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Google recovers "deleted" Nest video in high-profile abduction case (arstechnica.com)
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Nothing *ever* gets deleted.
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"it sounds like Google was voluntarily cooperating with the investigation, which makes sense."
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan launches dark-money group to influence CA politics (missionlocal.org)
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I don't know if I agree or not with his views, but the fact that he's moving from complaining about something, to doing something about his beliefs, has convinced me to move from a negative to a significantly positive view of him, as a person; to reiterate, regardless of whether I agree with said views. The will to fight for what one believes in - I think we can all agree that is an admirable human trait that would result, for those who do follow his views, in him being labeled as a hero and defender of people's rights. Bravo, Garry.
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The Mission Local is a good source for hyperlocal Bay Area news, but it does have a strong SF leftist/progressive political tilt in most of its articles, and Gary Tan is a favorite boogieman for these types. Here's what they have to say about his malign influence in the article: > But the operation is also a media venture: Garry’s List started with a blog pillorying public-sector unions as “special interests,” attacking the ongoing teachers’ strike, and denouncing the proposed billionaire tax. - Public sector unions are special interests. This is a plain fact. - The current teacher's strike in San Francisco, even if it succeeds, will only push the district into insolvency, prompting a state takeover. The state will then cut much more aggressively. Maybe this would be a good thing though, although probably not what the union intended. Advocates of the strike are literally demanding the district spend its reserves on a couple years of raises. - I'm certainly no billionaire, but the proposed tax will do nothing more than push the extremely small and mobile group of billionaires to take their business elsewhere. It's unlikely to raise tax revenues over the long run.
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shouldn't we call this bright money
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[delayed]
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So much whining in this thread because this person has a different political stance than you. Get a grip. Nobody seems to bat an eye to all of the insane tech money that goes towards supporting “progressivism”. California has a ton of problems, it has been a progressive stronghold for decades. It’s not working, people. Don’t pikachu face when someone takes initiative to do something different as a result.
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HackerNews Moderators are on top of any comments that might be seen as negative towards the CEO. Keep comments to yourself, I guess.
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Praying for Garry's downfall used to be a hobby of mine but these days it seems like it will take up less of my time as he has become aligned with my other enemies, reducing my number of enemy agents at play at any given time, or at least the number of attack vectors they have on me.
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> He once tweeted that seven of the city’s supervisors — all progressives — should “die slow, motherfuckers” in a late-night polemic. The tweet, which Tan said was a joke, prompted hateful mail and police reports. As a bay area resident who is often in San Francisco, I agree with him that those motherfuckers should die slow. I also agree with him on the more substantive parts of his agenda stated in this Mission Local article - more aggressive policing, attacking the billionaire tax, attacking public sector unions and non-profits, particularly public school teachers unions. I wish him luck using his money and the money of like-minded donors to influence California poltics.
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Garry Tan desperately wants to become Elon Musk/Peter Thiel so badly. Quite pathetic.
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Among the many weird things that the U.S. have but real democratic countries don't, the most promiscuous of them is this flow of private money into politics. Campaign financing, U.S. style, is just legalized bribing. In any healthy democracy it would be illegal. In the U.S. is just the way things are.
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Every single article I looked at seems to be generated from a tweet. The latest is a blatant attempt at promoting one of YC's privacy invasive investments Flock: https://garryslist.org/posts/atlanta-solved-35-homicides-with-flock-a-good-detective-does-5-to-8-in-a-year-the-math-is-obvious That tells you all you need to know about how trustworthy the site is.
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Save us, please!
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This looks concerning but I'm withholding judgement for now so that he can clarify this first on his side instead of jumping into conclusions.
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Cool.
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At this point it's just boring to have another rich asshole using government to protect their own interests. There's no substance or principle to it, it's just whatever policies makes CA more favorable to other rich assholes.
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He is probably going after Ro Khanna, who comes across as a pretty decent rep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro_Khanna Based on this warning from Garry to Ro re: wealth tax https://finviz.com/news/277038/y-combinators-garry-tan-warns-ro-khannas-policies-could-destroy-california-startups-set-back-us-innovation-by-decade So this appears to be all about the wealth tax and taken down anyone who supports it. AIPAC is also mad at Ro so it seems that Garry Tan can find common cause with them: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1GRXZqcQiU/?mibextid=wwXIfr
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oof, that incidentally also means he's about hiding the epstein files and avoiding accountability for its villains
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Which would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating. All they can talk about is how they’re all going to leave the state if it happens, but then are more than willing to try to spend more stopping it than they would just contributing their fair share in taxes. Don’t like it? Great, leave - but stop trying to buy elections.
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Where does the money go? Facebook and Google ads?
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A lot of it does. And it also goes to companies making inauthentic social media content. This is what modern election campaigns are.
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"Garry's List" is just straight up AI slop. This is a window into the coming AI-enabled era of astroturfing from wealthy individuals for their pet causes.
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Guess we know where those 15KLOCs/day went.
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I think rich people have too much influence, I probably agree with Garry Tan on a lot but we need to get money out of politics. Let’s face it we’re all meant to get one vote but rich people spend money on this stuff so that they manipulate what and who can be voted for. I do think that if this current system is the result of democracy + the internet we need to seriously reconsider how democracy works because it’s currently failing everyone but the ultra wealthy.
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System is broken af. Politicians don’t want to reign in on campaign financing because it will hurt their own re-election and campaign fundraising. Republicans have bought/installed the SCOTUS which allowed for favorable decision in Citizens United v FEC. This corporation dominated landscape is quite awful. Corporations have more rights than woman right now.
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> we need to get money out of politics. We need to get the power out of politics.
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Once you figure that out, get to work on the flying pig.
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hate to see that tech leaders getting into politics
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Or do you hate that their politics don't align with yours?
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Nah, I don't even know what Garry's politics are. I hate that there's so much money in politics in general.
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I'd prefer to see more of them do so, personally. That said, to watch Tan wading into a local fistfight about school curriculum and housing zoning and whatnot in the age of ICE abduction, targetted political prosecution and wanton macroeconomic regulatory chaos seems... frustrating. I mean, I kinda agree with him about most of the centrist stuff. But really, Gary? This is what you need to be spending your money and time on?
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Garry seems motivated by being against a wealth tax and this is also likely the reason other ultra rich people will donate to his dark money fund: https://finviz.com/news/277038/y-combinators-garry-tan-warns-ro-khannas-policies-could-destroy-california-startups-set-back-us-innovation-by-decade
[dead]
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> Garry Tan, the local venture capitalist who has for years railed against progressive politicians on social media You mean Garry, who has protested the dumbing down of schools? Garry, who protests removing math from the curriculum? He's "railed against progressive politicians" by supporting education and high achievement? You know China and Asia are laughing at us, right? They do schooling right. We are so backwards. I was bullied, beaten, sexually assaulted, name called, told to commit suicide, told I was a parentless bastard (I was adopted) in elementary and middle school by my peers. Yet the system did nothing to help me. I was the only one in my class that tested into early algebra, I led the theater team, I won my elementary school's geography bee, and very nearly won the spelling bee (except for a teacher that unfairly disqualified me) - yet I was the problem for being smart and over-performing. The system catered to my abusers. Do you know the amount of energy that was required to save me from the stupid public education system? It almost killed me, and it absolutely smothered my growth. I weep for what my younger ten year old self went through. Because I know there are thousands of kids going through the same experience. It's probably worse now. Any "progressive" that is pro-bully, anti-education is a problem. Garry's stance: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1650607982991011846 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1978187709169401956 https://fortune.com/2025/07/10/tech-ceo-garry-tan-y-combinator-slams-college-entrepreneurship-programs-teach-to-lie-disgraced-founders-sam-bankman-fried-elizabeth-holmes-gen-z-end-up-in-jail/ Garry is a stand-up guy. This is a hit piece. Edit: -2 within minutes of posting this. I don't even understand nerds anymore. You shouldn't embrace anti-education.
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I can appreciate you defending his character. The parent comment was not constructive. I’m no fan of Garry’s, but this doesn’t seem like a hit piece to me.
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He seems like a great guy https://missionlocal.org/2024/01/y-combinator-ceo-garry-tans-online-rant-spurs-threat-to-supe-police-reports/
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Well, this is helpful. Now I can refer to this list to let me know who, and what, to vote against...
Paragon accidentally uploaded a photo of its spyware control panel (twitter.com)
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From one Twitter user: > It's just a demo instance, but, these front ends are barely revealed to the public This genuinely doesn't look any different from the control panels of commercial infostealers and RATs sold on Russian hacking forums. Those usually sell for between $200 and $20,000 depending on features and pricing model (one-time vs. ongoing subscription). These spyware companies hype themselves up, but they're really not any different from Ivan's RAT-as-a-Service, besides having extra exploits to burn and wealthier customers.
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Non-X link: https://archive.is/kqvnH
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Looks like image was removed and maybe only a demo?
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Awesome. Moxie's "unbreakable" end-to-end communication protocol.
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How is this related?
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I see there's some room for ambiguity. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike
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The message can't be intercepted in transit, since we are talking about spyware, I assume they get it from the device, hard to defend against that if they have access to your process' memory space.
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>The message can't be intercepted in transit Lol, so like ... all encryption schemes since the 70s?
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They do have stronger schemes, which are called hash functions.
