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AI-Assisted Cognition Endangers Human Development (heidenstedt.org)
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"Cognitive inbreeding" is an interesting (though maybe not entirely accurate) term for something I dislike a lot about LLMs. It really is a thing. You're recycling the same biases over and over, and it can be very difficult to tell if you don't review and distill the contents of your discourse with LLMs. Especially true if you're only using one. I do think there's a solution to this—kind of—which dramatically reduces the probability and allowing for broad inductive biases. And that's to ask question with narrower scopes, and to ensure you're the one driving conversation. It's true with programming as well. When you clearly define what you need and how things should be done, the biases are less evident. When you ask broad questions and only define desired outcomes in ambiguous terms, biases will be more likely to take over. When people ask LLMs to build the world, they will do it in extremely biased ways. This makes sense. When you ask it specifics about narrow topics, this is still be a problem, but greatly mitigated. I suppose what's happening is an inversion of cognitive load, so the human is taking on more and selecting bias such that the LLM is less free to do so. This is roughly in line with the article's premise (maybe not the entire article, though), which is fine; I think I generally agree that these are cognitive muscles that need exercising, and allowing an LLM to do it all for you is potentially harmful. But I don't think we're trapped with the outcome, we do have agency, and with care it's a technology that can be quite beneficial.
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Doh. I went in expecting a really cool thesis — because the idea seems somehow intuitive, or at least really intriguing. But I have no clue what I read. Just totally odd and unconvincing. Greenland? Dialectal substrate? The idea is still super intriguing to me though!
Kalshi CEO expects US DOJ to prosecute insider trading cases (semafor.com)
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I'm guessing it's Trump insiders who are busy making bank on inside info. Some of them just happen to be big investors in Polymarket and Kalshi. There's no way they are getting investigated, let alone prosecuted, by this DOJ. At most some low-level flunkie will get named and slapped on the wrist.
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Ok, but isn't the idea that prediction markets surface private knowledge a big part of the defense as to why they shouldn't be treated as illegal gambling? So like, which is it, is insider trading expected, or are these just gambling sites that should be illegal in many jurisdictions?
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Prediction markets don’t need to surface private knowledge, they can surface sophisticated interpretations of public knowledge. They are certainly gambling if you’re an unsophisticated rube (which is most of the users).
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> isn't the idea that prediction markets surface private knowledge a big part of the defense as to why they shouldn't be treated as illegal gambling No. Their defense is that they are gamified futures contracts and hence should fall under CFTC regulation. The CFTC also cracks down on insider trading, but it took time for them to catch up with prediction markets. It is now a priority [0] [0] - https://www.lw.com/en/insights/new-cftc-enforcement-director-speaks-on-priorities-insider-trading-in-prediction-markets-and-coop
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On the Polymarket homepage right now, one of the featured markets is whether or not Bitcoin will be up or down over the next 5 minutes. It's hard to justify that as anything more than illegal gambling. I find prediction markets to be interesting on two fronts: 1) They like a really good way to determine the probability of something happening, which is interesting for events like elections 2) It provides an avenue for smart bettors to take advantage and sharpen their skill, whereas they get severely limited or banned from traditional sports books However, it seems like all incentive structures for the markets and consumer behavior will steer these things to degenerate gambling.
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Yes. This argument doesn't even apprehend insider trading laws on regulated securities markets in the US, where the crime is about theft, not fairness.
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“If you commit insider trading on Kalshi, that can and will at some point be a federal crime. It is a federal crime, I actually do expect the DOJ to prosecute some of these cases”. I'm guessing that “some point” is sometime after Jan 20th 2029.
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You give the Dems too much credit.
No more US Military aid to Israel (theguardian.com)
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America has zealously supported Israel since the 1940's - generally against the explicit advice of America's top diplomatic and military experts - because it's been d*mned obvious to America's elected political leaders, since the 1940's, that failure to zealously support Israel would result in their own failures to win American elections. (That may be now be changing, due to American voters souring on support for Israel.) But somehow, the western press seems perpetually incapable of up-front stating that support for Israel is a clear western voter preference. Not a decision by policy experts. Or by moral philosophers. Or by budget analysts. Or based on any of the other sorts of cerebral wonkery which the press starts drooling a river over the moment that anyone rings the "Israel" bell.
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Articles like this serve as a diversion. Netanyahu is a natural product of Israel as Israel's entire history is rooted in displacing Palestinians. You cannot remove this by removing Netanyahu.
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Just more israeli propaganda.
Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data (eff.org)
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I think Trump and his ICE stormtroopers, aside from having already killed several people, are in violation of the US constitution. In particular warrantless search and seizure. Probably some more. Would not normally people, no matter if citizens or not, require the state to have a reasonable suspicion? ICE tries to bypass the US court system to some extent, so by definition they are already operating outside the legal system. To me this technically constitute betrayal by the Trump government. How is this legal? It's like an overthrow of a democracy and total inaction against it (from state agencies that is; naturally many people object to the ICE stormtroopers - they are similar to the 1930s era in Europe here).
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> In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest As somebody who got two degrees abroad, the idea of attending public protests/riots, particularly any directed against the governments that issued me my student visas, sounds like possibly the stupidest move I could have made. Not sure what bro was thinking here. As for google, surely we’re all aware by now that all these tech companies can be easily compelled by US law to do all sorts of shit with your data - notwithstanding guidance in their TOS to the contrary. No doubt in the TOS there’s a carve out for this. FAFO, as they say. Should have just studied and enjoyed the overseas experience.
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It must really really suck to be a data-holder, that every single government out there views as some piggy bank, sitting there waiting to smash & grab. It's certainly been quite the turn recently. But being between the people and the governments that seemingly inevitably will turn into arch fascist pricks & go to war against the citizens is not an enviable position. Hopefully many jurisdictions start enacting laws that insist companies build unbreakable backdoorless crypto. Hopefully we see legislation that is the exact opposite of chat control mandatory backdoors. It's clear the legal firewalls are ephemeral, can crumble, given circumstances and time. We need a more resolute force to protect the people: we need the mathematicians/cryptographers!
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I feel bad for both sides in this. Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says; yes they can fight it, but if the government wants something badly, they will get it, they have powers (especially under the very broad definition of 'national security') to just get automatic compliance, using the same powers they can silence the companies from publishing anything about it too. I of course feel bad for the student here too, he should not be targeted for exercising his rights to peaceful protest. But Google is not the enemy here, I would bet good money their hand is forced to comply and their mouth is silenced. The enermy here is the overreaching government and ICE
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We could and should have better privacy laws, though foreigners will always be subject to less protection. That said, a lot of this comes down to a failure in education around privacy and the cultural norm around folks thinking they have nothing to hide. The intuition most people have around privacy, and security, is incredibly poor.
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Promises are broken, policies are changed and political regimes vary. You need to make sure that you consider the future and not just now. And that means NEVER handing your data over in the first place.
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"Don't be evil" they used to say.
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They dropped that a long time ago, at least a decade ago. Which is really an odd thing to do, what company would think that not being evil was holding it back but Google clearly did.
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Sorry guys, but what’s the story here? Google not protecting users data? Seriously?
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Agree. Google can't go against the all-mighty state. Just look at what Anthropic did and the effect of that action. There are billions of dollars at stake on government contracts that they can't afford to lose. Reminds me of Mullvad's ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPzvUW8qaWY
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Yes.
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This story is the one that finally pushed me to leave google. I moved off my ~20 year old Google account and deleted everything off their services including almost a decade of Google photos. I cancelled my Google one subscription for extra space. I'm now self hosting what I can and paying proton mail for everything else. I refuse to allow a company that will hand over data at the request of an administrative warrant to hold my data.
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When did you find out about this? The timeline of this actually pushing you to do all that seems a bit unbelievable.
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Privacy, technology and actual freedom overlap massively. Stories like this making it to HN are important since many of the people working at Google that had interactions with this, either by creating the tech or being aware of internal policy changes, read HN. Additionally many founders and decision makers in companies read these stories because it hit HN. Knowing that Google will do this changes your legal calculations. Should I trust them to store my company's data? Will they honor their BAA requirements if they are ditching other promises they made? People may be tired of seeing stories like this appear on HN, but getting this story exposure to this group is exactly why they need to hit the homepage.
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This is so wrong. What's the solution? Google class action lawsuit?
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Realistically? Treating visiting or studying the USA as visiting or studying in North Korea. Would you stand in Kim Jong square and protest their foreign policy? If you would I salute you. If something terrible happens, I will not blame you, the victim. But if you surprise pikachu at the results, you are a moron.
