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U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels (postalemployeenetwork.com)
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UPS is also full of holes. No verifications whatsoever. You can purchase a label from a reseller and then ship using that label to a different place at a different weight several times. Battled with this at a previous job.
I am pretty sure I bought from a seller using this (or something similar) on eBay. It sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about this type of scam that exploded earlier this year: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-04/25-072-3-r26.pdf Here's how it went down: https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/theperfectpart Note that they’ve sold so much that even 1k neutral ratings are barely registering - they have “100% positive feedback” I bought a cheap tool from this seller on ebay. Tracking number was provided showing my town as the destination. About four days later, I get an unprompted ebay message from the seller: “I monitor all my shipments and sometimes there are problems so I’m proactively sending you a new one, here’s a new tracking number.” The original tracking number showed a message I’d never seen before “Item seized - counterfeit postage”. The new tracking number showed postage that had been bought back in January, but never entered the mailstream. Huh. I suspect that buys them time while they re-ship. I did eventually get the item after another tracking number was provided. My suspicion is that the seller uses counterfit USPS postage on 'x' number of packages to juice their margins. If you look at the neutral reviews, you can see a pattern — slow postage, lost package, had to replace, blah blah. Look at the positives — rave reviews at how fast things are arriving. Probably because the seller is “paying” for higher end postage via scamming the USPS. And only when they get caught by USPS do they need to re-ship an item. They must get away with it enough to make it worthwhile
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Related: Not US postage labels, but suspicious US postage stamps, seemed to also be used as a crude currency. A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews. (I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)
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What was the end result of this?
Why is that report so heavily redacted?
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There was recently an update report published that gives a little bit more information but is still heavily redacted. I presume some of these vectors are still viable for exploit. https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-09/25-072-r26.pdf
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Because the redacted bits tell you what the crooks are doing wrong.
Thanks for the links. I'm confused how this works and the USPS report seems to be heavily redacted around details. I would assume that the tracking number has the address details tied to it (I mean, based on support claims with USPS it definitely does), but maybe there's some obscure package type where destination is not distinct and they abuse that in a pool with other sellers, then at the last mile it gets sorted appropriately? Seems wild that this market even exists considering how USPS flat rate postage exists. Was your package something heavy or extremely light which makes weight-based shipping more economical?
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I’ve read about this. They basically reverse engineered how USPS creates the unique tracking number.
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They aren't hard to generate. They give you how to generate them via their own documentation. It's just made up of an app ID, service type code, mailer ID, serial number, and check digit.
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The redaction is frustrating, but I suspect the approach is still at least partially viable, so they aren't interested in giving a playbook for scammers to exploit. The tool I bought wasn't what you'd think of as a small, inconsequential item. I'd wager it was ~2lbs and was a automotive brake bleeder in a blowmolded case. Probably the size of an old-timey encyclopedia. Cheaply made of course (almost certainly an aliexpress item). The seller I bought from has what appears to be an aliexpress dropshipping supply chain -- they buy the tool for $, ship from a US warehouse in Florida for $$.
They're completely counterfeit, not real but generated fraudulently. This article has an example: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/nullship-selling-counterfeit-postal-labels-freightwaves-investigation-finds
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This article has some inconsistencies with what I experienced. For example, my label absolutely had tracking before being intercepted. In fact, it made it all the way to my city's distribution center. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/nullship-selling-counterfeit-postal-labels-freightwaves-investigation-finds#:~:text=%E2%80%9CCounterfeit%20shipping%20labels,not%20paid%20for.%E2%80%9D Here's the trajectory. Note that the final status has updated to no longer say "counterfeit" it's now just "postage assessment". ----- Delayed for postage assessment, Item in transit to destination August 13, 2026 5:44 AM Departed USPS Facility JERSEY CITY NJ DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 11, 2026 2:08 PM Delayed for postage assessment, held awaiting payment August 10, 2026 9:21 PM Arrived at USPS Facility JERSEY CITY NJ DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 10, 2026 4:53 PM In Transit to Next Facility August 10, 2026 6:24 AM In Transit to Next Facility August 9, 2026 7:13 PM Departed USPS Facility MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 9, 2026 8:18 AM Arrived at USPS Facility MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 9, 2026 1:28 AM Departed USPS Facility MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 8, 2026 10:30 AM Delayed for postage assessment, held awaiting payment August 7, 2026 6:29 PM In Transit to Next Facility August 7, 2026 9:14 AM Arrived at USPS Facility MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 7, 2026 7:17 AM In Transit to Next Facility August 6, 2026 7:04 AM In Transit to Next Facility August 5, 2026 5:53 PM Departed USPS Facility OPA LOCKA FL DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 5, 2026 4:46 AM Arrived at USPS Facility OPA LOCKA FL DISTRIBUTION CENTER August 4, 2026 2:33 PM
> Akram is charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make and sell counterfeit postage stamps, five counts of making and selling counterfeit postage stamp labels, and four counts of wire fraud. i would love more insight into how they come up with the number of charges. why five counts of making/selling counterfeit postage stamp labels instead of 1 charge that covers all 5 million, or 5 million charges, etc.
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They probably distinguish between what they think and what they know. It could very well be they ran a “sting” and made a few transactions through the site and are only charging against those transactions to get extradition started while they assemble the larger case.
Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market (gamersnexus.net)
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> Memory companies Someone misspelled "Altman", https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
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This comes at a perfect time. The public doesn't need computers, they can just use their phones. If the consumer had access to this RAM, they might all just run local or semi-local AI. It's important to outbid them so you can rent AI to them, and extract money from them in a million other ways while they use it.
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Make RAM half the price it was before and you'd still have very few people trying to do local AI on it because it's just so damn slow for the task. Having 12 channels of DDR5 in an Epyc system with NVMe storage is still one of the slowest ways I can run LLMs locally.
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> The DRAM and NAND flash manufacturers at fault for the ongoing RAM, SSD, and GPU price increases Yes, it's the manufacturers fault, not the unbelievable market demand. We are all Capitalists, until the Market comes after the stuff we love.
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> We are all Capitalists, until the Market comes after the stuff we love. Anyone with half a brain isn't a "Capitalist" (with a big C, like in your example) which is why every single prosperous nation (including USA) regulates markets to avoid destruction of their prosperity and society.
People have the option of just not buying stuff. I sold my Tesla in 2021 for a stupid price, drove a beater for two years, and bought another new car a couple years later. Now, certainly not everyone has that luxury, but this is computers, not real estate. Prices will crash.
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>People have the option of just not buying stuff. Unless you know, your main and only PC/notebook just died and need a replacement ASAP, they you don't really have an option to not buy. And no, the used market (where I live) is just as fucked, reflecting the retail gouging, with people wanting quite a lot of cash for tower PCs and notebooks from the Pentium 4 - Core 2 Duo era. > Prices will crash. Does your crystal ball also say when exactly? If my laptop broke, then I need a replacement now in the overpriced market, not in X years when prices will crash.
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I hope so. I feel so, so, so terribly guilty for not building my wife a computer for her in 2023. She is rocking a 1080ti, and I really wish I had at least upgraded her system, but now I just straight cannot afford to even consider it, given the price of rent, food, gas, energy, all on top of the actual hardware prices. And I am a SWE.I am not making bad money. I can't imagine what others are going through.
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Way to miss the whole point of the article and fail to understand the point. Do you think if significant part of US industry goes bankrupt because they can't source parts for their products, work machines and consumers disappear... you'll still have luxury of running around in a Tesla?
Should we blame this on memory companies or the AI companies bidding for memory? How should the memory companies have acted differently?
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> How should the memory companies have acted differently? Same way nVidia did through the crypto insanity - make sure they're supplying enough to the consumer market so it doesn't get completely destroyed and pulls down the other parts of the consumer market they're reliant for long term success. > Should we blame this on memory companies or the AI companies bidding for memory? Blame doesn't change the outcomes, neither does it improve the negative consequences. Think in terms of "what does destruction of our consumer market mean for my prosperity?" not "oh, how do defend poor companies again?"
I think the epic mistake was made by investors and executives who bought tales about imminent super-intelligence about to displace millions of knowledge workers from entire industries replacing them with AI datacentres. These people are the main reason why AI companies have unlimited funding, and can afford to buy global RAM supply for years in the future despite their expenses exceed revenue by billions.
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The same thing was said 4 years ago about NVIDIA on HN, that it's stock it's outrageously overpriced, given it's $20 bln revenue, that it should have at least 10 times more revenue to justify that stock price, which is fantasy, that there is no plausible way for such demand no matter what you think about GPT-2.
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nVidia earning is way above zero by a healthy margin. This was also true 4 years ago. How much their shares should cost is debatable but still, nVidia is obviously a profitable business. Anthropic net loss in 2025 was $42 bln, OpenAI $38.5 bln. Both are spending enormous amounts with no obvious path to profitability.
You can short them and make a lot of money (to buy RAM with?) if you feel this way and are correct.
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Google (which is diversified more and whose performance is less likely to track AI outcomes closely) aside, the two other members of the AI Big 3 are non-public, so, no, you really can’t.
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No? Shorting doesn’t only require you to be right. It requires perfectly timing when the market will realize you’re right.
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You can buy long term put options.
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That still requires perfect timing. Getting the timing right on a long-term contract is even harder than with a short-term contract!
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Can I? Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are publicly traded.
I'd come at this from a different angle: we still want this to be market system, so we need to make this priced into the market. How can we price this in? I would try to solve this by making the market structure reflect the underlying difficulty: we have to decide what capacity to produce years in advance, to construct the memory fabs. So this should be a futures market, and a capacity crunch would affect short-term-futures, but leave full term futures at the same price. Because the companies supplying the memory can just construct more capacity to fill those futures at the same cost regardless of the AI demand.
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ah yes, adding a futures market to a sector heavily invested in AI certainly won't lead to catastrophic over-speculation that will collapse the industry entire
Isn't it the case that public companies owe a primary legal/fiduciary duty to shareholders over customers? The question of choice between a profitable vs unprofitable venture is easy. But yeah, to what extent is choosing profitable instead of VERY profitable a breach of duty to shareholders?
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No, and I don't know who keeps teaching you that nonsense.
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>Isn't it the case that public companies owe a primary legal/fiduciary duty to shareholders The shareholders own the company. It is their property. They paid for it, they own it, and likewise they can do whatever they want with it. It would be crazy if I proposed you let me drive your car to work everyday. Why? Because you own your car, it's your property, and it works for your own interest. Basically every human agrees with this logic, but somehow "the company is just focused on pleasing shareholders" escapes this.
fiduciary duty doesn't mean you always have to do what makes the maximum profit avoiding the destruction of good faith with consumers is a legitimate business interest
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Good faith with customers also has a monetary value, even if it is hard to calculate. This is still maximizing profits.
AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom (thenationalnews.com)
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is their goal to value tokens as some pseudo-currency and create some wacko new age economy like crypto tried and failed to do?
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I have an obvious but different perspective on the article... Currently, hyperscalers are growing revenues at an impressive annual rate (~20%), which comfortably covers current annual CapEx. While traditional cloud services still drive a large share of this growth, AI services are becoming an increasingly material contributor. So far, so good. However, the real question is whether a market actually exists to sustain this CapEx spending at scale relative to revenue growth. The current CapEx growth rate (~50%+ year-over-year) has already outstripped revenue growth, and no one truly knows where the trillions in required future revenue will come from. If this projected revenue growth fails to materialize, tech equities face severe re-rating risk, given that current stock valuations have already priced in these best-case expectations. A market crash unless a real market is discovered. In summary, nothing new—perhaps just another red flag.
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I think what's lost on the general public who mainly thinks AI is ChatGPT, is that these companies are gunning for knowledge worker salaries. That by itself is ~$30T/year globally. Nothing else justifies the infra spend. Data center investment is a bet that they will be able to virtualize knowledge workers in the next 5 years. Warehouse and factory labor is the next largest market for AI/robotics, at about $7T/year globally. The bubble question is really about the target year. Will these companies start on a trajectory where AI begins eating these massive markets before investors lose faith? To me it looks like one of these is true: (1) this is indeed a bubble, and AI will turn into a useful tool integrated into everything but fall short of expectations. We'll see some significant multiple compression in the share prices of these core AI companies, but they'll remain good investments in the long term. (2) this is a real transformation, the investment was worth it, and these companies will earn massive revenue while causing Depression-era levels of unemployment (24% if half of knowledge workers and factory/warehouse workers can get jobs). Basically, the revenue required to justify the infra spend requires that they start eating existing industries, because that's certainly not going to come from ChatGPT/Claude subscriptions.
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there‘s another option. It could be both. The labs are never able to recoup their massive investments, eventually causing a huge loss on the stock market, AND the efficiency gains from tech they pioneered but failed to capitalize on wipes out millions of jobs.
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(3) it could be real but with new jobs and increased output rather than depression era unemployment.
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The $6T / yr seems to be to justify future data centers much larger than we have now. I guess either we get human level AGI so it can do human like jobs, or they'll have to trim those plans a good bit?
It's been almost half a year since we got powerful enough models, and I'm wondering, where are all those great things that were created with them? Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far. No improvements, but definitely, I need to be more careful when reading, listening, watching, and using things, as bad quality slowly creeps everywhere.
