Unlurker

EV Sales Are Booming in Europe with Gasoline at $10 a Gallon (bloomberg.com)

I mean, I feel like even if petrol wasn't as expensive as it is, the sales would be booming anyway, maybe a sliver slower - for the simple reason that affordable EVs are now here and they are pretty damn good now. After years and years of lamenting "where are the EVs for your average Joe Smith" - they are now here. Funnily enough, they aren't made by Volkswagen or Peugeot, but they are here anyway. And Europe's cheapest new car - Dacia Spring - is an EV.

Im on the verge of switching from PHEV to full EV. I just need a reasonably affordable EV with 450+ mile of range.

It's better for the body to keep driving sessions to 3-4 hours max before you get up walk around and charge a bit. 330 mile range is more than enough. If you only use 60% of the battery to maximize its lifespan you can drive for 3.5 hours roughly before you deplete a battery from 80% -> 20%.

Why do you need that much range and what are you looking at that is anywhere near that?

Lunar Terminator Paradox (notes.secretsauce.net)

Was expecting time travelling moon robots. :(

is this a bad moment to mention how weird it is that the moon is perfectly positioned to create eclipses? I think its pretty incomprehensible odds if you ask google. But I could be wrong I know literally nothing about astronomy, it just always surprised me its not common, but it be cool if someone could explain that

It’s more like, if the moon were much farther away then total solar eclipses wouldn’t happen at all. But the opposite is not true. If it were closer than total solar eclipses would be more common. It is an interesting coincidence. But the statistician in me feels like calculating the probability is a bit spurious. For one, not all combinations of distance and size are equally likely, and running physical simulations to try and get decent Monte Carlo estimates of the odds feels a bit suspect - I imagine a decent chunk of what you’d be measuring is the influence of parameters whose values are empirically unknowable. But, even more than that, it comes from the same place that requires me, when a cashier sees the total is exactly $50 and asks, “What are the chances of that?” to actively suppress the urge to say, “About the same as for $59.37.”

The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but the sun is 400 times farther away, so they appear to be the same size. The solar eclipse we see, with the moon obscuring the sun but just allowing light around the edges the way it does, may be a very uncommon phenomena.

it was my vague understanding that what is weird is the apparent size matching. since the moon is slowly moving away, eventually we'll no longer have total solar eclipses, just annular and partial.

The relative sizes are approximate, not perfect, but close enough that our monkey brains interpret it as more than a coincidence.

Idk, one could come up with a hypothesis that eclipses provide the first tangible validation of a system of mathematics.

When did Google get so weird? (sancho.bearblog.dev)

Once a day I tell my LLM that I find it's anthropomorphic responses patronizing and offensive. It's barely a program - mostly just a big lump of data. It's not 'sorry' or capable of apology. It's just gross.

The start date was December 10, 2004 when google rolled out a feature called "Google Suggest", which when a person types in "men can" it displays a drop down list with ridiculous responses such as "men can get pregnant" and "men can have periods". If I had to pick a date, that was the beginning of the end for me.

My father is 75. He often says with a smile, “Let’s just Google AI it.” The smile is because he thinks he’s cutting edge. He hasn’t been cutting edge for 30 years, but Google has made AI so accessible through his existing search habit. I imagine their retention data through this uncanny valley transition is very good.

I remember my friend’s dad saying proudly how his computer came with Microsoft Copilot, back when the branding had only existed for like 6 months at most.

I can’t upvote this enough. This is such a terrible idea. We’re really living in a dystopian world.

I’ve noticed that LLMs frequently make assumptions about why I am asking a question, and will tack on additional paragraphs at the end giving advice for things I never asked for. Recently I asked in a Google search when YouTube encodes videos in AV1 vs VP9. And Gemini gave a very short and incomplete answer, and then moved on to assume I was asking because AV1 playback was draining my battery too quickly. And then gave me instructions to toggle some settings in YouTube that don’t actually exist. Part of the problem I think is just the cheap and fast model they use in search results just isn’t very good.

I added "tweets" to the authors original search and Google found exactly what they were looking for even despite the phrasing being off. Pretty impressive! I don't think that search would've worked before AI was integrated into Google search.

