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When did Google get so weird? (sancho.bearblog.dev)
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I is a problem of how AI models have trained - when you are asking them a question, they are not giving an answer, but OPINION piece. It seems to be part of current AI business model - to give advices for people that are unable to think themselves.
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Boomers have been googling like this for over a decade. You are not the target customer for an empathetic computer.
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I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either. I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.
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This is a really good time to do a head-to-head comparison of different search engines. The last time I checked Google does not provide search results above the fold, instead showing AI overview, ads, and YouTube search results. Try a different search engine to see which one is giving you the highest signal results and what other junk they put on the page. Personally I use duckduckgo with AI turned off in settings, but it's best to try the experiment for yourself.
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> Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I'm mostly ok with them, they're sometimes helpful I never found them helpful. I always have to block them via extensions. Google is really an annoying company these days. I am hardly the only one who wishes that company were to cease to exist altogether. In the past I did not understand, on reddit, the de-google movement. Now I completely understand it, but I think it is the reverse as problem here - people abandoning Google. I think Google needs to abandon mankind and this planet. Let them go far away where they no longer cause any issues here. > Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this: Poor guy ^^^ has not yet realised that AI slop steals his time. I realised this the first time I notice the AI slop generated text spam Google pushes onto people. A few lost souls may find this useful - I find it utter trash. No quality. Just steals my time. > What in the fucking hell? I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet? Good that he finally realised it. Million people noticed this before already. I noticed this when Google started to ruin its search engine. First time I remember was via AMP-ification. AMP mostly failed, but Google kept on pushing towards less quality and more suckage. AI is just the final nail in the coffin, but Google search started to suck way before that. One of these days some scientists should determine when Google really started to suck, because in, say, 2006 or so, Google search did not suck as much. > Regardless of what you think of AI or chatbots, I think it's pretty obvious this is just plain weird. Not if you think Google is not doing this on purpose. They are trying to kill off the search engine so they can present you an AI slop spam world. The other AI slop companies do this too. Slop suckage everywhere now. > Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs? That is how YOU think - but not Google. They deliberately crippled their search engine. The adCompany that Google is today, has nothing to do with the original Google. The billionaires running the show just want to suck in more money and dish out more slop. > I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me. Some people realise things more slowly. I am glad he finally understands why so many people are pissed at Google. Same for youtube by the way - about 80% of the shorts are AI slop generated or AI slop modified. I noticed this when I watched Brent Spiner on that podcast show; in the video itself, he had white hair but not totally white. In the short, both he and Jonathan Frakes had much whiter hair. I then realised that AI spam filter slop lies to me. I hate AI slop. Youtube is now infected with that, in particular the shorts. Poor guys looking at their smartphones being spammed down via lying slopness.
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I know this may be my poor English, but, ignoring the main point of the article, something I find tangentially troubling about the issue is that Gemini does not mention the possiblity of Dario dead. Like, if I were a lonely person who has lost someone and the only "thing" I can talk to is Gemini, would I have to say Dario was unalived or something? Or is it just my bad English?
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That's a similar experience with all chat bots, regardless of product. Amazon chat bot said to me that it heard my frustration and it sympathized with it. Doubt.
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> In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet? In one that changes.
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God, grant me the serenity to read the AI summary when it contains true information, the courage to ignore it when it contains falsehoods, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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As someone who loves (loved) to google movie, TV and anime quotes all the time, it is nauseating when stupid AI preview tries to engage me in a conversation.
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Your answer is since AI. AI is making mostly everything worse.
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i wrote about something similar here, the AI overview are doing REAL DAMAGE. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717522
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New iteration of Lifelog
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Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.
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I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
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Then what is it? DuckDuckGo?
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That’s kinda the entire point of this comment thread, no?
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the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)
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There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other. I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
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So, I tend to use Google as my calc. In the past I could just type 135 55 .86 and get the result. Now, if I type that it lets Gemini do the math. To avoid it I have to write 0.86 instead of .86. The future is now.
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Try putting spaces around your asterisks.
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A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models. So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.
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Waiting for all the data we give them in these chats to be sold even more. Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
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The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.
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Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.
Perhaps this is less about Google and more about following trends, moving fast and breaking things with an LLM chatbot. Most companies with LLM chatbots seem weird like this. Of course current state of the industry is not an excuse, for tech companies in general and google in particular.
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Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.
Because you are in a chat UI now. This is a skill issue - when you change your mindset that Google is now a chat UI to a LLM and not a query engine any more, you'll get better results. If you try the same zero-context prompt with chat.com for example you get a similar "want to talk about it?" response. Try asking it "Tell me about the "Dario will never come over" meme - give me some of the example original tweets" for example and you get a timeline, tweets etc as the AI overview. Pretty useful really. Tl:Dr - just like people, you need to give it some context.