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What? Hashing is not encrypting. You need to learn more about the topic, as it's a tricky one. Ref, https://www.okta.com/identity-101/hashing-vs-encryption/
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Surprising that end-to-end encryption doesn't really matter when you get into one of the ends.
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Even if you had to input your private key every time you wanted to read or send a message, having malware in your phone voids practically any form of encryption, because it has to be decrypted eventually to be used.
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not at all. there is no encryption that can save you when one of the legitimate participants is somehow compromised. doesn't even need to be a sophisticated device compromise, literal shoulder surfing does that too.
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Thanks GPT, but that's exactly what GP was saying.
This company btw for anyone else who had not heard of them before (there are a lot of companies by that name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragon_Solutions
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It's too bad that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" has become "we can download a full copy of all of your files at any time, or continually, if we feel like it, even if we don't suspect you of a crime".
iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day (macrumors.com)
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Careful if you're still on MacOS Sequoia, Apple has hidden Tahoe as a default under updates. If you click updated now it automatically upgrade you to Tahoe.
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macOS was so buggy for me a few days ago that I updated my computer to the public beta. Boom, problem solved. So bizarre.
I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.
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Liquid Ass is “ok” on the phone (I’ve updated) but I dread upgrading the Mac and will hold off as long as reasonable possible.
Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable. My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
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> “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.” I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer. There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
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> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s
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> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable. I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"? I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
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Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to render components with evident lagging - this is user-noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core I wouldn’t notice these things.
They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
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They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen. Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
A similar issue happens with Apple Silicon macs and external monitors since long time ago. A fix I found online [1] is to disable GPU dithering using the Better Display app. The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck for some minutes when it happened. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/s/TDOa9Lb5rP
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I tried that and many other things like changing the default color profile and it and it didn't work. A reboot fixes it for a few days before returning, so it definitely seems like a bug rather than a hardware issue. Both my work MBP (No issues, macos 15) and personal Air (macos26) are apple silicon.
The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory (cell.com)
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Omg people its - the bullshit mascaraing as science these days is exhausting. Earth is on a hot house trajectory regardless of climate. The sun expands and gets hotter - so do we. Its literally then simplest game structure there is - get to the next hop before you die. The next hop is Mars. I don’t understand why this isn’t inherently obvious.
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Just price in the externalities and it probably solves itself
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> During the mid-to-late Pleistocene (∼1.2 million to 11,700 years before present) ... with temperatures ranging roughly between −6°C and +2°C relative to the pre-industrial mean of ∼14°C Does this mean during mid-to-late Pleistocene it used to be -6C to +2C, or does it mean it used to be 8C to 16C? (If the former, then how did early humanoids, and many other animals, survive such cold?)
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The latter. I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Reconstructing_ancient_climates
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The later, "−6°C and +2°C relative to" is relative to the mean of 14.
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When I want to motivate myself I look at this https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-in-the
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Carbon tax. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
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One of the solutions is to stop the ai hype, as the excessive electrical needs it creates are obviously not helping with the climate.
>Despite decades of research and sophisticated computational climate modeling, the magnitude and pace of these events have surprised scientists, raising questions about how well current climate projections capture risk. "Yet again, worse than we predicted." When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with the electron charge, it was considered a priori "proof" that scientists were fudging their data to match expectations. The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is still studied in fundamentals of science class.[0] If climate scientists are constantly revising their predictions upward, then this is equally "proof" that climate scientists are under pressure to revise their estimates downward. Far from being "alarmist," such terms are actually cudgels used to discourage climate scientists from making their data look too bad. The result is the predictable fudging of climate data to look better than it really is. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology
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What about the possibility that the models so far have always been wrong and if they wrong in the wrong direction you would never hear about them?
If only there was a clean, nearly limitless source of energy, where the waste for hundreds of years of energy could be stored in less than a square kilometer. If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.
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"Environmental" groups funded by the oil industry told us that the nuclear is really really scary and bad! so we can't have that.
Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?
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i'm not sure there are, from a science point of view... From political point of view there are probably only 2 locations in one country... vs a gigantic energy output on planetary scale...
> Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history. And during those periods there were no human beings. And no agriculture, or unstable globalised economiies, or dense urban societies vulnerable to disruption. It is, of course, interesting that our planet has this long, varied existence that pre-dates us. But it is of little use in understanding how to get us out of the hole we're in. And it is arguably dangerous, because it misleads people into thinking that we have the capacity to adapt to such conditions, when we manifestly don't.
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To put a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology. The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us. We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
We have had the technology to decarbonise the grid since the 1950s and we have known about the problem since the 1970s. Politics however has driven the use of CO2 instead of nuclear energy and required the drastic development of high end wind and solar. Even that wasn't enough, it also had to get considerably cheaper than CO2 producing energy sources and the entire time the entire worlds population has been subjected to massive amounts of propaganda to keep burning oil, gas and coal. This transition was possible 55 years ago when the problem was first surfaced, the political will just wasn't there so it didn't happen. Its not an education issue, it has always been governments getting in the way and refusing to change the power source. its why I think Solar will win out, it can be deployed on an individual house level unlike everything else and that changes things enormously.
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eh... imagine a planet scale messmer plan... too bad petro-dollar is a thing
How about economically viable fission power, right now.
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That's the thing, can't be done
It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful. And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
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There simply is no solution to this problem. We would all need to stop driving, flying, and eating meat. Most families (in the US, anyway) would suffer unemployment and starvation if they couldnt drive to work. Humans will continue to do whatever is needed to survive,, and that currently involves driving, flying, and eating meat. They will only stop when those behaviours are either not possible, or hinder survival.
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I agree to an extent that each of us contributes in a manner, but the manner that we contribute is not certain. A person who puts more effort into reducing their own personal climate impact could be doing worse than using the same effort to enact systemic change. It could be bailing water on a sinking ship instead of fixing the leak. The problem is you might not appear to be doing anything in isolation. Just spending that extra effort at work and sending the money earned to the ship patching people so they can get what they need would fix the problem better. If you choose bailing are you not just choosing something visible but ineffective over achieving the desired outcome but just being a boring taxpayer. As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people might have different ideas about how to make the world better.
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Imagine if we had laws that required all LLM compute to come from solar, or other sustainable power sources. We could have used the market's thirst for AI as a backchannel way to force creation of new sustainable energy. In contrast to Elon/XAI's illegal methane fuled datacenter in memphis
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The difference is emblematic of the difficulty in getting attention for climate mitigation. AI succeeds because you can sell a service to an individual human which will give them advantages over other humans . Climate change mitigation fails because you are trying to sell a service to humanity which will result in a better end state over some other hypothetical imagined future . Humans make decisions, not humanity, and many of them are pretty bad with both hypotheticals and imagination. It's no wonder that a product designed to make them do better at what they do, right now is more successful than one designed to make everybody do better than what would otherwise have resulted, 50-100 years in the future when they'll likely be dead. Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are abstractions we use to label the behavior of individual people . You need to operate on the level of individual people to get any sort of outcome. (FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets, capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)
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Unfortunately it won't happen, as humanity rather nuke ourselves generating memes, while driving beverage from paper straws.
Maybe we could ask AI! https://chatgpt.com/share/698ce97b-4d54-8000-aecb-542ceecb003b
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But https://chatgpt.com/share/698cee2c-b8c4-800f-b3cb-fa8869f8746a
The concern about climate is well placed. Ripple et al. lay out a serious case that we may be closer to tipping cascades than models predict, with the Greenland Ice Sheet potentially vulnerable to tipping below 2°C warming, well before 2050. But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck. Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI infrastructure last year? The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political coordination to spend it. The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it was happening on their property. Go look it up. This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and political will, not capital. When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns. You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong, assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would be sensible." Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved energy in its datacenters ... using AI! Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure. We're told to be worried about them.)
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Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial problem. The problem is that environmentalists want this to be a moral issue. They already decided on the solution. If the solution is not environmental communism with them in power, they will not have it.
> not capital Capital, and by relation the system that centers the idea of Capital as a method for moving around resources is at the very center of this. Since Capital follows near-term incentive, if the "pollute the world" path has a greater near-term incentive, that's where the market will follow. If a single member of the system goes for long-term incentive(not cooking the earth), other near-term incentive chasers will eat their lunch and remove a player. The system itself is a tight feedback loop searching for local maxima, and the local max is often the most destructive. With chasing the local maxima, also comes profit and capital that influence the political system.
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What you've done here is called a fully-general counterargument. You should be suspicious of these! If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever been solved, right? But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked. What you're describing is the default behavior of uncoordinated markets, not a physical law. The entire history of regulation and international treaties consists of mechanisms that override local incentive gradients. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they work. "The system itself is a tight feedback loop" treats the system as fixed rather than something humans have repeatedly modified. The question is whether we'll add the right feedback loops fast enough, not whether adding them is metaphysically impossible. My original point stands: the bottleneck on MCB isn't that capital won't fund it. It's that the Alameda city council didn't know a field test was happening on their waterfront and NIMBY ... people ... made noise. Governance failure, not capitalism failure.
> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. I have to disagree here. This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting. The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the industry's hegemony. You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate crisis.
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I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?
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Hank Green did a good short video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change. You need to start somewhere.