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Start actively divesting of Google where possible. There are a lot of 'Switching to 100% European cloud' stories hitting HN lately. The more things like this happen the more stories like that will be there. Google and US tech are becoming toxic at many levels and an appropriate response is to mitigate risk by going to other providers.
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Huh, I don't think anyone expect Google to maintain privacy for them, Google deliberately leak 500K user info to various governments, every year [1]. https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
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The stats are per half a year, so even more than that. And we don't even know what the guy is really wanted for. I think EFF was just waiting for this to happen to make a political statement. That's what they do, if course, but how the hell can they be sure they're aren't vouching for a criminal?
CPUs Aren't Dead. Gemma2B Out Scored GPT-3.5 Turbo on Test That Made It Famous (seqpu.com)
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Seems to be llm written article and the tooling around the model is undeniably influenced by knowledge of the tests. In all cases, GPT 3.5 isn’t a good benchmark for most serious uses and was considered to be pretty stupid, though I understand that isn’t the point of the article.
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I'm very surprised at the quality of the new Gemma 4 models. On my 32 gig Mac mini I can be very productive with it. Not close to replacing paid AI by a long shot, but if I had to tighten the belt I could do it as someone who already knows how to program.
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This really shows the power of distillation. One thing I find amusing: download the Google Edge Gallery app and one of the chat models, then go into airplane mode and ask it about where it’s deployed. gemma-4-e2b-it is quite confident that it is deployed in a Google datacenter and that deploying it on a phone is completely impossible. The larger 4B model is much subtler: it’s skeptical about the claim but does seem to accept it and sound genuinely impressed and excited after a few turns. I don’t know how any AI company can be worth trillions when you can fit a model only 12-18 months behind the frontier on your dang phone. Thought will be too cheap to meter in 10 years.
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[delayed]
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Can you run the same tests on Qwen3.5:9b? that's also a model that runs very well locally, and I believe it's even stronger than Gemma2B
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[delayed]
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That was prolix and repetitive. I wish the purported simple fixes were shown on the page.
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Posters comment is dead. It may be llm-assisted but should prob be vouched for anyway as long as the story isn't flagged.
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appreciate the vouch but come on lol. we ran 80 questions, graded 160 turns by hand, documented 7 error classes, open sourced all the code, and put a live bot up for people to test. to write this post up took me hours. everyone is a critic lol.
I yearn for the days when I can program on my PC with a programming llm running on the CPU locally.
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I’ve been using Google AI Edge Gallery on my M1 MacBook with Gemma4B with very good results for random python scripts. Unfortunately still need to copy paste the code into a file+terminal command. Which is annoying but works.
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You can do it on a laptop today, faster with gpu/npu, it’s not going to one shot something complex but you can def pump out models/functions/services, scaffold projects, write bash/powershell scripts in seconds.
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we need sqlite for llms
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you're honestly not that far off. the coding block on this model scored 8.44 with zero help. it caught a None-init TypeError on a code review question that most people would miss. one question asked for O(n) and it just went ahead and shipped O(log(min(m,n))) on its own. it's not copilot but it's free, it's offline, and it runs on whatever you have. there's a 30-line chat.py in the article you can copy and run tonight.
> The model does not need to be retrained. It needs surgical guardrails at the exact moments where its output layer flinches. > With those guardrails — a calculator for arithmetic, a logic solver for formal puzzles, a per-requirement verifier for structural constraints, and a handful of regex post-passes — the projected score climbs to ~8.2. Surgical guardrails? Tools, those are just tools.
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>It needs surgical guardrails at the exact moments where its output layer flinches. This article is very clearly shitty LLM output. Abstract noun and verb combos are the tipoff. It's actually quite horrible, it repeats lines from paragraph to paragraph.
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"Surgical "is the kind of wordage that LLMs seem to love to output. I have had to put in my .md file the explicit statement that the word "surgical" should only be used when referring to an actual operation at the block...
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The core issue is that the LLM is using rhetoric to try to convince or persuade you. That's what you need to tell it not to do.
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you're right, they are tools. that's kind of the point. PAL is a subprocess that runs a python expression. Z3 is a constraint solver. regex is regex. calling them "surgical" is just about when they fire, not what they are. the model generates correctly 90%+ of the time. the guardrails only trigger on the 7 specific patterns we found in the tape. to be clear, the ~8.0 score is the raw model with zero augmentation. no tools, no tricks. just the naive wrapper. the guardrail projections are documented separately. all the code is in the article for anyone who wants to review it.
Where did my taxes go? (wherethefuckdidmytaxesgo.com)
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Now consider that the Defense budget is ~$1 trillion and the Department of Defense has never passed an audit [1] and the administration is seeking $1.5 trillion next year [2]. [1]: https://www.taxpayer.net/budget-appropriations-tax/why-cant-the-pentagon-pass-an-audit/ [2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/03/nx-s1-5772701/trump-budget-defense-spending
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The unbundling of "Veterans Benefits" from "National Defense" is such an American thing, as though the former would exist without the latter.
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"As though the latter...without the former."
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Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such as Finland, France and Canada. If you look at wealthy blue cities like NYC or SF, the spending is on the order of $50K/p/y, comparable to Norway. It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget_per_capita
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Is the amount proportional to the per capita income of the respective countries?
I really wish we would get away from this line of thinking. For state and local governments, yes, your taxes are put into accounts and are then spent according to the budget. For the federal government, no. Money that is paid in taxes is effectively eliminated. The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. When the federal government spends money, it is creating all new money. It can’t run out. It’s not your tax money that is being spent.
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The treasury has an account at the FED called TGA[0] which is funded by tax payments and proceeds from new Treasuries issuance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_General_Account > The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. Not accurate. Dollars are a liabilities on the books of the Federal Reserve. Tax payments to the federal government only cause a liability shift from commercial banks’ reserves at the FED to the TGA, it doesn’t really change the net amount of dollars in circulation. The most you could argue is that it momentarily reduces the net commercial banks’ liabilities (which economists call M*) until the Treasury distributes those dollars again to the broad economy
More and more I find my politics drifting towards whoever will balance the budget and pay down the deficit. Since that party doesn’t exist I am politically homeless.
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Neither party may be good on this issue, but one is certainly worse than the other[1]. [1] - https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/INTERACTIVE-US-federal-deficit-over-time-EDIT-MAY5-2025-1747665363.png
fun fact, I discovered in this process: if the US just went back to 2019 spending (with 2025 tax revenue), there would be a $780B surplus.
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Just fixing federal budget growth to a figure slightly less than GDP growth would do the trick eventually. But we just can't bring ourselves to do it. "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
As a thought experiment, it'd be interesting to imagine how things would play out if each taxpayer could adjust little sliders on each category to allocate where they personally would like their taxes to go. Agencies could recommend funding levels, Congress could recommend an allocation and if a taxpayer didn't change it, that default would take effect. But if a taxpayer preferred, they could say, "no, I won't be funding DOD this year". Or space nerds might say "I'm sending 100% of my tax dollars to NASA!" Of course no one would likely choose to do boring stuff like paying interest on debt. So we'd probably end up with incredibly well-funded national parks and cool space missions, and also a crippling recession due to defaulting on the national debt.
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Sure. I'd set all mine to zero, and keep the money.
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Organizations don't work well when their budget can change dramatically from one year to the next. There's no ability to take on long-term plans when another, popular department takes 50% of your budget, or someone in your PR department makes a gaffe. Long-term employees get laid off and won't return in a few years when your budget goes back up.
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Could have the slider pull the budget in that direction over the course of 5-10 years, instead of having it reflected immediately in the next year.
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I live in a place with basically zero property taxes (except a pittance for the school). No public roads, no fire, almost no police, no parks, no public utilities. It's absolutely glorious. I can buy exactly what I need. My monthly utility bills are way lower than anywhere else I've lived. I cannot believe the populace has been duped into thinking so much of what we fund so direly must be done publicly that armed tax agents need to drag them to prison if they refuse to fund it that way. It is important to remember that everything that is taxed, the underlying method that will be used to enforce that is violence, and very carefully limiting that employ of mass violence.
Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right? We are living in your sliders world. I hate these sorts of websites because they have a very intellectual starch to them but are very superficial. I also hate this frame of mind that's like, "nobody would choose to do boring stuff." People aren't stupid. I hate this "voters are stupid" frame of mind. It's unelectable, and it's always said by people who complain about political problems because they misunderstand and think that political problems are math problems. Like that all we need are more sliders. In this specific case, people love paying mortgages, they instantly understand the math of interest rates, and many many people are strongly incentivized to help people understand the magic of mortgages: that you get to both live in the thing you buy, which is useful, and that because you're living in it, people are willing to loan you 10x more than your income to buy it, a kind of leverage that isn't available anywhere else but people who will cut your fingers off if you don't pay them. We are living in your sliders world.