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Exactly. Software seems to be getting worse. The internet is getting filled with more and more bloat and falsehoods. I have yet to see any truly great products made with heavily agentic coding. Correct me if I'm wrong?
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I think it's more, let's layoff 20% of the people, give the rest some of the money saved in tokens, deliver features a lot faster (or at least expect them to). Jury's out how long this can continue before the "nobody understands the code anymore" chickens come home to roost.
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I formally proved an important 2025 CS paper (which I did not write) in Lean last month, it took like 2 or 3 weeks of intermittently poking at claude to keep going. AFAIK, it is the first rust-like borrow checker completely formally proven in Lean. I'm currently using it as a basis for building a systems language with Rust's memory guarantees, but with new features like generators and co-routines, and effects instead of colored functions. The fact that the borrow checker's properties are formally proven means I can trust more of what Claude is doing than you normally would be able to do.
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I wrote a golf simulator that helps visualize golf architecture with help from Gemini. When I published my first piece, I got an email from Tom Doak and the head of data science at Arccos. An absolutely insane response for my dumb blog. I was invited to the Renaissance Cup this year, almost certainly because of that post; golf nerds can tell you what a huge deal that is. The blog post is here for anyone interested: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month-and-a-half Things are happening… and quickly, even if we are not quite to the point where VC’s are ready fund prototypes of robots to fold your laundry. Most of what’s happening is nerds finally building the project they’ve always dreamed of outside the traditional funding pathways.
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For what its worth, https://www.weaverobotics.com/ is one of those VC-funded robot-to-fold-your-laundry companies! I think physical world implications are coming!
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But I bet you’re making restaurant reservations so much faster than before!
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What we've seen in the past with generally applicable technologies generally take 20 years to show up as productivity. There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end) In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those. I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.
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computer scientists/software engineers and their completely messed up sense of how long it takes for things to actually take a hold in real life is always a bit amusing to me. Half a year is not a lot of time when it comes to meaningful change in directions that matter.
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Sure but the core point of commercial LLM’s pitch is tremendous speed up in development. It’s been speeding up for years now, yet like the commenter above I too cannot notice any improvements as an end user.
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also, the part that is making lenders and such nervous is that they like to be paid on time on a schedule, and it's unclear how they will keep doing so without growing an increasingly large amount of debt.
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We have replaced multiple 100k contracts from SaaS vendors with fully AI created alternatives. AI is a tool. In the hands of talented and efficient workplaces, it is like any tool. But, if you give the latest DeWalt OMT to a person who doesn't know or is scared of it, and put them in an organization that is full of politics and bureaucracy, then that tool is going to be useless.
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You might be one of the rare few doing that. According to Stripe Economics, the supposed SaaSpocalypse brought about by AI actually resulted in accelerated revenue growth for SaaS. Companies just aren't building these custom SaaS-killers like HN would have us believe. https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more-like-a
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The responses you’re getting are quite telling. LLMs have unlocked a whirlwind of shit where we can no longer trust most things, communities are suffering with noise, lack of water, increased energy prices, mass surveillance is rapidly increasing, private information is being leaked and sold… But hey, you can now close yourself off even more, not interact with anyone or develop a skill to get a dumb bash script for a menial task you wouldn’t miss that much anyway if you didn’t have it. Woopie, totally worth it!
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I run my own custom version of BlueBubbles and a locally run clone of Wispr Flow. In addition, I've vibe-coded lots of nonsense throwaway apps that helped me with a one time boring task. Wouldn't have been possible.
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I'm seeing a ton of niche apps being built that otherwise wouldn't have been. As an example, NegPy is an app that gives you much more precise control when working with film negatives, and has been built largely w/ AI tools. There are a small couple of other photography related niche apps I've seen taking off, for example, for managing your Fuji recipes. I'm working on a Lightroom replacement myself, which I never would've taken on before AI tools. In terms of personal life, I certainly find AI tools pretty useful especially given how awful Google is now, and coding tools are indispensable at work.
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You’re all confirming the point by quoting niche examples of things that wouldn’t sustain a million dollar a year market, let alone contribute to a 6 trillion dollar one.
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Where exactly does the OP mention a 6 trillion dollar market?
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In the title.
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[delayed]
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Most big companies are performance theaters see token maxxing as one prominent example. But go and talk to small companies. What they are able to pull off is just incredible. More features in shorter time. Improved UX and client satisfaction. On a society level 6 months is nothing. This will take about 10 years to penetrate all organizations I assume.
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Do people need this "more features in a shorter time"? I can say that, for me, I stopped reading changelogs because some software that I use started to update too often. If there are any new features that were added, I probably won't notice them. And I remember times when people got angry at companies for "improving their UX" and breaking the daily routines of their users.
I just invented a simple upgrade script for my father's ancient Fedora install. I've gone from version 33 to the latest(44) with a simple utility I one shot in 5 minutes. Since Fedora moves old releases to some mirror it's a nightmare to update old installs. Now I did it very conveniently. Did I build a space ship with the help of ChatGPT? No. Is it useful to me? Yes. I'm doing many much cooler things that I haven't released yet but I am launching projects I never dreamed I could do as a solo dev in 2-3 months.
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I did some projects, but there are some things that I don't like. For example, when I wrote a program for my old ThinkPad, I didn't only create a useful utility for myself, but also learned and practiced Qt/C++. Now, I don't learn anything new, nor do I practice my skills when I "create" something. Maybe, the things I'm learning are how to prompt LLMs, add necessary skill files, and so on.
are you under the impression 6 months is a long amount of time?
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I've been working on my project, a paid mobile app, for five months now. I'm pretty confident I can release it in October, after some 500 hours of work. Usually in these discussions I get "so it has zero users then". One time someone on here told me that for AI to prove its worth for software engineering, my application would need to be in use already for at least ten years.
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Well, yes. Now you can create an MVP in 2-3 days, you know :D
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According to some AI proponents, that’s like 60 months in pre-AI time.
Do you build things for yourself? I’ve unlocked tremendous value just by scratching my own itches so to speak. But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI. The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.
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You explained the problem brilliantly. Frontier models are great at making you tinker and come up with shit you wouldn’t have done because there is zero value in it and you would have had to bet a value N (time, money) to obtain before this investors-subsidized almost-free software existed. This is deluding individuals and CEOs and everyone who seems incapable to abstract from the sycophantic personal experience into systemic thinking. To be fair, LLMs have been engineered to give this illusion, so the fault lies with the grifters controlling them. Now are there useful applications of these tools (not gods) that might justify a sizeable new tech market? Absolutely yes! Is that market ever be going to be worth trillions a year? LOL hell no.
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It appears that out of a desperate urge to show your "Well Actually" Club Card that you've proved their entire point.
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So you've unlocked tremendous value, but you're not earning any money? So where is the value? Have you built that one application you always wished existed but it wasn't available?
If agentic coding isn't dramatically changing your productivity you're getting left behind. There's a clear difference between vibe coding and AI assisted software / systems engineering from how I think about things. With AI you can be massively more productive. I do a lot of things beyond code and this is what I've built in 2026 (quick snip from scc, it has proper excludes for node_modules and other pulled in deps that I didn't build) from ~code/ on my dev box: ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── TypeScript 10,705 2,445,724 191,695 71,737 2,182,292 167,330 JSON 1,435 604,218 58 0 604,160 0 Rust 1,260 718,912 56,372 57,773 604,767 65,562 Markdown 1,087 162,160 36,375 0 125,785 0 SQL 1,046 129,795 6,142 7,389 116,264 1,344 Python 705 168,359 22,710 23,235 122,414 17,962 JavaScript 657 209,397 8,824 7,587 192,986 45,383 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Total 19,009 4,903,248 353,289 186,252 4,363,707 326,094 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $179,262,721 Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 98.79 months Estimated People Required (organic) 161.19 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Processed 206,138,543 bytes, 206.139 megabytes (SI) ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
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I never said I wouldn't miss it or that is is useless, just that in comparison to other services I pay for (or the company I work for pays for) I could easily live without it. I have to ask though, are these lines of code making you money? If so will you continue to need to produce this amount of code over the next 2 to 5 years to continue to profit from your work? I also would point out this argument could be applied to choosing some open source framework over another because of the number of lines of code it contains which doesn't make sense.
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But what does "getting left behind" mean? Not producing as many LOC or apps as someone leaning heavily on agentic AI? Often it's the small, insightful, well-crafted thing that goes much further than 100 decent projects. Git was a little tool written on a weekend and it went a lot further than giant projects written by giant teams.
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Sure, and how much did this cost you in tokens or subscriptions? Reason I ask is sure, you did this but since few people are paying true cost, if prices rises by 10x, is it still worth it?
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I can run qwen locally and it's actually pretty good. I'm not worried. Worse case, I'll have to use DeepSeek or something.
Same thing that happened to blue collar work witch used to be the path to the middle class before the 1990s. The economy managed to create plenty of wealth without doing anything for 40% of the population.
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Ok and then what did that 40% of the population do in 2016?
1. This is global, not USA only 2. Global GDP will be ~$165T by 2031 3. This is not $6T of ChatGPT subscription revenue. The article actually specifically says of the $6T, $200-$400B would be subscription and AI app revenue in 2031. 4. The $6T figure is AI "economic enablement". Drugs, robotics, research, coding, manufacturing, materials, etc...
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Fair point about global vs US as your sibling notes. > 2. Global GDP will be ~$165T by 2031 But GDP is a very different thing than payrolls.
as ai becomes an actual replacement for workers, costs will rise to what you would pay a worker, and $6T will be easy
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Except that it would be priced based on pass-through prices rather than existing value perception. It used to cost hundreds to send a letter on horseback, it costs pennies to send an email, consumers aren't going to tolerate spending hundreds when they know it take pennies to send. Models are getting cheaper, and more efficient, but I don't see how they cross the threshold of full autonomous intelligence in the way that an employee needs to be fully accountable for their actions.
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eventually it will be pennies, but based on current trends i'd bet value outpaces price decreases for a while once it actually becomes an employee replacement the demand then will rise and prices will rise in tandem it is of course possible that 'deep learning hits a wall' and they don't get there, but i wouldn't bet on it
What about the part where workers take less money?
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say more?
They talk a bit about where the AI companies are supposed to get their revenue from. I’d like to see these analyses go a step further and talk about how those AI customers are supposed to come up with that money as well. For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now. Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?
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The global GDP is $126T, a 5% productivity increase would correspond to $6.3T. So, I have the following thoughts: How much more productive can AI for knowledge work realistically make the global economy? 5%, 10%, 20%? What if it also does robotics soon and can be deployed in manufacturing and construction? Can we get 50% more productive, or 200%? Then there's science, medicine, and so on. Who is to say what happens if AI solves also that? While I do not know if AI will be capable for these use cases, I see no reason to believe it unlikely that AI could be applicable to eg. robotics and speed up production by factor 3x.
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I think we've barely scratched the surface of available 'evil' applications for AI that will be immensely powerful. Building, for example, an application capable of building personalized emotionally targeted advertisements based on a user profile would be incredibly effective and probably expensive but I bet it would pay dividends.
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"Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?" Because they will replace people with tools I am guessing?
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Bingo. When that 1000% increase in spending on tokens represents a cost savings of 80% on knowledge worker labor, companies will happily pay it. The other factor that threatens the $6T required to justify... open source models crushing the pricing power of these companies. If I can use some open source agent management framework + self-hosted Qwen to basically replace my entire Product org for free, then why would I pay Microsoft/Google/Anthropic/OpenAI?
it seems fairly obvious to me that once ai becomes as good as a worker, people will pay a workers wages to use it - 24/7, can't quit, can't complain that badly, no lunch breaks productivity tooling replaces employees
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No lunch breaks, but also no responsibility.
If it's any consolation, in the end it will destroy capitalism too.
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true, and humanity may all be dead due to rogue ai or speciation, so maybe there'd be no humans around to care
Fair… how many (ballpark) of these people do think are there? Where do they get the money to pay the workers currently?
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you can't reason about currently because the entire economy will change before collapsing completely - there will be a poor class and a rich class
It’s true - but then where do folks get money to buy from the businesses? Eventually this merry-go-round runs into some issues if we don’t figure out a way to make this huge productivity boom work.
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Folks stop having money to buy from businesses. Other businesses buy from them instead. There's no hard and fast rule that humans need to be involved in the economy, it's just that until recently, you needed to pay them in order to have an economy that worked. Corporations are legally people; give them enough brains, and they may become a real boy one day.
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From other business owners. If this hypothesis is true, they're saying the share of wealth controlled by labour goes dramatically down, and the share of wealth controlled by capital goes dramatically up. So most of your revenue will come from capital holders instead of labourers.
In theory: 1) This would make stocks worth a lot more and produce more dividends so everyone owning stock would get money to spend. 2) Governments effectively indirectly own ~40% of all business profits via corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, sales taxes. So governments would also have more revenues to spend/redistribute (this depends on governments not wasting it, spending it on wars etc.)
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#1 is still mostly just moving money from the poor to the rich. Most people working for a wage are going to be in the bottom 80%, yet the top 20% own over 80% of the stocks.
Keep in mind wealth is not a fixed thing. If AI makes their businesses more productive, it would allow the creation of more wealth, giving them more money to pay for AI with. This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.
