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State Attorneys General Want to Tie Online Access to ID (reclaimthenet.org)
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If there are 40 state Attorney Generals signing this letter, this must include a number of Democrat lead states as well correct?
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What I find puzzling about these proposals is that it SEEMS like they could be designed to achieve 90% of the stated goals with almost 0% of the loss of privacy. The idea would be that devices could "opt in" to safety rather than opt out. Allow parents to purchase a locked-down device that always includes a "kids" flag whenever it requests online information, and simply require online services to not provide kid-unfriendly information if that flag is included. I know a lot of people believe that this is just all just a secret ploy to destroy privacy. Personally, I don't think so. I think they genuinely want to protect kids, and the privacy destruction is driven by a combination of not caring and not understanding.
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Better yet, require online services to send a 'not for kids' flag along with any restricted content then let families configure their devices however they want. Even better, make the flags granular: <recommended age>, <content flag>, <source>, <type> 13+, profane language, user, text 17+, violence, self, video 18+, unmoderated content, user, text 13+, drug themes, self, audio and so on...
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Internet Explorer had content ratings back in the day
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I completely agree. The problem is the lack of compromise on both sides of the issue. I wouldn't say it's a lack of understanding, but that any compromise is seen as weakness by other members of their party. That needs to end.
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I have not once seen a proposal actually contain zero knowledge proof. This isn't something exotic or difficult. It is clear to me there is ulterior motives, and perhaps a few well meaning folks have been co-opted.
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FWIW, the EU is working on zero-knowledge proofs: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-makes-available-age-verification-blueprint But I strongly prefer my solution!
I’m going to go against the pessimism here and say that this is the US not Europe or the UK and the First Amendment has teeth. There’s ample Supreme Court precedent that anonymous speech is a protected right (Talley vs CA, Macintyre vs Ohio, etc) so I’d expect efforts like this to flounder in the courts if push came to shove.
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What the US Supreme Court decides is much less relevant than it used to be because the US executive can and will simply ignore the decision. If anyone in the US administration breaks the law, they can be pardoned by the US president,if the president breaks the law, he's immune against prosecution based on a previous decision of the Supreme Court, and no court can enforce anything if the executive doesn't comply with the court order.
Just as a note, federal officials are retaliating against those providing respectful comment on policy.[] So the worst that can happen could be worse than nothing. [] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/department-of-homeland-security-withdraws-subpoena-targeting-man-who-criticized-them
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Did I say to provide feedback to the Trump administration - an entity that has not made an official stance on this matter? No. I said your state Attorney General's office and your elected federal Senators and members of the House. So I reiterate - the worst that can happen is you don't change where things have been going to. The best? Your elected officials bow out of this.
i think the worst that can happen is you could be put on a list of dissention.
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Being active about KOSA won't get you put on a "list of dissenters". This is an issue being pushed by the States and your federal lawmakers, not the executive branch.
It's tiring how legislation like this is becoming predictable and feels inevitable. This article even mentions the verification needing to be embedded in the operating system itself, spelling the death of open computing
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It's already the law in California. I don't remember any outrage here when it was passed there.
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No it isn't. There is no law in California that mandates showing an ID to see ambiguously-defined adult content.
Some people have been saying for so long that you should need a license to use the internet, and now that we have it, it's a little different than we intended :(
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We don't have it yet and there is still time to head this off. Not much time - but still time! Talk to your federal lawmakers and state AG's office!
I'd argue it's more like KYC for the internet. Something HN users have brutally and ruthlessly defended for banking every time I argue it's a 4A violation (in fact, it's one of the most fiercely defended things anytime I bring it up). Give in 20+ years and you'll be called a kook for thinking otherwise.
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Can you explain the connection between KYC in banking and the Fourth Amendment? How does KYC constitute a government search/seizure?
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The government requires the bank to search your identity documents to open an account, even when there is no individualized suspicion you've broken the law as to why your papers need to be searched, as part of the KYC regulations passed post 9/11. Technically it's not in the statute that they actually search your documents, but rather enforced through a byzantine series of federal regulatory frameworks that basically require them to do something that approximates "industry standard" KYC compliance which ends up being, verifying the customer through inspecting their identity and perhaps other documents. This is why i.e. when I was homeless even my passport couldn't open an account anywhere -- they wanted my passport plus some document showing an address to satisfy KYC requirements. Maybe I will have more energy for it tomorrow, I've been through this probably a couple dozen times on HN and I don't have the energy to go through the whole rigmarole today because usually it results in 2-3 days of someone fiercely disagreeing and in the end I provide all the evidence and by that point no one is paying attention and it just goes into this pyrrhic victory where I get drained dry just for no one to give a shit. I should probably consolidate it into a blog post or something.