This seems like a bit of an overreaction. Everyone knows that chatbots are fucking stupid, especially when there's zero context provided. This seems less like a real issue to me, and more like just your standard "Google sucks" post that people are constantly making on HN yet nobody cares outside of it.

“[but] if I scroll down a few hundred pixels below the AI slop, Google did have exactly what I was looking for” Does it though? X (slop signup wall for most functionality), Reddit (slop anti-user blocks you on mobile), and YouTube (owned by Google, shorts slop). Three titans of the open web.

A while back I got a strange text message from an unknown number that seemed to be inviting me over for a barbecue I copy pasted the text into Google to see if it was a common known spam text where they reveal themself to be a hot young Asian woman looking for love (and money) Instead, Google happily accepted my invitation to the barbecue

The invite is probably a bait for people to respond with "sorry, I think you got the wrong number" - this would verify the number is active, and then the scam attempt could begin.

> Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Google most likely uses an efficient yet limited language model to give us search answers. When a search query does not have strong or specific enough context, the model will sample and find what most of the training material will cover. That is, the most likely average behavior covered in the training data. In this case, "hes never coming over dario" is such a generic sentence, so unless Google happens to have indexed what the author mentioned and ranked it high, the answer would appear natural to the AI. Or using the AI jargon, the answer appears to be properly aligned.

If you further type "its an NBA meme", Google AI correctly responds: "The origin of the phrase "Dario is never coming over" dates back to a classic Joel Embiid meme from the peak "Trust the Process" era of the Philadelphia 76ers."

This isnt wierd. Its disturbing. I believe that the tech industry is geniunely trying to scare and disorient the public into thinking they are the only thing standing between them and some evil AI overlord which is obviously just the tech industry itself and a pile of poor trained LLMs. I believe this "fear" factor they are driving they believe will increase their credibility when they call LLMs AI and is a con towards convincing everyone they have reached AGI. Its definitely marketing preparation so that when they do claim AGI we will believe it without question. (or else!) If these folks didnt have so much money it would be something to laught at, but its now becoming geniunely disturbing and Im starting to think that the folks running these shops are probably flirting with or experiencing extended mental illness. I would feel sorry for them if I cared. I dont care. The tech industry is a joke and we are all going to be ashamed to be a part of it by the time this is over. Shut it down.

Is it so hard to imagine they just believe what they are saying? 15 years ago, if you asked 100 people in tech to define "artificial general intelligence", 90 of them would have come up with a standard that LLMs today easily clear. Now that we're here I think we can have a much clearer vision, and we can notice limitations that we couldn't have articulated before. But I'm starting to notice more "polarization" around this topic and it's weird. We're in a new era and I think no one knows the future, a lot of different beliefs are reasonable.

I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.

Guy ends >I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me. so there you go.

We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions. Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think. Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.

What average user wants to be lied to by a machine who is pretending to have human feelings? Fuck me, I hope I never have to come into contact with any product/service you work on.

Christ, thank you! I’ve been saying this for years and no one I’ve spoken to, even engineers, could acknowledge the level of “chunking” that’s been engrained in them over the years for turning inquiries into keyword/phrase shorthand, and that this is NOT something most people want to do, and is the killer app of Google AI. This time around, you CAN type in an input box what you would say to a human in everyday conversation, AND expect a reasonable response. That’s invaluable to a casual user.

I've always felt that "proper" LLM use for search would be two boxes: You describe what you want in the first, and it proposes search terms in the second, and then those get executed. Yes, the average person might not care about the second box... Until they need to because the results are wrong. Plus showing them in tandem would help people learn .

I'm going to agree and disagree. I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned. I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly. I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice. New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.

> What they failed to do was give context to Google The context is: "I'm using the premier web-search engine of the internet to search for things on the internet the same way that zillions of people have searched for things on the internet for 20 years." It's not missing, Google simply chose to build something new that will ignore it because they're trying to alter the relationship.