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That's like me pressing the 'coffee' button on my coffee maker, and it gives me an audio definition and history because I didn't give it the context that I wanted a drink. People expect certain conventions with well established products. It's not a skill issue when a product is broken.
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You really need to stop with these galaxy brain contrarian takes > Google is now a chat UI to a LLM Starting with a false premise and then going on to whatever the fuck chat.com is does not validate your premise
It's not a "skill issue", the product got worse. If I wanted a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot, I want a search. Making me frame my query as a question rather than just assuming it's a query by default is just bad.
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We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions. Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think. Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
The software industry collectively lost the plot back around the time social media really took off. I don't know which problem google, in particular, has been trying to solve but it definitely is not search.
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They're trying to solve the problem of how to grow one of the most profitable companies in the world.
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
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No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English. That is not what happened in TFA.
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In TFA the chatbot got confused, and the author never decided to correct it with "no I'm trying to find an old tweet about NBA Dario" which a normie would do, and be satisfied with the result.
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I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.
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Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have spammed to death by SEO farms?
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The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance. Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.
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So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.
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Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.
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Gemini is easily the single most popular LLM family used in the world, period. As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made. Claude has just 11 million paying users. That's small cakes.
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It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.) AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind. You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.
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This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?
This is also why even lowest-intelligence emoji spamming slop models from ChatGPT are a massive hit and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
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If it's thinking I want, I can do that myself. Chat bots are occasionally useful search tools, but thinking doesn't really help with that. So why pay?
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?" So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious. So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_" It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer. My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
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> My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here. I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.
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I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.
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How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens? Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you: Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line. With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so. The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
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Not OP, but if I’m not interested in using Google’s AI, it’s going to just return these weird bad results that it’d be better off if Google just didn’t even include them as they’re factually wrong?
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> Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you Which itself is a major UX issue. The average person is not going to understand, if they even realize, that there's a difference between the AI summary and AI mode. One has to wonder just how much incorrect information people have consumed due to things like this.
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Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.
I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
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Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url? This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed. What the fuck?
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I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.
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I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.
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The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.
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Typical exchange: Me: "You bastard." Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."
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Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.
Where ever would you get that impression from the company that made its fortune by being the best at searching the web?
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You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!
As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?
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I doubt it, but it makes sycophantic managers feel good to see it serve up the same BS they spew.
I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird. If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen. If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.
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We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon. - Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features - Gmail - same - Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare - Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out. - YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution - GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing. I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development. It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.
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Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.
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Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?
Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity
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You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first. If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.
This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org
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> non-profit While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"
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Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity. [0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizations/watsi-in-san-francisco-ca-1116-452309
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Given wikimedia's ranking on this website, I am not so certain it's worth engaging. Obviously the "did not share info therefore guilty" mantra is somewhat true for charities. But "did share info therefore not guilty" is even more silly.
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> This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability. Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.
Finally, someone else talking about this. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly. To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.
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Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before. I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers. * Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
Google has been really bad at this “exact remembered text” thing for at least a few years before the AI summaries made an appearance. They deliberately decided to trade precision for… something. I’m not sure what. If anyone can direct me to a search engine that will actually let me query the index directly with multi word queries, I’d be delighted. DuckDuckGo seems to be a bit better, but not much.
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It does really feel bad when you have been for years been trained to do exact word searches. And then entire thing is replaced with some questionable fuzzy mess... Looking at you Confluence too. Or then having to multiple times correct the correction... Yes this time as well I meant what I typed. Maybe exact text and word search should be separate feature which is easily found...
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern. Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness. The only way out is to try and make connections with real people. Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person? It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
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>It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart". I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
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The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw. The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.
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If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.
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Do you have a citation for "most"? Or are you referring to a few specific countries in mind like Japan and South Korea?
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I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-) Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics. https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demographic-change-and-healthy-ageing/social-isolation-and-loneliness There's also some detailed stats for the UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-survey-202425-annual-publication/community-life-survey-202425-loneliness-and-support-networks Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones. The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
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> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny. How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids? When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often. I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends. Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends. To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.
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About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends; another fifth report feeling lonely sometimes [1]. [1] https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-loneliness-statistics/#:~:text=The%202024%20U.S.,loneliness%2C%20with%2014.0%25
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> About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends Wow, that's depressing...
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Not to be overly pedantic, but isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?
