you've ever made. Do you think kids using ChatGPT to cheat on homework would care if their chats were "private" but educators could check if submitted essays matched generated content? Uh, yes. So privacy isn't as simple of an idea as you think it is, and is certainly extremely valuable.
> To date, the STF has received approximately $65,000 in donations. This is enough to maintain critical Session infrastructure for the next 90 days. Excuse me, what?! Spending $22k a month in infra as a pre-money startup is insane.
•
I've had the same question above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706122 Haha. The wording's equal too!
They're taking about paying for full time developers.
•
Where am I reading this wrongly? > approximately $65,000 in donations. This is enough to maintain critical Session infrastructure for the next 90 days. We are extremely grateful for the support Session has received from the community, but unfortunately this is not sufficient to retain full-time developers. As a result, all paid staff and developers will have their final working day on April 9, 2026. After this date, some team members will continue on a primarily volunteer basis to help maintain Session until July 8, 2026.
nah. we never had a business plan and are still going strong 11 years later. 99.999% is a gross exaggeration of reality. we’ll never actually have this data, but I bet there isn’t much correlation if any between having a business plan and being successful. have you started a successful business?
•
I’m not speaking from the startup world, but the sheer amount of small businesses that don’t do any level of revenue forecasting, financial modeling, or even formal budgeting and still make a comfortable sum (~$10m assets over the course of 10 years) based on instinct is pretty staggering. Personally it seems more stressful but that’s the leeway experience gets you.
•
I suspect you did actually have a business plan, even if it was informal & just in your head. Something like "based on my experience in this line of work, I can charge about $X for Y service, if I get Z sales at that price, it's a viable business, otherwise I'll try to do ABC instead." It's light on details, but that's still a business plan, you had a plan to bring income in. That's fine. Not having a business plan looks like "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time. > have you started a successful business? Not yet, but I am actually working on it! Having a meeting with a local business tomorrow to discuss potential market pricing options so I have some idea of how much money I can expect to make. Business plan!
For my master thesis I did a lot of digging into the research on success factors for startups. And at least based on what I found back then, you're right. The correlation is weak between any factor like this and success. Generally positive though, so it does make sense to try doing some planning. But it's definitely not a requirement. In general, observable factors doesn't strongly correlate with success. Probably both because there are so many to choose from and because the real world is complex and typically doesn't align well with any predefined plan.
•
This kind of analysis sounds far more interesting than a lot of the "just do what I did!" startup writing that's out there. Do you have any recommendations for further reading from this perspective?
Fair early, fail fast is a cornerstone of startup culture
•
That's not what Session is doing. They're dragging it out with a plea for donations to cover operating expenses.
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year Why not outsource this to a cheaper country? For example, here in Germany salaries are about half of that, and the talent pool is excellent.
•
If you are getting 60k EUR as a senior developer in Germany, you are getting ripped off. Look for a place with an IG Metall contract, friends - if you would like to be making significantly more than $75k USD full time as a senior developer, anyway.
Launch HN: Relvy (YC F24) – On-call runbooks, automated (relvy.ai)
•
Congratulations! The difference between pure agentic exploration and deterministic steps is spot on. Runbooks give ops more confidence on the data exploration and save time/context. Curious how much savings do you observe from using runbook versus purely let Claude do the planning at first. Also how the runbooks can self heal if results from some steps in the middle are not expected.
•
>> how the runbooks can self heal if results from some steps in the middle are not expected. Yeah this is a very interesting angle. Our primary mechanism here is via agent created auto-memories today. The agent keeps track of the most useful steps, and more importantly, dead end steps as it executes runbooks. We think this offers a great bridge to suggest runbook updates and keep them current. >> Curious how much savings do you observe from using runbook versus purely let Claude do the planning at first. Really depends on runbook quality, so I don't have a straightforward answer. Of course, it's faster and cheaper if you have well defined steps in your runbooks. As an example, `check logs for service frontend, faceted by host_name`, vs. `check logs`. Agent does more exploration in the latter case. We wrote about the LLM costs of investigating production alerts more generally here, in case helpful: https://relvy.ai/blog/llm-cost-of-ai-sre-investigating-production-alerts
Interesting! In my experience using custom harnesses has worked better eg: Stripe etc all did it custom largely because of the sensitive integrations. How would you handle that?
•
Re: custom harnesses, imo maintaining them can be time consuming especially when things are changing very fast with AI. Bringing up a prototype is easy but a robust harness that handles the edge cases needs time and effort.
•
Do you mean how we connect to internal data? Today, you can connect any API endpoint to Relvy, so if you have internal business data / dashboards that you look at while debugging, Relvy can do the same if there's an API for it. Most of our deployments are self-hosted, in which case the data stays locally (your chosen LLM provider exempted), if that's what you are asking.
 Top