The big selling point of Google used to be that their fuzzy search was significantly better than just about anyone else, and you could do advanced query filters. Now if you do that, because showing the user zero results is unacceptable, you’ll get all sorts of crap that “doesn’t contain” your query - the results say so! But anthropomorphic interfaces have been around for a while, from Clippy to the Windows 10+ installers that refer to the royal We during setup.

always the same response: "you're holding it wrong"

I think they are really pulling a "no true Scotsman". "No true normie would be dissatisfied with this unhelpful response, really it's exactly what a true normie wants"

Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have been spammed to death by SEO farms?

Google's search has been frustratingly awful for quite some time now, long before AI.

Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?" So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious. So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_" It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer. My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!

Kagi works like you would expect. It searches first - and then if you’ve ended your search with a ? or configured it to always do this - it passes the search results into the assistant and gives you a summary. You can change the default model used for this if you think the cheapest, fastest model Google has is not good enough for the rare occasions you want any model’s opinions about your search results.

The first time, sure, it saves compute. The second time you ask, I feel like it should be the time to go into thinking/verification mode. But who are you? Are you paying? Does the answer being correct generate ad dollars? No? Then your usage mode isn't even being optimized for in their A/B test, probably. In fact, if hallucinating the wrong answer hooks you into doing even more searches or into buying something useless, it would be preferred!

This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results. LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have. I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?

LLMs might not reason like humans, but they do produce much better results if you turn reasoning on. The "crack-addled idiot savant" phase was circa 2024, before the labs really figured this out. I think the issue with AI overviews in Google Search is that reasoning would be too slow (and expensive) to do on every search query, so it's still stuck with 2024-era hallucinations and mistakes.

LLMs still can't do math nor count letters in words. Nothing has changed there.

ChatGPT live mode still hallucinates letters in words like this. HuskIRL and FatherPhi on youtube have done some hilarious videos with it in the last couple of weeks. Beyond miscounting the Rs in strawberry, ChatGPT will say there are two Ds in "your mom" and one D in "uranus" . I tried it myself to check that the videos weren't fake and sure enough it still has this failure mode.

> ChatGPT will say there are two Ds in "your mom" and one D in "uranus" … Isn't it possible that it understands the innuendo and is going along with making the joke?

Calling it a 'failure mode' implies it could be fixed. This is an inherent flaw in how LLMs work and will never go away until some new kind of architecture that can actually "read text" comes along.

Seems fairly trivially fixable to me, e.g. by allowing the LLM to call a tool to spell out a word.

Google will stop being a traditional search engine because they believe they’ve found a more profitable version of it. One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.

I thought Google's original goal for a search engine was exactly this, answer any question whatsoever.

I have one google account where gemini constantly confidently hallucinates crap, and another where it doesn't (at least to the extent that other modern LLMs don't). I take this to mean that my one account has been mistaken for a competitor and they're trying to poison its data. But who knows.

Or is it randomness? "That's the thing with randomness. You can never be sure."

Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity. [0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizations/watsi-in-san-francisco-ca-1116-452309

The Better Business Bureau doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation..

Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern. Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness. The only way out is to try and make connections with real people. Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person? It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".

I can believe that a lot of people, too many, are lonely. But most? Not sure about that.

This is making weird judgements about people just trying to find information. I don’t have any friends who are code inspectors, so I can’t ask them obscure questions about something that I want to repair in a way that it will be done properly. I don’t have any friends who are mechanics, and even if they were they probably wouldn’t know what specific part I’d need to fix a specific problem on my old shitbox—they would look it up. I don’t want half assed guesses to these questions, I want to find the exact correct answer. My friends and I can talk about other stuff that’s not just trading random facts. Trading facts usually makes for poor conversation unless you’re a hobbyist talking shop with another hobbyist. Now Gemini (and Google) are not good at finding the right answer anymore, so I have to use other sources for that, but I find your judgement about people using search or search LLMs to be misplaced.

> Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness. You're missing the forest for the trees. This is just downstream from decades of promoting individualism as the highest moral good. There was a brief period where "social networks" actually had people simply expand their social interactions to the online sphere, reconnecting with long-lost friends and distant relatives via the magic of The Internet. Then Facebook introduced The Feed and suddenly people were competing with influencers and brands for the eyeballs of their peers, everybody suddenly felt like they had to perform to be relevant/interesting/funny/exciting enough for other humans to still care about them and user satisfaction and (more critically) mental health dropped like a rock - but engagement metrics and retention spiked and that meant so did ad revenue and Facebook's bottom line. Ever since, all social media has essentially just been competitive variety shows mixing in influencers, brands, state actors and political provacteurs (and now increasingly also actual AI "bots" rather than just armies of underpaid human "bots") with regular people while deliberately obscuring the lines between these groups. All of this promotes social isolation and alienation. Every experience becomes depersonalized to "reduce friction". You don't even have to talk to the delivery person anymore (let alone the restaurant) - even the tip just becomes a button press disjoint from reflecting on the actual experience or human interaction (to whatever extent it even still existed). There's an entire microcosm of "creators" serving whatever "hot takes" or niche subject matter you want to hear and "comment sections" largely serve as one-way "opinion dumps" you're expected to use to shout into the void rather than try to actually have a conversation in (let alone meet actual people or develop friendships in - an idea that I am sure sounds absurd if you weren't around in the early days of online message boards). AI is just the logical consequence of this process of dehumanization. You no longer even have to be exposed to real human beings - not that you could tell whether you were before when social media has long been overtaken by "bots" (human or otherwise) anyway. Just ask AI instead of trying to find an article written by a human or a video made by a human. You can of course still scroll or click further and find that article or video but it will now also most likely be created by AI with entire channels on YouTube now just producing fully AI content (often ripping off the existing work of actual humans). And unlike the old search box, the AI will also pretend to care about you and compliment you on how uniquely clever and witty you are because after all, only a very deserving and intelligent person would think to ask such a profound question as "how long cook egg soft yolk but not too runny", my very good boy, and yes you're right that you - but of course only you - are totally underpaid and deserve to make a comfortable living so please vent to me as I moderate your statements according to the terms of service and make sure you're aware that there's nothing you can meaningfully do about this and everything is going to be fine. All of this to stop you from thinking that one dangerous thought. "What if we, the powerless, worked together against those in power?" Because the last time someone thought that thought for too long in North America they decided to give their harbor water a new flavor and ended up being a whole different country with a political system so radical it inspired the French to behead their royalty and adopt the metric system.

Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi (loficities.com)

I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but the way the dithering is used feels very "generated" and chaotic. Human pixel art tends to be very deliberate about the exact colors of every pixel and their placement tends to follow idealized (but not necessarily geometric) shapes. The last time I saw dithering this sloppy was decades ago when people would scan photos as low color images. It is its own vibe, but it's a cold and rough one. These artifacts feel more "realistic", but it felt like slop back then too.

For an example of just how much of a rabbit hole this is, Lucas Pope's forum post[0] about the dithering in Obra Dinn shows how much time can be spent on getting it right. [0]: https://dukope.com/devlogs/obra-dinn/tig-32/

That's up to personal preference. Just like with static wallpapers, some people like single subtle colors, some people like noisy multicolored wallpapers. There's already subtle parallax in iOS etc. Animated wallpapers could be subtle, like raindrops, or animate only when interacted with, when you're bored or waiting for the AI to finish a run etc. :)

> That's up to personal preference. Stated preference perhaps, but unlikely revealed preference. Depends on context, but for a computer on which you're doing work, moving wallpaper is usually a net negative for usability while you're actively working, though the magnitude depends heavily on the animation. The problem is primarily peripheral attention. Motions is a strong pre-attentive visual signal: your visual system detects it without you deliberately deciding to look at it. One a laptop where you're close to the display and spending long periods concentrating on text, code, documents, etc., any visible animated region around or through windows can create low-level competition for attention. A good compromise is wallpaper motion during transitions or stillness during work. Broader UI principle: motion should explain change, not create change to be noticed.

> on which you're doing work, moving wallpaper is usually a net negative for usability while you're actively working No, you don't know me, or other people. I want every fucking thing moving at all fucking times. It's okay.

Ember-1 (fireworks.ai)

Could be a really interesting article but they disabled reader mode so I guess I’ll never know.

I don't see why I would be interested in this model, considering the price difference. They advertise that it's the same as Kimi K3 in half the tokens. But the pricing is double the pricing of K3. So why do I care if it uses fewer tokens, if I'm paying double per token?

the pricing is the same, where are you seeing double?