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> We are living in your sliders world To some extent? But the sliders would probably be even more extreme. If you are 70 years old you’ll probably vote to put everything on Uncle Sam’s credit card and let younger generations deal with it after you’re dead.
It may just be my cynicism talking, but it seems that it comes down to the power of lobbyists. In the US, the healthcare companies control the government. Elsewhere, the government controls the healthcare companies.
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The media narrative is a factor too. Like I have extended family, friends, and work colleagues in the US, many of whom are wealthy and well-traveled and even a lot of them will still loudly assert obvious untruths like "well at least we don't die in waiting rooms like in Canada" or "at least we don't have death panels deciding who gets to have life-saving treatment" or worst of all "ehh I mean I have good insurance, and outcomes are much better here for top-5%ers, so I don't really care about the rest of the system." All while decades of TV hospital dramas depict a well-oiled medical system delivering effective and efficient care to people with nary a whisper about how it's getting paid for. It's got to be desperately frustrating trying to fight this kind of thinking when you've got whole communities who have never even thought to question it. My main hope at this point is with bottom-up type efforts. Let Mamdani show people that an effective city government can fill potholes and operate a few at-cost supermarkets. Let that be the start of citizens expecting more than chainsaw-waving and twitter rants for their tax dollars.
> We also spend a ton on lifestyles diseases because no one walks and culturally we eat like shit on average. And there's a pretty straight line between that and government subsidies for sugar and processed foods in general, not to mention car-based infrastructure, although the latter doesn't stop other countries from not having crippling obesity rates.
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And acknowledging the very obvious instances of regulatory capture that directly harm quality of life is political suicide for anyone with even the smallest amount of access to power. It’s hard getting normies to admit that if soft drinks weren’t so heavily subsidized by the government at every step of manufacture and distribution, there would be less overall obesity.
A lot just gets sucked up by 3rd parties of all stripes. Only ~20% of hospitals are for profit institutions for example.
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My daughter’s classmate’s father is a head of a non-profit hospital. They have a 6k sqft house with a basketball court, pool and a pool house in the prime location in West Los Angeles. They had to join two lots to build to their liking.
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We call that "pulling an Altman" these days.
The tiniest e-reader in the world, and you can build one yourself (androidauthority.com)
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My current e-reader is an Openbook Abridged designed by Joey Castillo of Oddly Specific Objects. It is larger than this tiny device, but smaller than something like a smartphone, and I think it is the PERFECT size. It's a similar kind of device which actually has even less features than this O24. I love it so much, and have been reading so much more than I used to since I soldered the kit together ~6 months ago.
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Is this actually out? I saw him with demo units at Supercon last year. I would love to get one
What's really nice about tiny e-readers is that you can read without having to move your eyes horizontally. If there are only four words per line, you can slide your eyes down the middle and take in all the words in a chunk like you would for normal speed-reading. I have an xteink X4 and X3 and I swear I can read for much longer without strain. You can also just crank your margins way up on most other e-readers.
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Is it really worth the tradeoffs of having significantly smaller storage space, reduced screen size, and clicking through way more often, just to not have to move your eyes as much horizontally?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Fix monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity in chair (aalonso.dev)
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This happens to me when I brush off my mousepad too fast with my palm. It will also cause my wireless headset to "reboot".
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I thought it was me bumping my table. But now you have me wondering if it's charge buildup.
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Might want to increase humidity. In ESD rooms the humidity is controlled and kept high to reduce static build up. to add: > In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit. The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
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I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again. I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
CRISPR takes a bold leap toward silencing Down syndrome's extra chromosome (medicalxpress.com)
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This is very clever - the X chromosome has a mechanism to shut itself down (which makes sense; otherwise cells in women would have twice as many gene products from the X chromosome as cells from men). The linked research report[1] uses that mechanism, Xist , to shutdown chromosome 21, the extra chromosome whose presence causes Down syndrome. In its present form, it would need to be optimized for each potential patient and is unlikely to be used as a treatment paradigm, but the biological approach is clever. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2517953123
It would be interesting to understand what people with down syndrome feel about this. Would they all want what makes them unique turned off? Most people with down syndrome live happy, fulfilling lives. A google search will show studies that show 99% are happy with their lives. E.g. https://www.downsyndrome.org.au/about-down-syndrome/statistics/health-and-wellbeing-statistics 99% of people with Down syndrome were happy with their lives; 97% liked who they are; 96% liked how they looked; 99% expressed love for their families; 97% liked their brothers and sisters; 86% felt they could make friends easily.
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> It would be interesting to understand what people with down syndrome feel about this. Would it? > Would they all want what makes them unique turned off? Having a disability doesn't make you unique, it makes you disabled. There is a difference. > 99% of people with Down syndrome were happy with their lives; 97% liked who they are; 96% liked how they looked; 99% expressed love for their families; 97% liked their brothers and sisters; 86% felt they could make friends easily. Survey their parents, who are almost certainly their full-time caregivers, if they are "happy their child has Down syndrome."
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They have a significant reduced live span and are far away from the normal population. They also can't reproduce (at least woman, only with very high risk). Most people don't want to be unique, they want to be a part of the rest of the herde. Its objectivly better to not have down syndrom. And before i get downvoted: My stand doesn't mean i look down on peole with down syndrom. These two viewpoints are not exclusive. The same for the decision to abort a fetus with down syndrom doesn't mean that someone decided this, would look down on people with down syndrom.
But it's only possible for them to lead good lives when their parents basically dedicate the rest of their own lives to caring for them, I think?
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Individuals have very different abilities and needs. Some are able to drive and work independently while others require ongoing support.
It would break the feeling of superiority of people without that disability. Fact. So they can't believe it.
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Every person downvoting this just confirms my point. Your knee-jerk reaction is pretty obvious.
If I told you I put a chemical into the water supply that gave people brown hair you’d probably think I am weird and stupid but not evil. If I told you the chemical gave people down syndrome you’d probably think I am evil. Whenever these topics come up there’s always people saying things like “but what if people like it?” And I can’t help but wonder, really? Are we really having this conversation? The answers are obvious so why pretend they’re not? I don’t believe anybody actually thinks this way.
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The answers are not obvious. Arguably, putting anything into the water supply is seriously ethically questionable, whether it changes only your hair color or lowers your IQ or raises it, for that matter. People have the right to accept or deny medical treatment. For treatment which occurs before birth clearly they cannot do that, but if you were meditating upon whether to apply a procedure or not, and you had adults who could understand the question and to whom the procedure would have been applied, taking their opinions into consideration on the subject is entirely valid. You think of a person with Downs' as less than a person without it, clearly. But why should your opinion matter? If we accept treating Downs' in utero, should we accept genetic treatments to lower criminality? What about independent thinking? What about other "inconvenient" personality traits. Like why not allow some "authority" to eliminate any "negative" trait they wish from the population? Obviously these are extremes and your position that considering the question with respect to Downs' leads to a straightforward conclusion: on balance, it make sense, but I think we should approach any question about modifying people with serious consideration.
If you force something major and permanent on somebody without their consent for no good reason, of course it would be evil. It would be evil to force somebody gay to be straight and it would be evil to force somebody straight to be gay, that has nothing to do with the goodness or badness of being straight or gay. Hair dye is temporary.
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All of the arguments in this thread seem to be treating this research's outcome as deleting a person, and applying a corresponding moral judgement thereto. But it is not! I personally find that choosing to not have a child with Down Syndrome by engineering away the possibility in advance is no worse than choosing not to have a child at all, and better than aborting a viable but affected fetus, because no life is ended. I am not a murderer for choosing not to have any child at all because I feel that my genes should not be imposed on another generation, and I am not a Nazi for saying that if I had a child, I would take any available humane steps to ensure it received the best subset of genetic material from the set available to it. I would, in fact, argue that leaving the creation of a whole person who will have to experience life for 80 years to a series of genetic coin flips is morally reprehensible. Just because we've always done it that way doesn't make it desirable or humane. I welcome this development.
>I don’t believe anybody actually thinks this way. Oh, there are far too many people that do. I mostly call them the "Hell for you, heaven for me" bunch, the doublethink/cognitive dissonance in so many is very very strong. https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/ “The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion” is a common example of this behavior.
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I think this is a deeply flawed interpretation of the original commenter's post. They are suggesting that we think very carefully about imposing our standards of what constitutes a "good" person on the unborn. I don't see the problem, honestly.