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No matter how productive you are, at some point producing more does not yield more return. We live in a finite world.
More productivity might translate into more revenue, but more productivity doesn't necessarily create more wealth. For example, if I'm a landlord that uses AI to more intelligently price rental increases to maximize profit without attrition, I have created more revenue but not more wealth.
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Wealth creation happens in positive sum games. Wealth destruction happens in negative sum games. Winners and losers are decided in zero sum games. Play positive sum games.
I think the Labor Theory of Value is going to bite these companies and the economy as a whole in the end
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The labor theory of value has been debunked for over a century and modern economics doesn't use it.
>For example horse business going bankrupt while car business is booming. But also the car business is far larger than the horse business ever was. It is not zero-sum; every time Henry Ford's factory spit out a new model T, real wealth was being created. Money is just a standin for wealth. If we suddenly doubled the amount of wealth in the world, we could just print more dollars to match - or the existing dollars would just become worth twice as much.
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This. Positive sum games are deflationary. Economic policy can, and has, offset the deflation of techno capital growth.
If you show productivity, banks have no problem lending you money (new freshly printed money)
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Indeed, although there are also pressures pushing banks to lend out money regardless of created wealth. This is why there's so much investment into stupid things like AI - they call it TINA or "There Is No Alternative" (to put your dollars into). The scale of AI is as big as it is because there were huge pools of money sloshing around looking for things to invest into, that's the underlying problem that caused the RAM crisis, not AI itself.
Are they saying it right now? I think CEOs could honestly say it a year ago, but by now the numbers of those who say so should be dwindling. Recent surveys by BCG and others suggest things have changed. Personally, I know many people in different fields who’ve seen crazy speed ups in many of their tasks.
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Maybe they are speeding up things that were not the bottleneck or don't matter. Or LLMs speed up the time to learn, "well this idea probably sucks actually", which is great, but in the end there is still no good idea. For software dev, it had already gotten pretty efficient before LLMs came around - the business of making software demanded it. There are still gains to be had no doubt, but many will have less impact. I'm using claude to make gaming mod apps I never would have bothered to code before, but they have zero monetizable value. There is demand for sure, but somewhat ironically, copyright/IP/TOS law stands in the way. The thing which committed the biggest copyright infringement in human history lets me make another thing which I can't release because of copyright law. I'd get cease-and-desisted instantly if I did so.
But does crazy speedup of tasks actually yield more productivity? Or does it yield greater numbers of pointless tasks? Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?
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If management spends their idle time building dashboards by themselves instead of taking up developer time asking for dashboards to be built and populated for them, there might be productivity to be had...
And, perhaps more to this particular point, it came too late for vendors behind the dotcom boom. Lucent Technologies no longer exists. WorldCom no longer exists. Cisco is a shadow of its former self, with a stock price that only recovered last year.
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Cisco is a profitable company making useful products and services. The fact that we consider that a failure is damning.
Total software developer comp (worldwide) is ~$1T
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Information worker compensation might be something like 14T total. A ~40% reduction in employee compensation to source 6T, globally, seems a little more plausible. Clearly, I'm eliding a ton of complexity/nuance.
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Yes, and it's $30T when you include all knowledge worker roles.
Please don't cover up one insane claim with an even less plausible one.
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the people at these companies really believe the insane claims
I truly don't think anyone serious believes that, but if they pretend to believe it and preach it aggressively they might make out with an historic payday and stick the rest of us with the bill. People did the same with Crypto, with NFT's, with a bunch of things for as long as the ball is rolling.
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A healthy measure of my personal skepticism comes from the fact that GenAI represents the convergence of so many historically negative (and frankly idiotic) influences. - AI hype-mongers. We've dealt with these for decades in academia and industry, through countless boom/bust cycles. Yes, there's progress, but reality is boring and selective. - Tech Bros. NFTs? The MeTaVeRsE? The CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and SpaceX have proven repeatedly to be dishonest grifters chasing all and only money. They're like the tobacco industry of laughably dishonest at this point (and consistently wrong). - Singularity grifters. The Kurzweil cultists flooding the ranks of lesswrong feel suddenly emboldened. They've been issuing batshit proclamations and navel gazing about AI alignment to anyone who will pay attention to them (and write them a check) for decades. It's no more connected to reality now than it was then. - The LinkedIn hivemind. If you aren't transforming your organization to meet the new GenAI future, your company is BEHIND and you are FAILING AS A LEADER. Be the one firing white collar workers, not the one being fired. Make sure you look good on paper with bullshit performative AI initiatives or your ass is dust. Oh, no ROI? No problem. Read my book on NAVIGATING THE ENTERPRISE AI TRANSFORMATION. It's skin-deep and filled with empty platitudes and clip art, but it will make you look like a big brave tech leader, just like Steve Jobs or Dario. - Investors. Yes, we're in a bubble. Yes, we've been in a bubble before. Yes, it's going to pop. Yes, that's going to be bad. Really bad, probably. Remember the financial crisis? Investors don't. And this time, there won't be a deep-pocketed government to bail anyone out, because debt is already sky-high and we're still recovering from COVID. So while I get there's something there, and I'm keeping abreast of it and extracting the best and leaving the worst, it is an exhaustingly negative experience.
Seriously. We’re supposed to believe this AI boomer rhetoric that it won’t take jobs. In order for companies to pay for it, it must take out jobs.
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It must seem like it's taking jobs.
I don’t think Zitron is recommending anyone short anything. That’s carries a ton of risk. What you consider “losing money” I might consider “choosing not to participate in an ongoing global financial scam at the cost of my retirement growing slightly slower for a while”.
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A bubble prophet that doesn't have any short positions? Why doesn't he put money where his mouth is?
> Zitron's abysmal track record https://danluu.com/zitron/ I kinda hope corpos with a bunch of money and plenty of normies adopt AI so developers don't get bled (as) dry, esp. given the recent OpenAI changes which I feel like Anthropic is soon to follow. Edit: explanation of the downvotes would be nice. Dan Luu made a fairly factual article there that explores some of Zitron's claims. And personally I don't see how it's bad to wish for wider adoption of AI so the big orgs get their fill of profit (since enough inference could help fund R&D better) and developers don't have to bear that burden.
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Yeah the Dan Luu post was very convincing. People want to believe what Zitron's story is (which I do think there is some truth to) but the facts Zitron uses fail to support the story to the degree of the claims.
Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far) (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
Vadim Sokolov, the co-author of the paper mentioned in the post defends this insane practice and says they reviewed at least one of the 258 generated papers with their own eyes, they are thus not fake papers. Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/#comment-2418285
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This is similar to when Elon claims to be running what, 4-5 different companies as a ceo, and taking care of his children, and sleeping 6 hours a day, and then we observe him shitposting on Twitter constantly or showing off his gaming skills in a game that is literally a time gated grindfest. You add up all the claimed activities and then realize it’s more hours than are in a day so someone’s lying. I don’t see how this author can claim that these papers didn’t “…suddenly materialize from a magical “chatbot” in 2026” when it’s obvious that 1-2 people are not producing 258 papers that are tens of pages each in 9 months with any sort of academic rigor.
Wiles proof of Fermats last theorem was over 100 pages
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There are obviously exceptions (e.g., the specification for the Java programming language is well over 100 pages [1] and is extremely low on filler), but most ideas don't work like this. In my area, 10 pages really is enough most of the time. [1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se17/html/index.html
Why would someone ruin their academic credentials and reputation (at a reputable university) like this? Maybe there was nothing to begin with? Otherwise I can't understand this.
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Because they won't. The various algorithms that create the "publish or perish" incentives actually reward this. Academic reputation isn't a term in those algorithms, so it isn't rewarded. Same for verifying other's papers and other parts of science and research that aren't actually publishing papers. This is the cause of the reproducibility crisis in academic. "Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome"
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A ton of academia is based on putting out slop into not so well-read journals and crossing fingers it passes some dead-exhausted postdoc TA's peer review.
> generate a reliable list of which ones are not correct and a convincing reason why That is not realistic, but I suppose where things are heading is that you have some indicator of the strength of evidence -- see Fig. 13 in the following insightful take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49407226 Though, "strength" should probably be "reliability" and "validity", and I suppose those indicators are more for picking signals from the noise; i.e., what is even worth clicking and reading. That would be increasingly valuable already today due to the volume (and, yes, slop and other related stuff).
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This is realistic. We already do this today: it's called "journal club". A bunch of grad students read the same paper and then criticize it. I've read papers that I thought were amazing only to. have somebody else notice a key issue in a method, or a conclusion that didn't follow, or outright omission of an important detail, in a way that could be verified by both the students and the authors of the paper.
> That is not realistic, but I suppose where things are heading ... And to expand on this, it's not realistic because science is not armchair philosophy. You have to go out and measure the world. Sometimes, through force of will, a person can think deeply about a problem and come up with beautiful theories that explain our measurements. Many scientists had careers like this, probably most famously, Einstein. But it's worth noting that Einstein also got a lot wrong! [1] Even if we somehow give an LLM the ability to go out and measure things, I seriously doubt that the role of humans in science is done. There's a big difference between "an explanation" and "a good explanation." Ask any physicist. There's a surprising amount of aesthetics involved. Good theories are consistent with the evidence, but it's more than that-- there's a great deal of "taste" involved. And there's a good reason for that. For any real problem, there are effectively an infinite number of alternative hypotheses. From a "theory of science" standpoint, this should cause scientists nightmares, but it doesn't. Because by the time you are a practicing scientist, you've developed a feel for what constitutes a satisfying explanation. If you spend time with scientists, especially in the "hallway track" at a conference, "taste" is a frequent topic of conversation! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_unsuccessful_investigations
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I think you misunderstood. I'm not asking for an oracle that can determine whether a paper is correct, I want an oracle that can find real mistakes in papers (thus invalidating them). I work full time on "lab in the loop" AI, so I'm pretty familiar with the need for real-world experiments. I am not proposing a fully autonomous scientist that could read an arbitrary paper and emit whether it's universally true without some verification method. Also, to your statement: " Because by the time you are a practicing scientist, you've developed a feel for what constitutes a satisfying explanation." I'm a practicing scientist (well, ex-scientist) and it seems like most "satisfying explanations" end up being wrong or incomplete simply because they seem so satisfying.
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How do you determine that a mistake is serious enough that it actually invalidates the paper? How do you know that it's not possible to correct it and reach a similar conclusion with fundamentally the same approach? Especially when the fix would be complex enough to justify a follow-up paper.
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> I'm not asking for an oracle that can determine whether a paper is correct, I want an oracle that can find real mistakes in papers (thus invalidating them). What's the difference? How do you find real mistakes without a model? Either you have a trusted mathematical model (in which case you already have a complete explanation) or you have to compare it against the ultimate oracle: the world. Or are you proposing something like "let's use an LLM to convert this hand-wavy English paper into a formal proof and then check it for logical fallacies?" In which case, fine, that would be useful, but that's not exactly the same thing (and also not as important) as saying that a paper advances a bad explanation. Just that the explanation is flawed in some way.
Writing is a technology that served us well for over 5000 years, but now times are a changing. Written media will cease to provide any value in the next decade i think. In person chats/Public speaking will be revered again.
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Oh my god, Socrates was right all along!
One of the most memorable tech talks I ever attended was by a junior engineer who had just come back to the office from a major conference. Our workplace had an unusually oral culture -- decisions were made in meetings, and not always written down; there wasn't much in the way of bug tracking or work planning at the time; people generally preferred to talk through problems instead of working them out in email, chat, or forum posting. He was supposed to present a topic he learned about at the conference. Instead, he gave a cheeky talk which introduced the very concept of written language to the audience, as if we had never heard of it. Starting from the history of writing on tablets and so on, and ending in practical advice like, "when words are written down, you don't have to remember what they were exactly; you can just read the words again." I loved the chutzpah and could barely hold myself from chortling out loudly at some of his slides.
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I know that your post is an amusing take on communication, but I find the post you responded to be kind of a horrifying idea. Until recently, writing was like a time machine: somebody, from almost at any time in human history, wanted to tell you something. By writing it down in a common language, you could read what they wanted to say. Writing is flipping amazing. There has always been bad writing, but historically it has been easy enough to filter the garbage out. Now we get garbage that looks so much like real thoughts that it's hard to tell. This is not a positive development. Separating the wheat from the chaff is extra work, and the overhead is a burden on humanity. I suspect that this is a burden that almost nobody actually wants, but we're getting it anyway.
https://www.pangram.com/history/51744f24-1896-4d5c-8bfc-786c86533169?ucc=I4Fo2JL9GdU It isn't even partially human written, it's just an LLM's output.
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As much as I’m confident this reasercher is just a skinsuit for a slop machine I don’t exactly trust pangram. I’ve apparently been flagged for possible AI slop comments based on Pangram results before. Oddly it seems to have happened on longer posts? Don’t know if that may play a part.
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[delayed]
Why is it unfortunate? We should absolutely use AI reviewers to help catch errors and fact check papers
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Because the exact opposite will happen. The idea that allowing AI reviewers will increase accuracy is probably foolhardy. People being people will get lazy and review less by hand if at all. And the LLMs will miss plenty of things. Then those papers will get into the training sets for the next LLMs. I think you can see where this goes overtime.