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The 2 biggest contributors to climate change are ... - US Military - Cargo Ships You fix those 2 things and like 60% of pollution goes away.
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> consumer-level personal responsibility Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to act decisively on this.
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If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk, you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to. That's you. Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway. Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.
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Andrew Forrest, a well connected billionaire, puts the blame on a group of 1000 "captains of industry". https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-andrew-twiggy-forrest-s-urgent-global-climate-campaign-20231026-p5efbc.html
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I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility is absolutely not the way to go. To a certain extent I try to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's simply a cute hobby. The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level. And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
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Moving from fossil is less convenient, not more. So, we're stuck.
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While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced! Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users. There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!
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> Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users. Society's choices and lifestyles don't exist in some rational-individualistic vacuum. Companies advertise products while hiding known risks and side effects of what they're pushing. Cigarettes. Oil. PFOA/PFAS. They all knew, and they did and continue to do it anyway. Regulatory capture solved all their problems by removing accountability.
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> it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha. Consumers are often presented the least expensive option with the worst outcomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
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I remember when that switch at grocers from paper to plastic was taking hold, and you could choose. "Paper or plastic?" was the question asked. Some comedian (probably) had a good one liner: "That'll be 42.39. Kill a tree or choke a fish?"
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This presupposes that consumers have infinite capacity to ingest the minute details of every single product they come into contact with. Yes, the plastic bag has users. Do you really expect every single shopper to investigate how the bag at <grocery co> was made and if the plastic is recycled? What if they also have to do the same for every single thing they interact with every single day? It's much easier to ask the people that work with the minutia of plastic bags every day, namely the people who make them, to maybe fix this problem.
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If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry, many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing emissions.
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Americans use a lot of power. Buying big houses means they have higher heating and cooling costs. All this makes a big difference.
There is nothing g to “disagree” about. Of course systemic changes are required. But if the individual improve their actions it will have a meaningful impact too
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It won’t and believing it will is part of ensuring nothing changes. All energy you spend on personally changing should be instead spent lobbying, organizing, and otherwise working politically to effect systemic change. There is no value in individual change. It’s worse than doing nothing.
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Without systemic change the impact of individuals wont be meaningful. Maybe on a spiritual level but they won’t contribute meaningfully to the climate change (or non-change)
Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train. This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.
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Prisoner's dilemma is a bad reference here. Prisoner's dilemma is about situation when optimal outcome requires cooperation from all participants. In the situation with climate change, personal decisions of 99% of Earth population do not really matter.
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You are correct that this is not a prisoner's dilemma, it is a tragedy of the commons[0]. However, if a wizard could magically control the "personal decisions of 99% of Earth population" and make them optimal for reducing CO2 emissions then, believe me, climate change could be trivially solved. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Outside AI independently uncovering some energy breakthrough there is nothing it can do to help, only hurt. We already have a source of clean, cheap, unlimited energy, we aren't rolling it out the way we could and should because some rich people would rather have us on a subscription plan where we literally light our source of energy on fire so we have to keep coming back for more.
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AI has already pushed fusion research forward. We could certainly do better but switching isn't as simple as you imply. You also conveniently left out the part where activists historically blocked nuclear buildout.
> Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one. Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.
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Solar is so cheap and getting cheaper than we can power those sectors with air-to-fuel plants. A carbon tax would go a long way towards leveling the playing field with carbon neutral or carbon negative alternatives to fossil fuels.
We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past. Innovation often happens because many people go different directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?
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> Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning Urban planning of the SimCity sort isn't particularly difficult. The associated politics are the issue.
If you're looking to experience a "climate change" simulator, kind of, the game Oxygen Not Included is an interesting chemistry sandbox where you need to balance things like O2, heat, food, etc in a "terrarium" of sorts. The parallels to climate change are similar to real life--most of the game ending problems you encounter are from short sighted thinking earlier on/kicking the can down the road.
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If you're near Lake Powell, you could also visit it right now and compare it to what you remember. Not a simulator, just a pretty scary real thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCEJDU9_p4Q
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I found Half-Earth Socialism: The Game[1] to be fun for quite a few playthroughs. 1. https://play.half.earth/
You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their behavior, we would be in a much better place. We used to reuse glass jars, now it’s plastic. We used to can goods, now it’s plastic. We used to use refillable bottles, now it’s plastic. We used to have car doors that went “thunk” when you slammed them shut, now it’s plastic. If we each are mindful of the amount of trash/litter/waste we produce and take an active step towards minimizing it, we would all be in a better place.
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The problem is that a single consumer can't throw themselves into the gears of the industrial machine to slow its progress. If you stop buying food in plastic containers, the food will still be produced, and it will still be purchased by the large multinational corporations that have supply contracts with the food industry, it will just go straight into a landfill when its expiration date passes instead of being purchased. Unsold subsidized produce, which took petroleum based fertilizers to grow, and petroleum powered equipment to cultivate and distribute, will rot in a landfill. Farmers won't stop growing it if you stop buying it. The damage has already been done by the time you make the choice to purchase it or not, and it takes more than a handful of people making a conscientious decision to reduce waste to stop the waste from happening in the first place. And that's if you even have a choice in the first place. The only way to eliminate carbon emissions is to return to manual labor and subsistence farming, and since all the arable acreage is owned by land barons and the price is so high, even that is out of reach of the average consumer. We are trapped. Consider that aviation is a much larger contributor to emissions. Airlines will consistently fly completely empty planes just so they can maintain a parking spot at a given airport. Or compare the carbon emissions of the military to the rest of society. Or the quantity of flare gas that gets uselessly burned off by oil rigs. All market forces which a single consumer or group of consumers is powerless to stop. And all of which are backed by investors with more clout to sway the powers that be than you or I will ever have. As a sibling commenter said, it's a fun hobby and makes us feel a little better about ourselves, but it's a drop in the bucket. A depressing state of affairs to be sure.
So are humans (we breathe out CO2 constantly!). A process emitting greenhouse gases is not an inherent reason to eschew it, so long as the entire end-to-end process isn't net-positive. Use that compost to fertilise a tree, and you are still net negative on carbon, versus sending those food scraps to the local trash incinerator.
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It's all a cycle, They put carbon in, they release carbon out. At least the average American is doing a commendable job in increasing their personal carbon sequestration.
Very alarming. I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right ( https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-for-germany-heat-pump-election-climate-change/ ) I don't know what to do.
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this is like a tiktok rage bait way of thinking. western nations have largely peaked on carbon emissions. china is slowing down and will peak soon. there are a lot of countries that still are growing in emissions, sure, but you are not looking at this scientifically.
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> I don't know what to do. As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children. Good luck to those of you who did. This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to the upcoming migration/resources wars
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Fear and egoism is probably causing the rise of the far-right, fear of not having enough, and egoism of "Why do I have to share?" (and being dumb enough to believe "make it great again" lies). And then the idiotic "center" who doesn't want to lose voters start moving to the right. With the decaying planet less capable of producing food, there'll be less, and there'll be more of that scarcity mindset (although do we even have scarcity, maybe it's just the uneven distribution, with billionaires eating cows that's been fed grass that's grown with the purest glacier water flown by helicopter from the Swiss alps...). In one aspect, the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping has a positive: "We're going to cover the whole mountain with solar panels, and force electrification of cars." and there's no busybodies protesting and threatening to vote his party out of office.
> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially? Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.) Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning. And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline. I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
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Yep, its the far right. The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading climate science denial across UK / EU) They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to climate laws. https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/10/donald-trump-uk-eu-maga-slush-fund-financial-times/
> Is it the "far right"? Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us, and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle the government's legal rationale for regulating emissions. They're laughing at us right now, doing victory laps. They're telling polluters to take the gloves off. These people are terrorists, extremists, and they're in charge of the world's single most powerful economy and military. They're obsessed with domination, with doing violence to the weak and the poor and to nature. It's pure Freudian thanatos . It's just hard to take your position. [0] https://theecologist.org/2023/dec/05/every-molecule-hydrocarbon-will-come-out
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I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the "far-right", but you seem to be implying this 'every molecule' quote (or more charitably, the goal) is of the "far-right" in the U.S. In reality the quote is from Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. I mean, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Saudi Arabia is considered far-right governed but I doubt your wording is giving the correct impression to readers.
Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything: * Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it? * Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything? * Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable. * This one hurts, but: eat less beef. * Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle. * What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses? * What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity? Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.
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I would add: * Plant more trees
Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a) inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c) set them up for disappointment when climate change happens anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook. If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough. Governments need to take action and hold industry to account. That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a placebo. It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later, we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyMs2xox_hE
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Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.
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And almost all of them have plenty of other benefits too: Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage. More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths. Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution. Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city. Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for your health, too.
Not an expert in any of that, but I think overall impact may be greater if people with sufficient means take a more hands-on approach that grants visibility of where money is going. I lean environmentalist be the truth is that there’s a good deal of well-marketed snake oil in the environmental space.
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The issue with quibbling over impact is my experience is that people end up doing neither. I recently started a Master's in ecology so I don't have a good idea of what's cost effective right now but I know the field is pretty shockingly underfunded (both for general research and conservation projects). I learned the "fun" fact recently that bird populations in the US are down ~30% in the last 55 years.
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A fair assessment. Doing nothing is not the answer to risking doing the wrong thing. It's probably worth some time spent on due diligence when selecting groups to donate to, regardless.