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If humanity had the ability to think very carefully then the world would be a much different place. The number one rule of thinking about the unborn would be thinking about those who are living first.
You got downvoted because people fail to see from both sides. The people outside of course would compare and say this is the worse outcome, fix it no matter what, but once the person already have it, from their perspective, what do they think about it? Do they also compare, but maybe they cannot make that decision clearly, but it's also their choice so there is room to debate.
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If there is no real downside to it, its not even a debate. People with down syndrom have an avg iq from 50-60 which means that our society do not see them as independent human beings who are allowed to make all decisions themselves. Also people with down syndrom do have reduced life expectency. In 1960 it was 10 now its at 60 (heart issues).
Show HN: Libretto – Making AI browser automations deterministic (github.com/saffron-health)
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Thanks for this! We have clear answers for things that are 100% and 0% automated, but it’s always that 80%-99% automated slice where the frontier is, great idea.
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this looks awesome
how does it differ from playwright-cli?
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At its core, libretto generates, validates, and helps with debugging RPA scripts. As far as I understand tools like playwright CLI are more focused on letting your agent use playwright to perform one-off automations. The implementation is also pretty different: - libretto gives your agent a single exec tool (instead of different tools for each action) so it can write arbitrary playwright/javascript and is more context efficient - Also we gave libretto instructions on bot detection avoidance so that it will prefer using network requests for automation (something that other tools don’t support), but will fall back to playwright if it identifies network requests as too risky
Open Source Isn't Dead. Cal.com Just Learned the Wrong Lesson (strix.ai)
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> Today, Cal.com announced they are transitioning their core codebase away from open source. The reasoning provided by their CEO, Bailey Pumfleet, is that AI has automated vulnerability discovery at scale, making code scanning and exploitation "near zero-cost". In this new world, they argue, "transparency becomes exposure." Laughable and hilarious. Extremely short sighted. I can show code generated by Claude Opus 4.6 at the highest compute intensity that lacks even basic checks in input validation that was clearly provided in the spec. There's no point in arguing with crypto and AI bros. They are the same tribe. AI crowd however might learn their lessons sooner because the universe isn't forgiving or flexible. Note: I use AI code generators all the time but I take them as very very dumb transpilers no matter how expensive their input/output pricing it and I learned that hard way. PS: Edit to fix typos.
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Reading between the lines, it seems like they were working with cal.com and used red team bots to find vulnerabilities in cal.com’s code. And they probably found bugs a lot faster than cal.com could fix them. So the CEO balked at the estimated cost of fixing and took his ball home. This article is effectively an announcement that cal.com is riddled with vulnerabilities, which should be easy to find in an archive of their code.
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I'll admit that I agree with a lot of the post but that I can't fully wrap myself around the cybersecurity situation today, is it basically: -if code is open source or closed source, AI bots can still look for exploits -so we need to use AI to develop a checklist program regardless to check for currently known and unknown exploits given our current state of AI tools -we have to just keep running AI tools looking for more security issues as AI models become more powerful, which empowers AI bots attacking but also then AI bots to defensively find exploits and mitigate them -so it's an ongoing effort to work on I understand the logic of closing the source to prevent AI bot scans of the code but also fundamentally people won't trust your closed source code because it could contain harmful code, thus forcing it to be open source Edit: Another thing that comes to mind is people are often dunking here on "vibe coding" however can't we just develop "standards / tools" to "harden" vibe coded software and also help guide well for decisions related to architecture of the program, and so on?
Is there any recent research on whether open or closed-source projects are more secure? I am genuinely curious if anyone has studied the question.
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I mean "yes but" lots from 2015 and before, on a scholarly paper search engine. (I do not have access to most, but there are some public ones) I mean as a convention when dealing with cryptography, so far the only organization that has succeeded in doing closed-source cryptography securely, has been the USA's "NSA", and mostly their algorithms are public. I mostly work in the closed source world, however my observation from all the code bases I've seen is "mostly open source are more secure", except when very thorough following of formal security specifications are followed, and then security is as good as the specifications. (YMMV there, of course).
Brilliant piece of content marketing: 1) Pulls you in with a catchy title, that at first glance seems like a dunk on Cal.com (whatever that is). 2) Takes the "we understand your pain" approach to empathize w/ Cal.com, so you feel like you're on the good vibes side. 3) Provides a genuine response to the actual problem Cal.com is dealing with. Something you can't dismiss out of hand. 4) But in the end of the day, the response aligns perfectly with the product they're promoting (a click away to the homepage!) This mix of genuine ideas and marketing is quite potent. Not saying this is all bad or anything, just found it a bit funny. The mixed-up-ness is the point!
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That's exactly how this read to me too. Ultimately, the whole article is written by a company that does AI vulnerability scanning, and it's to try and get you to sign up for their service. As it mentions in their article, Strix actually scans the Cal.com codebase and reports vulnerabilities to us. But the reality is, they actually miss so many vulnerabilities that other platforms do find. There's no one platform that seems to be able to reliably find all vulnerabilities, and so simply adopting AI scanners just isn't enough.
> My code is perfectly secure and bug-free. I mean, bold statement but statistically speaking it's almost certainly incorrect. I will say that, irrespective of whether source is open or closed, I would be deeply skeptical of a project that made this assertion.
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I assumed they were trying to be humorous . Although I find that type of humour obnoxious enough that it would put me off the project.
I have an open source project and started receiving a lot of security vulnerability reports in the last few months. A lot of them are extremely corner cases, but there were some legit ones. They're all fixed now. Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. So I definitely agree with the message of this article.
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We actually run AI scanners on our code internally, so we get the benefit of security through obscurity while also layering on AI vulnerability scanning, manual human penetration testing, and a huge array of other defence mechanisms.
> Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. What makes you so sure that closed-source companies won't run those same AI scanners on their own code? It's closed to the public, it's not closed to them!
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As I mentioned above, we actually do run these AI scanners on our code, but the problem is it's simply not enough. These AI scanners, including STRIX, don't find everything. Each scanning tool actually finds different results from the other, and so it's impossible to determine a benchmark of what's secure and what's not.
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As someone who works on closed source software and has done for a couple of decades, most companies won't even know about that and of those who do only a fraction give enough of a shit about it to do anything until they are caught with their pants down.
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More eyes, more chances that someone will actually use the tools. Also, the tools and how you use them are not all the same.
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With enough copies of GPT printing out the same bulleted list, all bugs are 1. shallow 2. hollow 3. flat ...
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Came here to say the same. Same tools + private. In security two different defense-mechanisms are always better than one.
> It seems obvious that there's more to gain for attackers using AI agents to exploit open source repositories, than there is for good samaritan defenders. Actually the opposite is obvious - the comment you replied too talked about an abundance of good Samaritan reports - it's strange to speculate on some nebulous "gain" when responding to facts about more then enough reports concerning open source code. > In this new closed-source world (for Cal.com), there's nothing stopping them from running their own internal security agent audits That's one good Samaritan for a closed source app vs many for an open source one. Open source wins again. > any open-source business stands to lose way more That doesn't make any sense - why would it lose more when it has many more good Samaritans working for it for free? You seem to forget that the number of vulnerabilities in a certain app is finite, an open source app will reach a secure status much faster than a closed source one, in addition to also gaining from shorter time to market. In fact, open source will soon be much better and more capable due to new and developing technological and organizational advancements which are next to impossible to happen under a closed source regime.
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The main drawback is that you will need to be able to patch quick in the next 3-5 years. We are already seeing this in a few solutions getting attention from various AI-driven security topics and our previous stance of letting fixes "ripen" on the shelf for a while - a minor version or two - is most likely turning problematic. Especially if attackers start exploiting faster and botnets start picking up vulnerabilities faster. But at that point, "fighting fire with fire" is still a good point. Assuming tokens are available, we could just dump the entire code base, changesets and all, our dependent configuration on the code base, company-internal domain knowledge and previous upgrade failures into a folder and tell the AI to figure out upgrade risks. Bonus points if you have decent integration tests or test setups to all of that through. It won't be perfect, but combine that with a good tiered rollout and increasing velocity of rollouts are entirely possible. It's kinda funny to me -- a lot of the agentic hype seems to be rewarding good practices - cooperation, documentation, unit testing, integration testing, local test setups hugely.
What do you use for the pentests? any oss libraries?