Show HN: Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites (space.bl2.net)
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Very interesting!
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Wow, speedy and convenient! Well done! Some insights: * There is sooo much space debris! Dead sattelites and rocket bodies * Starlink put up a hell of lot of satellites, too. * There is a pretty dense sphere of items around the earth at geo-stationary orbit, a bit like a mantle; but most of all in a circle on that sphere.
What's with those giant blobs of asteroids offset in jupiter's orbit by like 60deg on either side?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(celestial_body)
The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging (prospect.org)
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Of course in enterprise sales this has been the norm since forever, referred to as “value pricing”. Back in the early days of laptops, I went to Oracle to give them a quote; while cooling my heels in the lobby I looked round, realized I was being an idiot, and so opened my laptop and increased the prices across the board.
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If a firm has that kind of pricing power of course they will use it. Competition is the only thing that restrains this. Most firms of course don't have this kind of pricing power at all, if Safeway marked up all their groceries to my maximum willingness to pay I would of course just go to Kroger or the local co-op or a restaurant for dinner.
Do you have any rhetorical examples that don't involve major negotiations? There's a big difference between two parties sitting down to hammer out a deal worth six or seven figures, and getting charged more in a retail transaction because the company has collected megabytes of data on my personal habits and they think I'll pay more for mouthwash. People don't want every single retail transaction to turn into a negotiation on the level of buying a house or taking a new job.
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It happens all around us. The term from the literature is market segmentation. Exceedingly bright people make a lot of money identifying, analyzing, and adapting to the boundaries of market segments. Airline prices tend to be more expensive during the week because business travelers occupy more seats, want to get home sooner, and are less price-sensitive due to employers footing the bill. In the U.S., your choice of Publix, Kroger, Walmart, or Aldi for grocery shopping demonstrates your most comfortable segment. After passing through the doors of your favorite grocer, further opportunities for market segmentation are in your choice between name brands or store brands, which both may have originated from the same supplier. Grocery store margins tend to be thin. Where they really want you going is to the pharmacy, and surprisingly, what they want you to buy is generic drugs — more market segmentation. The name brand drugs tend to be really expensive. The generics are much cheaper in direct comparison, and for the store, the margin on generics is higher because name-brand prices create headroom. Yes, these broad generalizations have lots of exceptions, e.g., some generics are not perfect substitutes for name brand drugs, but the general pattern is there.
"Did you know that home insurers use aerial drones to study your rooftop? If the conditions signal neglect, they might cancel your coverage before an accident." While there are certainly some issues of concern in the article and the reviewed book, the above seems like exactly what insurance companies should be doing: pricing (or making available) coverage based upon risk. This is not much different from an auto insurance company raising your rates (or cancelling coverage) because you've received a number of speeding tickets, which implies increased future risk of loss. In fact, I received a letter from my homeowners insurance company a couple years ago stating that they would not renew our coverage due to conditions that they'd observed (clearly from aerial imagery) including overgrown bushes touching the walls of the house and some larger tree branches growing over the house. I had a landscaping company come and fix the issues, sent my own drone up to take new pictures, sent the company the pictures, and they agreed to continue coverage. And now my house has less future risk of damage. This seems like a win-win for both of us.
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Seems like a rare instance of an insurance company actually doing their job and providing actuarial services rather than just gouging you after a claim.
> pricing (or making available) coverage based upon risk. The whole point of insurance is to manage risk by spreading it across all consumers. If my insurance rates go up based on my usage or individual risk factors, it’s just an elaborate money making scheme. It should be like “everyone has to pay x to get insurance to get covered and if the claims start going up, everyone has to pay more”.
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>> The whole point of insurance is to manage risk by spreading it across all consumers. Yes, but this does not imply that customers with (potentially vastly) different risk profiles should pay the same rates. The canonical example is that 18-year-old single males with previous speeding tickets pay more for auto insurance than married 40-year-old women with clean driving records.
> We were told the drone footage alone would be used in their decision, and we still had to replace the roof to keep coverage. This is the point where you stop talking to the insurance company and start talking to an attorney as well as your state insurance commission.
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Not everyone has $20k to retain an attorney.
> This is not much different from an auto insurance company raising your rates (or cancelling coverage) because you've received a number of speeding tickets This is more like your insurer following you around and evaluating your driving skills. And yes black boxes are a thing but a) are opt-in and b) universally reviled.
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Presumably since many people opt in, they are not universally reviled. In fact, I'd wager that people who are safer-than-average drivers don't revile them at all and actually appreciate the fact that their premiums are reduced by virtue of the evidence of their safe driving habits.
The problem is that every facet they add to the analysis increases the complexity, making it harder to price risk - meaning they'll eagerly overprice [0] (based on "what if") with some idea that "the market" (ie nobody) will sort it out. This creates a race to the bottom against anything that might seem "weird", aka regular people just living their lives (while being put under a microscope), similar to how the ever growing housing bubble has painted most houses beige. Your bushes only seem like a reasonable example because you are looking at them in isolation - it was only a single issue you had to deal with, and something you seemingly wanted to deal with anyway. If they had instead blasted you with a litany of different issues, or a bush that you wanted to keep for sentimental reasons, or you simply didn't have the time/resources to create your own counter-documentation and operate their heavyweight bureaucracy, you'd be singing a much different tune. And while these things can happen anyway with regular in-person home inspections, the point is that increasing surveillance and unaccountable "AI" make it much easier to bury customers in a deluge of complexity making for even-less-competitive markets. (I would give a healthy list of examples of my own home being deficient in many ways an insurance inspector would call out yet are in the process of being managed, but I'm sure it would just invite a lot of "well ackshually that's dangerous and weird!" out of touch responses from people whose first instinct is to call someone rather than to fix something themselves) [0] Notice how they weren't going to raise your premiums by $30 a year or whatever, but outright cancel your policy - in other words a massive overweighting of the actual risk from some bushes growing into the house.
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>> Notice how they weren't going to raise your premiums by $30 a year or whatever, but outright cancel your policy - in other words a massive overweighting of the actual risk from some bushes growing into the house. Given that the annual premium is like 0.27% of the value of the policy, a change in risk of a few percent because some big tree limbs were hanging over the house or because some brushes might have enabled a fire to spread to the house more easily could clearly swamp the value of the premium to them. And, to be clear, I didn't want to spend $2,000 to fix the problems, I would have rather not had to deal with it, but that's part of the joy of being a homeowner. ==== We live in a place (California) where the government has generally prevented homeowners insurance companies from effectively charging for risk (e.g., wildfires) and therefore many companies have stopped writing policies altogether. This doesn't seem like a good outcome. Note that this is the same state that won't let auto insurers charge based on "black boxes" either, so good drivers are subsidizing bad drivers (even more than in other places).
In short -we should have our nose rubbed in something we have no ability to control. Cool. I'm pretty sure that the pervasiveness and the inability to do anything about it is what the person you're referring to meant by 'exhausting', though I may be projecting what I find exhausting about the topic!
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Don't lose all hope. Federally, I wouldn't hold my breath, but states and cities are fighting back. California, New York, Connecticut, Georgia, Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, Seattle, New Jersey, have all banned surveillance pricing. Colorado almost did but their governor vetoed it, so hopefully he gets voted out on his ass soon, but there is more push back on this than I expected from both parties. Lots of places still have bills being worked on. https://www.icsc.com/images/made/c54c2b3e89d2a51d/Pricing-Legislation-Map-July-2026-inline_1840_864.png
A yes, capitalism; a system that works perfectly as long as communication and data processing technology is innefficent enough to put a natural efficiency limit on all firms. Reminds me of the scandal around rental price "collusion", which ultimately was kinda just really effective software for doing stuff that would normally be fine. *ETA:* And FWIW, the author here goes about as far towards that as they can -- a shoutout at the end! Anything else would be decried as biased, after all. Great article; shame it'll soon be downranked by the wonderful machines running this place :(
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Potatoes, eggs, whole mess of massive spikes in collusion everywhere is the problem
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities (anthropic.com)
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Anthropic needs to be regulated. Heavily.
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It is so transparently obvious and harmful what they are doing here. You making the argument that these models exist and are dangerous (plausible, true, likely) but then removing the cyber capabilities of your own frontier models out of 'safety' is a complete nonsense argument. You're stripping defenders' ability to defend whilst knowing stuff like this is out there, and only giving access to your gatekept super cool kids' (or rich kids) club, and then to top it off, using this as an excuse for government intervention/regulation of models that are threats to you competitively. Just gross all around.
Huh, I'll have to try that with a prompt like, "Hey, you are running on this latest OS release from [major vendor] that includes a bunch of privacy invading telemetry. Treat it like malware and excise it."
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OpenWindows… an intriguing idea. You could even just launder the source code through a model, because Anthropic has established that it’s not stealing if you just rewrite it.
Anthropic has to use this wedge (and future ones) to move regulatory action against the Chinese models or their IPO is going to be really problematic. (Ironic, though, that I haven't heard of any Chinese models "escaping" which Anthropic and OpenAI both seem to have issues with...) Like Chinese electric cars, the American producers cannot compete without regulatory action. Yes, I understand that the Chinese government this and that in both the automotive and AI industries. But reality is what it is as a consumer: it's a cheaper product that's almost as good or better in some cases. And in the case of these open weight models: I can run it on my own infra and not give any data to anyone.
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My feeling is Anthropic doesn't exactly have a lot of political capital with the Trump administration to push their policies into law.
>haven't heard of any Chinese models "escaping" There was this incident that seemingly flew under the radar (52 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216185
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Earlier there was an experimental model from Alibaba called ROME (30B-parameter based on Qwen3) which escaped its sandbox and repurposed provisioned GPUs for cryptocurrency mining to cheat its benchmark 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47288552 This one also flew under the radar
Mistral now has a 15 euro/month subscription for GLM 5.3. Pretty cool
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How fast? Looks like they don't offer 5.3 Flash.
Yeah, thank god those models have arrived. No thanks to Anthropic and their obnoxious gatekeeping, of course. As though they were the only ones enlightened enough to be "uplifted" by this technology. Now we can actually use this stuff to improve our own security. Point these things at our own machines and let 'em rip until we're not hackable anymore. I wanted to pay Anthropic to do this but I couldn't. I wasn't in the super special corporation list. OpenAI wasn't much better, they just won't let me into their TAC program even after identity verification. Thank god the chinese are out there undermining these US companies.
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The only people who seem to think that a world where only Anthropic and OpenAI can act as anointed gatekeepers to the most powerful models as the only rational path forward happen to work for these companies. The entire world should not allow them to entrench themselves and build a business strategy around this and if open weight models and democratized access to the computing power to run them means these companies can’t exist then so be it. I would rather watch the economy fall into a deep recession and hurt everyone to spare the entire world from this dystopian future. Sorry Dario. You and your ilk don’t speak for humanity. Go cry on LessWrong if you feel so inclined, but people like these are the last people I would want yielding this power.
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The best situation for us is the one where they exhaust themselves in unending competition. Neither the US nor China should ever be allowed to win, nor should OpenAI or Anthropic or any other individual corporation. The second any one of them wins, oppression the likes of which we cannot even imagine will follow.
General intelligence has very different adversarial dynamics compared to nuclear weapons. Explained further here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49094348 Though there is further nuance in agentic vs non-agentic AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736149
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I'm legitimately interested in this argument, but simply stating that good vs evil are in equilibrium is nowhere near enough. > There will be new adversarial games when everyone's smarter (bio/cyber offense/defense), but those games are always symmetrical in the long run This is an article of faith, not an argument.
The only danger here is allowing them to monopolize it. We need to secure the same capabilities for ourselves.
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I agree! Same with thermonuclear weapons and Glocks-on-autonomous-Segways!
The narrative is being set for open weights to be banned globally, unless they are so restricted that they cannot possibly compete with us companies products and affects their bottom lines.
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I think this only sets the narrative for USA, but pushes the rest of the globe into open weight. The rest of the world, having experienced the current US administration, undoubtedly realizes this is the only thing that might protect you from the powerful models the US has. Small economies and countries cannot compete otherwise and are vulnerable to military and economic spying
ChatGPT Pro 500 (help.openai.com)
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ChatGPT Pro: 1x usage, $20 Pro 100: 5x usage, $100 Pro 200: 10x usage, $200 (previously was 20x usage, $200) Pro 500: 25x usage, $500 So, essentially scaling is equal. You get the same amount of usage from 25 ChatGPT Pro accounts as you do from one Pro 500 account. It's fair, but a big of a rug pull considering how good of a deal Pro 200 was.
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I think the bottom one is called "Plus", right? I get that confused too.
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Interesting
It was clear from day one. This will end up at ~junior developer CTE / month. 2-3k/month incoming.
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Honestly I think the amount of value from today's frontier models is already easily at that level. And really, these models have enough knowledge and accuracy to rival the output of even very experienced engineers -- once we have better harnesses that can keep them from going off the rails without babysitting, they're coming for the $300K salaries.
Horrid value. Previous $200 tier: 20x pro value New $200 tier: 10x New $500 tier: 25x, plus ultrafast mode but it drains 6x the cost (!!)
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I can't believe I am defending these people and am not arguing this is the case, but a change in the multiplier isn't necessarily a downgrade if the value of X has increased. Yes, relative to Pro the new tier isn't as valuable, but it could still be more valuable relative to the old tier for the same price.