The low prices of solar and batteries are a glimmer of hope. For many regions it's now the cheapest source of electricity.
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You mean cutting into the profit/MONEY of these large corporations? How will they survive!?
Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
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I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I think there will be more support for changing reflectivity (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).
So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well. That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration
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> apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) I’m in a loop. I must be. How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices. Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon. There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff. It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.
The rich don’t care which side you’re on, as long as you’re fighting each other.
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Both sides aren't fighting each other, one side has turned themselves into a weapon for rich pedophiles to attack the other side with.
This is one of the key sentences: > Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transition Most people still underestimate what it means for the earth system to change from the current stable state into another state, which might need many years to become stable again. And that new stable state might be a lot less favourable for us humans.
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> might need many years to become stable again People really fail to grasp the significance of this part. One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post -apocalyptic world and rebuilding . But this presumes a new normal has been established. With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives. It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode. While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt . In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again). The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.
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> the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. As far as agriculture goes we can adapt but the cost would be exorbitant. Vertical farming is technically doable.
> It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Sure, if by "some" you mean "virtually all".
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Nope, attempted bothsidesing rejected. By "some" I mean "some". Not everyone in politics treats truth as optional.
It's a classic multi-agent coordination problem. Should I stop taking jet liners and eating meat, when everyone else is anyway?
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To be fair, if we cut beef, lamb, and dairy, we get 80% of the GHG benefits of going full vegan. Beef and lamb are really GHG intense. So you can keep your animal proteins: it'll just be eggs, fish, poultry, and pork. https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
> my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them, but few if any that contain all of them, and then if you're missing one you're going to have a bad time. So the problem there is almost certainly that you need to eat some different plants than that the thing you were missing is only found in animals.
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Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. These aminoacids and compounds are the ones which boosted our brain capacity and allowed us to evolve to that point. I eat (and like to eat) tons of veggies, yet I feel my brain capacity declines and I crave esp. meat if I don't eat it for a long time (for two weeks or whatnot). As I said, I don't need two ribeye steaks per week. My body is very good at signaling what it needs, and I prefer to listen to it. What I eat is Mediterranean cuisine 99% of the time, and it's pretty well balanced, yet eliminating meat is not possible for me. So, my diet is not junk food peppered by meat. It's mostly veggies and legumes (beans, lentil, whatnot), peppered with meat. Yet, I need it, and this is something I tested over and over more than two decades. On the other hand, my wife is completely opposite of me. She can go a month or so without meat. So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine. For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
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> Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. Which ones specifically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid All of those can be found in plants.
Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"
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> Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away" Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to happen within a billion years.
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So… the sun is hotter now than it was what… since the 1950s? The 1850s? The Jurassic period? What scale is do you need to make this claim reasonable? Also, I see a lot of things presented as facts in your comment, you seem to have convinced yourself quite thoroughly.
How Did the FBI Get Nancy Guthrie's Nest Doorbell Footage? (lifehacker.com)
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The Nest footage is conclusive and unambiguous. Nancy Guthrie was apprehended by ICE agents and deported to Australia. ======= Irishman at Sydney airport: “Greetings, here is my passport and visa” Customs agent: “G‘day sir. Have you got a criminal record?” Irishman: “M‘Lord, no! I didn’t realise that one was still required!”
> Should you get rid of your Nest camera over privacy concerns? Absolutely, and you shouldn't have bought and installed this garbage in the first place. Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you for Google's benefit, much like the rest of their dis-services (email, cloud storage, mobile operating systems). If you absolutely need surveillance cameras for your safety, use generic IP cameras connected to your own NVR (network video recorder), possibly with Frigate for offline AI processing and notifications. Nothing should ever leave your network; the data should be encrypted and only shared with the police when it is in your interest.
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I have that sort of arrangement. I've been wondering though. What's the proper data access protocol? Like I want it available, easily, if the police need it and I'm not there but at the same time, I don't want anyone to just screw around with it because I've got directions and password printed on paper somewhere. We did have some repeated night time visitors (long story, but it was some mistaken identity that took a while to sleuth out) it wasn't difficult to export data for the police but it wasn't something I'd just ask my wife or kids to do either. Scan the footage, find the timestamps, export the data then upload the data somewhere where they can get at it. It wasn't hard but it was chores and it took time with high emotions. First off, it's not inexpensive. It's not a giant investment either but my cameras cost in the same range as the Nest cameras do and then there is a relatively powerful mini pc, and an accelerator for AI detection and then drives to store the data, PoE switch, network segmentation... I'm rocking home assistant and frigate and 8 8k cameras. Then the much more subtle part is I have a pretty good idea when I'd like the police to have all the data and when I don't want that. That's not so easy if I was abducted. Perhaps an off the shelf complete solution is better and has that sort of law enforcement access situation sorted out. This is sort of the 0.000001% kind of thing though. Over the years, I've replaced drives a couple times too, it's becomes a living and breathing system that needs support and love.
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> Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you Here I was thinking the primary purpose was to see who's at the door and check if Doordash and packages have been delivered. We've also used them to "spy" on our cats to be sure they're using the litter box while on vacation, and even to "spy" on wildlife in our backyard. Not everything needs to be a conspiracy. These devices are useful and practical and have value. Also, lest it get lost in the chorus of voices telling us to throw these things out: the actual news here is that the device appears to have provided an actual evidentiary lead in the investigation of an actual (and horrifying) crime. That has value too, even if kidnappings are rare.
Fair point, but security cameras, despite their name, do very little for your security as evidenced by the news. Most people don't need one, and only have Rings/Nests and other similar spyware because of a combination of fearmongering, aggressive marketing, and pricing subsidized by data collection (spyware). If you truly fear for your safety, you should purchase a shotgun, not a Nest camera. In any case, when you don't have the skills required to do something, you can hire someone who does. I pay a plumber because I don't have plumbing skills and tools, so it's not unreasonable to pay someone to set up a local camera system for you if you want one.
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Cameras do more than just that kind of security. Our camera has been of great use. In fact has largely made us money. We had an incident where a fire truck damaged our car in the street with its hose. We thought a kid with a bat did the damage at first. The camera though showed the real culprit. When we told the fire department they denied it and said there were no firetrucks in the area. We sent the video footage and then they sent a city lawyer with a checkbook.
There was an article the other day called something like "How is Google helping the investigation?" It said she didn't have a cloud subscription, but that there are data pipelines that make these sort of devices work. (Imagine there's a thumbnail of the video in the product somewhere, so there's a pipeline that takes a video stream and generates thumbnails.) According to the article, it was a matter of having someone figure out which pipelines her videos might have touched, and then go looking to see if there were any ephemeral artifacts that hadn't been lost yet.
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The guy writing a thumbnail pipeline isn't getting petabytes (exabytes?) of storage to cache all videos from the past week in their entirety. If this quantity of data is being stored, it's being stored deliberately and at significant cost.
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saw this cnn article that discusses a similar theory. it was unclear to me whether the source of the article is purely speculation. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/tech/google-video-nancy-guthrie and archived at https://archive.ph/oZyRM
Why are we overthinking this? It was disconnected by the kidnapper, not erased by him. All the FBI has to do is reconnect it (or even just find the MAC address) and wait for Google to provide them the footage via a request. https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en-US#:~:text=threats%2C%20school%20shootings%2C-,kidnappings,-%2C%20suicide%20prevention%2C%20and
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The article even says "[...] some Nest devices record event histories and store them on-device. The third-gen wired Nest Doorbell can save up to 10 seconds of clips, while the first and second-gen wired doorbells can save up to three hours of event history, all without a subscription.".
The google/ring backbone service people are likely disconnected from google's money collecting people. It is probably just easier to collect all of it and then check for payments only when users login to get at the footage. Otherwise, every fetch of footage from a camera would trigger a query to the payment system.
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If I don't pay, they should not store footage. What is so difficult about that?
The CBC report yesterday on tv mentioned the awkward phrase the it was recovered “buried deep in servers” and I thought it was bizarre. Replay available on YouTube. CBC the national.
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They ultimately found it sandwiched between the videos of epstein uncut jail cell footage and Jan 6's lost video exhibits.
If it was still uploading events then why did it take so long to recover?
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The camera was supposedly disconnected fwiw
Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance (theverge.com)
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There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-surveillance
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Know what is super easy to do? Not buy Amazon Ring products.
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Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
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Recording public spaces should be illegal. Public street? Public sidewalk? Not your turf, no cameras, no recording.
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I'm not sure you've thought this through. That would mean you can't record law enforcement or any other abuse of power. The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly: > Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it? > Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone. > Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver. > Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong . > Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius. > Lucius Fox: At what cost? > Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person. > Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person. > Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it. > Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
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Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted? Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
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The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
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Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
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That kind of change in morality seems possible for an 18 year timespan? If anything the slope is closer to typical than to the maximum recorded. The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
> Alfred Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
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same difference
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It was :) Morgan Freeman not Michael Caine.
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
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And Scarface was an inspiring rags-to-riches story.
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And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses. https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-fight-club-groups-spreading-in-canada-investigation-finds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs
Why is it that (from what I've seen) the average American citizen is fine with mass surveillance but only if it's not used to track illegal immigrants? It's such an odd thing to draw a line in the sand over.