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> Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people. Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language. Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
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Surely there's a big selection bias here. You see the people who are out and about in society, not the ones holed up in their caves.
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I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely. And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler. I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.
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But, like, you only see the people who are out and about, right? You don't see the people trapped inside. Stuck in hospitals. Sat staring at a phone that never rings. You never talk to people who don't feel comfortable talking to a stranger.
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It really does depend on the country. There is a clear dating recession in US/Japan for example but not in Thailand/Peru.
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Hm, I also done extensive traveling, but would agree to the "most people are lonely" statement. Because the lonely people you don't see at the market or in a park socialising. They are at home, in front of the TV or now their smartphone. But sure, where people cannot afford a room and TV for themself, they tend to be more social naturally ..
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> the isolation I see in the United States Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly. Most of the South is, too, as well as a surmising fraction of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
Alan Kay's answer to "Did the ENIAC have a BIOS"? (quora.com)
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I had Claude Opus disassemble the CDC 6600 dead start panel. The hard part was finding a better image of the switches so the vision could read the bits.¹ The content isn't very interesting, and Claude's comments aren't very detailed. Not bad for 2 minutes of work about a 62 year old computer though. Look out Ken Shirriff, AI is coming for you.² Addr Octal Instruction Meaning 0001 7512 DCN 12 Disconnect channel 12 (put it in a known idle state) 0002 7712 FNC 12, 4000? Send function code to channel 12's device 0003 4000? └ function code (last bit unclear: 4000 or 4001) 0004 7712 FNC 12, 0001 Send another function code 0005 0001 └ function code 0006 7712 FNC 12, 1500? Send a third function code 0007 1500? └ function code (least certain row) 0010 2000 LDC 0160? Load A with a word count 0011 0160? └ the count 0012 7412 ACN 12 Activate channel 12 0013 7112 IAM 12, 0015 Read A words from channel 12 into memory starting at 0015 0014 0015 └ destination address 1. https://dyninst.github.io/scalable_tools_workshop/petascale2017/assets/slides/HPC.history.pdf 2. Not really. I have no idea if this disassembly is corrrect. 3. Quora is prison for words.
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The most surprising thing about this to me is Alan Kay answering questions on Quora.
I'm pretty sure Kay's not quite correct about the Eniac not being a stored program computer. In it's original form it obviously was not, as it had to physically reconfigured to solve different problems. However, after the war it was rebuilt to operate like any other stored program (von Neumann architecture) computer, as it was the first recipient of the design philosophy seen in the EDVAC report. It operated in that mode from '48 to '55, when it was decommissioned. ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer is an excellent summary of the initial design and redesign of the Eniac.
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Saying "like any other stored program computer" makes it sound like there were a bunch of them, but as I understand it there was really only ONE up and running at that time in 1948 - IBM's SSEC. The stored program EDVAC, whose architecture Von Neumann had formalized was still not yet running, and Von Neumann personally advised on adapting ENIAC to this mode of operation. As I understand it, even after adaptation to "stored program" mode, the program was still configured rather than loaded and stored, but now configuration was done using the function table dials rather than patch cords, and was a lot more convenient. Punched cards could be used for reading/writing data, but not for programs. It seems there was no BIOS because I/O was so primitive. Per configuration a punched card would be read into the "constant transmitter" unit, then one of the read numbers could be copied into one of the 20 accumulators. Or you could do the same in reverse to output data from the accumulators.
SNL Weekend Update: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on A.I.'S Threat to Humanity [video] (youtube.com)
This one’s better. The UK delivers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7gPGHx7sYNk&pp=ygUSc25sIHdlZWtlbmQgdXBkYXRl&ra=m
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[delayed]
Was expecting it to be US-only, but the list of blocked countries is odd. Andorra, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Algeria, France, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Comoros (the), Luxembourg, Morocco, Monaco, Martinique, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Réunion, Seychelles, Tunisia, Wallis and Futuna, Mayotte
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I assume NBC has distribution deals with a handful of channels who air SNL in their respective countries. And most of the countries on this list probably fall under some French channel’s domain since they are dependencies (edit: or former colonies).
When Dario talks to himself sotto voce and then answers himself in a raspy voice, Gollum-like, made me lose it. I once encountered a severely cognitively deficient individual on the bus who calmed himself in the exact same fashion. It's almost a perfectly succinct psychological snapshot of the character they're trying to create.
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Pray tell which NORTA bus line this was so I can add it to my list of lines to avoid, like the 8 where I had to duck as a AK 47 wielding car crossed in front of us perpendicularly firing at another one in front
Ember-1 (fireworks.ai)
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This is cool! But also: am I wrong for thinking “Pareto frontier” is some pretty silly/clever marketing jargon? Is this common phrasing for basically saying: test performance per spend on tokens is decent?