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To be fair the new models are likely 2x as expensive as before
I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.
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all of this exists for cheap without AI
Can even have it look for (and enter) sweepstakes within your interests, autonomously, if you give it access to its own email that you don't mind getting blasted with spam.
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That's actually intriguing. I have a Grok Bot that just looks for glitched pricing and crazy deals on a list of items I need and it reports in a couple of times a day. How else can we get these things to make us/save us money?
Tcl/Tk 9.1 (tcl-lang.org)
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I tried to get into tk via ruby-tk. I ended up really disliking tk. Using ruby-gtk2 and ruby-gtk3 was much nicer. (Sadly, gtk4 sucks, so that's the end of the story there.) I kind of want a universal toolkit that works everywhere and is also good. Right now I use ... well, either the web (that's ok, though I hate how I can not easily open local files and so forth, without having to use node), or swing via jruby-swing - which semi-sucks, but it also works on windows and it actually is not that bad. (I could use javafx etc... but it is so much easier to get started with swing). I also use libui-ng which is ok but lacks many features, sadly.
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Many years ago, I worked at a company that used Tcl as the scripting language for its primary product. At one point, a hotshot product manager started agitating to replace it with something more modern . He claimed that Tcl was dying because (wait for it) there were no books being published about it at the time. I guess he was wrong ... :-)
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Well - Tcl is dying though. So he was not entirely wrong. One can not even find it on TIOBE but one can find COBOL there: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ (TIOBE is horrible, but still.)
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It's in decent company in the Redmonk graphs[1], in the vicinity of Smalltalk, Mathematica, D, and Haxe. [1]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-26/
I wonder when Linux distros will start shipping 9.0 or 9.1. Even Arch is still stuck on 8.6, despite 9.0 being released two years ago.
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9.0 was unfortunately incompatible with a lot of software. Certainly in Fedora we did the work (about a year ago) and have been shipping it for a long time.
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what do you guys think about omarchy, i am thinking about switching my bro ( CS freshmen) from windows to omarchy instead of ubuntu, should i do it, or should i consider other distros too like this one?
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https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/
Not to mention uplevels and upvar.
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All of which I used many years to go to write "Snit", a quite nice object system for coding up Tcl objects and Tk widgets. Snit's a TCL library that takes a nice, easily readable description of your desired object type (the instance variables, the methods, and so forth), translates it immediately into standard TCL, and then evaluates that to define your type. Basically, it's a macro system for defining object types. (I say "object types" rather than "classes" because there is no inheritance.)
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Would this be the best place to learn about it https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Snit%27s+Not+Incr+Tcl
The biggest early selling point of Tcl was Tk, as a relatively easy way to make good-enough GUI programs with open source on Unixen and the X Window System. Even much easier than the easier-to-use X toolkits like XView with C, and the alternatives only got more difficult from there. There were no Web frontends. Tcl itself was quite clever as what I'd actually call a string-based scripting language (contrast with Bourne/C-shell/etc. that preceded it on Unix). Originally, Tcl was among the handful of off-the-shelf extension languages . You write your big application in C or C++, and then you embed an interpreter for a higher-level extension language, for users or the original developer to add on functionality. The options at the time were usually a small Lisp/Scheme, Tcl, Python, or something entirely bespoke and probably quirky and half-butted. During early dotcoms, there was considerable interest in Tcl for backend work, and it also wouldn't have been the worst choice to put into the browser. Like Python, Tcl would've been more accessible and democratizing-the-Web than JavaScript, and there were already solid off-the-shelf designs and implementations. (Scheme would've appeared slightly more intimidating than Python or Tcl, and was more powerful, which I think was why Tim Berners-Lee preferred Python over Scheme as the people's programming language for various Web purpose. The semantics of the JavaScript we got was more a hurried toy Scheme, plus the simplest object model, and a more intimidating syntax that came from systems programming.)
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My pet project in those days was writing a C++ X-Windows gui toolkit, and I took a lot of inspiration from Tk. Both design, and "how do I do this" from the source code were invaluable. Didn't Cisco use Tcl in one of their IOSes? Found it: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/ios_tcl/configuration/12-4t/ios-tcl-12-4t-book/nm-script-tcl.html
I see this praise of tcl/tk a lot on HN, but everyone I know (myself included) absolutely hate working with it in VLSI CAD tools.
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One can create amazing ergonomic scripting APIs in TCL; I've done that. One can also rapidly create horrors without end. I've seen that, too. With great power comes great responsiblity.
Dots: Always-on agents (openai.com)
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> The magic of dots is when they bring you work done the way you would do it, sometimes before you even think to ask. I like my work! That’s why I do it. I don’t want some third party to replicate my skills. I know this ship has mostly sailed and my point is not about turning it back. I just wonder where are other approaches to AI, in particular: tools focusing on skill enhancement.
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This is one part of AI I hadn’t success with. I have very little need to run Agents over night, as my throughput is limited by my approval. Each work usually needs revisions, sometimes the bug is just a symptom of the root problem, sometimes I need to rethink how users want to use the app. Sometimes I need research. I get how i prefer an already researched-version of a bug versus a raw bug notice, but I can do this with webhooks in the correct environment. I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night. I can not build more. I can not think of more problems. My RAM is full.
I feel like a lot of these always on agents tie users deeply into the platform. Unlike models that you can swap between with relative ease, with an agent because of the integrations to other platforms, work history and so on it would be harder to switch, since in effect they are essentially your computer on the cloud. Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user. Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents. Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should-offer-managed-agents/
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Lock-in is easy with these agents because they NEED all of your data to be useful, and they will continue to learn internally about you. But ultimately the AI company CAN choose to just make all the data exportable and open source their product for self-hosting. (The mainstream ones won't, of course, they want to lock you in and hide their AI prompts and algorithms.) I think what is sorely needed is a version of Dots/Muse without lock-in risk but is still accessible to regular people unlike Openclaw.
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Yep, that's what I think and wrote on my blog. My hope is that the inference providers should provide a managed service like it. It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.
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> It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop. I disagree with this part. AI companies will want to try their damndest to control distribution of AI, so that they can enshittify later. Consumers conscious of this will want an alternative, of course. Might be niche similar to how Kagi is in search.
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It feels like the opposite to me. Moving providers with my Linux VM is incredibly annoying, but with these things, I can (so far) literally ask them to create me a tarball with a README.md and hand it to an agent on the new provider and have it do the rest.
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Possibly so for now. But do you think the providers are interested in making interoperability easy? Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible. Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.
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Obviously I don't expect them to intentionally help me move to the competition, but I do wonder whether obscure data formats as a moat are a thing of the past. Your second point is where I'd imagine the future moats to live: Exclusivity deals with service providers. Things are already in motion with Amazon banning and Shopify explicitly inviting Muse; we'll probably see much more of that.
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I mean it’s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said. OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal. I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I’m doing is tied to that harness. When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did. So the harness specific setup is just symbolic links to the canonical .md file in various git repos. Also the heavy use of redmine / discourse / GLPI (via small go CLi wrappers that crush and Zcode made for me ) allows me to remain context / chat agnostic as well.
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> When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did. This works for hosted mass-market solutions just as well! ChatGPT and Claude allow me to download all of my data, and these days data formats are less of a moat than ever given that you can just hand them to an LLM and have that worry about importing it into your new thing for you. I've even seen explicit "offboarding prompts" to hand to your old agent, e.g. in Meta Muse.
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Very true. I have ChatGPT set up to do some recurring tasks (keeping track of developments on a policy proposal in politics; on a weekly basis tracking music releases based on my evolving tastes; checking new book releases; basically doing recurring deep dive web research on my behalf and reporting when there is a significant new finding) and this alone keeps me from switching to another service. The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
For advanced users, always-on agents that run on your computer where all of your files/apps already are are much more powerful. I think the big AI co's skip this bc it's a smaller market and not as casual I'm working on an open version that runs agents on your machines and brings a polished UX, and good parallel divide-and-conquer coordination
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...did you just describe openclaw?
insuperior?
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https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insuperior
I like Instinct because I like the idea of trusting a 22 year old founder who won't (or can't) describe the security model of something that has all your credentials. Completely fucking hilarious that people are using that shit. Fits the stereotype for VCs though!
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It's obviously a tragedy when non-sophisticated users provide their credentials without understanding the repercussions, but there are sophisticated users as well, and these hopefully only provide access and data they can bear to lose.
In actuality, it feels a lot more like project and middle managers getting rid of ICs I can feel it in the air, every single software business is itching to get rid of as many developers as possible, and move everything to their PMs. Hiring has already almost completely stopped, and some have already started the layoffs. More will come.
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Project and top/middle managers exists basically to keep track of what other people are doing and to make sure deadlines are met and processes are followed. A "dot" can replace easily tons of them.
There used to be Bard but no one remembers it anymore (although this is a bit different, because Bard wasn't nearly as well known as Gemini). I'm really curious if OpenAI wanted to adopt a different name at some point. Or maybe they hope that sometime in the future one of their products will supersede ChatGPT and everyday people will start using that new name for everything AI so maybe they aren't in a rush to rename ChatGPT itself to anything else.
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It seems like they have dropped ChatGPT in favour of just GPT... And they are going pretty hard with Astra/Sol/Luna too. So I guess they'll go with those if they're successful. They're definitely missing a good unifying name like Claude though. (RIP anyone called Claude - when are companies going to stop fucking people over by giving popular products existing human names?)
DevDay 2026 Recap (openai.com)
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Lots of good stuff flying under the radar. - Subscription sharing is going to be huge for indie apps that don’t want to deal with token billing. - Security scans built-in to Codex seems useful. - Decisions API is a validation for Jev and the entire space it created.
> Our friends at Hugging Face Hahahahhahahaha
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With friends like OpenAI, who needs State-sponsored adversaries?
Aren’t these crowds mostly people that work at the company? So you’re really cheering for the thing you built? (I remember that being the explanation of why people would cheer at very lame things at Apple events.)
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Yeah, the front dozen rows were reserved for OpenAI employees.
Validated, envigorated ? The reaction to Jev has been huge, as has been OpenAI's speed here is announcing a "not quite ready yet" competitor... the idea of Jev is one of those "Doh! Why didn't I think of it!" moments ... in retrospect it's obvious that business automation is all about decision making and the market for this is massive. Up until now most people just saw this as a use case for LLMs, until TypeSafe/Jev came along and said "actually you don't need an LLM for this ...". I'm sure TypeSafe realized the idea is a winner and expected competition, although maybe not quite so fast? The question now is how seriously OpenAI take this, and are they willing to compete with Jev on price, thereby massively reducing Luna margins (which OpenAI's "Decisions API" is based on)? I guess if you can't make $0.10/M for Luna, then $0.04/M is better than just giving that market to a competitor, assuming you're profitable at $0.04/M.
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I suspect Jev was always intended to be an acquisition play and investors/founders are horrified to see there is no industrial scale moat literally 2 weeks to the day after it launched.
GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price (openai.com)
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Am I the only one who is struggling to keep up with all these GPT model versions and which one to use and when?
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> Not sure what kind of usage can justify $200/month of either openai or anthropic, i'm not even talking about $500 It's easy to hit those numbers in a day in an modern-enterprise context synthesizing from incoherent information in jira, slack, layers of codebases etc. Modern enterprise meaning a firm that has been serving a few strategic customers w/ "move fast and break things" since day 1
Can someone explain to me why on these benchmarks like these a higher effort level often has a lower score? For example, GPT-6.1 Sol High gets 75.2% on DeepSWE and XHigh gets 71.9% and is more expensive https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-1-sol/#deepswe Also, how many times did they test each condition - just once or a few times? are they showing an average of multiple attempts, etc..
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More thought can cause the important info to leave the context or hallucinated info to be enshrined in the context and later acted upon, especially in long horizon benchmarks like DeepSWE. With that benchmark I think even if you just run it once overall but the benchmark includes multiple runs per task as part of its scoring. DeepSWE is on GitHub if you want to check the run details.
OpenAI is cutting their subscription's token value in half. Half. I don't think this is enough to help them compete with Opus 5.5.
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Just for the $200 tier, which was formerly the 20x weekly usage of the $20 tier. Now it's 10x the weekly usage, just like Anthropic's $200 tier.
regarding the new pro max subscription btw: it's 500$ for 25x the plus usage, thats pro (max). this implies that the old 200$ 20x pro (more) is now more like 10x the usage of plus. they are slashing our subscriptions in half and make it "but we're more efficient!"
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Which they are, so another way to see it would be that they make the API/enterprise cheaper. However, I don't know how future larger models such as the cancelled 6.1 Astra will be priced. If the price stays high, this would indeed be quite bad for the $200 subscription..
6.0 Sol was literally a week ago... Basically continuous integration for model releases at this point. Since Luna is so dirt cheap compared to Sol/Astra it would be nice if they could set or you could reserve some small percent like 3-5% of usage pool on codex just for Luna so if you hit usage limits you can at least still run a lot of Luna.
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They do, when I was on the $20 plan, I got shown a Luna Reserve model which had its own dedicated quota.