Towards Autonomous Mathematics Research (arxiv.org)
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the idea of autonomous math is fascinating because it implies a shift from search to verification. if an ai can traverse the proof space faster than a human, the bottleneck becomes checking the work. from a risk perspective this feels safer than autonomous code generation. a bad math proof is just invalid (provably false). a bad code snippet is a vulnerability. math has a built-in truth layer that software engineering often lacks.
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i got scooped :(
>The results of this paper should not be interpreted as suggesting that AI can consistently solve research-level mathematics questions. In fact, our anecdotal experience is the opposite: success cases are rare, and an apt intuition for autonomous capabilities (and limitations) may currently be important for finding such cases. The papers (ACGKMP26; Feng26; LeeSeo26) grew out of spontaneous positive outcomes in a wider benchmarking effort on research-level problems; for most of these problems, no autonomous progress was made.
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The ridiculous resources being thrown at this, and the ability through RLVR to throw gigatons of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, should make it very clear just how incredibly inefficient frontier AI reasoning is - however spectacular it may be that it can reason at this level at all.
This feels like a maybe interesting position, but I don’t really follow what you mean. Is it possible to just state it directly? Asking us to ponder is sort of vague. These math LLMs seem very different from humans. A person has a specialty. A LLM that was as skilled as, say, a middling PhD recipient (not superhuman), but also was that skilled in literally every field, maybe somebody could argue that’s superhuman (“smarter” than any one human). By this standard a room full of people or an academic journal could also be seen as superhuman. Which is not unreasonable, communication is our superpower.
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Yeah - it's interesting where the edge is. In theory, an llm trained in everything should be more ready to make cross-field connections. But doing that well requires certain kind of translation and problem selection work which is hard even for humans. (I would even say, beyond PhD level - knowing which problem is with throwing PhD students at is the domain of professors... And many of them are bad at it, as well.) On the human side, mathematical silos reduce our ability to notice opportunities for cross-silo applications. There should be lots of opportunity available.
Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations (arstechnica.com)
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Glib observation, but this sounds quite generic and AI-written.
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Imagine a future news environment where oodles of different models are applied to fact check most stories from most major sources. The markup from each one is aggregated and viewable. A lot of the results would be predictable partisan takes and add no value. But in a case like this where the whole conversation is public, the inclusion of fabricated quotes would become evident. Certain classes of errors would become lucid. Ars Technica blames an over reliance on AI tools and that is obviously true. But there is a potential for this epistemic regression to be an early stage of spiral development, before we learn to leverage AI tools routinely to inspect every published assertion. And then use those results to surface false and controversial ones for human attention.
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So, the solution to too much AI is... Even more AI! You sound like you would fit just right at a LLM-shop marketing department.
In the case of hallucinated quotes, I think the more important aspect is to describe how this happened, whether the author is a regular contributor, how the editors missed it, and what steps are being taken to prevent it from happening in the future. It's good to issue a correction, and in this case to retract the article. But it doesn't really give me confidence going forward, especially where this was flagged because the misquoted person raised the issue. It's not like Ars' own processes somehow unearthed this error. It makes me think I should get in the habit of reading week-old Ars articles, whose errors would likely have been caught by early readers.
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> It's not like Ars' own processes somehow unearthed this error. It might be even worse (and more interesting) than that. I just posted a sister response outlining why I now suspect the fabrication may have actually been caused by Ars' own process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47027370 . Hence, the odd non-standard retraction.
Yes I just read the retracted article and I can't find anything that I knew was false. What were the fabricated quotes?
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I was wondering the same thing. After I posted above, I followed the archive.org link to the original article and did a quick search on the last four quotes, which the article claims are from Scott's blog. None appear on the linked blog page. The first quote the article claims is from Scott does appear on the linked Github comments page. When I wrote my post above, I hadn't yet read the original article on achive.org. Now that I know the article actually links to the claimed original sources on Scott's blog and Github for all the fabricated quotes, how this could have happened is even more puzzling. Now I think this may be much more interesting than just another case of "lazy reporter uses LLM to write article". Ars appears to use an automated tool which adds text links to articles to increase traffic to any related articles already on Ars. If that tool is now LLM-based to allow auto-generating links based on concepts instead of just keywords, perhaps it mistakenly has unconstrained access to changing other article text! If so, it's possible the author and even the editors may not be at fault. The blame could be on the Ars publisher's using LLM's to automate monetization processes downstream of editorial. Which might explain the non-standard vague retraction. If so, that would make for an even more newsworthy article that's directly within Ars' editorial focus.
Who got fired?
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The lack of specificity to me suggests that someone probably is getting fired. It is written as if legal vetted every word.
People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.
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At this point anyone reporting on tech should know the problems with AI. As such even if AI is used for research and articles are written on that output by human there is still absolute unquestionable expectation to do the standard manual verification of facts. Not doing it is pure malice.