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This is a sandbox escape pentest so the only tooling needed is Claude Code and a simple prompt that asks it to follow a workflow: https://github.com/airutorg/airut/blob/main/workflows/sandbox-pentest.md
> Closed source software won't receive any reports Not from the automated repo scanners, but bug bounty programs can generate a lot of reports in my experience. AI tools are becoming a problem there, too, because amateurs are drawn to the bounties and will submit anything the AI hallucinates. Closed source companies can (and should!) also run their own security audits rather than passively waiting for volunteers to spend their tokens on it.
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That's absolutely our plan. We have bug bounty programs, we have internal AI scanners, we have manual penetration testing, and a number of other things that enable us to push really hard to find this stuff internally rather than relying on either the good people in the open source community or hackers to find our vulnerabilities.
Of course everyone should do their own due diligence, but my point is mostly that open source will have many more eyes and more effort put into it, both by owners, but also community.
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But also tools that might not be nice and report security vulnerabilities, but exploit them. There is no guarantee that open means that they will be discovered.
> The reasoning provided by their CEO, Bailey Pumfleet, is that AI has automated vulnerability discovery at scale, That sounds like an excuse. The real reason is probably that it's hard to make a viable business out of developing open source.
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We've run an extremely profitable business for five years, raised a seed and a Series A, and grown at 300% a year sustainably while being open source. Going closed source actually hurts our business more than it benefits it. But it ultimately protects customer data, and that's what we care about the most.
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AI makes a great scapegoat. Need to lay off people? "AI." Need to switch to closed source? "AI."
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
How do Wake-On-LAN works (blog.xaner.dev)
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A couple years back, Ryuk ransomware used Wake-On-LAN in an attempt to encrypt more hosts on the LAN. Here is a link to the article I wrote on it. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/wizard-spider-adds-new-feature-to-ryuk-ransomware/
I was kinda hoping to get the nitty gritty of how the NIC does the packet matching, how, it wakes up the system via PCIe and how switches route the frames to the port which has/had the client. Nothing against the article though, but maybe someone knows a good writeup.
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Ditto, I clicked and was disappointed. "How to send a magic packet in $LANG" isn't very interesting to me. There are plenty of guides for it, and I remember actually doing it 20+ years ago with a short PHP script. Even at the time, the task didn't seem like "enough" for a show-the-world blog post. A dramatically shortened version (no validation, error handling, logging, etc.) for your amusement: // Given $macAddress and $addr and $port $macAddress = str_replace(":","",$macAddress); $macAddress = str_replace("-","",$macAddress); $header = pack('H12','FFFFFFFFFFFF'); $payload = pack("H12",$macAddress); $packet = $header . str_repeat($payload,16); $sock = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, SOL_UDP); socket_set_option($sock, 1, 6, TRUE); socket_sendto($sock, $payload, strlen($payload), 0, $addr, $port); socket_close($sock);
The original paper proposing the technology is actually very good (and surprisingly still online!): https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/archived-tech-docs/white-papers/20213.pdf
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I was distracted by the poor typesetting in parts of the page. The meaning of the text is overwhelmed by the distracting spacing used to justify the text: > . I n o t h e r w o r d s , s i l i c o n - o r g a t e - l evel
Cal.com is going closed source (cal.com)
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Monumentally dumb given their codebase is already public and the type of security issues that exist in software are usually found in the oldest code. But also, and more importantly, cal.com launched coss.com last year, open source is (ostensibly) their DNA. How could they do a complete 180 on something so fundamental and think that wouldn’t worry customers, much more so than their codebase being public? I cannot even begin to understand this. Surely there must be more to the story?
> I suspect we'll see more 'open spec' software, with actual source generated on-demand (or near to it) by models. Then all the security and governance will happen at the model layer. So each time you roll the dice you gamble on getting a fresh set of 0-days? I don't get why anyone would want this.
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You already do this with human-authored code, just slowly. Project model capabilities out a few years. Even if you only assume linear improvement at some point your risk-adjusted outcome lines cross each other and this becomes the preferred way of authoring code - code nobody but you ever sees. Most enterprises already HATE adopting open source. They only do it because the economic benefit of free reuse has traditionally outweighed the risks. If you need a parallel: we already do this today for JIT compilers. Everything is just getting pushed down a layer.
Sure, I can see that to a degree. And there definitely is a bit of chaos during the transition period as everyone scrambles to figure out what the landscape looks like now. I could understand if they decided to temporarily do less-frequent code releases, or maybe release their code on a delay or something, while they wait for the dust to settle. But I don't think permanently ending open source development is the right move.
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Agreed! There must be a way to maintain the principles and benefits of open-source; the alternative, which is that all software becomes a black box, is antithetical to the same security that that choice supposedly aims to achieve. I think companies make decisions like this from a tactics level, not realizing that by doing so they are not only alienating their customers but misunderstanding the basic (often unconscious or unspoken) social contract upon which their very existence is predicated. Calendly already existed. Cal came along and said, ok, but what if the code were out in the open -- auditable, self-hostable. Then you wouldn't have to worry about lock-in, security, privacy, etc, in the same way. Now they are removing that entire aspect of their value prop. It may be the only thing that caused a good portion of their customers to adopt in the first place.
I get the mentality but it feels very much like security through obscurity. When did we decide that that was the correct model?
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Security through obscurity is only problematic if that is the only, or a primary, layer of defense. As an incremental layer of deterrence or delay, it is an absolutely valid tactic. (Note, not commenting on whether that is the rationale here.)
It only takes 20 minutes and $200 to hack a closed source one too though. LLMs are ludicrously good at using reverse engineering tools and having source available to inspect just makes it slightly more convenient.
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Very true, but that is still a meaningfully higher cost at scale. If, as people are postulating post-Mythos, security comes down to which side spends more tokens, it is a valid strategy to impose asymmetric costs on the attacker.
The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought (wired.com)
Maybe, just maybe, the previous generation (I include myself here) have lost the plot raising/educating children and are breeding just absolute disrespectful, egotistical, attention seeking assholes as younger generations. Teachers in the classrooms have been globally sounding the alarms for decades about the loss of discipline, the loss of basic manners, the loss of respect for authority, the loss of empathy, the attention issues (attention seeking and attention impairment), the increase entitlement, the inability to cope with negatives, the increase in illiteracy, etc.. No one has listened. Then things go wrong and we blame the teachers. It is ok for kids to be mischievous. It is ok for young adults to take the piss out of each other in a healthy way. But this looks to me like an education problem. That kind of value based education where parents used to educate kids to be compassionate to each other, to respect each other and to f**ng understand that if a moment of fun with some friends could ruin someone else's life maybe it is not worth being the cool dude for 5 minutes. We have lost that. Most kids do not have these values these days. But what did we expect? We have been systematically ditching those values. We have an older generation now that is selfish, egotistical, careless and dismissive with anything that it is not them and their belief framework whatever that is. We have polarised to the extent of hatred. And this is showing in society. It is showing in our kids. I don't think tech is to blame. I don't think kids are to blame. This might be our fault.
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> That kind of value based education where parents used to educate kids to be compassionate to each other, to respect each other... No, we used to teach them to hide their cruelties and told them which targets were acceptable. Ask anybody who experienced being gay before 2000.
Do unto others as you would have done to you. Or its simpler corollary: Don't do to others what you would _not_ want done to you. Everything else derives from this.
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How about passing a job interview better than someone else?
> Seems self-contradictory to profiteer off of sexualized mass + social media (totally OK) but then get up in arms when that power is given to the masses (deepfake nudes). I think you might misunderstand the issue. Adults posting their own nudes on social media, even to profit from it? At a glance, seems OK, might have some moral/ethical considerations if you're involved with religion, but that should more be "Should I post my nudes?" rather than "Should others be allowed to post nudes?" but alas, religious people often don't think like that. People posting generated/fake nudes of others (sometimes children) on social media, even just for fun? At a glance, obviously not OK and obviously something that has to be addressed, in some manner, the very least make it illegal if it isn't already.
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> fake ... obviously not OK Obviously OK, and the puritans have to learn to live with it.
Thank goodness middle schoolers have fully developed adult emotional regulation, then.
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[delayed]
No, you make it a crime and prosecute it. What loony tunes world do you live in where you start giving away peoples other info. This just incentivizes you to abstract your data like businesses abstract their profits. Make it a crime. Prosecute it. This isn’t hard, unless you have a legislature that is incapable of passing laws. People are becoming fed up with this stupidity. Give it a few years and a few congressman kids getting targeted as it becomes more mainstream and things suddenly change. We’re at the leading edge of the stupidity, voters, families, politicians aren’t angry enough yet. It will change, legislation is cyclical.