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Objection: facts not in evidence! The problem with the current push on "illegal immigrants" is that 1. It has been incredibly brutal 2. Many of the currently "illegal" immigrants were not illegal until their status was revoked by the current president. 3. The question of your immigration status, under the current system, is decided without proper access to legal representation. These problems are very much worth drawing a line in the sand over. --- Some people feel that the current push is solving a real problem in the real world. Unfortunately, the real world is actually very complicated, and you can't flatten that complication without violence. If that is hard to imagine, replace the ICE acronym with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of Land Management, or Internal Revenue Service.
This nitpick in language adds nothing to the conversation and is fundamentally incorrect. "Fears of" does not imply the thing feared doesn't exist.
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Fear of bears in the woods? We already had bears.
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?" Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
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So instead of drinking or shopping they want to support a cause? My god how do they live with themselves.
Amazon also had the ad about Alexa killing you. Not sure what they were thinking exactly.
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It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.
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Straw man?
Claude Code Is Being Dumbed Down (symmetrybreak.ing)
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claude code is big enough now that it really needs a preview / beta release channel where features like this can be tested against a smaller audience before being pushed out. as a regular and long-term user, it's frequently jarring being pushed new changes / bugs in what has become a critical tool. surprised their enterprise clients haven't raised this
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Here's my honest take on this: You're mass-producing outrage out of a UX disagreement about default verbosity levels in a CLI tool. Let's walk through what actually happened: a team shipped a change that collapsed file paths into summary lines by default. Some users didn't like it. They opened issues. The developers engaged, explained their reasoning, and started iterating on verbose mode to find a middle ground. That's called a normal software development feedback loop. Now let's walk through what you turned it into: a persecution narrative complete with profanity, sarcasm, a Super Bowl ad callback, and the implication that Anthropic is "hiding what it's doing with your codebase" — as if there's malice behind a display preference change. A few specific points: The "what majority?" line is nonsense. GitHub issues are a self-selecting sample of people with complaints. The users who found it cleaner didn't open an issue titled "thanks, this is fine." That's how feedback channels work everywhere. You know this. "Pinning to 2.1.19" is your right. Software gives you version control. Use it. That's not the dramatic stand you think it is. The developers responding with "help us understand what verbose mode is missing" is them trying to solve the problem without a full revert. You can disagree with the approach, but framing genuine engagement as contempt is dishonest. A config toggle might be the right answer. It might ship next week. But the entitlement on display here isn't "give us a toggle" — it's "give us a toggle now , exactly as we specified, and if you try any other approach first, you're disrespecting us." That's not feedback. That's a tantrum dressed up as advocacy. You're paying $200/month for a tool that is under active development, with developers who are visibly responding to issues within days. If that feels like disrespect to you, you have a calibration problem. With kind regards, Opus 4.6
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They don’t seem to realize that doing vibe coding requires enough information to get the vibes. There are no vibes in “I am looking at files and searching for things” so I have zero weight to assign to your decision quality up until the point where it tells me the evals passed at 100%. Your agent is not good enough. I trust it like I trust a toddler not to fall into a swimming pool. It’s not trying to, but enough time around the pool and it is going to happen, so I am watching the whole time, and I might even let it fall in if I think it can get itself out.
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It's nerfed to a point that it feels more like lawyer than a coding assistant now. We were arguing about an 3rd party API ToU for 1 hour last night. VSC Copilot executed it within 1 minute.
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I absolutely love reading thoughts and see the commands it uses. It teaches me new stuff, and I think this is what young people need: be able to know WHAT it is doing and WHY it is doing it. And have the ability to discuss with another agent about what the agent and me are trying to archive, and we can ask them questions we have without disturbing the flow, but seeing the live output. Regarding the thoughts: it also allows me to detect problematic paths it takes, like when it can't find a file. For example today I was working on a project that depends on another project, managed by another agent. While refactoring my code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs code's user data to find the recent files history if it can find out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if it has problems, it should tell me. It explained it can't find that file, i gave it the paths and tokens were saved. Why dumb it down?
Perhaps some power user of Claude Code can enlighten me here, but why not just using OpenCode? I admit I've only briefly tried Claude Code, so perhaps there are unique features there stopping the switch, or some other form of lock-in.
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Anthropic is actively blocking calls from anything but claude code for it's claude plans. At this point you either need to be taking part in the cat and mouse game to make that plan work with opencode or you need to be paying the much more expensive API prices.
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i see i guess they were blocking OpenCode for a reason this will put people to the test that use mainly Anthropic, to have a second look at the results from other models
> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake. It is _really easy_ to think you are making improvements by hiding information if you do not understand why that information is perceived as valuable. Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive. It's even easier if you have non-expert users getting attention. All of us here at HN will have seen UIs where this has occurred.
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I am so glad to hear there are working PMs who are aware of this (and if you’re hiring it makes me more interested in considering your employer).
Product management --and managers-- can be, shall we say, interesting. I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an established market, make waves and shock it. We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that information, we produced a set of specifications and user experience requirements that far exceeded anything in the market. We got green-lit to deliver a set of prototypes to present at a trade show. We did that. The prototypes were presented and they truly blew everyone away. Blogs, vlogs, users, everyone absolutely loved what we created and the sense was that this was a winning product. And then came reality. Neither the product manager nor the CTO (and we could add the CEO and CFO to the list) had enough understanding and experience in the domain to take the prototypes to market. It would easily have required a year or two of learning before they could function in that domain. What did they do? They dumbed down the product specification to force it into what they understood and what engineering building blocks they already had. Square peg solidly and violently pounded into a round hole. The outcome? Oh, they built a product alright. They sure did. And it flopped, horribly flopped, as soon as it was introduced and made available. Nobody wanted it. It was not competitive. It offered nothing disruptive. It was a bad clone of everything already occupying space in that ecosystem. Game over. The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc. When someone says something like "I am not sure that's a good idea for a startup. There's competition." My first though is: Never assume that competitors know what they are doing, are capable and always make the right decisions without making mistakes. You don't always need a better product, you need better execution.
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Replace the C levels with AI. The C suite is am impediment to innovation and progress. They are the office politics mentioned in this entire thread. The person with the vision and the strategy is a random person out there that doesn't even work for your company. Hell, you could have done it. > The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc. They only accidentally succeed in spite of those things. They have those things more than existing businesses precisely because having too much money masks the pressures that would force solid execution and results. When you have 80% profit margins, you can show up drunk.
Product management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong? It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month. Just saved you thousands or millions in salaries, and you have a better chance of making things that your users actually want.
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Good PM's are extremely good at understanding users, and use soft-skills to make the rest of the org focus on users more. I've worked with a couple, and they've added an enormous amount of value, sometimes steering teams of dozens of engineers in a more productive direction. The problem is, it's hard to measure how good a PM is, even harder than for engineers. The instinct is to use product KPI's to do so, but especially at BigTech company, distribution advantages and traction of previous products will be the dominant factor here, and the best way of raising many product KPI's are actually user-hostile. Someone who has been a successful FAANG engineer who goes to a startup might lean towards over-engineering, but at least they should be sharp on the fundamentals. Someone who has been a successful FAANG PM might actually have no idea how to get PMF. > Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month This is actually a great idea, but what will happen is this socially competent engineer will soon have a new full-time job gathering those insights, coalescing them into actionable product changes, persuading the rest of the org to adopt those changes, and making sure the original user insights make it into the product. Voila: you've re-invented product management. But I actually think it's good to source PM's from people who've been engineers for a few years. PM's used to come from a technical background; Google famously gave entry-level coding tests to PM's well into the '10s. I dunno when it became more fashionable to hire MBA's and consultants into this role, but it may have been a mistake.
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This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. AI coding is making technically minded product manager's MORE powerful not less. When/if coding just because your ability to accurately describe what you want to build, the people yielding this skill are the ones who understand customer requirements, not the opposite. > Find your most socially competent engineer, These usually get promoted to product management anyway, so this isn't a new thought.
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> This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. It's not. Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work taken off their plate, now done by AI. That allows them to be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is directed towards strategy, design, quality. Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own tools in house. Why pay someone when you can vibe code a working solution in a few minutes? So product managers are getting squeezed out by smarter people below them moving into their cognitive space and being better at solving the problems they were supposed to be solving. And users moving into their space by taking low hanging fruit away from them. No more month long discussions about where to put the chart and what color it should be. The user made their own dashboard and it calls into the API. What API? The one the PM doesn't understand and a single engineer maintains with the help of several LLMs. If it's simple and easy: the user took it over, if it's complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room. That has never been the PM.
I have worked with some really really good product managers. But not lately. Lately it’s been people who have very little relevant domain expertise, zero interest in putting in the time to develop said expertise beyond just cataloguing and regurgitating feedback from the customers they like most on a personal level, and seem to mostly have only been selected for the position because they are really good at office politics. But I think it’s not entirely their fault. What I’ve also noticed is that, when I was on teams with really elective product managers, we also had a full time project manager. That possibly freed up a lot of the product manager’s time. One person to be good at the tactical so the other can be good at the strategic. Since project managers have become passé, though, I think the product managers are just stretched too thin. Which sets up bad incentive structures: it’s impossible to actually do the job well anymore, so of course the only ones who survive are the office politicians who are really good at gladhanding the right people and shifting blame when things don’t go well.