I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice in the world given the low importance of the topic, but journalists should be reporting the truth on anything they deem important enough to write about. Cutting corners on the truth, of all things, is the greatest dereliction of their duty, and undermines trust in journalism altogether, which in turn undermines our collective society as we no longer work from a shared understanding of reality owing to our inability to trust people who report on it. I've observed that journalists tend to have unbelievably inflated egos and tout themselves as the fourth estate that upholds all of free society, and yet their behaviour does not actually comport with that and is rather actively detrimental in the modern era. I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. I entertained that it is possible, but that would be the most charitable view possible, and I don't think the benefit of doubt is earned in this case. They routinely cover LLM stories, the retracted article being about that very subject matter, so I have very little reason to believe they are ignorant about LLM hallucinations. If it were a political journalist or something, I would be more inclined to give the ignorance defense credit, but as it is we have every reason to believe they know what LLMs are and still acted with intention, completely disregarding the duty they owe to their readers to report facts.
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> I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice... That's more or less what I mean. It was only a few notches above listicle to begin with. I don't think they intended to fabricate quotes. I think they didn't take the necessary time because it's a low-stakes, low-quality article to begin with. With a short shelf life, so it's only valuable if published quickly. > I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. So your hypothesis is that they intentionally made up quotes that were pretty obviously going to be immediately spotted and damage their career? I don't think you think that, but I don't understand what the alternative you're proposing is. I also feel compelled to point out you've abandoned your claim that the article was generated. I get that you feel passionately about this, and you're right to be passionate about accuracy, but I think that may be leading you into ad-hoc argumentation rather than more rational appraisal of the facts. I think there's a stronger and more coherent argument for your position that you've not taken the time to flesh out. That isn't really a criticism and it isn't my business, but I do think you ought to be aware of it. I really want to stress that I don't think you're wrong to feel as you do and the author really did fuck up. I just feel we, as a community in this thread, are imputing things beyond what is in evidence and I'm trying to push back on that.
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What I'm saying is that I believe they do not care about the truth, and intentionally chose to offload their work to LLMs, knowing that LLMs do not produce truth, because it does not matter to them. Is there any indication that this has damaged their career in any way? It seems to me that it's likely they do not care about the truth because Ars Technica does not care about the truth, as long as the disregard isn't so blatant that it causes a PR issue. > I also feel compelled to point out you've abandoned your claim that the article was generated. As you've pointed out, neither of us has a crystal ball, and I can't definitively prove the extent of their usage. However, why would I have any reason to believe their LLM usage stops merely at fabricating quotes? I think you are again taking the most charitable position possible, for things that I think are probably 98 or 99% likely to be the result of malicious intent. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that someone who prompts an LLM to source their "facts" would also prompt an LLM to write for them - it doesn't really make sense to be opposed to using an LLM to write on your behalf but not be opposed to it sourcing stories on your behalf. All the more so if your rationale as the author is that the story is unimportant, beneath you, and not worth the time to research.
He's on the AI beat, if he is unaware that a chatbot will fabricate quotes and didn't verify them that is a level of reckless incompetence that warrants firing
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Yeah! We can call things reckless incompetence without calling them malice!
Odd that there's no link to the retracted article. Thread on Arstechnica forum: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations.1511671/page-2 The retracted article: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/
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The articles authors are listed on that page as: Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland.
You don't announce that you're firing people or putting them on a PIP or something. Not only is it gauche but it makes it seem like you're not taking any accountability and putting it all in the employees involved. I assume their AI policy is fine and that the issue was it wasn't implemented/enforced, and I'm not sure what they can do about that other than discipline the people involved and reiterate the policy to everyone else. What would you have liked to see them announce?
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They just needed to expand "At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident." into "We are still investigating, however at this time, this appears to be an isolated incident". No additional details required. And yes, it looks like Ars is still investigating (bluesky post by one of the authors of the retracted article) https://bsky.app/profile/kyleor.land/post/3mewdlloe7s2j
> It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process. That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door. Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk. Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.
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> That's not how it works. Some places. > It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door. Some places. You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done. It's standard op nowadays to acknowledge that your experiences are not universal, and that different organizations operate differently.
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> You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done. Neither. I just meant it's common. The comment I replied to said, "they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process." I think the commonality of the practice shows that Ars Technica doesn't need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process, if office staff is even gone in the first place (again, Ars Technica appears to be open for business today ). There's certainly no legal reason why they'd need to wait to fire people. Does Ars Technica have a "policy" to only fire people on weekdays? I doubt it. Imagine reading that in the employee handbook. Besides, President's Day is not a holiday that businesses necessarily close for. Indeed, many retailers are open and have specific President's Day sales.
Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015 (modern-css.com)
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Me: cool, let's be creative, I love 2026. Browsers: Yeah, but beware of limited availability, most of those creative examples are in the 40-50% browsers support range.