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That's what will likely happen. And that's why girls will just accept it. Plenty of harassment is already illegal, and it's still a normal part of life for women and girls. And I agree that giving up that personal information would be a nightmare. That's one reason it won't happen. It's just probably the only analogue to what the perpetrators do that would actually scare them. We're likely just going to put up with this state of affairs.
This isn't just nudity. These fakes are made of young women with what looks like cum all over them or in a pose to give a blowjob or be penetrated. Devaluing nudity does not change how people interpret porn.
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Sounds like people here want to outlaw non-physical abuse, but that contradicts the first amendment, doesn't it?
> If society wasn't so puritanical there would be no harm from it. What is "puritanical" then, in your opinion? Is it being uptight? Do we abandon our efforts to uphold modesty and dignity of the human person? Do we stop teaching our children about boundaries and propriety, and their responsibilities as they mature? How should boys and young men conduct themselves around women? Should they learn about the concept of consent, and respecting others' wishes?
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Draw the boundary at physical abuse.
So since there are other consequences, nothing should be done? I think sexually demeaning children is a really big issue, and pretty well-defined and wide spread. We may not need to ban things, but not doing anything is a cop-out.
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What would the effect of hysteria from technologists achieve? If you think it’s a really big issue, why don’t you own the problem? You could just go turn off the trillions in AI spending and destroy computing as we know it. No cop-outs, remember.
Elevated errors on Claude.ai, API, Claude Code (claudestatus.com)
Anthropic has been avoiding the hard thing, but they just need to do SOME kind of pricing thing here to shift demand. I expect there is just no amount of tricks that can handle the few hours at peak load. They need "surge pricing". This seems reasonable surge pricing approach to me: 1. Implement surge pricing for everyone for the peak 2 hours of the day if possible. 2 hours you can work around, 5 hours is too hard. 2. Give existing customers a one time credit for surge 3. Make sure the plans just consume credits at an accelerated rate (e.g. if on the max plan, i just get 1/2 usage during peak hours). 4. Exempt sonnet/haiku from surge (so people can keep using) 5. Make "auto" settings in claude code etc automatically adapt during surge hours, so people don't get surprises by default. 6. For the first 90 days, unofficially waive the fist $100 in surge for every user but notify them. To train users about the surge, and get them used to it without having them actually pay. 7. (I don't think they would do this but this would help) allow users to fall back to using something like GLM 5.1 or Gemma 4 automatically in outages, with a partnership to handle it. Its not ideal, but i would prefer it in "partner mode" than not. IMO they can charge like 10% on top of the partner fees for this if used in other times, but during outages or surge, partner mode is free. But 100% managed by Anthropic so users don't need to set things up and can just use the Anthropic harness.
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One of their challenges is pricing of Max 20x. Max 20x is discounted 50% vs Pro and Max 5x. The way Anthropic's pricing currently works the $20(1x) and $100(5x) tiers are paying double for usage vs the heavy-user $200(20x) tier. That sort of non-linearity only makes sense if there is excess capacity. ChatGPT's new Plus/Pro pricing plan did not copy that aspect of Anthropic's pricing structure and kept "sane" linear pricing. Generally if you give people unused cycles to burn, they'll feel entitled to finding ways to burn them. So someone who is hitting the wall at x5 goes x20 and now has an extra +x10 to burn. Again, that's good if hardware is sitting around idle and you're encouraging innovation and exploration. It can make less sense when resources are scarce.
Did you try downgrading?
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That....that doesn't make sense. Why is the response to someone complaining that anthropic takes too long to fix major bugs _in their software_ be "well, did you fix it yourself?"
No amount of valuation can fix global supply issues for GPUs for inference unfortunately. I suspect they're highly oversubscribed, thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).
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> thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length). The dynamic thinking and response length is funny enough the best upgrade I've experienced with the service for more than a year. I really appreciate that when I say or ask something simple the answer now just comes back as a single sentence without having to manually toggle "concise" mode on and off again.
Coding is a problem solved. Claud writes the code. I edit it. I code around it. Engineer roles dead in 6 months.
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Because of the context I would think this is sarcasm, but I am not sure.
In the case of Gmail that was fake scarcity. In the case of Anthropic is fake availability. Sam Altman explained the idea is to scale the thing up, and see what happens. He hadn't claimed to offer a solution to the supply problem that would unfold.
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Are you sure it was fake scarcity for Gmail? IIRC they did it because they were worried about systems falling over if it grew too fast, and discovered the marketing benefits as a side effect.
Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 (deepmind.google)
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As the article notes regular Gemini and Gemma also have spatial reasoning capabilities, which I decided to test by seeing if Gemini could drive a little rover successfully, which it mostly did: https://martin.drashkov.com/2026/02/letting-gemini-drive-my-rover.html LLMs are really good at the sort of tasks that have been missing from robotics: understanding, reasoning, planning etc, so we'll likely see much more use of them in various robotics applications. I guess the main question right now is: - who sends in the various fine-motor commands. The answer most labs/researchers have is "a smaller diffusion model", so the LLM acts as a planner, then a smaller faster diffusion model controls the actual motors. I suspect in many cases you can get away with the equivalent of a tool call - the LLM simply calls out a particular subroutine, like "go forward 1m" or "tilt camera right" - what do you do about memory? All the models are either purely reactive or take a very small slice of history and use that as part of the input, so they all need some type of memory/state management system to actually allow them to work on a task for more than a little while. It's not clear to me whether this will be standardized and become part of models themselves, or everyone will just do their own thing.
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For the fine-motor commands: or, the model can write the code to generate them on the fly. It seems to work, in my very limited experiment. As for memory: my approach is to give the robot a python repl and, basically, a file system - the LLM can write modules, poke at the robot via interactive python, etc. Basically, the LLM becomes a robot programmer, writing code in real-time.
This seems perfect to hook up to my 'LLMs can control robots over MCP' system. The idea is that LLMs are great at writing code, so let's lean in to that. I'll give it a try! I just got a bigger robot, we'll see how it does... https://colinator.github.io/Ariel/post1.html
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Really unfortunate that I forgot what YT video i saw about this just 2 weeks ago. It was about Googles PaLM-E evolution and progress. It basically has two models one which controls the robot, the other is a llm and they are combined together in some attention layer.
Showing the murder dog reading a gauge using $$$ worth of model time is kinda not an amazing demo. We already know how to read gauges with machine vision. We also know how to order digital gauges out of industrial catalogs for under $50.
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Completely agree, I get that this is a stepping stone for future, more reliable robots but I found the demonstration underwhelming.
Is emulating human behavior really a valuable end goal though? Humans exist as the evolutionary endpoint of exhaustion hunting large pray and organic tool-making. We've built loads of industrial and residential automation tools in the last 100 years and none of them are humanoid. I'd imagine a household robot butler would be more like R2D2 with lots and lots of arms.
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Every single behavior? For sure not but otherwise we are the result of a very very long evolution and there is nothing else around us as smart and as adjustable. The planing ahead thing through simulation for example seems to be a very good tool in neuronal network based architectures.
US v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026) no attorney-client privilege for AI chats [pdf] (fingfx.thomsonreuters.com)
The ruling explicitly overrules Shih, thus making exactly that argument: > Shih, of course, is not binding on this Court, and this Court respectfully disagrees with its holding. As relevant here, the court in Shih principally concluded that the work product doctrine is not limited to materials prepared by or at the direction of an attorney. Id. But that conclusion undermines the policy animating the work product doctrine, which, as one of the cases cited in Shih explains, is "to preserve a zone of privacy in which a lawyer can prepare and develop legal theories and strategy 'with an eye toward litigation.'"
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Does that imply that materials produced by the client in conversation with the attorney (e.g. attorney says to client "Ok write here in your own words what happened so I can understand your perspective") are not privileged? Or would those presumably exist under the umbrella of privacy because they're relevant to the lawyer preparing and developing their legal strategy?
None that operate legally will be able to avoid logging chats when ordered to do so. For example OpenAI were required by a US federal judge to log all chats, and make them discoverable to lawyers representing The New York Times last year. https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-new-york-times-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-chatgpt-logs-private-2025-11 Additionally the company can be gagged by a court from disclosing that the chats are being logged, at least in the USA and the UK.
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The Lavabit case years ago was quite scandalous, things have only gotten worse. There should have been much harsher limits on what companies can be compelled to do.
Obviously this (along with the original unwritten order a few weeks ago) is causing a stir, but this decision isn't as weird as it sounds. The defendant's assertion was essentially a retroactive application of privilege: he didn't use Claude to draft documents at his attorney's request but instead used Claude effectively in lieu of an attorney and later provided the Claude-drafted materials to his attorney (heavily paraphrasing here). Privilege is not a bandage that closes self-inflicted wounds. I have some concerns about some of the reasoning, namely the practical implications of referencing Claude's TOS in a world where public AI features are creeping into everything, but I expect some of the reasoning is based on this particular defendant likely being more sophisticated than an average person.