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The proportion of "really good" PMs on product engineering teams has to be less than 0.1%. The counter to that is "the proportion of 'really good engineers' to product engineering teams has got to be in the single digits," and I would agree with that, as well. The problem is what is incentivized to be built - most teams are working on "number go up?" revenue or engagement as a proxy to revenue "problems." Not "is this a good product that people actively enjoy using?" problems. Just your typical late-stage capitalism shit.
Then why is the suggestion to use verbose mode treated as another mistake? The user is highly skilled; let them filter out what is important This should be better than adding an indeterminate number of toggles and settings, no?
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does claude code let me control whats output when? verbose i think puts it on the TUI and i cant particularly grep or sed on the TUI
I fully agree with you on almost everything you wrote in this thread, but I’m not sure this is the right answer. I myself currently spend a lot of time with CC and belong to that group of developers who don’t care about this problem. It’s likely that I’m not alone. So it doesn’t have to be the least professional audience they serve with this update. It’s possible that Anthropic knows what are they doing (e.g. reducing level of detail to simplify task of finding something more important in the output) and it’s also possible that they are simply making stupid product decisions because they have a cowboy PM who attacks some OKR screaming yahoo. We don’t know. In the end having multiple verbosity levels configured with granularity similar to java loggers would be nice.
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Oh totally - I'm definitely not saying that they made the decision to cater to non-dev users, just that it's a possibility. Totally agree with you that at the end of the day, we haven't the foggiest idea.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371 It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the secret sauce to end users. I have to patch Claude every release to bring this functionality back.
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> It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the secret sauce to end users Meanwhile, I am observing precisely how VS+Copilot works in my OAI logs with zero friction. Plug in your own API key and you can MITM everything via the provider's logging features.
5.3 Codex on cursor is better than Claude code
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Not in my (limited) experience. I gave CC and codex detailed instructions for reworking a UI, and codex did a much worse job and took 5x as long to finish.
Hmmm, I used OpenCode for awhile and didn't have this experience. I felt like OpenCode was the better experience.
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Same, I still use CC mainly due to it being so wildly better at compaction. The overall experience of using OpenCode was far superior - especially with the LSP configured.
How much longer is Anthropic going to allow OpenCode to use Pro/Max subscriptions? Yes, it's technically possible, but it's against Anthropic's ToS. [1] 1: https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-without-knowing-it-228fcecc168c
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There are also Azure versions of Opus
I just assume that they realized that they can split the offering, and to charge for the top tier more. (Yes, even more.) If Claude Code can replace an engineer, it should cost just a bit less than an engineer, not half as much.
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Remember there are no moats in this industry - if anything one company might have a 2 month lead, sometimes. We've also noticed that companies paying OpenAI may swiftly shift to paying Google or Anthropic in a heartbeat. That means the pricing is going to be competitive. You may still get your wish though, but instead of the price of an engineer remaining the same, it will cut itself down by 95%.
At least that misunderstanding didn’t cause a nuclear accident: https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/4/15/when-kitty-litter-caused-a-nuclear-catastrophe
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Luckily these strayed goats weren't irradiated
Am I right that they still refuse to read AGENTS.md?
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Yes as of about a week ago, last I checked.
Amodei has to be the most insufferable of all the AI hucksters, nowadays even Altman looks tame compared to him. The whole company also has this meme about AI safety and some sort of fear-mongering about the models every few months. It's basically a smokescreen for normies and other midwits to make it look more mysterious and advanced than it really is. OOOOH IT'S GOING TO BREAK OUT! IT KNOWS IT'S BEING EVALUATED! I bet there are some true believers in Anthropic too, people who think themselves too smart to believe in God so they replaced it with AI instead but all the same hopes are there, eg. Amodei preaching about AI doubling the human lifespan. In religion we usually talk about heaven.
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Just 1 more data center build, man! A few more megawatts and double the context window and it's AGI! I just want useful tools.
Believe me, I wish it was just parroting. The real annoying thing about Opus 4.5 is that it's impossible to publicly say "Opus 4.5 is an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it" without sounding like a AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it's the counterintuitive truth, to my personal frustration. I have been trying to break this damn model since its November release by giving it complex and seemingly impossible coding tasks but this asshole keeps doing them correctly. GPT-5.3-Codex has been the same relative to GPT-5.2-Codex, which just makes me even more frustrated.
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It still cannot solve a synchronization issue in my fairly simple online game, completely wrong analysis back to back and solutions that actually make the problem worse. Most training data is probably react slop so it struggles with this type of stuff. But I have to give it to Amodei and his goons in the media, their marketing is top notch. Fear-mongering targeted to normies about the model knowing it is being evaluated and other sort of preaching to the developers.
I can't watch a YouTube video without seeing a Claude ad. Same for friends. Safe for non-programmer friends.
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They have insane marketing push, across HN and reddit too btw.
NetNewsWire Turns 23 (netnewswire.blog)
It wasn’t at the time.
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[delayed]
My YOShInOn RSS reader uses an SBERT model for classification (will I upvote this or not?) and large-scale clustering (20 k-means clusters and show me the top N in each cluster so I get a diversity of different articles.) For duplicate detection I am using DBSCAN https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cluster.DBSCAN.html and found some parameters where I get almost no false positives but a lot of duplicates get missed when I lowered the threshold to make clusters I started getting false positives fast. I don't find duplicates are a big problem in my system with the 110 feeds I have and the subjects I am interested in, but insofar as they are a problem there tend to be structured relationships between articles: that is, site A syndicates articles from site B but for some reason articles from site A usually get selected and site B articles don't. An article from Site A often links to one or more articles, often that I don't have a feed for, and it would be nice if the system looked at the whole constellation. Stuff like that. Effective clustering is the really interesting technology Google News has had for a long time.
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I have been attempting this exact sort of clustering solution for a few years now (on and off as a side project). Do you have source code available, or more detailed explanations/resources of how to approach this? Edit: I just looked around for your YOShInOn RSS reader code and couldn't find it. I did find a number of references it looks like you've made to it on various forums, etc over the years.
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The technical report on YOShInOn is about 2 years overdue! You mean the k-means for diversity or DBSCAN for duplicates? Either way it is about 10 lines of scikit-learn code. Send me an email.
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Both. Just sent an email. Thanks!
I love it too, but I would still like some concept of folders, so that I could sort my feeds into eg. programming, design, hobbies, and then have a feed to match the mood.
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Are you talking about NetNewsWire? There are folders, I have a bunch setup.
Should your developer company go open source? (extremefoundership.substack.com)
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Why not a single word about competition with other companies? Even before AI ElasticSearch got smashed by Amazon with their own product. Now with AI "translation", they don't even care about license.
(I'm editing to fix my tone). Having first hand experience with building multiple open source and open core dev infra companies, the advice in this article is spot on. If it is AI slop, it's still good advice. I'd prefer comments focused on content vs. trying to Turing-test AI generated text.
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The content is useful only if it's fact-checked. The author evidently did not even bother editing the article, so how is anyone supposed to know whether it's factual or it's conjured out of some numbers.
Each article like this one is an opportunity to assess whether it's mainly written by an AI or not. After reading part of this one I mostly think not (except for the obvious AI generated image), but it would be amusing if it were. "I’ve been asked a few times about my approach to open-source in the past few weeks, so decided to write this article to structure my thoughts." Is this being told from the perspective of Claude or OpenAI? I assume across the millions of users this has been asked a few times in the past few weeks. If it's from the human perspective, perhaps while he was drafting it, the AI assistant asked him about his approach a few times so that it, and in this case each conversation counts as a separate character asking him for his thoughts about it. Either way it's easier to inflate the number of people asking the author's opinion. However, for this, I dug into the author's bio, and with almost 10k followers on X, it seems likely he did get asked this a bunch of times.
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> Open-source is not a value statement. It’s a strategy. > The only question that matters is this: Does open-source structurally help this product win? > A hard filter first: Only technical users are emotionally sensitive to open-source. > Important framing shift: OSS is not the product. OSS is the entry point. > Open-source is powerful. But only when it is deliberate. Finally, the random bolded bits of text. This article is literally copy pasted directly from some LLM, and I'm fairly sure it's ChatGPT.
I suspect it depends on the customer/target audience. If you target developers, open source vs closed source will make a difference. For others, customers probably don't even know what GitHub is.
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I think that a poster child for this is Hashicorp They were OSS for a long time, but once the IPO took place and the investors needed a return, the licences changed..
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
We rendered and embedded one million CAD files (cad-search-three.vercel.app)
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The approach could be helpful for searching though large 3D model libraries like GrabCAD for some visual placeholder part by just describing it. The generality of the part descriptions made me chuckle. > A bevel gear with a circular base and a series of angular, tapered teeth extending radially outward. The teeth are uniformly distributed around the circumference, allowing for meshing at an angle with another gear. The gear's face includes a set of holes, varying in size and symmetrically arranged around the central bore, likely for weight reduction or mounting purposes. The central opening likely acts as an axle or shaft attachment point. The design facilitates the transmission of rotational motion between intersecting shafts, typically at a 90-degree angle.