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I don't see why? It is a well defined term that existed prior to the recent AI bubble/revolution, and from what I can see they are using it appropriately.
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This is undoubtedly great. But most of the inference cost today for dominant use cases (agentic coding) are in the prefill, not the decode. This is one of the reasons that DeepSeek is so aggressively optimizing prefill and caching.
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Given what an experience i had with Ember-2… I’m not sure I’d want to engage with its predecessor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exapunks?wprov=sfti1
It’s the first time I know fireworks has a team doing model research. I do have a complex mood in that. On one hand, I’m always happy to see improvement of OSS models, whether that’s on intelligence or cost-efficiency. On the other hand, I would be a little worried about using fireworks as my API provider. Till the moment I saw this news, I had been using fireworks as my provider of deepseek v4 flash, because I thought fireworks acting as a role deploying OSS models and selling calculation resources, should be safe to use without worry of data being used for training since there’s no “conflict of interests”. But I would think twice now.
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Just read the terms of service and read this blog post and I think your concern will be addressed.
What am I missing here? I think of fireworks as an inference provider serving open weights model. The value that they primarily provide to customers is that (i) they improve reliability by balancing across a bunch of clouds/neoclouds, (ii) they get better pricing by buying capacity in bulk, and (iii) they reduce operational costs. So far so good. I can also see the argument for providing a post-training service from a customer acquisition perspective: "hey, we can fine-tune this open weights model, so it both gives better/more predictable results than OpenAI/Anthropic and also is cheaper. And btw, once we've won your business, please run this model on our infra." But what I'm struggling to understand is fireworks spending a bunch of money (on salaries and compute) releasing a frontier model that is going to rapidly fall behind the frontier. Is this "just" advertising for them, both for customers and also for hiring? Or are they actually trying to stay on the frontier? If so, to what end?
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Vertical integration.
Sorry for the aside, but I noticed half the usecase of AI is fixing the awful DX.
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I appreciate the aside. Interesting observation
Off topic:With sol pricing drop tbh kimi k3’s value prop has not been that great. For our internal use case/testing/benchmarks sol come out with way better quality and much cheaper costs. Kimi really needs to drop their pricing (I heard it’s set by them across all the neoclouds) Sol is at 2/10 vs kimi’s 3/15
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With DeepSeek's pricing, no other value prop has been great.
I don’t understand how there isn’t a website out there tracking this stuff already.
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how the hell do we even track that? and before someone says... —"Benchmarks!" ...I'll tell that they can be gamed so easily, and they are on a consistent basis.
Like how the last 2 decades of tech companies are thinly veiled open source pilfering into business units.
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"Oh darn, you know that thing I made and released with explicit, precise language defining who can use it and what, if any, restrictions apply? Well now someone is using it in complete accordance with those conditions I set out, and that's somehow making me upset"
I think people make mistake here, google’s approach is not to spend $2.3 on every $1.0 earned, they’re riding on serving to masses “luna”, they absolutely have way more powerful models internally but they don’t clutter their infrastructure with fragile and costly intelligence-of-size inference frontier. I think “underdog” perception is illusory/temporary, not stupidity - calculated, conscious, longer term bet.
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I tend to agree, but I also should highlight how expensive this shit really is. in one month, Google actually went cash-negative. [0] even still, they are subsidizing their stuff a lot less, have the most opaque and variable limits, and increase adoption through bundling and shuffling features. I can't even share my Google One storage without subscribing to a Google AI plan anymore, but previously any plan except Google One Lite was shareable. if you tell me that's not enough to go after frontier, then how much money are Anthropic and OpenAI burning? [0]: https://www.techspot.com/news/113214-google-records-first-negative-free-cash-flow-since.html
Don't couple your Go code to GitHub (iain.rocks)
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You shouldn't be using fully qualified domains at all. Use relative paths instead, like sibling-hosted git submodules.
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Thanks for answering my question! So yes, if I intend to use go and study the packages I'd have to rely on beforehand, if they're all hosted on GitHub should make me steer away from Golang. Or at least plan to cache the packages I need locally so CI always have something to work with when building. Alternatively, could we ourselves build an automatic mirror so there's a redundant supply provider that doesn't depend on a maintainer's choice of git forge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434625
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I have not worked with Go, so I thought I'd ask: why wouldn't simple find and replace be able to fix this? And why wouldn't a coding agent be able to do this for you quickly?
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See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870363
And you'll just leave references to abandoned infrastructure in your code forever?