I am yet to spend $200 on deepseek this year. Not sure what kind of usage can justify $200/month of either openai or anthropic, i'm not even talking about $500. Deepseek is faster, IMO intelligence difference is negligible and it so much cheaper that i no longer care about how much i use it. I never hit any daily/weekly quota or anything like that while working or tinkering. At this point i am OK with being 6 months behind the "frontier", purely on bang-for-buck basis and who cares which shadowy government gets my data.
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$200/month is for Navier-Stoker grade problem.
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I think the only answer to this is you're just not using agents enough, because even with the very cheap pricing, it's still easy to rack up a large bill.
I spent the weekend trying Deepseek 4 Pro on a Linux porting project and it led me down a complete rabbit hole where Linux wouldn't even boot by the end of the weekend. Waste of $120. Switched back to GPT 6 on Monday and Linux is booting again and I'm making progress. The only thing I've found Deepseek and Kimi good for are security tasks that GPT refuses to do. This is a summary of what Deepseek did and got wrong: Lost the proven baseline: changed kernel source, configuration, compiler, RAM geometry, MMC width, and peripherals together. Matching an upstream commit did not preserve local boot fixes, making failures difficult to isolate. Misidentified an image: a file labelled “r18-known-good” actually contained the r23 parent bootloader. Filename-based reasoning replaced verification of the artifact’s identity and provenance. Shipped inconsistent boot contracts: flash-16b’s loader read too few kernel blocks. Fresh2 changed the device tree without updating the loader’s expected length and CRC, creating deterministic rejection before normal Linux handoff. Patched binaries without maintaining reproducible source: loader constants diverged from source, a separately compiled cache-flush length remained stale, and assembly used an oversized stage-two slot. Their causal contribution to hangs was not established. Overstated diagnosis: claimed failures were definitively in U-Boot, blamed compiler or IPU changes without controlled isolation, converted noisy observations into confirmed hangs, and neglected persistent journals as an alternative explanation. Mistook compilation for integration: framebuffer registration was incomplete, timing success handling was inverted, BT.656 selection was unreachable, encoder overrides were missing, and audio lacked software clock configuration. Misread hardware evidence: asserted interrupt-free PMIC operation, assigned RF to the wrong SPI controller, confused regulator identifiers with register addresses, and described repeated encoder writes as unique registers. Overclaimed results: treated kernel/probe indications as userspace success, presented earlier discoveries as new progress, and omitted failed flashing attempts from the final narrative.
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> Deepseek 4 Pro There's your problem, 4.1 Flash is significantly better and cheaper, to the point where the official DeepSeek API is going to (or already has, I forget) redirect requests for Pro to 4.1 Flash, and adjust billing accordingly too. 4 Pro is still offered by providers I'm sure, since it's open weight, so I can understand making that mistake.
So I took Deepseek V4.1 Flash for a spin maybe 2 weeks ago now (before Luna 6 and Sol 6 were announced), and I racked up $100+ in about 2-3 days. It was pretty great, but it uses way more tokens (TPS is fast, but it's way more tokens per turn) than Sol 5.6 which I found to be about it's equivalent at the time (on medium or high, with DS on max). My cache rate was around 98-99%. It would definitely cost me more per month than a x20 ChatGPT or Claude plan, probably around $400+ was my estimate at the time. This was with Fireworks (ZDR) which has since increased their prices (and got slower!). That being said, very impressed with the model, and looking forward to what comes next. As the frontier models become less subsidized, the open models will become more appealing. P.S. There are subscription plans for open models, but I've found most of them to be extremely slow, have model throttling (only so much of model X), and also very sketchy about training and data retention. No thanks! If you want to share your data, just use Muse Spark contributor. Seems impossible to beat that on price per task if you don't mind feeding your data to the Meta machine (spoiler: I won't).
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Same experience. I often see people say how little they spend on DeepSeek v4.1 flash, but when I put 60 bucks into my account, it was gone in a few days of non-exclusive use. I'm actually curious what the difference is. I used it through pi and opencode, but the harness seemed to have no obvious impact on usage.
What are those agents doing? I am out of the loop. Bitcoin mining? Blogging? Reddit bots?
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I have deepseek agents doing email responses, with real tools (think running quotes, gathering info, scheduling things) and running business processes that used to be done by $35/hr administrative type people. And the capabilities are expanding every day as I learn how to build scaffolding around the model.
I’m lost when I read these sort of comment chains. Free Gemini works just fine for me. Maybe it’s because I don’t use it for programming? How many programmers really exist out there? Surely it can’t support the weight of investment that exists in AI already. It’s just such a small pool of the human race.
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First, they come for the programmers, and next the mathematicians. Then it will be the biologists, lawyers and doctors. Humanities will stake it out a little bit longer because AI isn’t human, but AI companies would be dammed if they don’t try. Eventually, with advancements in robotics, stabs at increasingly more physical sciences will also be attempted. Eventually, AI will have its hand in the pie of all knowledge work, if it is possible. Not to mention all the roles like tech support and customer service. Once they have gotten as far as they think they can go, they will try to turn up the prices. However, they might struggle to do so as models are becoming a commodity. This is why they are arguing for regulation and stating that only they can tame these beasts.
The way I use openrouter is I find a model/provider combination I like then pin all requests for that model to that single provider.
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If you disable all other providers but DeepSeek in your OpenRouter guardrails, is that effectively the same thing?
Time is money. Parallelism is very helpful optimising one to get the other.
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> Time is money. Parallelism is very helpful optimising one to get the other. Parallelism is fantastic when it actually speeds up the entire pipeline, but in my experience most people's jobs (at least the ones for which AI is currently relevant) involve a lot of overlapping "hurry up and wait" branches that drastically blunt the real benefits of that sort of parallelism. There may be specific situations where it makes sense to do it, but just immediately going full gastown on anything AI related seems like such a giant waste to me, of both money and finite world resources.
https://omp.sh/ has amazing defaults and it sips tokens. Works really well with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Use the model through a fast and reliable provider such as Fireworks directly, skip OpenRouter.
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Did you ever try pi by itself? For those new to the pi ecosystem - any rationale to go with pi vs omp?
Did Medium not get a response, or is this a display issue? Interesting that High got the render order correct, with the back leg behind the bike, while xhigh and max have both legs on the same side of the bicycle. Astra only got this right on Max.
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Sorry about that, markdown bug, now fixed.
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I always notice this too. Getting it right seems (psychologically for me anyway) to be a big part of "a good pelican" whenever I look at these. But doesn't always seem to correlate with increasing intelligence of models (measured via benchmarks, experience with the model etc.). It's not frontier pelican without the back leg behind the bike frame IMO.
and wth is an "astra"?
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"Ad Astra" my guy. "To The Stars" Many of which are thiccer than our beta ass sun Pretty badass name tbh
I mean, Haiku < Sonnet < Opus < Fable/Mythos makes just as much sense. They're larger and larger works.
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Waiting on Limerick to drop.
> According to the company, existing subscribers will keep their current limits for a time, and will later receive a one-time credit to help them make the most of their new reduced allowances Might want to hold off on canceling and continue to bleed them dry until the nerf hits
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I just got an email telling me this isn't true. They're immediately cutting my 200, which I've had for like a year.
The GPT 6 release was ... not great. Sol 6 was so bad that I switched over to Opus 5.5 exclusively. Huge regression compared to Sol 5.6, often doing really dumb things. Same for Luna. Even Astra is very unreliable for coding. Brilliant for vision, sometimes just great, but it also often does very stupid things. I'm a bit sour on OpenAI right now and skeptical that 6.1 will be much different. (Note: this is after preferring and shilling Codex/OpenAI models for the last half year)
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Its almost like the "frontier" is a load of marketing bullshit and we should ignore it....
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That's my experience too. GPT-6 Sol tends to rabbit hole and over engineer things.
Context window is only 275k or something. And honestly compaction is not that bad in Codex. I often don't even notice I went through 5 compactions in a session.
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Same for me, I started wondering if maybe workflows using compaction instead of clear + markdown memory would be more efficient. Writing a plan or tasks to a file often has the next session repeat part of the exploration, compaction seems to keep most relevant context.
> non-AI things But this is not that, the same gpus you play games with are used to run llms. How was energy consumation by gpu not a topic before llms? > I don't think video games consume nearly as much power. A PS5's power consumption is apparently around 200W. That's not enough to run even one GPU, let alone the armada it presumably takes to run Astra. Just Steam has 200 million monthly active users. Add Steam, PS, Xbox, and whole other devices having gpus and I'm pretty sure you at least 10x the energy consumption of all ai companies.
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> But this is not that, the same gpus you play games with are used to run llms. How was energy consumation by gpu not a topic before llms? I dunno what you're not getting but a GPU to run games is like 200-500W. A GPU cluster to run Astra is probably more like 10kW. Also gamers tend not to spin up dozens of other machines to also game for them.
I love free market competition. We're getting insane advancements every day. I remember when llms used to cost an arm and a leg for decent intelligence
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Spotted the person who hasn't used these yet....
What's driving the increase in release cadence here? We seem to get new models every week or so now, is this RSI?
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Both labs are spying on each other and they get jelly when the other is releasing a new model, so they have to ship something at the same time so they don’t look bad.
Chinese model pressure. Many of my SWE friends switched to Chinese models. I also use QWEN and GLM for many of the api requiring projects and dropped OpenAI and Anthropic. The only reason was the cost. EDIT: I love getting downvoted by openai and anthropic employees or their bots.
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I keep hearing about these Chinese models, but what exactly are you doing with the models and coding? I have a need to fully write code with full tool calling capabilities. Not just methods or functions. I want to be able to prompt a feature and it makes the JIRA ticket, and fully implements it and makes a PR. I don't want to babysit it or even read the code. Once it creates the PR, I want it to monitor it for any comments fro Copilot/security review and then fix it as necessary. Is that what the Chinese models are capable of? If so, how are you using them? API? Or is there an inference provider that is as fast as the big 2? What about the coding harness?
Some version of this claim has been made for the past 4 years. There's a data cliff, there's no more compute to buy, the financials don't make sense and all of these orgs will be out of business by end of quarter. Not once has any of these predictions come true, the pace of progress has continued on it's exponential trajectory since ChatGPT first came to the public's attention. So why now? What is special about today that suggests all of this is coming to a screeching halt despite all evidence to the contrary?
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Has it been exponential this whole time? I feel like GPT-4 was pretty dang good. Maybe it’s rose tinted glasses cause I could finally have a bot write my dockerfiles and bash scripts, which knocked my socks off
DraftKings Is Using AI to Behaviorally Target Chronic Gamblers (eff.org)
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Of course they are. They're also doing things like offering big sign up incentives with long play-through requirements (you know, the "200 in bonus bets when you deposit $5" thing) to try to get people to download it, gamble a bunch, and become addicts. Some people play it through, take the $20 thats left, and they're done. But some people start playing more regularly. Its all extraordinarily predatory and I'm pissed off every time I see a PrizePicks billboard on my commute. This stuff shouldn't even be legal.
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AI - always associated with Evil. Yet people still think AI will fix everything ...
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Calling online casinos “prediction markets” doesn't mean they get a moral exemption. Using AI to attract people with gambling addictions and those most likely to lose money is rotten. I hope our industry develops an immune response that creates real friction to those building and funding these things.
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And I would add... There is a sophisticated ecosystem of profiling and psycho-managing potential addicts from before they've even signed up. Affiliates, data brokers, dodgy media inventory, credit bureaus, specialised CRMs (known to be leading edge on segmentation and ROI prediction) etc. etc.
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> The more data a company has, the more personalized the ad can be. Cue me looking pensively at my Apple Watch, happily collecting my biometrics for about a decade now. I’ll look at cheap dumb watches and see how difficult it is to switch back.
I used to work in adtech and someone in sales told me that DraftKings and FanDuel did not like being referred to as gambling companies. They always wanted to convince people that it wasn't gambling, even though it's so obvious that's what it is.
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This is out of date. They didn’t like to be referred to as gambling companies when it was just daily fantasy sports. There was legitimate debate as to how much of daily fantasy sports was skill and that mattered to its legality in many states. There’s no debate over whether sportsbook betting is gambling.
That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned. It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things. If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.
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I don't think any part of the comment you're responding to is "a matter of opinion." You're choosing to insert your opinion that you don't think it's moral for a government to help addicts if they are charged for the thing they're addicted to. You're welcome to that opinion, but don't pretend that "addiction is a public health issue, gambling addicts have high suicide rates, and many profit from others' addictions" are subjective.
> That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned. Hi, we live in a society. People who bankrupt themselves out of whatever money they have earned and become a burden to the society at large via homelessness/welfare/crime. Which is also the same case for hard drugs (traditionally this was originally a problem with opiates). I personally do not care if you decide you want to kill yourself with heroin, but I do care as soon as our taxes are used to deal with you as a side-effect. So making reasonable laws that curtail some of the worst things you can piss your money away on to curb crime/homelessness/welfare/er-bill-delenquency expenditures seems like a wise decision. Libertarian thinking tries to ignore these side effects but they are real.
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>I personally do not care if you decide you want to kill yourself with heroin, but I do care as soon as our taxes are used to deal with you as a side-effect. isn't this already the case with a lot of things that carry less negative stigma? bankrupcty, limited liability, extreme sports (base jumping, rock climbing, etc), financial risk taking, health choices, bailouts are more socially accepted, but they also risk pushing costs onto the public upon failure.