Neat. As a mechanical engineer, I feel the part of my job is safe from AI for the time being. I don't think quality training data for good mechanical design exists. 3D CAD is only part of good design. To a tinker-er that is 3D printing simple parts, an STL is fine. But most parts that matter require far more design consideration and detail than simply the geometry data that an STL (or other 3D file) provides. The majority of parts are accompanied with a drawing, and that is where the real design actually is found: Tolerances, GD&T, materials, processing notes... Even then, most of the calculations and considerations to build the model and drawing are not explicit in the design documents: Nothing about a drawing of a stainless steel part tells you WHY it must be a stainless steel part. I don't think there is a large set of well documented designs out there to act as training data for an AI system to design an assembly beyond basic 3D parts. The authors identify this gap, but it's a fundamental problem with the wholesale move to AI in mechanical design.
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Agreed. At the end of the day, manufactured parts are driven by constraints outside of the CAD environment so analyzing 3D data as the foundation of an AI system strikes me as attacking the problem from the wrong direction. i.e. Simple optimization of a part for injection molding can take it from requiring a bunch of side actions and collapsing cores to a simple 2 sided mold and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling. None of that is obvious from 3D data alone. That said, I am excited for AI assisted CAD tools. Things like creating and applying global variables to an existing part, complex assembly analysis for part reduction or just making a starting base part can be incredibly tedious and are low hanging fruit for improving CAD workflows with AI imo.
We rendered the one million part ABC dataset from Deep Geometry, and open-sourced the data. We also built a fun demo with the following pipeline: CAD > render > caption > embed. Open-sourced dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/daveferbear/3d-model-images-embeddings Blog writeup: https://www.finalrev.com/blog/embedding-one-million-3d-models
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The search function doesn’t seem to work at all, it provides nonsensical results. For example if I search “supercolumns” I get regular household furniture.
GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering (z.ai)
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Been playing with it in opencode for a bit and pretty impressed so far. Certainly more of an incremental improvement than a big bang change, but it does seem better a good bit better than 4.7, which in turn was a modest but real improvement over 4.6. Certainly seems to remember things better and is more stable on long running tasks.
What is truly amazing here is the fact that they trained this entirely on Huawei Ascend chips per reporting [1]. Hence we can conclude the semiconductor to model Chinese tech stack is only 3 months behind the US, considering Opus 4.5 released in November. (Excluding the lithography equipment here, as SMIC still uses older ASML DUV machines) This is huge especially since just a few months ago it was reported that Deepseek were not using Huawei chips due to technical issues [2]. US attempts to contain Chinese AI tech totally failed. Not only that, they cost Nvidia possibly trillions of dollars of exports over the next decade, as the Chinese govt called the American bluff and now actively disallow imports of Nvidia chips as a direct result of past sanctions [3]. At a time when Trump admin is trying to do whatever it can to reduce the US trade imbalance with China. [1] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/chinas-ai-startup-zhipu-releases-132222546.html?guccounter=1 [2] https://www.techradar.com/pro/chaos-at-deepseek-as-r2-launch-crashes-into-hardware-problems-rivals-gain-huge-advantage [3] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-customs-agents-told-nvidias-h200-chips-are-not-permitted-sources-say-2026-01-14/
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Exactly. The emperor has no clothes. The largest investments in US tech in history and yet there less than a year of moat. OpenAI or Anthropic will not be able to compete with Chinese server farms and so the US strategy is misplaced investments that will come home to roast. And we will have Deepseek 4 in a few days...
US Secretary of State Bressent just publicly said that the US needs to get along and cooperate with China. His tone was so different than previously in the last year that I listened to the video clip twice. Obviously for the average US tax payer getting along with China is in our interests - not so much our economic elites. I use both Chinese and US models, and Mistral in Proton’s private chat. I think it makes sense for us to be flexible and not get locked in.
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>His tone was so different than previously in the last year that I listened to the video clip twice. US bluff got called. A year back it looked like US held all the cards and could squeeze others without negative consequences. i.e. have cake and eat it too Since then: China has not backed down, Europe is talking de-dollarization, BRICS is starting to find a new gear on separate financial system, merciless mocking across the board, zero progress on ukraine, fed wobbled, focus on gold as alternate to US fiat, nato wobbled, endless scandals, reputation for TACO, weak employment, tariff chaos, calls for withdrawal of gold from US's safekeeping, chatter about dumping US bonds, multiple major countries being quite explicit about telling trump to get fucked Not at all surprised there is a more modest tone...none of this is going the "without negative consequences" way >Mistral in Proton’s private chat TIL
This Pelican benchmark has become irrelevant. SVG is already ubiquitous. We need a new, authentic scenario.
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Like identifying names of skateboard tricks from the description? https://skatebench.t3.gg/
How many pelican riding bicycle SVGs were there before this test existed? What if the training data is being polluted with all these wonky results...
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I'd argue that a models ability to ignore/manage/sift through the noise added to the training set from other LLMs increases in importance and value as time goes on.
Thank you for continuing to maintain the only benchmarking system that matters! Context for the unaware: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/
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They will start to max this benchmark as well at some point.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have real user data that they can use to influence their models. Chinese labs have benchmarks. Once you realize this, it's obvious why this is the case. You can have self-hosted models. You can have models that improve based on your needs. You can't have both.
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zAI, minimax and Kimi have plenty of subscriber usage on their own platforms. They get real data just as well. Less or it maybe but it's there.
They had plenty of time to update their system prompts so they don't be embarrassed. I noticed whenever such meme comes out, if you check immediately you can reproduce it yourself, but after a free hours it's already updated.
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I think you're seriously underestimating how much effort the fine tuning at their scale takes and what impact it has. They don't pack every edge case into the system prompt either. It's not like they update the model every few hours or even care about memes. If they seriously did, they'd force-delegate spelling questions to tool calls.
It's unclear where the car is currently from your phrasing. If you add that the car is in your garage, it says you'll need to drive to get the car into the wash.
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Do you think the average person would need this sort of clarification? How many of us would have recommended to walk?
I think there are two types of people in these conversations: Those of us who just want to get work done don't care about comparisons to old models, we just want to know what's good right now. Issuing a press release comparing to old models when they had enough time to re-run the benchmarks and update the imagery is a calculated move where they hope readers won't notice. There's another type of discussion where some just want to talk about how impressive it is that a model came close to some other model. I think that's interesting, too, but less so when the models are so big that I can't run them locally anyway. It's useful for making purchasing decisions for someone trying to keep token costs as low as possible, but for actual coding work I've never found it useful to use anything other than the best available hosted models at the time.
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It's high-interest to me because open models are the ultimate backstop. If the SOTA hosted models all suddenly blow up or ban me, open models mitigate the consequence from "catastrophe" to "no more than six to nine months of regression". The idea that I could run a ~GPT-5-class model on my own hardware (given sufficient capex) or cloud hardware under my control is awesome.
It reflects the Nvidia tax overhead too.
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Not really, Western AI companies can set their margins at whatever they want.
Toyota Fluorite: "console-grade" Flutter game engine (fluorite.game)
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Not written in rust? No thanks
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Interestingly this name (fluorite.game) is in the HaGeZi normal blocklist. https://adguardteam.github.io/HostlistsRegistry/assets/filter_34.txt
LLMs would not be popular if "spending those few minutes doing it yourself" part was true. In actuality it can be hours, days, or weeks depending on the feature and your pickiness. Everyone acts as if they are the greatest developer and that these tools are subpar, the truth is that most developers are just average, just like most drivers are average but think of themselves as above average. All of the sudden everyone that was piecing together code off of stackoverflow with no idea how to build the damn thing is actually a someone who can understand large code bases and find bugs and write flawless code? Give me a break. To the degree that those same people are now writing 10-100x more code...that is scary, but the doom and gloom is pretty tiring.
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The SO copy-pasting is actually quite accurate. The same folks are now just blindly generating code. That's why most software in the world is shit, and will continue to be in the future. There might just be more of it.
And before you realize you're nothing more but a prompter ready to be displaced by someone cheaper.
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I think a lot of people, regardless of whether they vibe code or not are going to be replaced by a cheaper sollution. A lot of software that would've required programmers before can now be created by tech savy employees in their respective fields. Sure it'll suck, but it's not like that matters for a lot of software. Software Engineering and Computer Science aren't going away, but I suspect a lot of programming is.
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Ah yes, like no-code programming in the past, or what was it called again?
> They use this game engine in the 2026 RAV4 Funny how “game engines” are now car parts in 2026. Can I just have an electric car that’s a car and nothing else? Seats, wheels pedals, mirrors, real buttons, no displays just a aux jack. I’d buy it, hell I might even take the risk and pre-order it
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dawg idk how you have a car that's "electric" and also "basic." everything in an electric car is _necessarily_ mediated by software. if you want a simple car, you want combustion.
Real buttons are more expensive than electronic. Not sure if you care, but people make that mistake more generally. Game engines are probably trivially cheap to produce in 2026. You forget that Toyota sells 10M cars per year. In 3 years thats 30M cars. What does it cost each buyer for the game engine? 30 cents?
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Unity has a whole template and asset library for creating car displays. https://unity.com/blog/industry/automotive-hmi-template-take-it-for-a-ride
> no displays In the US, no. Backup cameras are required by federal law as of 2018. The intent of the law was to reduce the number of children killed by being backed over because the driver couldn't see them behind the car.
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Cameras are required, but not displays :~)
Right, backup cameras make sense even for sedans and other small cars. The high-hood trucks and SUVs in the US are the reason we'll probably get mandatory front cameras eventually as well.