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CSS and JavaScript are like two dysfunctional law enforcement agencies fighting over jurisdiction.
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All web standards are like this, and then the battle continues when it comes to browser implementation.
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CSS in 2025: Let's write html inlined styles as if it was 2005 and separation of formatting/representation was never invented. I talk of tailwind, of course.
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Yeah let's do that. You have everything related to your component on place instead of jumping between files.
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2015 is good enough. For example instead of grid center, one can use flex and margin auto. If you are building really nation-wide products, there are still a lot of guys in corporate with old windows (where even chrome stopped updating like win7). Or, you know, old or poor people with PC from 2008. Also don’t forget guys with mobile phones: not like one could easily install a browser there. Especially on phones which no longer receive updates. So writing CSS like it is 2015 is great. Otherwise you’ll get humbled by your clients soon enough. And in corporate they won’t even be your clients unless you support old stuff: IE 11 is a great target if you really want to shine.
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I definitely don't agree with all of these, but grid centering is pretty nice and has a lot fewer quirks than Flexbox based solutions.
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Is it just me or gradients and tile grid with specific hover effects are AI generated stuff giveaways? Maybe it's old people yelling at clouds, but I'm very reluctant to trust the site, when I see these signs.
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You’re right not to trust it, it’s wrongly calling sibling-index() widely available. And that’s the first example I checked.
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AI got it from people though. I too am saddened by the instant-polish marketing pages everyone and their grandma deploys to Render, but also some people at some point in time really did make these effects. And they are nice. HTML based UIs will always have a place in my heart. Btw: actually I think webflow did more to pump this stuff out to the masses. The animate on scroll being the biggest offender. It's so good, but not for every literal text paragraph on your local bakery's website.
Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals (theintercept.com)
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Even if contractors/intermediaries consider themselves bound by HIPAA, the protections are lighter than one would think, in the political environment we find ourselves in. Notably (though I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice) - https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/part-164/section-164.512#p-164.512(f) describing "similar process authorized under law... material to a legitimate law enforcement inquiry" without any notion of scoping this to individuals vs. broad inquiries, seems to give an incredibly broad basis for Palantir to be asked to spin up a dashboard with PII for any query desired for the administration's political agenda. This could happen at any time in the future, with full retroactive data, across entire hospital systems, complete with an order not to reveal the program's existence to the public. Other tech companies have seen this kind of generalized overreach as both legally risky and destructive to their brand, and have tried to fight this where possible. Palantir, of course, is the paragon of fighting on behalf of citizens, and would absolutely try to... I can't even finish this joke, I'm laughing too hard. I'm old enough to remember we literally had a Captain America movie, barely more than a decade ago, where the villains turn private PII and health data into targeting lists. (No flying aircraft carriers were injured in the filming of this movie.) Clearly, we learned the wrong lesson there.
Take the following crude entities: - Stones - Sticks - Some rope Takes awhile, but humans eventually make a murder weapon out of that and build armies. Now take the benign elements of a crud stack: - Database - Server - User system It takes awhile, but eventually humans will make something (something not good) out of that. Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but databases will never hurt me Right?
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Bleach and Ammonia are perfectly shelf stable on their own. Mix them up and they're literal poison. What you've described are just benign ingredients. The poison is turning them into a "analytics" or "adtech" system.
Surprised that YCombinator threads are misunderstanding palantir, of all forums…
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On the contrary, I think it's [pleasantly] surprising that YCombinator threads have finally stopped misunderstanding Palantir. God knows it took long enough.
No one can explain what it is. They have some bullshit “ontology” thing they talk up on every investor call and bots spam about it on twitter and reddit. I think they are basically a software consultancy firm that the government can outsource all evil deeds to. Like warrantless surveillance
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Their "ontology" is not bullshit but they speak about it in a bullshit way. I think they refer to it like a product or something they invented as a form of marketing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science) If you just google ontology you probably end up reading some Heidegger and conclude how deep these guys must be. Whenever I hear Karp say it I always think of it like he is saying "Database" or "The Database". "What makes Palantir different is Database". I think so much of Palantir is performative and for sales performances.
Michael Burry is extremely bearish on their business model and has written excellent pieces on why he is shorting Palantir.
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The valuation is obviously insane. You can't have that kind of P/E ratios. Same thing with Tesla.
And Golden Dome is just the reheated leftovers of the 80s Star Wars space-based scheme literally dreamed up by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller, and promoted by the Heritage Society as a way to get past MAD and allow the US to start and win WWIII. These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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> These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check. They already are.. but.. have you seen the DOW?
AFAIK their business model is to send skilled engineers to client sites to be consultants and developers. Their selling point is not some product/code per-se (ie. they have a code base with existing analysis tools, but nothing crazy), but the fact that they jump into whatever situation and grind through problems. The problem is that they also keep close ties to law-enforcement and (para-)military clients, and while they promise to keep your data safe, they would never inform you if they received a warrant from the government to share the data.