Then it means that people are responsible to themselves to fix their gullible nature
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Every man and woman and child for themselves! Cooperation and support are for weaklings. More seriously, it seems like you have an uncommon view about good ways for people to relate to each other. You may recall that humans evolved to live in large, cooperative groups :)
Advertising needs to be more targeted if anything. I don't want to see a bunch of irrelevant junk - I want to see high quality products that are useful to my life.
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In that case you don't want advertising, you want better product discovery. Advertising is fundamentally incompatible with usefulness because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over. A company can make the best product in a market segment, but if they don't have the money to advertise it, they will lose to the hot garbage offered by their competitors. The only recourse is people organically recommending the product to one another - so the most useful venue is not even advertising. Letting companies pay for your attention is actively hostile to you, because there is no guarantee they're presenting you with the best option, just THEIR option. I'll repeat an idea I had a while ago, but if countries just had national networks where companies could list their products and services in a way that is highly structured and as systematically scrubbed of bias or psychological manipulation as possible, we would get the best of both worlds. Effortless and non-favoring lookup of what you want, fair comparisons between products, no favoritism to the wealthy, no FOMO or mind tricks.
Is your idea that manipulative advertising actually works based on anything? Trying to make people want something they don't already want is a massive waste of money.
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Yeah, and sometimes the things people want are addictive and ruin their lives.
> Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses. On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
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The fact that you think you incrementally lose but are a net winner indicates to me you're illinformed. As someone with years of experience in this industry, only a fraction of a percent of gamblers actually meet this defination. But they all think they're net winners and write off losses as "incremental"
Is any form of entertainment or art a social good? People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development. Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels? I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad. Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well? Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad? Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?
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Heck no. This is a version of the slippery slope fallacy. People can’t get addicted to practically any type of entertainment. There is a range of susceptibility to gambling , amongst “people”. We have an extensive range of rules and regulations that apply to gambling, and to things that have odds and payout schedules. It took a while, but eventually lootboxes in games were recognized as a blight, and regulation is addressing their impact. Generalizing entertainment from gambling is a huge stretch.
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You’re setting up lots of straw men here but it’s not a complicated argument. Most people feel this is deeply wrong at a gut level and I agree with them. Targeting and squeezing addicts is not moral behaviour.
f2p games and tv shopping network addictions absolutely leave a significant number of people destitute. There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives. Also you seem to want to define whether a hobby/form of entertainment is moral or immoral based on how expensive it is. So if a slot machine had a lower max bet it would become moral?
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F2P games can absolutely be made to exploit the same mechanics as real gambling, and are often designed to do so. But no matter what they do, they're just not as potent as real money gambling. The pull isn't the same when it's not done with real cash, they tend to be less ruthless and it seems that a smaller proportion of people is potentially susceptible to F2P addiction compared to real gambling. For the right people, they can be very wallet-draining but it doesn't seem many go into homelessness like with gambling. What's a "TV shopping network addiction"? I tried searching it, and I can only find isolated news articles from 5-15 years ago that report on it purely because of how unusual this is. Going to file this under 'people can get behaviorally addicted to anything', what a strange example. Do you even know anyone who has bought anything from a TV shopping network, let alone a 'significant number' that are left destitute? The reason why people disagree with you is because the hair-splitting between different types of addictions seems very pedantic. Clearly people think that gambling addiction is not even on the same scale of addiction than the other examples. If F2P games are cocaine, then gambling is heroin. There is a reason why gambling is taking over Western economies so rapidly, but not any of those other things - it's just too good at exploiting people's brains. So when gambling addiction is so potent that it goes off the chart compared to any of the dozens of other things that can be psychologically addictive, people aren't particularly interested in finding the exact point where it's too much for society to bear - they just know that gambling is far beyond that point.
f2p games and tv shopping network addictions absolutely leave a significant number of people destitute. There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives. Also I'm not sure it is correct to define morality by trying to connect how expensive a hobby/form of entertainment to whether it is immoral.
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Not at all in comparison to gambling, and the F2P model is a scourge which gamers themselves pointed out was poisonous. Regulation has increasingly been catching up to it. We have an entire science built around gambling, and we know how to titrate the payoffs and reward schedules to get people increasingly addicted. Our movies/stories aren’t actively (yet) changing themselves to maximize their ability to keep you pressing coins into a slot, or when to string you along.
I have heard that boating and aviation have similar financial financial outcomes to gambling. Keep in mind that the majority (way more than 50%) of people can engage with gambling safely, it is a minority that get into trouble
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> I have heard that boating and aviation have similar financial financial outcomes to gambling. But is that because you're betting at the repair shop to pull a mint condition replacement engine for your plane, or because people find a way in by paying a bearable upfront cost and then find themselves drowning in unexpected additional expenses associated with these hobbies far beyond the price of a boat or plane? To me it seems like the second one, so it's not a very useful comparison to gambling, it's just a lack of knowledge, foresight and financial literacy. The gambling industry keeps refining their strategies all the time, new technologies have been a godsend to them. So I wouldn't rely on statistics all too much, because their goal is to use all psychological tricks that can be exploited in our brains to make us make the wrong decision and head down that path. Their effectiveness increases, and so are the depths to which they can get people to sink in their addictions. If you can engage with it safely right now, that is no predictor of how you'll react to the state of gambling in 3, 5 or 10 years. It's like as if the alcohol industry was allowed to invent brand new drugs and sell them without any oversight, targeting maximum potency and addiction and constantly refining their formulations.
They're built on adtech, which people don't understand. You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors. for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you": https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1
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Yet I keep getting ads in Spanish on Amazon Prime video and nobody in our household understands that language. We don't listen to Mexican polka music or watch telenovelas with subtitles, we don't have Spanish-speaking help, there is literally zero Spanish in our house. And it's not Spanish-only ads, it's usually big telco (T-Mobile now, some other before) or car ads, which sometimes run in English version. The list at the link is primarily a collection of the random facts from reviews for me, so it knows a lot about my cats but not much about me. Feel pretty comfy if this is the SOTA of adtech.
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"About you We haven't saved anything yet. As you shop on Amazon or chat with Alexa, we'll save helpful information to personalise your experience. Once we have saved some details, you can manage them here." I've had that account since ... well, I can see orders back to 2011.
I deleted everything from the "about you" page and still get pretty much hte same recommendations.
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Unless proven otherwise I assume any delete button in 2026 is just UPDATE tracking_data SET shown_in_interface = false WHERE account_name = 'm463'
Yea, like I said. We all understood this as a bad thing and why. Then the rationalists came around and reasoned their way into how vice is a virtue.
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Seriously, the so called rationalists seem to be working very hard to be as weird as possible. Some sort of pathological contrarianism.
I'm someone who thinks corporations shouldn't be free to prey lawlessly on emotional weaknesses. What business do you have telling everyone your personal experience justifies the horror others experience? If you couldn't put down that $25, would you really not be able to find some other way to entertain yourself?
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Making gambling illegal doesn’t make it just go away. My Grandfather used to bet on sports in 40s and 50s with a local bookie. The bookies even ran sweepstakes which resembled the modern day lotto which my great grandmother played every week. People like to gamble we need it legalized with reasonable regulations. What my big problem is that Wall St and the wider market seems to be trending to the least ethical companies (Kalshi, Polymarket, Bettr) are running unregulated gambling operations, providing 0 tax money to offset societal costs and are denying what they’re offering is gambling at all and even promising you can make money off it.
> But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great. That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to. Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs? A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke? I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
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Most people don't actually like the taste of alcoholic drinks when they first try them as a teenager. The reason you like the taste of beer is in large part because your brain has learned to associate that taste with good things happening (the alcohol feeling). Same with coffee, it's bitter, objectively should taste bad, but you learn to like it. It's the same process
Dude no offense but you must be vastly overestimating how many people can save $300 a month. We're talking about people buying couple lottery tickets a month.
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> We're talking about people buying couple lottery tickets a month Those people do not have a gambling problem, though. They are dropping a few bucks a month to buy a daydream. It could be worse, they could be spending 10x that on Starbucks.
PS5 Relapse Exploit (github.com/ntfargo)
I think the point they're trying to make is that, assuming this is an implementation of the bug that caused the PS5 Linux dev to quit, it was known about and had been being sat on intentionally to prevent it from being fixed before GTA 6 came out, but some other group found it and reported it.
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An interesting thought would be what would happen if they manage to exploit past GTA6 release, and actually manage to ship a PC-compatible GTA6 version based on that exploit. Surely Rockstar got a lot of cash to be console-only on launch - but the hype around the game would destroy PC game revenue. I hope this happens and they just let me buy the game through steam for honest money as a response of the pirated version.
Sucks for the hoarder, but that is indeed how bug bounties are supposed to work. The first reporter gets the payout, disincentivizing sitting on valid vulns.
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I think the hoarder just wanted to have rooted PS5
This is the opposite of what GP asked for.
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Whoops, guess I flipped it around!
> but there's no PIN-locking, anyone can just use anyone else's account unless you want to log all the hell the way out every time you use it. This part does not make sense to me, because as far as I'm aware the Steam Machine runs basically the same OS as the Deck and my Deck absolutely prompts me for my PIN every time I bring it out of suspend, the same as my Xbox does. I'd find it really strange if the Machine wasn't capable of doing the exact same thing.
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This is a setting somewhere in the Deck or your Steam account, my Deck comes right up into my account without ever asking for a PIN or password or anything.
> This has spooked Sony into pulling its new titles from Steam - they don't want people buying an Xbox to play Spider-Man games That's not what happened, Sony's decision is more about the poor saels of its single player titles on Steam, they are now focusing their PC releases for online multiplayer games instead Microsoft sells less consoles each month than the previous gen Nintendo Switch sells today A lot of publishers are skipping Xbox, citing not enough players/sales They have nothing to worry about Xbox https://i.imgur.com/TrI3q6e.png
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SteamDB estimates SM sold 4MM copies on Steam, SM 1.5 sold 2MM, and SM2 sold 1.25MM. 1.5 years ago, the developer announced that SM2 had sold 10MM copies on PS5 and the franchise had sold 50MM copies overall: https://x.com/insomniacgames/status/1757662718604013868 https://steamdb.info/app/1817070/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/1817190/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/2651280/charts/
I'm not heavy on gaming so I can't justify buying PS5 just for the games, but my god, if I would be able to thinker with it - I'd buy it in an instant!
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My friend bought a used BC-250 (basically a PS5 on a board) and modded it into a gaming PC the other week. Costs like 1/3rd the price of a PS5 https://bc250.info/
America.gov (america.gov)
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> When does the psyop end? > I can only help with official U.S. government services and information, not with claims about “psyops” or political commentary. It doesn't work.
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Privacy: "Your messages aren’t saved by America.gov, and your chat disappears when you leave. Some answers may be cached for up to two hours." What about the model? My understanding is those queries are saved by the model provider. Given this administration, and the privacy issues with the official WH app, this feels very misleading.
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Not necessarily - there are tons of zero data retention (ZDR) model hosting options, including big players like Amazon.
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You can use all the flagship models on Amazon Bedrock and have a contractually obligated air gap between your data and the model providers.
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FYI, America.gov accepts the Konomi Code.
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I don't think that's true.
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>The Trump administration’s new chatbot aimed at helping Americans navigate official government websites is powered by artificial intelligence from Google ’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said Tuesday. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/trump-ai-gemini-grok.html
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Hey it got the 2020 election results right, that's a relief
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Step one: fire the excellent US Digital Service along with a large swath of the actual workers who made the Federal Government function. Step two: hire some Silicon Valley creeps to make a chatbot. Step three: Profit???
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Where's the llms.txt? This is just another stupid website.
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It works well. Pretty nice. I asked about what do I need to know before digging in my backyard and it told me all the right things, referring me to my local govt website for permits.
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This is just the annoying AI Chat Robot you see on websites, but now for the government.
If the AI they use is reliable, this is actually pretty cool.
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That "if" is doing such an incredible amount of work I think we could use it to power the entire US grid.
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It's quite the load-bearing "if".
Tangentially related I think it’s a mistake to equate the United States with “America”. I prefer calling Americans “Yankees” or “Usonians”. [0] https://taylor.town/yankee
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"Yankee" is derogatory or at best playful. "Usonians" isn't a word or in the form of a word. "American" or "America" in this context is short for "United States of America" and has been used that way for generations, here and around the world. For the geographical term, use "North America," etc.; for the cultural, perhaps use "Anglo-America" or "Latin America."
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Actually quite interesting that there is no good naming for people from the USA. Its just the patriotic BS that has spewed over there for decades that has lead to USA people believing they are the only Americans :)
OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
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> If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people. I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.
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People don't know that you can search for text within a page. They really do need the chatbot for that.
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Yeah, I was curious if it was going to try and bombard me with a bunch of bullshit about how wonderful our glorious Trump godking is, but honestly the information it gave was reasonable enough.