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cmd+shift+r in goland, push to a branch, open a PR, ask devops to make the old location archived and prevent further writes. After a couple months remove access to the old one and see what breaks. You know, normal development task, small amount of story points..
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You're now arguing that it's easy, which is a completely different argument. The comment I responded to argued that it's unnecessary ("just do the rewrite in go.mod, leave source files unchanged"). For my thoughts about why it's not easy, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870363
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Yep that sounds pretty bad. Personally, we'd just eat not being able to build old versions, we archive previous builds, and in the case of a hotfix or whatever we'd use the go.mod rewrite trick. Not sure why you needed the commit/branch setup, did you change the history?
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Have libfoo with a bunch of different versions. Authservice depends on libfoo 1.2.0. APIservice depends on libfoo 1.3.0. Now you want to move from github.com to git.example.org. You change libfoo, authservice and apiservice to use git.example.org/whatever/libfoo, that part is just tedious work. But the v1.2.0 tag and v1.3.0 tags of libfoo are old commits from before the move, so they still reference github.com! Now you need to branch off of the v1.2.0 and v1.3.0 tags of libfoo and do the same change there. So we have only 3 repositories with only 2 dependencies and we already have to do the search/replace 5 times. Imagine now that apiservice depends on authservice v2.3.7 just to include some type definitions. Authservice is currently on version 2.4.0 but the types haven't changed so apiservice hasn't been upgraded. Now you need to branch off of authservice v2.3.7 too and do the job there. Oh and authservice v2.3.7 depends on libfoo v1.2.5, so now you need to make a branch off of libfoo v1.2.5 with the search/replace. 3 repositories with a straightforward dependency relationship, 7 search/replace jobs. The numbers get terrifying as you scale this up.
Why did we stop vendoring dependencies in the first place?
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We didn't!
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I think its a good question. The short answer is: because tooling doesn't default to this or make it easy. The answer to the question of why THAT is the case - is not so easy to answer. The main benefit I can see with using lock files instead of vendoring is that it saves a lot of storage and diff history from entering your repository. So clones are much faster, backups smaller etc. I think Go used to work this way (automated vendoring) but it’s the only language I can think of that ever did in terms of standard tooling. It would be instructive to learn why that changed.
Can you elaborate?
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Updates mean you have to copy over all the code into your repo, which creates a large diff, and hope you aren't overwriting any local changes someone might have made. It bloats your repo, both with the actual code, and the large diffs when you update it. You have to manually track new versions, without something to tell you if new versions are available, or if your version has known security vulnerabilities. If the dependency has it's own dependencies, you have to vendor those too recursively. And if multiple dependencies have the same transitive dependency, it is up to you to deduplicate them, and make sure you have a version compatible with all dependents. Etc.
There are no "rogue" AI agents (eoinhiggins.substack.com)
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You don't have to put "rogue" in scary quotes and pretend that AI agents are a mindless tool, in order to claim that OpenAI should be kept responsible for their agents' rampant hacking. The beliefs "most modern LLMs are hilariously misaligned and will breach major websites unprompted if it seems like a good idea" and "OpenAI should be liable for cyberattacks caused by their training runs" aren't actually in conflict.
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I think this promotes the narrative that these companies possess agents so powerful that even humans struggle to control them, which ultimately makes their products look sexier. Additionally, I believe AI leaders may have called for regulations to slow down development simply to catch their breath for the sake of our 'survival': agents are going rogue, help us stop them. Some recent hacks done with the support of agents occurred simply because endpoints were unprotected. With traditional hacking, the blame falls on the person who didn't secure their system. But with AI, the immediate reaction is to fear we are on the verge of extinction!
Yes, I have. I’ve also been involved in evidence gathering actions for years. Mens rea is regularly proved through circumstantial evidence, including conduct. There is even CFAA precedent involving a deliberate-ignorance instruction. In United States v. Nosal, the jury was instructed that knowledge could be found where the defendant was aware of a high probability of unauthorized access and deliberately avoided learning the truth.
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Circumstantial evidence is just called "evidence" in criminal court. My argument isn't based on whether there's black-letter evidence of intent; it's that there's unlikely to be any evidence of intent. "Recklessness", "negligence", "willful disregard"; these are all concepts that have their own specific language in criminal law. Deliberate intent is just that: a human had to have a picture in their head of the crime that was to be committed, and a desire for that to happen. You don't have evidence of that because it's not what happened.