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no, Heppner's attorney-client privilege argument wasn't that the conversation was privileged inherently because it was legal consultation with Claude, but that it was privileged as personal notes made in preparation for consultation with counsel and then actually communicated to counsel, see Ford-Bey v. Professional Anesthesia Services and Greyhound Lines, Inc. v. Viad Corp. Rakoff makes two arguments against this: - privilege was broken because Claude/Anthropic is a third party; but I don't think he successfully distinguishes Claude from say Google Docs/Translate/Gmail in this regard (he just notes that Google Docs isn't usually claimed to confer privilege on its own; but this is not the claim being made about Claude either); and see NYSBA ethics rules 820 and 842) - he quotes Gould v Mitsui: documents do not "acquire protection merely because they were transferred" to counsel; but that same case says they do acquire protection if communicated "for the purpose of obtaining or rendering legal advice"
I don't know why you think I did not read it. My remark is an application of the 3-point test in the decision to another system.
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Well, hrrm. I thought that because it seemed to start clearly in the document I linked that something like Google docs wasn't safe, regardless of spell checking feature use. However, following my link again, it seems that the referenced post has been edited or something because going to grab a quote, I found myself in a different document than I remember. I think in hindsight I was remarking, effectively, these two claims (yours and the courts) don't seem to live in the same world. Not your responsibility to resolve my confusion and different parts of the court system can issue edicts that contradict to be later resolved at higher levels of the system so... Sorry I didn't respond within the full context you wrote.
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs (aphyr.com)
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> I think a part of the reason is that these roles are not just about sending emails and looking at graphs, but also about dangling a warm body over the maws of the legal system and public opinion. Spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield. Now, ~10 years later, this clip feels like it would only need slight adjustments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE
I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.
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Most companies contain several layers worth of business context that the higher ups have no idea of, as well. Everything from "unpaid bills are handled this way" through "the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal" to "we need to report our earnings biweekly in Indonesia, and we need to retry the form several times before it works". This is not fundamentally doable by LLMs because the higher ups wouldn't know what to ask for, and if they did it would not be feasible to keep everything in single persons head, no matter how AI-assisted. So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.
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Eh, this sounds like the people that have been replaced at a lot of companies already. >"the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal" For example, why modern certificates are being dropped down to very short times. The push to automate everything. >"unpaid bills are handled this way" Any company that has things like this will start changing their process. You have this idea (and maybe the AI company CEOs do too) that this will be like a container drop in. No, instead these things will be part of a gradual process change and human parts will eventually disappear. >So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs. What percent. This is what matters at the end of the day. Once unemployment reaches high rates over all age groups in a society that is used to low unemployment things go bad. It can take longer to go bad where you have social safety nets and jobs programs, but in places like the US that is communism, so expect the haves to shoot at the have nots.
Anecdotally I've been observing a significant uptick in the amount of code being produced by my peers who are in senior engineer, leadership and engineering management positions. They can take their 20+ years of experience and use it to build working systems in the gaps between meetings now. Previously they would have to carve out at least half a day of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done.
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> build working systems in the gaps between meetings now Agreed, I've actually done this. Sitting in a meeting where someone was asking about what tooling we could build, what it might be capable of, what their options were. So while we were chatting I was having Claude build a working demo. In the end it still needs to be turned into an enterprise app with all the annoying accoutrements that go with that, but for demo work it was phenomenal.
> But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems. Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of the usual "it's not X, it's Y", full of AI-slop. Most of the text is filler, with a few tidbits of real content here and there. I don't know before, but now blog posts have become more noise than signal.
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The "dead Internet" theory has become more real. It's especially bad on LinkedIn. Everyone is now an "AI expert", posting generated slop and updating their profiles with AI enhanced head shots.
Who is better positioned to pilot the LLM than a domain expert? "Software engineer" as a job title has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder, for years prior to LLMs. People assuming the only, or even primary, function of the job is outputting code reveal a profound lack of understanding of the industry in my opinion. Beyond the first year or two it has been commonly accepted that the code is the easy part of the job.
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> has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder This is something that I would have thought HN readers were pretty familiar with. LLMs can make my code work faster or more prolific, but with 30yoe I spend a fairly significant chunk of my work time doing anything but code.
clearly not the same when they were abstracted from the realities of building software and.. directly taking accountability for it! by semantics, i mean the definition and pool of tasks, responsibilities, and outcomes a job is comprised of is shifting so fast that the borders of what is a 'software engineer' and 'business person' are melding together. software engineers are business people in their own way
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I don't understand why humans abstract a business leader away from the realities of building software, while LLMs do not. If the rhetoric is to be believed, the set of responsibilities falling to the role of "software engineer" is shrinking to zero, and all engineers are being forcibly "promoted" to the managerial class of shepherding around agents.
AI ruling prompts warnings from US lawyers: Your chats could be used against you (reuters.com)
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There's a few threads there where folks would benefit from reading Judge Rakoff's memo. There's a copy here, or it's on PACER/RECAP: https://www.akingump.com/a/web/ssTGsd5NHbtZ1onzXQMTye/1_25-cr-503-27-memorandum.pdf For 1), his reasoning shows how intelligent, well-read humans view AI which is quite different from the attitudes seen on HN. Rakoff calls the chats "Claude searches" which while it may sound ridiculous (what is this, Perplexity?) is just how some people must view this crazy new thing: another Google. You type stuff in and get results out. 2) Rakoff goes through the 3 elements of attorney client privilege in US law (communications between attorney and client, intended to be and kept confidential, and for the purpose of legal advice). It's obvious the Claude chats fail two of them and he goes over why. 3) A lot of people bring up the point that if you use Google Docs to transcribe privileged information, is that the same, since you send your data to Google? The model AI companies take when they cater to legal clients is akin to that of a locked filing cabinet in a storage facility: sure, you're sending the data to them, but with a ZDR they ain't looking at it or training on it. Another CRITICAL point here not mentioned in the article is Warner v Gilbarco; Gilbarco directly contradicts Heppner and indicates that work-product doctrine covers AI-generated chats! https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/heppner-and-gilbarco-courts-apply-privilege-and-work-product-protection-generative The law is not settled. I looked into on-premises AI for legal as a business idea but decided it's not a great idea right now.
… and this is not okay right?
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It's perfectly okay. An AI isn't a lawyer and can't grant you attorney-client privilege. It's just a notebook that can talk back to you, and you've made the mistake of telling it all the details of your case.
sam altman commented on this topic before, and i think he's right we need some kind of user-chat privilege much like doctors and their patients, or lawyers and their clients
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Alternatively we just need people to realize they're transcribing their thoughts into a corporate database, which should generally be avoided depending on the topic.
Why would you run segments of your profitable business through a chat? It's just as large of a vulnerability.
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Losing your business and income isn't the same as being charged with a crime and jailed.
It would never occur to me that they couldn’t. From a legal POV, that sounds a lot like using your search history against you.
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(IANAL - in the US) I think it's worth clarifying that the third-party doctrine is probably what applies here. You used someone else's computer (Google search and the recorded search history, Claude and the conversation history, or cell phone providers and the tower ping records) and you had no expectation of privacy or any sort of confidentiality (e.g. lawyer/spouse/protected medical info). I understand that other countries handle this differently and might have more privacy restrictions, but this seems to come down to a judge asking a neutral third-party to testify to what they know about a subject and them responding with search history/chat logs/location pings. I guess if you want to do crimes then you need to stop intentionally revealing incriminating evidence to unbound third-parties.
If you are the subject of a criminal investigation, they will seize the devices from your house and do forensics on them. Taking steps to make that harder could expose you to more charges for tampering with evidence.
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Exactly this: that's what happened to Heppner. They took the Claude transcripts from his computer with a warrant. Same failure mode. Not clear local AI helps meaningfully
This. All of your rights are up for debate under a judge. There’s only a few you can still exercise if a judge wants something from you but ultimately if a judge decides it’s relevant to the case, it’s relevant to the case and you must comply. Or be held in contempt. Or praise? With a senate hearing to boot. I’m confused on how our legal system actually functions now but that is how it’s supposed to be. If a judge decides to include it, it’s in. Go get it.
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One of my friends recently spent some time getting an OpenClaw instance running in Ubuntu so he could have a truly private conversation with it, complete with an air gap. The value of that configuration has just been greatly magnified.