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They dump all your stuff into a schemaless database and then attach widgets to it. That's literally it. It's not even particularly good technology.
It is like 1984. But shit.
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It's wild they we are happily buying telescreens. Who would have imagined pre-2000s that would actually happen. And that the number one defense of capitalism would be to use telescreens as an example 'but look at how cheap your telescreen is, TVs were so expensive'.
They figured out that if the government does something it is opposed by a lot of people. But if a company says they'll collect information from every single customer in exchange for some worthless token, people will willingly provide all their information to said company. And those companies will either sell that info to governments or give it away with a little ask... So, the private economy has become the biggest contributor to the surveillance state.
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What people have "willingly" given their data directly to any company? It's usually buried in an agreement or hidden behind some dark pattern. Suing your government generates results. Suing a company usually results in it shedding it's shell corporation and taking it's assets where you can't get them. Selling user data needs to be a federal criminal offense. You need to go to jail for doing this. You need 15+ years in prison for doing this or enabling this in bulk. Let's start talking asset forfeiture next.
I keep thinking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Illegal data gathering was a big deal only 10 years ago. It seems like with businesses like Palantir that this behavior has been normalized to the point where what was unthinkably bad 10 years ago is just business as usual today.
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It’s more that many adult citizens (and increasing every year) have grown up with the patriot act and liberties being stripped away in the name of security. I talked with cousins about it 8 years ago and I got laughed at as a conspiracy nut for saying that our personal data will be used against us if we allow it. People either don’t understand or don’t care because they’ve grown comfortable with it.
So Palantir receives info from governments only to… hand it back to them? It seems like most people really don’t know what Palantir actually does and are just speculating.
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No, we know very well how they operate. They're paid to get all kinds of sensitive information from governments and other institutions around the world and store it in their very "secure" data centers. Once there, the US government can easily get any of that information for "national security reasons", because how would they say otherwise, and the Israeli government can do the same as well without even announcing anything, because how would the US government ever say "no" to them... It's all just obvious at this point.
The government gets to ignore the will of its people and companies get to be middlemen leeches, it's perfect really.
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Yes.. but.. have you seen the DOW?
LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop (github.com/TechPaula)
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Good timing: My current weekend project is constructing something similar to the the first third of Ben Eater's 6502 design (last weekend was the clock module plus some eccentricities). It occurred to me that given the 6502's predictable clock cycle timings it should be possible to create a realtime disassembler using e.g. an Arduino Mega 2560+character lcd display attached to the 6502's address/data/etc pins. Is there relevant prior work? I'm struggling with my google fu.
I sometimes wonder what the alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties would look like. We might have had to manage with just a few MB of RAM and efficient ARM cores running at maybe 30 MHz or so. Would we still get web browsers? How about the rest of the digital transformation? One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.
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This is basically the premise of the Fallout universe. I think in the story it was the transistor was never invented though.
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I always think the Core 2 Duo was the inflexion point for me. Before that current software always seemed to struggle on current hardware but after it was generally fine. As much as I like my Apple Silicon Mac I could do everything I need to on 2008 hardware.
The whitewashing of the past in this thread is something else. Did everyone forget the era of web browsing when pages were filled with distracting animated banner ads? The period when it was common for malicious ads to just hijack the session and take you to a different page? The pop-up tornados where a page would spawn pop ups faster than you could close them? Pop unders getting left behind to discover when you closed your window? Heavy flash ads causing your browser to slow to a crawl? The modern web browsing experience without an ad blocker feels tame compared to the early days of Internet ads.
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What you describe sounds like the late nineties to me, not what we had with the technology of (at most) 1990. There are orders of magnitude between available performance and memory on both ends of this decade.
> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get. No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow . Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard. It’s silly to claim that 90s web browsers ran about as fast as they do today.
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Yeah slow? Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow
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No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.
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what a glorious time that was! now it's too easy to get stuck looking at the stream of (usually AI generated) crap. I long for the time when the regular screen break was built-in.
EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear (environment.ec.europa.eu)
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[delayed]
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Took me a while to find the actual rules: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-delegated-regulation-setting-out-derogations-prohibition-destruction-unsold-consumer_en Overall, seems reasonably sensible. It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product. " So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions). Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
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I get the impression this will turn out similar to how some "for cause" businesses have. Past examples include: - TOMS Shoes - PlayPumps - Textile Aid I worry that, one way or another, this is going to create a pile of unwanted products somewhere, and it probably won't be in a nice neighborhood.
First, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start. Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies. Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste. Is it perfect? Of course not, no real legislation ever is. If there's a better way to get started on reducing waste I'd like to hear it, though.
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> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start. They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng
The "Less Growth for Europe" party strikes again.