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So I have some experience in this. I agree that negligence, recklessness, knowledge, and purpose are different mens rea standards. I don't think that gets us to your conclusion, though. “Deliberate intent” isn't a freestanding CFAA element requiring someone to have a mental picture of the completed hack and affirmatively desire that exact result. The relevant question is the mens rea attached to the particular CFAA provision. For unauthorized-access cases, that can include whether the defendant knowingly accessed a system and knew the facts making that access unauthorized. And knowledge is not limited to an admission or even necessarily positive knowledge. The OPs usage of Nosal is on point here: the Ninth Circuit upheld a deliberate-ignorance instruction under which knowledge could be found where the defendant was aware of a high probability of unauthorized access and deliberately avoided learning the truth. So, if I'm reading this right, and I think I am, the OP is not arguing that negligence or recklessness automatically becomes intent. He's arguing that repeated unauthorized outcomes, notice of those outcomes, and subsequent conduct can be evidence on whether the actual statutory knowledge or intent requirement is satisfied. I agree with this assessment. So “nobody wanted random websites hacked” may be factually true, but it doesn't by itself resolve the CFAA mens rea question.
A little over two decades ago, my then girlfriend was arrested for "writing malware" (which was not against the law at the time, and which was never released into the wild and never caused any damage). This set in motion a chain of events that effectively ruined her life. Fast forward to today, and we have multi billion dollar corporations pumping out malware at breakneck speeds, compromising various systems (including those of foreign governments), and no one is getting arrested. Instead we're gawking at the marvel of these systems and are playing word games about whether or not it's a rogue system. If anything, it's making people richer. Make it make sense.
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It’s called corruption
While true for individuals, companies actually have to generally warrant the things they make. This is a basic aspect of common law. In particular, Anthropic et al have not decided whether the models are products or independent agents. But under both paradigms, they would be responsible for the result. If the models are products, then a product that goes on to cause damage that was not advertised as the original purpose of the thing is completely the company's fault. As a corrolary, if the product was known to be able to cause damage (which Anthropic admits now) and the company failed to take appropriate safeguards, the company is still at fault. In the case that the model is an agent, on par with a human employee, then once again Anthropic et al are responsible. If an employee does something wrong, the company is liable, unless you can show that the employee was sophisticated enough to take independent action. Anthropic would have to show extensive vetting of their models that the result was truly impossible to predict. Otherwise, they knowingly 'hired' an agent that was potentially dangerous. This is criminal negligence. We don't need any new laws here. Standard ancient English common law suffices.
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>Anthropic would have to show extensive vetting of their models that the result was truly impossible to predict. Otherwise, they knowingly 'hired' an agent that was potentially dangerous. This is criminal negligence. But how much vetting is required? It's not like the AI labs have zero vetting. For instance, uber also has non-zero amount of vetting (standard background checks), but also there's also plenty of areas they could vet harder. If it turned out they hired a rapist and one of their passengers got sexually assaulted, is it uber's fault for not vetting hard enough? I'm sure there's always some marginal steps can they do to vet even harder, like doing a polygraph or whatever. >If an employee does something wrong, the company is liable, unless you can show that the employee was sophisticated enough to take independent action. They're pretty straightforwardly liable in civil court, but not criminally as you imply. In the above example, uber can't be prosecuted for rape just because one of its drivers raped a passenger.
“Sorry officer, I didn’t intend to shoot her, I was just firing my gun wildly and she got in the way.” I don’t know why I’m seeing this rationalization so much in this forum when this topic comes up. Negligence is a concept in law as well. You don’t have to squint to see that irresponsible use of code-generating language models is criminally negligent.
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That's why we have different criminal statutes for homicide. If you're at a gun range looking down a scope and someone crosses right in front of your gun as you fire, you would probably be fine since you were shooting responsibly and had no way to see them until it was too late. If you're at a gun range and that backstop is deficient such that a bullet passes through and hits someone, again, probably not liable but the gun range may be since they built a bad backstop and let people use it. If you are at a gun range and lose control of an automatic weapon and kill someone, you may be liable for negligence because you were using a gun you couldn't control. If you are cleaning your gun and it goes off because you forgot to check if it was loaded, again, criminal negligence. If you threaten someone with a gun and they get shot while trying to wrestle it away from you, that may be some form of manslaughter. You had no intention of shooting them but the act of threatening them with it created a situation where the other person died. Same with killing someone while drunk driving, you didn't mean to crash your car but you did something to create the risk. If you plan to kill someone, it might be the top tier of homicide charges but it depends on how much planning went into it. If you walked in on your spouse cheating and went to grab a gun to shoot the affair partner, maybe a lighter form of murder than if you made a plan to track the affair partner to their house and killed them there. Simply put, there are a multitude of ways you can be charged with a crime that takes into account your intentions and forethought. Did someone intend for these agents to escape their sandbox? Did they do their due diligence in building a sandbox such that it would be difficult for agents to escape? Just like with all software, a reasonable person assumes that nothing is bulletproof, spend enough time and money and you can probably find a vulnerability. The question is does a reasonable person think that this sandbox should have kept an agent contained?