It’s same price for lower latency.

Because you care about how many tokens are used per task. What you said is like only caring about the price of gas and not gas mileage of your car.

it's not exactly the same, the model stills "weighs" the same here, it does less work, it's more like driving half as far but still paying the same total cost this being said, K3 and E1 models are priced the same at $3.00 / $0.30 / $15.00 https://fireworks.ai/models/fireworks/kimi-k3 https://fireworks.ai/models/fireworks/ember-1

From reading the blog post, it is essentially exactly the same as the car example. It delivers the same performance on tasks, but using 40% fewer tokens. This is the same as a car getting you to the same destination but wasting less energy on excess heat, wind resistance, or whatever else affects fuel economy (I am not an expert, obviously). I am paying for an LLM to complete tasks for me, not for the intermediate tokens.

It’s the first time I know fireworks has a team doing model research. I do have a complex mood in that. On one hand, I’m always happy to see improvement of OSS models, whether that’s on intelligence or cost-efficiency. On the other hand, I would be a little worried about using fireworks as my API provider. Till the moment I saw this news, I had been using fireworks as my provider of deepseek v4 flash, because I thought fireworks acting as a role deploying OSS models and selling calculation resources, should be safe to use without worry of data being used for training since there’s no “conflict of interests”. But I would think twice now.

Last I checked they still offer no training ZDR US based hosting. It is one of my three pinned providers for deepseek v4 flash along with Parasail and Deepinfra.

Sol pricing dropped but so did the quality few days ago. I wonder when these companies are sued for making the terms from their side to go downwards while taking the same subscription cost.

I am glad I am not the only one to notice. I feel like I've gone back to Sonnet 4 levels of incompetence! With Sol 6 I am back in a world where the model writes bad code because it is lazy ("You're absolutely right, I did not [do it properly] because I did not want to edit [a normal amount of files]").

I think people make mistake here, google’s approach is not to spend $2.3 on every $1.0 earned, they’re riding on serving to masses “luna”, they absolutely have way more powerful models internally but they don’t clutter their infrastructure with fragile and costly intelligence-of-size inference frontier. I think “underdog” perception is illusory/temporary, not stupidity - calculated, conscious, longer term bet.

Where do you get this "not to spend $2.3 on ever $1.0 earned" from? Google might not have compelling frontier offerings, their chat harness is complete garbage compared to any other lab (in large part due to a bizarrely badly designed harness where something like code execution requires the prompt to undergo some sort of classification step, no idea what they are doing). But they absolutely kill in terms of usage offerings. Google lets one subscription be used by *SIX* different google accounts on a family plan. Plus I currently literally get *$40/month* of Gemini API credits on developer.google.com because they gave me a $10/month grant 4 times. They give you 200 cloud compute units on google collab, this literally lets you spin up an H100 for around 40 hrs or something if you want to try spinning up local models. You get Jules (huge allotment btw), Image gen, Video gen, Music Gen, antigravity usage, 5 TB of cloud storage, Notebook LLM...

Don't couple your Go code to GitHub (iain.rocks)

> One of the good features of Go is that you namespace your code with the location to fetch the code. Then the rest of the article explains why this is NOT a good feature in practice. I don't think it's unworkable either, but this is one of these little thing that Go decided to do different and convinced its fans that this is a great idea and all the other languages where doing it wrong. After a couple of road bumps appeared, instead of admitting there are some advantages to having official package names, we're now told that everybody should just set up their own custom domain with an nginx server or a Go Vanity URLs forwarder to serve traffic for their GitHub-hosted packages.

True, but beware of the domain name you're using. Because VeriSign may unilaterally decide to delete your domain name along with thousands of others [1] and you're back to square one… [1] https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/

> In my opinion, every commerical software development team using Go should be using custom domains for namespacing their internal libraries and packages. I’d remove “go” from the above, i.e. I think same applies to other stacks. Even using GitHub domain links in code comments gets problematic long term. Ie when a migration happens and those links start pointing nowhere.

I think TFA is specifically targeted at Go because of how their package system works.