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It's regulation from the previous European Parliament and the first von der Leyen Commission. The new parliament from 2024 has a lot fewer red/green members (still enough to cause trouble, though) and the second von der Leyen Commission has a different agreement with the current parliament. The current Council is also a lot different than the council of just a year ago -- not in terms of members but in terms of opinions. A lot of the craziness is being rolled back, maybe this will also be rolled back. The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.
I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources? I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in. It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
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I agree wholeheartedly, seems to be a symptom of bureaucracy. Rules upon rules that end up as the status quo without consolidation and a good refactor.
You have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting". Why apparel specifically ? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles. Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't . It was mandated on smartphones in general , and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.
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> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry Because it is very visible to low information voters who are also red/green voters.
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Are you a high-information voter? If so, could you please provide information about any consumer industry that comes even close to the apparel industry in terms of a) ubiquity and market scale and b) destruction of unsold but undamaged items while still producing equally functional equivalents for market? Is there such a thing as fast-cutlery? Or fast-furniture? Maybe fast-book or fast-vehicle? Fast-whitegood perhaps? I'm at a loss here, I've only heard of fast-fashion .
I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that most of it are produced in small sets anyway. Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold. Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
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Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2. The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
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[delayed]
You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name. Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
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> Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. Does that actually happen? What I see happening instead in the bike clothing market is that either after the season, or if a new design is to be unveiled after several seasons, the items gets heavily discounted (often more than 50%). It's just your decision if you need the most expensive newest items right now or you buy possibly older or out of season designs much cheaper. But the branding is also very much integrated, so it would be hard to change the branding on an existing item. There are a few brands that try to limit this and keep the discounts in check like Assos, but that only means it's harder to find a heavily discounted item, still possible. > When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense. Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.
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This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
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That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring. Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at. Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.
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It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live. I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects. If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for. Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.
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It's silly to take an abnormal year and extrapolate it to be caused by global warming. Global warming is real, is a problem, and can kill us all. But it's very slow. My town has had two snowfalls in 2 years which are higher than any in the past 20 prior. I don't take one season to disprove global warming, nor should you take one warmer season and do the same.
sure, though New York has gotten a real honest-to-goodness winter this year. There's been a foot on the snow on the ground continuously for the last month, and it's been cold enough that the pipes in one of my bathrooms froze. I think it's easier from the West Coast to bemoan the end of East Coast winters than to live through one :)
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This has been a decent, classic winter. It’s an important part of the regional character. Sorry about the pipes.
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It has been brutal, and very cold, and we have not seen the sun. Send help!
Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying. So now either they err closer to under-production and risk missing out on sales or secondary market supply of their goods increases leading to possible brand dilution. So in the end the value of these companies ends up lower than before, less pollution, and apparel is cheaper. I'd like to know more about the equity and carbon effects of the process they will need to now follow. So they trade destruction with shipping a crate to Africa. What is the difference? Firms will be less profitable, manufacturing is reduced, who is impacted by that?
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If firms prodice less, prices will be higher.
Overproduction is not an issue. The issue is that they damage unsold things instead selling them for a market price dictated by supply and demand. This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items. This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution. If you can't prove that you either sold or transfer to non-profit an item you manufactured then you should be fined for each unaccounted item proportionally to their market price.
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And suddenly the EU becomes #1 in private non-profits, the first ever non-profits to turn up revenue and reinvest them into stock from Gap and H&M. Also the first non-profit to build gigalandfills in Africa.
People living in the tropics don't need clothing suited for temperate climates.
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People who live in temperate climates wear tshirts, underwear, and socks, if I'm not mistaken.
The appearal industry is among the most exploitive in the world. It's good to kill it before it springs up. Bangladesh is not anyone's example of a model country.
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Note specifically that I said local industry. I don't mean some factory owned by a global chain.
How will apparel be cheaper? When they lower production runs, it'll be less available, which will mean prices will go up.
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Economically, producing less to start with is not very different from what is currently done, destroying excess inventory. Therefore I don't think it's at all a given that prices will go up.
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Destroying the inventory has a cost though.
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet. The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
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Why would it require becoming a billionaire to benefit? A lot of big companies are able to purchased by the public. There are even fractional shares which lowers the bar even further in being able to get exposure to these companies.
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all that said.. most of the clothes are not so "branded"? Who cares if a GAP or something ends up in outlet or wherever..
It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory. Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
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Most software developers are not founders, but they like to hang out here for the news and community anyway. It used to be a lot more libertarian back when I joined (even more so when I only occasionally lurked) but things have shifted rather dramatically over time.
It’s shocking to see this legislated. As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead. I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
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Major fashion houses have been caught destroying clothes to prop up the value of the brand.