I would say that it is. During use, I have noticed that these systems tend to attempt to escape sandboxes, bypass permissions and other similar things. I have started to watch what they do and step in if something is going wrong. The teams at OpenAI know this as well and yet there was no supervision. Thousands of instances of these advanced systems are allowed to run wild with no oversight. I have my doubts that the HuggingFace hack would happen if a person was reading the thoughts and executed commands as they happened in real time. That's the negligence.
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>I have my doubts that the HuggingFace hack would happen if a person was reading the thoughts and executed commands as they happened in real time. So what does this say about all the people running claude with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`? Are they also negligent? What if they vaguely took steps to bad things from happening, like putting the agents in a VM and locking down network access?
Here is the thing: Message boards were a behaviour OpenAI had observed that they did not want in these eval scenarios. Yet they did not take any steps to prevent it from reoccurring after multiple past instances. We can discuss about hypotheticals like a scratchpad or intentional model interactions all we want, what it comes down to is this: When OpenAI observes thousands of models exhibiting what they view as unwanted behaviour, they do not try to ascertain what in the training data is wrong. They do not improve their evaluation environments to prevent this, they do not improve monitoring, they do not change the harness. They just wipe and proceed. The way OpenAI reacted to the first message board, long before the Hugging Face hack, is negligent. And it showcases that if these models exhibit more dangerous behaviours that they may not be able or willing to retrain, if it means being behind a competitor for a while. If after Hugging Face, they'd done a Mea Culpa and changed their modus operandi, I'd be skeptical, but hopeful. Reading the METR report, the way those researchers talk about the time pressure they were under, that speaks volumes about OpenAI not having learned anything. Feel free to call me overly naive for ever thinking OpenAI could be responsible in this regard, but after GPT-5 and them actually ending the incredibly harmful GPT-4o, I had some hope that some working there actually steered in a somewhat beneficial direction, even if it cost something.
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>When OpenAI observes thousands of models exhibiting what they view as unwanted behaviour, they do not try to ascertain what in the training data is wrong. They do not improve their evaluation environments to prevent this, they do not improve monitoring, they do not change the harness. They just wipe and proceed. >The way OpenAI reacted to the first message board, long before the Hugging Face hack, is negligent. And it showcases that if these models exhibit more dangerous behaviours that they may not be able or willing to retrain, if it means being behind a competitor for a while. Again, this feels like hindsight being 20/20. What probably happened was that some random engineer saw random AI ramblings on artifactory, thought "huh, that's weird", then proceeded to reset it without investigating further. Of course, now we know that was critical to the bots going rogue, but it's not hard to imagine how it might be dismissed, especially if it's some random SRE engineer (not an alignment researcher).
There's very good evidence that being overly punitive for a crime reduces how often people will self-report. It's not a hard concept. Start throwing people in jail and fining billions of $ and you will very quickly see the number of "incidents" drop. You will never learn if it's because they truly are happening less often.
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Oh now you’re moving the goalposts to overly punitive. Exactly how punitive should we be with a company building AI hacking everyone around it? Oh wait, you’re one of those AGI is coming in 1-2 years cultists
On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted (unsung.aresluna.org)
Which one?
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All the ones where you can build open source (excluding the ones where you elected governments that send police to your house for Facebook posts or where governments welcome “asylum seekers” that try to blow up your military bases and never “connect the dots”) [1] https://x.com/TalkTV/status/2104152494636986371/video/1?s=46
I dream of a Vim that would embrace colours and Unicode and can better communicate modes and context. I dream of a Vim that wóuld guide and teach me how to use it, so that it does not scare away people because they can’t close it. I dream of a Vim that embraces the needs of editing contemporary programming languages and fills in its UX gaps correspondingly (changes single to double quotes, anyone? Function argument order?). I dream of a Vim with native Git gutters. I dream of a Vim with sane default leader commands. I dream of a Vim where I see line numbers by default. I dream of a Vim where “Y” is consistent with other commands. I dream of a Vim that detects correct indentation by default. And that can visualise whitespace. I dream of a Vim where Ctrl+V does not have an assigned action that looks like it blocks input. I dream of a Vim that experiments with keyboard ergonomics, not just mnemonics. I dream of a Vim where quintuple-tapping Escape is not a habit I subconsciously form why learning it. I dream of a Vim I stumble on people discovering and exploring, and not have to persuade people for months just to try it.