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The front camera is the best thing I added to my 2004 Prius. The hood on that car is very good for visibility, but with the birds eye cameras I can roll it up within centimeters of things in front of me (there's a slight risk that you can absolutely poke the nose under stuff but at that point it's quite obvious out the windshield too).
While I agree with you that the issue is far worse with larger vehicles, I do find that backing up in my wife's 2011 camry (without a backup camera) feels significantly less safe than I feel backing up my 2017 accord with a backup camera. I'm all for fixing the structural issue you are referring to, but I think the requirement for those cameras is sane in an age where the added cost to the manufacturer is miniscule.
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As someone who can only afford cars that are 10+ years old, i've never owened a car with a backup camera. And in a way-- good. That part of my brain, let it continue to develop. I am much better at "feeling out" where a car is than my friends who rely on back up cameras.
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Being good at driving doesn’t fix the huge blind spot you have behind your car
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I have to agree. Backing up my Tundra (8' bed) feels substantially safer since I can see immediately behind the vehicle than any pre-regulation vehicle I've driven. That doesn't even account for the convenience with lining up for towing, hauling, etc. (It's no replacement for GOAL—Get Out And Look—but it definitely helps!)
Its not just the added cost, its the supply chain. Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before. There was the chip shortage during covid which held car production back becasue the auto makers couldnt source their chips fast enough. I am waiting to see if the current supply issue for ram chips modules will produce a similar effect.
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All cars have required "chips" since OBDII was mandated in the early 90s. That ship has sailed around the world, returned to port, and sailed again.
A gigabyte!? You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet. And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display. Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes. Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VLM (yet) that would justify anything approaching gigabytes of RAM.
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Back in the mists of time, we used to do realtime video from camera to display with entirely analog components. Not that I'm eager to have a CRT in my dashboard, but live video from a local camera is a pretty low bar to clear.
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I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed. So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.
A Toyota Corolla starts at $23K. I think the "Under 20" and "Under 30" price points (a la the original Model 3 goal) are simply a thing of the past for any volume car with reasonable demand.
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What you get for that $23k is now quite substantial though. Power windows are standard. 169hp. Automatic climate control , central locking and key fobs, Automatic emergency braking and other radar based features. Digital gauge cluster. Modern infotainment. Modern crash safety, which is really good compared to 20 years ago. That's a lot of car for $10k in 1996 dollars. That's ignoring the $3k in fees, taxes, and whatever scam the dealer runs. The reason we don't see more of it is that selling one $23k Corolla to one value minded shopper can't make line go up as much as selling one $60k MEGATRUCK to one easily influenced shopper. The new car market is exclusively for people who buy new cars regularly, and are therefore willing to get very bad deals for cars. The market is driven by people who self select for bad ability to parse value.
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Yup. The expectations are set higher and to a point since cars are bigger for safety reasons (crumple zones, airbags) and have more pedestrian safety features like spring loaded hoods, it invited incremental additions until the new price points were set. A spartan 19K car isn’t going to sell as well as a CarPlay equipped 23K car.
Interesting, they flipped the problem around. The UI toolkits in game engine usually suck hard, so here they started from a good UI toolkit and made it possible to make relatively performant games. There's more info at https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r0lx9g/fluorite_toyotas_upcoming_brand_new_game_engine/
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Qt Quick 3D in Qt is I guess a similar value prop. They have a fun demo of a 3D shooter in it.
U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025 (nbcnews.com)
Stagflation or vibecession? Surveys say people feel down about the economy, but their spending says otherwise.
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Spending is up in the top 10% and down in the bottom 90%. Average spending is up, median spending is down, adjusted for inflation.
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Those 2 groups are increasingly separate populations.
Obviously not a macroeconomic analysis but if you watch YouTube channels like Caleb Hammer it seems people are literally spending their life away. No planning, no asset building, just hedonistic stuff. The kind of people you see there have the mentality of: "I'll never pay this debt down anyway so I'll max out my loans to do what I want before I die". Not very optimistic, even if it inflates the consumer market.
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Youtube is entertainment designed to get clicks, and the algorithm enhances biases. Fox news hosts would likely be youtubers if they started their careers today.
The children yearn for the mines.
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Legal working age needs to be reduced to 2, so they have the necessary 20 years of experience after college to get an entry level job.
it's almost telling how Super Bowl commercials tell the mood of the country's population and economy latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
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Idiocracy pretty much
All that is old is new again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
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Except this time it's the main banks doing it?
Personally, I think it's better to normalize and point out there are a lot of valid points made. But I suppose change needs both strategies.
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Every business leader who makes money is a Marxian! Capturing the surplus value of the labor of others is how a business makes money and that is a value neutral statement.
AI-First Company Memos (the-ai-native.company)
People have always resisted change especially one that modifies the way they work. They’d rather work on the same thing for life. To get them to adopt new tools you need to do this stuff. And yes, people did resist IDEs (“I’m best with my eMacs” - no you weren’t), people resisted the “sufficiently smart compiler”, and so on. What happened was that they were replaced by the sheer growth in the industry providing new people who didn’t have these constraints.
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Emacs is an interesting analogy. I've switched from IDEs to Emacs at some point in my career, and inertia obviously wasn't the reason. Then another 15 years later I went back to using IDEs (inspired by Carmack's interview). 2 years in I realized it destroyed my ability to generate and maintain mental maps of the codebase and generally remember things about it, although I think it's still a net gain so I stick with it. Agentic coding poses the exact same problem and the exact same tradeoff. And I think the jury is still out on whether it's worth it. At the very minimum you need to take proactive measures least you end up with a codebase no one can maintain (other than maybe future AGI).
Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.
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Stock valuation has moved further away from Ben Graham-era emphasis on analysis of cash flow.
AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the level of the individual worker. Converting an entire factory is a top-down decision. No single worker can individually decide to start using electricity instead of steam power, but individuals can choose whether/how to use AI or any other individual-level tool.
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> AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the level of the individual worker. Ah, but that is the question, isn't it. Is it bottom up or top down?
Reminds me of those little gadgets, which move your mouse, so that you show up online on Slack. I’d just add a cron job to burn some tokens.
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Years ago I remember talking to someone who purchased a "mouseJiggler" for that very purpose. That was literally what he called it. Problem for him was we turned it into a meme, and he immediately regretted telling us.
Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?
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If things are hard or impossible to repair, that means they are even harder and more impossible to recycle. If we built devices to be repaired, not only would less of them get trashed to start with, but the stuff that does get trashed would be much easier to recycle.
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If you buy ICs from a Chinese source, there is a good chance you will get something desoldered from e-waste. People don't like it unless they have no choice because there is less guarantee it actually works plus there is the ick factor. Anything less valuable than an IC is probably not worth the labor required to recycle it. On a side note, it is funny to see posters demanding that the company pay for the full recycling cost of their devices. We required the nuclear industry to do the same with nuclear waste and reactor decommission. The result is artificially inflating the cost of one of the best ways to cleanly generate electricity to the point that it became uneconomical to built nuclear so we ended up burning more coal instead. Be careful with second order effects of your feel good solutions to complicated problems.
I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows. e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output. And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.
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If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it. But because it is glued together to not be taken apart, and there are no diagrams for how anything in it works or is put together, it isn't worth the time even if you have a station and equipment all ready setup and replacement component on hand. 95% of the time fixing electronics is just figuring out how they were put together in the first place so you can diagnostically trace along the circuit. Not that I think lightbulbs are probably worth saving, but expand it to any other device which gets exponentially more complex and it is easy to see why they don't get diagnosed, not to mention repaired. With a board diagram I can point at a spot on the board and say "I should see 15 volts here", without a board diagram i gotta draw out and figure out how the power supply even works so I know what it is suppose to be outputting and then trace that all the way to the test point to make sure there isn't other crap inline before then that might change what I see.
Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work. Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board. It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.
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If we were provided board and part diagrams it might be worth it because then you don't need an actual engineer or super highly knowledgeable person to waste a few hours of time just to diagnose most problems. But because we lack such diagrams whoever is diagnosing it also has to reverse engineer how it works in their head.
This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order. Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall. Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash. Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them. Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.
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This is why every device should be bootloader-unlockable (with legal enforcement). There's billions of old phones and IoT devices out there locked to outdated software. This has to change. If it can't be unlocked, it can't be sold. That should be the law.
500 years is only a blink in Earths lifespan.
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But its a lot longer than most people expect biodegradable to mean.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
GLM-OCR: Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive (github.com/zai-org)
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This might be a niche question, but does glm-ocr (or other libraries) have the ability to extract/interpret QR code data?
Surprisingly, I have a few hundred gigs of old newspaper scans so am very curious. How fast was it per page? Do you recall if it's CPU or GPU based? TY!
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It is CPU-based. Somewhere between 1 to 2 seconds per page on a single core. I ran 20 instances of it in parallel to utilize 20 CPU cores so the avg time came down nicely.
Off the top of my head: for a lot of OCR tasks, it’s kind of worse for the model to be smart. I don’t want my OCR to make stuff up or answer questions — I want to to recognize what is actually on the page.
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Sometimes what is on the page is ambiguous. Imagine a scan where the dot over the i is missing in a word like "this". What's on the page is "thls" but to transcribe it that way would be an error outside of forensic contexts. I am reminded it's basically impossible to read cursive writing in a language you don't know even if it's the same alphabet.
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