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Shocking? Why such drama? Is this AI text? I don't see anything shocking here. Corporations doing corporatey things, which is maximizing profits and that can easily literally mean destroying unconsumed stuff since it would cost them 2 cents more per tonne to ship it and sell someplace cheaper. Ever heard the term economies of scale for example? Those distort many things in money flows. Those corporations don't give a fuck about mankind, environment, future, long term stuff etc. Any approach to similar topics which gives them benefit of the doubt is dangerously naive and misguided from the start. It's up to society to enforce rules if its healthy and strong enough. Some are better off, some worse.
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Companies can and should participate in law drafting. If they have some not yet mentioned insight they should raise it or just take it to their grave.
However hypercars are not purposely limited. It takes an enormous amount of time and labor to build them unlike a handbag where the limit is artificial to sell more.
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> However hypercars are not purposely limited Are you serious? Pricing theory includes both supply and demand, and limiting supply makes the remaining items more valuable by dint of rarity. Companies absolutely limit supply on items to maximize profits. How is this even a question?
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
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https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/12/story/20181212STO21610/20181212STO21610_en.pdf They are working on that, too.
What do you mean, 'statutory warranty'? At least in the US, aside from a few specific circumstances (door to door sales for example with a '3 day cool off' period) there is no mandatory return policy or timeline.
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That sounds like another problem then :) In the EU (or maybe just my country of origin?) there is certainly statutory warranty. Length and coverage varies per product category.
Cheap clothing is a civilizational achievement and good for human welfare. So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.
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Getting common goods less expensive is good, making them too cheap is not. Imagine you are optimizing a math model, but nothing actually has prices. You just get a garbage point as optimum. You need to have scarcity, so that a system that optimizes the allocation of scarce goods actually works.
Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?
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This already happens a lot for used clothes with the thrift store->poor country->landfill pipeline. That third step will likely be a lot less rare with new clothes.
Cut the price, this is basic microeconomics.
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That is not what they should do according to microeconomics because luxury goods are Veblen goods. Decreasing price would lower demand, at least until they lowered it enough that it was no longer a Veblen good. Basic microeconomics is just that: basic and thus an oversimplification.
Any name brand would rather send their unsold clothes to a landfill in India rather than allow their wealthy customers to see poor people wearing the clothes.
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Which is why you write regulations to ban that. Hence, this thread.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
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> Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems. You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters have? I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targeted], is something enough people would want to change.
Show HN: Knock-Knock.net – Visualizing the bots knocking on my server's door (knock-knock.net)
Many/most of these are servers that have been compromised. DigitalOcean is certainly one of the biggest ISPs/providers; however, I’m betting that if you looked at ratio of knocks per ASN IPs registered, DigitalOcean would still be at the top. I’ll look into that. Providers can shut down abusive IPs. I run a script every night to report attacks to abuseIPDB.com (included in the extras folder on the knock-knock GitHub repository). Some providers just don’t care.
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> Some providers just don’t care. And they should be shunned by everyone. We should all be naming and shaming such providers and those of us with any conscience at all will avoid using them. This is the only way to stop the tsunami of bad actors.
OP here. site: https://knock-knock.net Every server with port 22 open gets hammered by bots trying to brute-force SSH. I built a honeypot that accepts every connection, records the credentials they try, and displays it all on a live dashboard with a 3D globe. Some fun things you'll notice: - Bots try the same passwords everywhere — "admin", "123456", "password" are the classics. Yes, you'll see the Spaceballs password in the top 10. - Certain countries and ISPs dominate the leaderboards - Attacks come in waves — sometimes nothing for a minute, then a burst of 50 from one IP cycling through a wordlist - There's a knock-knock joke panel because I couldn't resist Originally inspired by my kids asking "who keeps trying to log into your computer?" when they saw me tailing SSH logs. The stack is Python (FastAPI + paramiko for the honeypot), Redis pub/sub for real-time updates, SQLite for stats, and globe.gl for the visualization. WebSocket pushes every knock to your browser as it happens. The whole thing runs on a $6.75/year VPS. The domain costs more than the server. Source: https://github.com/djkurlander/knock-knock
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> who keeps trying to log into your computer? I'm curious, how do you think this helps you answer the question? Proxies are incredibly easy to come by these days, rotation makes it hard to identify what's behind it all.
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That’s a valid point. We can easily see where the attack is coming from but not who or which botnet. Some of these can be inferred by the pattern of usernames and passwords attempted, and the ISPs. Someone suggested that I collect the client SSH signature as well, which would help. But you’re right, we don’t know who is behind the attacks.
This is neat. What VPS service do you use? I am trying to replace my tendency to spin up small EC2 instances just to deploy a simple web app.
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My $6.75 per year VPS was a Black Friday sale from Dedirock on https://lowendtalk.com . Some of the Black Friday sales are still being honored. The site https://cheapvpsbox.com/ has a nice search engine for cheap VPS sales.
Side question: which cheap VPS are you using in Los Angeles? Looking to get one in the Southern California area.