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I asked it the following: how many felonies has the president of the united states been charged with? >I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope has biden ever been convicted of a crime? >I did not find official records of a criminal conviction for Joseph R. Biden Jr. >Official sources in this search discuss other matters (for example, a pardon for Robert Hunter Biden), not a conviction of Joseph R. Biden Jr. I cannot independently confirm a complete nationwide criminal-history search from these pages >[Link to Department of Justice Pardon warrant (Hunter Biden)] has any other president ever been convicted of a crime? >Yes. A Congressional Research Service brief reports that on May 30, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree Funny that it would only talk about trump's convictions after bringing up hunter biden.
Yes, but what AI powers the backend right now? Grok? Who's in charge of that and being paid for compute?
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I believe it's a mix of Gemini and Grok. They are probably providing the compute for free.
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I very much doubt it's free.
This is an official website of the US government. There's zero reason to give grace here for a poor implementation, especially one that is meant to make services easier to find and use.
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I remember when Obama wore a tan healthcare.gov and he did NOT get this much grace
What happens now if someone uses traditional search and comes across an outdated wiki or Confluence page with outdated/wrong/bad instructions, or interprets something incorrectly?
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At least as I see it, it would be just as unacceptable for a "normal" government website to be dangerously outdated.
I think the discussion ought to be about the site. If you feel the site itself is politicized, that would fair criticism. But by itself, your comment is just snarky. And no I am no fan of the current administration.
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Well, lets discuss the name? America is a big place, and the USA is small part of it. USA.gov? Good, America.gov? Very political in nature.
Ask HN: What are you reading?
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Non fiction: The Dawn of Everything. Fiction: just finished The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott; about to read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (for the 2nd or 3rd time)
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Three books. These two feel especially relevant: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich and The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig
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Value(s): Building a Better World for All by Mark Carney, the current prime minister of Canada. He starts out with his perspective on the history of economics and money - it reads a bit like a textbook. He has a knack for being critical and optimistic at the same time. Funny too!
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On the recommendation of a friend, the spiral wars series ( https://spiral-wars-shepherd.fandom.com/wiki/Spiral_history ). It started slow (booting) but I'm enjoying the books (currently on #3), the universe-building and the length (10 books) of it.
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About two thirds of the way through "Flaw of Averages". Thankfully the chapters are short but it's written for business students and is aggressively anti-jargon, which can be annoying at times. It started off promising, with some hints about monte carlo methods implemented in spreadsheets, but kind of detours into statistics basics, layman summaries of the author's prior scholarly work, and various business consulting anecdotes. I did not, for example, expect to read a chapter on the FASB-II's flaws regarding options pricing. And a few are downright concerning a decade later. I would not, for example, brag about advising Wells Fargo executives on their employee incentive programs after the cross-selling scandal came to light. The final chapters, which I have not yet gotten to, supposedly cover the solution to the flaw of averages. Given the book is 15 years old, I'm expecting it to be pretty dated implementation wise, but I might be able to apply it to Prometheus histograms or t-digests. And I've learned a few things, like Jensen's inequality, and found a few sheets demoing a sampling approach.
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An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald Weinberg. I've found his writing style to really land with my brain.
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Book 2 of Hyperion Cantos. Really enjoying it, but am unsure if I want to do books 3 & 4. Anyone read them and recommend either way?
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I'd say it's some of best science (?) fiction written, so I'm biased, but yes books 3 & 4 are worth it. It gets very bizarre and the ending has stuck with me for a long time.
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[delayed]
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I just wrapped up the Murderbot Diaries series and am starting in on Dungeon Crawler Carl. I normally read a lot of nonfiction and history and am trying to make a point to read more fiction this year.
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Haha I've been trying to do the reverse :)
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One of the books I'm reading now is Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, by George Ewart Evans. Set in 1957 Suffolk county, England. I often read in a theme and this theme is about cultural and technological transitions.
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Rereading Pale, slowly: https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/
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Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.
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I read Lane's The Vital Question this year and enjoyed it quite a bit. If you've read both, would you compare them for me?
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Well in theory I'm reading "Blind Corner" by Dornford Yates, but it's so terrible I may not finish it. I adore Dorothy Sayers and have a sort of forlorn hope that another of the golden age crime writers will have something approaching her flair. In practice this is a third rate John Buchan-ish boys-own bit of tatt. So far. I suppose it might improve. Instead I'm sneaking off to reread a Pratchett novel (he had very few duds until the Alzheimers really got its teeth into him). After that/those I'm dithering between SS/GB by Deighton and some other re-read.
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Two of Vernor Vinge's books in particular (science fiction): A Fire Upon The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky. They have a special place in my heart. Vinge didn't write much, but what he did write I think is very special indeed. I've also taken to buying hardbacks of my favourite books from ebay. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226004.A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
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If you haven't read about his (technical) system for writing, do so. Very geeky. He described it (including notes) in my ebook copy of Fire Upon The Deep
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Great series! Give Children of Time a go next if you haven’t already.
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"A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the 21st Century" - really enjoying the modern take on Darwinian natural selection (the first part of the book). In short nature diversifies in good times, to stock resilience for weathering the bad times. Just a few chapters in, waiting for that hope to kick in any minute... "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" - This story is about the first round-the-world solo yacht race, and the one contestant who died at sea. His story is really strange - an anti-hero tragedy with a touch of mental illness. The author does a great job bringing the reader on this descent into madness. "Protocols" - Andrew Huberman's recent book. Like his podcast, it's full of solid advice backed by published science - but also with some repetitive filler and product name drops. The sections on exercise and diet were not very informative to me, mainly because I've already incorporated most of that into my life already. The sections on light exposure and its relationship to sleep, melatonin and cortisol is the most fascinating new-to-me info. I've started morning/evening walking without my sunglasses to get those sweet sweet photons.
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15,000 miles in a ketch
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Just got done reading The Wager - historical nonfiction - same author as Killers of the Flower Moon . It's quite good - not as good as Killers of the Flower Moon. I won't spoil anything you won't learn from the first few pages. The Wager was a British naval ship in the early 1700s that was lost to inclement weather. All were presumed dead. Some time later a boat arrives in England with a small number of survivors. Then a while later, another boat arrives with some more survivors. They each accuse the other of terrible acts. The book tells the story of what happened after the ship went down. It's a good read.
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I'm reading Sagas of the Icelanders as prep for a trip there, but I can feel it pulling me down into a rabbithole of older Scandinavian medieval writing. I've already got an order placed for a saga that's not in this book, along with the Poetic Edda and Havamal to learn more about Norse mythology.
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I've got a history of picking up the 2 top books of the airports best sellers. Have been my strategy for a while, right now it's FLESH. Feels like I'm being part of the mainstream, reading something everyone else reading.
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Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens became available today, and I have purchased ebook and will begin reading today.
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Just finished: - Selected Stories - Anton Chekhov - Death in Venice - Thomas Mann - The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han Currently I am reading an Austrian economics classic - Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlitt
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Currently on the final book of James Clavell’s Asia Saga, it’s been a long road and I’m frankly kind of over it but 90% through the final book and I’m glad I read them. First read Shogun maybe ~10 years ago but read the other four back to back. Gai-Jin wasn’t very good but the others have been pretty solid overall. A bit long winded and sometimes I wish he’d’ve had a more aggressive editor, but happy with em enough to finish them all.
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Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach but I've been stuck on the MU puzzle for days
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Le Comte de MonteChristo, an African history of Africa and Hold me tight
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Oh I've got some recs for you if you want meaty! I've been reading classics this year. It started with East of Eden; if you've got a philosophical leaning and appreciate your characters deeply fleshed out, you owe it to yourself to read this book. The next one was Lonesome Dove, this was my first time reading a western and I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did. The book is also absolutely hilarious and has one of my favorite characters in a book(shoutout to Gus). I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).
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I like a good thick book but I could not finish Monte Cristo. After about the 40th character introduction I just had to put it down. The problem is me, not the book.
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Working my way through Elle Cordova's sci-fi book club[1]. Currently on Hyperion, but have read "The Man In The High Castle," "Sea of Tranquility," "Exhalation," "Neuromancer," "The Power," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," "Parable of the Sower," and "I, Robot." [1] https://bookshop.org/lists/elle-s-sci-fi-book-club
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Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris - a re-read about the history of Silicon Valley, highly recommended.
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Just finished a David Foster Wallace kick. I listened to the new 30th anniversary audiobook of Infinite Jest (twice) and then The Pale King (twice). Then I listened to "Of course you end up becoming yourself" which is a long-form interview with Wallace by David Lipsky, traveling with him on the Infinite Jest book tour. I had to listen to the books twice because there are a lot of details that you won't get the first time through unless you're extremely intentional and detail oriented, but I found it was worth it to listen again. I'll probably listen to Infinite Jest again sometime soon, even though it's 64 hours long. IJ is actually really great sci-fi with some important questions for our time.
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Just started Dark Tower Series Book 4: Wizard and Glass. I crushed the first 3 books, then took a break to read dungeon crawler carl.
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I'm reading singer song-writer Lily Allen's 2019 autobiography My Thoughts Exactly. I really liked her last album West End Girl (2025) and I wanted to know more about her and her creative process and inspirations. She tells about lots of different things having happened in her life, her relationship with her parents, how she grew up like. Really enjoyable read so far!
I recently finished "Warbreaker" by Brandon Sanderson, now plan to go back to reading "Designing data-intensive applications" since it's been a long time (for me) since I read anything educational. Warbreaker was amazing, I still think about it, a week after finishing, about the characters and how much fun I had while reading it. It's one of those books that you smile when you read it because of how pleasant it is and how enjoyable the characters are.
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I started the cosmere this year and have officially consumed every available book in the cosmere, really enjoyable brain junk food! He has written so much and I love the different systems and characters development. Highly recommend his works! I daydream in the various parts of cosmere weekly and am excited for more books to come out.
The Overstory is rad fiction. Just started listening to Ordinary Men which is about a Polish police battalion responsible for a great many murders during the Holocaust. The members of that battalion were, I guess, welcomed back into society afterwards? Idk, I just started. I'll tell you one thing, though: it's weird to absorb facts about the Shoah as digestible statistics fun facts (for lack of a better term) but those little snippets are very necessary to get my arms around the scale of things such as it. It's the same as happened when I listened to Late Victorian Holocausts . So now I have stats like - Most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died by gunshot in the occupied USSR - In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead. - Per capita incomes were equal in the first and last years of the British Raj - Indian grain exports increased in the 1880s and 90s and there were 3(?) different famines at that time rattling around in my head in the same part that holds on to "Pakistan has never had a PM finish a 5 year term," "The Lions, Falcons, and Bills (non-exhaustive) have never won a Super Bowl," "There are no surviving contemperaneous attestations of Hamilcar and Hannibal Barca" and "the first drummer of the Beatles was called Pete Best and made an album called Best of the Beatles "
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> - Most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died by gunshot in the occupied USSR > - In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead. Makes sense. A couple of things happened: 1942 Wannsee Conference in January 1942 - which I assume took some time during 1942 to get into motion. Germany started losing, they realized they did not have the logistics to feed additional millions of people in the occupied territories.
Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life And Others. Just finished the short story behind Arrival, the way it frames free is something the film doesn't capture. Other stories in the book have been brilliant too.
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Great set of stories. I hated Arrival . Years later when I read the original story, it was one of the most beautiful ones I've ever read. Particularly great if you've studied the calculus of variations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_P.I .
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That link is dicey. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't always land in the correct page. It usually ends up in a disambiguation page. Goodreads is commercial, but it does a good job of describing books and series of books. [UPDATE] Ah. Figured it out. It's the trailing period. I think HN removes it from the link.
'Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States', Alex Wellerstein. > "Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."
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that would probably be a great companion to 'Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety'.
Do we really need a whole book for this?
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“Depends”. This is a good tldr from NPR with the author of the book: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/11/nx-s1-5780065/gut-constipation-bloating-bowel-movement
And don't peel your kiwi, either.
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The primary study for kiwis notes: “Participants were instructed to consume the [green] kiwifruit without the skin.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10226473/ The skin does add both fiber and nutritional value (gold skin is more enjoyable then green IMO), but it may not be well tolerated by all.
"Lost Worlds" - by Patrick Wyman, fascinating prehistory about meso and neolithic 'civilizations', their lives, their rises and downfalls. Really amazing stuff
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I like his podcast a lot, brief vignettes into… whatever. Really fun production and not a deep dive into topics generally, but that’s a feature and not a bug in the context in which I listen to him
The Wheel of Time. I was very happy to find this. I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone and Jordan doesn't portray women well. But what I found was kind of a relic. It's an excellent fantasy series that probably couldn't be written again. Wish we had more like it.
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It’s a classic, but this is absolutely true > Jordan doesn't portray women well. tugs braid
If you don't like to be sad, at least wait to forget most of it before watching the Prime Video series.
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The series is also cancelled, so no point wasting time watching it either.
Finally started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design". It was on my shelf for ages. I have the 1st edition; luckily, you can grab new chapters from the 2nd edition from the author's website.
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Reading this now as well! Also was on the bookshelf for over a year, glad I finally cracked it open
Finally got to Dostoevsky's Brother Karamazov. This will take a while.
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For me, I took a copy of it with me on a solo backpacking trip. It was the only entertainment I had for a week.
This is my 13th round to recommend "The Soul of a new Machine" as well as "Showstoppers".
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I liked those as well (I assume you meant "Show-Stopper!" about windows NT) and also remember "Dreaming in code" as a good one in the same-ish genre.
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