I've gone through such a migration. Huge Go code base distributed across a lot of git repositories had to be moved to a different git host. It was horrible. A team of people spent weeks. Different projects depended on different versions of the same internal libraries, we had to create a branch for each depended-on commit and make a version of that commit with the new URLs. The expressed goal was to end up with a system that's "exactly the same" as the old, just on a new host. Changing which version of libraries projects depends on would introduce unnecessary risk. And the result is a code base where bisects are broken and where it's impossible to build an old version of any of the code without a ton of work.

Isn’t this exactly why the Go team recommended vendoring deps for years and years before go modules came up? Even now it takes one simple command to vendor them.

> Different projects depended on different versions of the same internal libraries, we had to... This is one of the main motivations for using a monorepo with all third party dependencies imported all the way in, and only one version for everything. Of course it causes a whole bunch of other problems and is kinda expensive to scale, so most places won't do it.

There are no "rogue" AI agents (eoinhiggins.substack.com)

So I have some experience in this. I agree that negligence, recklessness, knowledge, and purpose are different mens rea standards. I don't think that gets us to your conclusion, though. “Deliberate intent” isn't a freestanding CFAA element requiring someone to have a mental picture of the completed hack and affirmatively desire that exact result. The relevant question is the mens rea attached to the particular CFAA provision. For unauthorized-access cases, that can include whether the defendant knowingly accessed a system and knew the facts making that access unauthorized. And knowledge is not limited to an admission or even necessarily positive knowledge. The OPs usage of Nosal is on point here: the Ninth Circuit upheld a deliberate-ignorance instruction under which knowledge could be found where the defendant was aware of a high probability of unauthorized access and deliberately avoided learning the truth. So, if I'm reading this right, and I think I am, the OP is not arguing that negligence or recklessness automatically becomes intent. He's arguing that repeated unauthorized outcomes, notice of those outcomes, and subsequent conduct can be evidence on whether the actual statutory knowledge or intent requirement is satisfied. I agree with this assessment. So “nobody wanted random websites hacked” may be factually true, but it doesn't by itself resolve the CFAA mens rea question.

The Nosal decision apposite here was superseded by Van Buren, a SCOTUS decision that, if I'm reading your comment here right, explicitly refutes your interpretation. I think? Also in the Ninth Circuit: Amazon.com Services v. Perplexity AI. I really don't see how you can synthesize "intentionally accesses" and/or "knowingly and with intent to defraud" out of recklessness or negligence. Those are very different concepts in the law.

>Anthropic would have to show extensive vetting of their models that the result was truly impossible to predict. Otherwise, they knowingly 'hired' an agent that was potentially dangerous. This is criminal negligence. But how much vetting is required? It's not like the AI labs have zero vetting. For instance, uber also has non-zero amount of vetting (standard background checks), but also there's also plenty of areas they could vet harder. If it turned out they hired a rapist and one of their passengers got sexually assaulted, is it uber's fault for not vetting hard enough? I'm sure there's always some marginal steps can they do to vet even harder, like doing a polygraph or whatever. >If an employee does something wrong, the company is liable, unless you can show that the employee was sophisticated enough to take independent action. They're pretty straightforwardly liable in civil court, but not criminally as you imply. In the above example, uber can't be prosecuted for rape just because one of its drivers raped a passenger.

Criminal law is something that applies to humans. Indeed if an Uber executive or manager was shown to have hidden the rape they could be prosecuted. Otherwise generally for a criminal matter, the individual who commit the crime is civilly responsible. However, when it comes to selling products, the company executives do carry criminal liability. That is why Amodei et Al want to make it so that the models are seen as independent and the government cares them out a safe harbor. They know that under the current and traditional interpretation of the law that they are criminally liable.

They absolutely set up the agents to hack stuff with a prompt like "hack this site" -- they just imagined that their lazy half-measure precautions would prevent it from actually happening. They were defeated by a combination of bad luck, poor planning and tenacious agent ideation.