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Has it? There's value in privacy vis-a-vis snooping corporations, but those conversations could still be surrendered to the court if the judge rules them potentially relevant, and if your friend refuses to do so, he'd be held in contempt of court.
Do you even need a database? (dbpro.app)
For the simple case, it isn't necessarily that fragile. Write the entire database to a temp file, then after flushing, move the temp file to overwrite the old file. All Unix filesystems will ensure the move operation is atomic. Lots of "we dump a bunch of JSON to the disk" use cases could be much more stable if they just did this. Doesn't scale at all, though - all of the data that needs to be self-consistent needs to be part of the same file, so unnecessary writes go through the roof if you're only doing small updates on a giant file. Still gotta handle locking if there is risk of a stray process messing it up. And doing this only handles part of ACID.
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don't forget to fsync the file before the rename! and you also need to fsync the directory after the rename!
> The real question isn't "do you need a database" but "do you need state" — and often the answer is no. This is a solid takeaway and applies to a lot of domains. Great observation
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But if you have state, and that state needs to persist between program executions, then for the love of resiliency and all that is robust, consider using a SQL database!
im sure, but honestly, i would love to have a db engine that just writes/reads csv or json. does it exist?
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SQLite can do it
a) Just heard today: JOINs are bad for performance b) How many columns can (an Excel) table have: no need for JOINs
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vlookups are bad for performance. recursive vlookups even more so.
Sometimes yes, I've seen it. It even tends to happen on NoSQL databases as well. Three times I've seen apps start on top of Dynamo DB, and then end up re-implementing relational databases at the application level anyway. Starting with postgres would have been the right answer for all three of those. Initial dev went faster, but tech debt and complexity quickly started soaking up all those gains and left a hard-to-maintain mess.
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> end up re-implementing relational databases at the application level anyway This is by design, the idea is that scaling your application layer is easy but scaling your storage/db layer is not Hence make the storage dumb and have the application do the joins and now your app scales right up (But tbh I agree a lot of applications don’t reach the scale required to benefit from this)
If the argument for NoSQL is, “we don’t know what our schema is going to be”, stop. Stop and go ask more questions until you have a better understanding of the problem.
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Oftentimes better understanding of the problem needs trying out solutions. Armchair architectures tend to blow up in contact with reality.
Honestly, there is zero chance you will implement anything close to sqlite. What is more likely, if you are making good decisions, is that you'll reach a point where the simple approach will fail to meet your needs. If you use the same attitude again and choose the simplest solution based on your _need_, you'll have concrete knowledge and constraints that you can redesign for.
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not re-implement SQLite, I mean "use SQLite as your persistence layer in your program" e.g. worry about what makes your app unique. Data storage is not what makes your app unique. Outsource thinking about that to SQLite
Backpacks got worse on purpose (worseonpurpose.com)
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I heard advice from Adam Savage on the topic of cost-vs-quality that I've found to be quite useful. It was something along the lines of: When you're first getting into a new craft/hobby and need a specific tool, get the cheapest one you can buy. When you're first starting out, you probably don't really know how to judge quality, and you don't have a good sense for what features/enhancements you actually need (not to mention, you may or may not know you're actually going to stick with the hobby at all). By the time that first cheap one breaks, or you gain some experience/skill and hit your frustration limit with it, you'll have a much better understanding of what you want out of the tool and will be better position to pick out the "best" version to suit your needs.
63% AI generated according to Pangram. Better than 100%; this makes me think that they wrote the copy manually then used an LLM to clean it up. Anyway, VF also bought Timberland and, by proxy, Smartwool. They absolutely tanked both brands.
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I was trying to figure out why this article got flagged. Thanks!
So it’s bad that now apart from high quality expensive option (which is still available!) you can also get cheaper, lower quality one?
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The problem is that there is a deliberate lack of information that clearly distinguishes the "technically a product" category from the "someone put effort into this" category. Price doesn't do it, brand doesn't do it, name recognition doesn't do it because companies are constantly enshittifying existing products, too.
If you're looking for a backpack, I can't recommend Osprey enough. They are still a independent US company with a lifetime warranty they actually stand by. I had to call their customer service just last week after I ordered the wrong size bag. I was connected to an actual human immediately, and he sent me a prepaid return label, even though it was my fault and I was fully expecting to pay for return shipping myself. I own several of their bags and have never had a single issue with any of them.
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I'll add that I've had a very positive experience with a Projekt Gravy backpack since we're dropping favorite products. Excellent quality and I've been using this thing daily since 2021.
There is a whole community of bag enthusiasts who intricately review backpacks. Packhacker etc. It's super easy to find reviews of most backpacks and plenty of video reviews detailing every feature on the bag - and even in some cases reviews after a few months of usage. Day one might feel great, but after a few trips you start noticing flaws. I'd echo what one of the other commenters here said about AER and Cotopaxi. Although I have to say wearing my Cotopaxi Alppa 35l feels like a small child is trying to drag me to the floor compared to the comfort of having the AER straps on my back for the travel pack. I still love both though.
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Aer is sort of an interesting case to me. At its core the nylon material they use certainly make the bags feel like they'd last forever. But I feel like Aer also tends to include features or materials that are just not designed for BIFL longevity. Two that jump to mind are the PU coatings on a lot of their zippers and their use of elastic straps as the main way to secure water bottles (but they might be moving away from the elastic on their newest bags). Both of those feel like they have a much more limited lifespan (relative to some of the other aspects of the bags).
The CPI doesn’t arbitrarily “swap in” items. It changes based on consumer behavior. That’s why it now tracks streaming services but not VCRs. Similarly, if the price of Gala apples triples and everyone switches to Fuji, a fixed index would overstate the actual cost of living. Insofar as gold impacts the cost of things people buy, it’s already included. Adding it directly to the CPI makes no more sense than adding Bitcoin or soybean futures. The cost of housing is already is a massive component of the CPI.
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But if you used to be able to afford steak and now all you can afford is ground turkey, readjusting the basket of goods for that shift in "preference" is just hiding the fact that nobody can afford steak anymore. And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory have gotten. But you can't buy an iPhone 1.0 for $1 to satisfy the need to have a phone that you can install apps onto (and the upgrade cost every few years as cheap phones can no longer run an O/S version that your banking app requires).
In some ways. The asterisk on it that gets really frustrating for me is that there are often SKUs manufactures make for them that are actually worse in meaningful ways. I almost bought my Bosche dishwasher from them last year, because it was a bit cheaper than getting it at lowes. And then I noticed buried in the detail that the reason for that was it didn't have an auto-open drying feature that was one of the main reasons I was buying the dishwasher. I guess this is kind of the opposite side of it though. I had done a bunch of research, and if I'd wanted to skip that and just buy the dishwasher at costco I would have ended up with a very good option at a reasonable price, even if it didn't have every feature possible, and costco would have done the work of eliminating all the cheap builder-grade junk for me.
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Not all builder grade is junk. Apartment owners want a cheap appliance that will last for a long time. So mixed in that price range is both junk and high quality stuff with only the features you need (and generally intentionally ugly because even though the cost is the same nice is something people will pay for)
That's a worthwhile observation. It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it. And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater. But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.
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The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself. The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does. I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.
The best rule of thumb for tools, at least if you have a decent collection of them for diverse but hobby/homeowner level projects is buy the cheapest to do the immediate job and then replace it with an expensive one if it breaks or you use it often and the better version improves efficiency or quality of life. Once in a while you get “burned” and immediately end up buying two tools for the same job, but if that happens typically you can return it under retail warranty. This is definitely the best advice I got way back in the day. I have a small collection of very high end tools I use quite often and abuse at least weekly. Or get use out of having the best quality available to me. But the vast majority of them get used a few times over a decade and sit in storage the rest of the time. I have zero use for a $1500 impact socket set. The $150 one does just fine, and I replace the two commonly used sizes I snap apart with expensive high quality versions while the others I may never use even once. My power drill and impact driver? Best quality I could find and worth every penny. They bring me value just in the joy I get using them over the cheap stuff.
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I find it is better to find the middle ground. There are often some "mid grade tools" that are plenty good for me and high quality. And I don't have the worry about something breaking or failing to perform. I always figure if I was hiring a pro to do a task they would have good tools, so the first time I can get the good tool and be even money - the second time I have the tool and so I'm saving. (I also rent some tools, but that is for tasks that need an expensive tool I rarely use)
this comment reeks of AI too, and the fact i can't tell if you're being tongue in cheek means i'm cooked
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I'm moderately sure it's intentional irony.
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