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My $6.75 per year vps was a Dedirock Black Friday sale that I found https://lowendtalk.com . https://cheapvpsbox.com/ reports several nice Los Angeles sales still going on from various providers. My London, Tokyo, and Amsterdam VPSs are holiday sales from RareCloud and Racknerd - all less than $19/year.
Palantir vs. the "Republik": US analytics firm takes magazine to court (heise.de)
If Palantir is an "analytics firm", I am a helicopter.
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lol, you and I mate…
You're correct in that Israel doesn't have a hold over the US (it would be silly to assume that a pissant country could have the resources to control the [at time of writing] most prominent country in world), but they are a US client-state and thus receive preferential treatment when it suits US foreign-policy in the Middle East.
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It could be either way around, really. On the one hand, Israel has no military force apart from what the US gives it. On the other hand, Israel has the Epstein tapes (not the files) so it might be rational for a majority of US politicians to just do whatever it asks for.
that sounds good in theory, but in practice almost every country in europe has already fully bought into Palantir tech so you are a bit late with that. Europol has used "Palantir Gotham" for a decade at this point. The idea of western nations national sovereignty is an illusion. Most european journalists wouldn't need to be told not to report badly about Palantir, that's the only thing that makes this story an outlier.
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What you say can be true while what I say is valid in the same time. US gov is currently very hostile to whole Europe, way more than say to China and I don't see any option for a change in this in future. This is the approach US population prefers. If we here use such tech, maybe we need to come up with our own (just FFS don't buy israeli stuff if we want to have any higher moral ground), its not magic just data analytics. And to be frank, I am more than happy if we don't have such capabilities, we have much more serious topics to focus on like russia probably starting another war in Baltics in few years - thats a real mortal enemy, not some left wing dissidents (unless heavily manipulated by russians but then you don't need palantir's solutions).
Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format (gwern.net)
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I made something similar a while ago for zipped webpages (a zip which has an index.html file and related structure of files: images, css, js, folders etc.). It has two parts: a viewer[1] (12KB) and a wrapper[2] (16KB). Both run offline as single file HTML vanilla JS tools. The wrapper bundles a given zipped webpage with the viewer code into a self-extracting HTML file that also runs offline (as in `file:///`). I only needed it to work with simple zips but it shouldn't need much work to deal with more interesting ones. [1] https://gregabbott.pages.dev/zipped-webpage-view/ [2] https://gregabbott.pages.dev/zipped-webpage-wrap/
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The example link doesn't work for me at all in iOS safari? https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/religion/2010-02-brianmoriarty-thesecretofpsalm46.gwtar.html I will try on Chrome tomorrow.
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Very cool idea. I think single-file HTML web apps are the most durable form of computer software. A few examples of Single-File Web Apps that I wrote are: https://fuzzygraph.com and https://hypervault.github.io/ .
It's fairly common for archivers (including archive.org) to inject some extra scripts/headers into archived pages or otherwise modify the content slightly (e.g. fixing up relative links). If this happens, will it mess up the offsets used for range requests?
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The range requests are to offsets in the original file, so I would think that most cases of 'live' injection do not necessarily break it. If you download the page and the server injects a bunch of JS into the 'header' on the fly and the header is now 10,000 bytes longer, then it doesn't matter, since all of the ranges and offsets in the original file remain valid: the first JPG is still located starting at offset byte #123,456 in $URL, the second one is located starting at byte #456,789 etc, no matter how much spam got injected into it. Beyond that, depending on how badly the server is tampering with stuff, of course it could break the Gwtar, but then, that is true of any web page whatsoever (never mind archiving), and why they should be very careful when doing so, and generally shouldn't. Now you might wonder about 're-archiving': if the IA serves a Gwtar (perhaps archived from Gwern.net), and it injects its header with the metadata and timeline snapshot etc, is this IA Gwtar now broken? If you use a SingleFile-like approach to load it, properly force all references to be static and loaded, and serialize out the final quiescent DOM, then it should not be broken and it should look like you simply archived a normal IA-archived web page. (And then you might turn it back into a Gwtar, just now with a bunch of little additional IA-related snippets.) Also, note that the IA, specifically, does provide endpoints which do not include the wrapper, like APIs or, IIRC, the 'if_/' fragment. (Besides getting a clean copy to mirror, it's useful if you'd like to pop up an IA snapshot in an iframe without the header taking up a lot of space.)
Pretty cool. I made something similar (much more hacky) a while ago: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/Zundler Works locally, but it does need to decompress everything first thing.
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So this is like SingleFileZ in that it's a single static inefficient HTML archive, but it can easily be viewed locally as well? How does it bypass the security restrictions which break SingleFileZ/Gwtar in local viewing mode? It's complex I'm not following where the trick is and you only mention single-origin with regard to a minor detail (forms).
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