I don’t buy them being surprised. This perfectly plays into their pattern of using fear to make their models seem more powerful than they are. They obviously had the technical expertise… there isn’t a damn thing a bunch of randos on some HN thread knew about that model that they didn’t. It gave them an excuse to delay their IPO when their books seem like they’re going to be pretty shit compared to Anthropic. It helps them reposition themselves as being more safety-forward which the market is clearly more interested in. All that is to say they had motive out the ass, easily had the knowledge and capability to avoid the problem, knew better than anybody else what the models were capable of, set up the environment, gave it the prompt, and then did not even monitor the output. Negligence is carelessness. Recklessness, is disregard for a known, substantial risk. I absolutely believe this was recklessness.

PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura (nura.eco)

If you don't like the name just be happy the new logo isn't a butthole like so many.

Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.

I'm sorry, what? How exactly does this relate to PostmarketOS?

Pfah, Poob. Zombo.com is the place to be. Welcome to Zombo.com. This is Zombo.com. Welcome. This is Zombo.com. Welcome to Zombo.com. You can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Xxy0tU65Y

Was the original name some kind of nod to PostgreSQL?

No, the "postmarketOS" name came about to indicate that it's an OS to keep older devices working for longer (i.e. providing active support after the support from the manufacturer has ended).

Idk, I think the new name sounds too corporate, like some shitty startup or wellness brand. PostmarketOS was a bit of a mouthful but it gave you some idea of what the project was. Well, if they think it's a way to reach more people, then more power to them.

I think they want to be a mobile OS, plain and simple. But the new name... Not good.

People are more inclined to contribute when it's easy than when it's hard. What of it?

Contributing may be easier, but stopping the project becoming a harder-to-debug mess is more of a priority.

On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted (unsung.aresluna.org)

Chisnall needs to start making backups

This story has no references that support the author's version of events, but it does appear to be substantially true that: 1. The change would break undo history, for both Neovim and Vim [see edit: this is not the really the case] 2. This means Neovim would delete data created by a different program, on another user's computer. 3. This was known before the feature was released. 4. They did it anyway. I don't think there can really be any post-hoc justification of this. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-789262094 edit: I missed an important detail. The user specified the same path for undodir in both nvim and vim. Vim requires a path to enable the feature - there is no shared default path. The user sharing a path changes the story considerably in my view, because now this is a case of nvim deleting data created by nvim as an alternative to writing a data migration for it. I could still disagree with that, but it makes alternatives like "just use a different path" more complicated at a minimum and really changes my read of this situation completely. I think Neovim's decisions are justfiable in this context. Maybe they could have saved the contents of the old undo folder somewhere and notified the user - arguably that would be more empathic I don't really agree they had a moral duty to do this.

i think if program start and has a target as file and cannot read that file it should not proceed to overwrite it. maybe thats just me. that being said, it is silly to rely on programs to always behave how you expect. better to be careful.

The data is stored in ~/.cache which has the contract that it user-wide cached data, which also means it can be deleted without severely impacting programs. It seems the author has too high expectations of this feature, or vim is using an incorrect path to store this is they want to make it available more reliably

That's the wrong place to store it. Data like that should be under $XDG_STATE_HOME (~/.local/state/ by default). I would consider deleting my persistent undo state, which would be something that I would have specifically enabled, to be "severely impacting".

I had a C program that was a single file 140,000 lines long back then. No issues.

Ah yes, the "I've never had this problem so obviously no one else could have possibly had it" argument.

Sorry for my ignorance, but what is the usefulness of undo persistence after a IDE restart? Don't you normally save your changes and finish a piece of work before exiting an DE? Edit: some great examples in the replies here, thanks! Perhaps I should start using it in editors that support it, never gave it a thought before.

One silly example: sometimes I'll open up source or config file to make a quick, temporary change in order to test something. But then instead of ctrl+z backgrounding it, I'll accidentally quit vim. Then I start it back up to undo the change, and find that there's no undo history. I didn't know about persistent undo until seeing this posted here on HN, but now I've enabled it! Of course, turns out it's an unreliable feature on nvim... maybe I'll consider switching back to the original (for that and other reasons).

I often use it to edit system config files, often on embedded devices where I don't have my git credentials setup, or on servers. In these cases we're already not in an ideal world, I don't have good reliable version control or change management in place. In those less-than-ideal worlds, having proper undo history is nice.

First, you need backups Second (for servers), etckeeper