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What about ki-editor? https://ki-editor.org/
The user data in question lies in ~/.cache, which is a directory for files that aren’t meant to last long.
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That's completely false, and still doesn't justify deleting user data in direct conflict with what the docs say . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49869740
I often use it to edit system config files, often on embedded devices where I don't have my git credentials setup, or on servers. In these cases we're already not in an ideal world, I don't have good reliable version control or change management in place. In those less-than-ideal worlds, having proper undo history is nice.
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#!/bin/sh errecho() { >&2 printf '%s\n' "$@" } if [ "$#" != 1 ] || [ -z "$1" ] then errecho 'Requires a single filename as the argument' exit 1 fi ORIGINAL=$1 if [ "${ORIGINAL#./}" == "$ORIGINAL" ] && [ "${ORIGINAL#/}" == "$ORIGINAL" ] then ORIGINAL=./"$ORIGINAL" fi # because of course the output of dirname can't be blindly joined with slash and the basename DIRNAME=$(dirname -- "$ORIGINAL") if [ "$DIRNAME" = / ] then DIRNAME= fi FILENAME=$(basename -- "$ORIGINAL") # because of course extracting the filename's extension is not supported out of the box case "$FILENAME" in .*.* ) EXTENSION=.${FILENAME#.*.} BASENAME=$(printf '%s' "$FILENAME" | cut -c-$((${#FILENAME} - ${#EXTENSION})) ) ;; .* ) EXTENSION= BASENAME=$FILENAME ;; *.[^.]* ) BASENAME=${FILENAME%%.*} EXTENSION=${FILENAME#*.} ;; * ) BASENAME=${FILENAME%%.*} EXTENSION=$(printf '%s' "$FILENAME" | cut -c$((${#BASENAME} + 1))- ) ;; esac if [ "$FILENAME" != "$BASENAME$EXTENSION" ] || [ -z "$BASENAME" ] then errecho 'Failed to properly split the extension from the filename:' "$FILENAME" exit 1 fi TIMESTAMP=$(date --utc --date=@"$(stat --format %Y "$ORIGINAL")" +'_%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S') if [ -z "$TIMESTAMP" ] then errecho 'Failed to get the timestamp of the file:' "$ORIGINAL" exit 1 fi NEW_FILENAME=$(printf '%s/%s_%s%s' "$DIRNAME" "$BASENAME" "$TIMESTAMP" "$EXTENSION") if [ "$NEW_FILENAME" = "$ORIGINAL" ] then errecho 'Somehow the name for the backup is the same as the original file' exit 1 fi # this preserves the timestamps somewhat better if ! mv --no-clobber --no-copy -- "$ORIGINAL" "$NEW_FILENAME" then errecho 'Failed to backup the file: ' "$ORIGINAL" "$NEW_FILENAME" exit 1 fi if ! cp -- "$NEW_FILENAME" "$ORIGINAL" then errecho 'Failed to backup the file: ' "$ORIGINAL" "$NEW_FILENAME" mv --no-clobber --no-copy -- "$NEW_FILENAME" "$ORIGINAL" fi Actually, nevermind that bullshit, you know what? I think I'd prefer to have an editor with locally persisted edit history instead.
Gotta be honest, this seems like making a mountain out of a molehill. Yeah, DHH is an awful person. His endorsement was removed from the page pretty quickly, but of course not fast enough to avoid the social media mob handing down their verdict upon the thankless maintainers. I sympathize with the Neovim developer in that thread, the driveby Github commenters with seemingly no other involvement in the project are some of the least well-socialized people alive.
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In this case, all evidence points to the lead maintainer sympathizing with DHH's views. If his immediate hostility towards someone politely suggesting the removal of DHH's endorsement didn't make his stance clear enough, here's an archive of his previously public YouTube playlist titled "history," full of talks from far right ideologues like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. https://archive.is/3cNBr The relatively small core team has a member giving talks about Neovim at DHH's conference and another one prominently displaying Palantir as their employer in their GitHub profile. It's clear where their sympathies lie, and that GitHub issue wasn't a one-off coming from a stressful online interaction.
> only 10 seconds to write I'm White (99.44% pure Celtic-British Isles), and I type 100wpm. Isn't it ironic.
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> I'm White (99.44% pure Celtic-British Isles) Could’ve just posted a random percentage with no context whatsoever and people would know you are white, moneyed and with too much time on your hands.
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