Unlurker

Ask HN: Which password manager do you use / would you recommend?

Dashlane. It works on most browsers, both Android and iOS, and even has the option of family accounts, so everyone has their secret passwords and some shared passwords across accounts that everyone should have access to. It also comes with a free VPN for five devices with Hotspot Shield Pro.

this may be controversial here, but what google + chrome + android does is pretty great imo JSR_FDED has a parallel comment for the Apple ecosystem

I was in your position, realizing I had to do something about how my family manages passwords. I found the built in Passwords app in MacOS was actually sufficient for our needs.

OddsRabbit- Reddit Alternative that doesn't allow politics. Only hobbies (play.google.com)

For HN, it would be better to point to the website rather than an app - https://www.oddsrabbit.com/ . Looks like it has the same poisonous new reddit-style infinite scroll/low post density where any discussion is a secondary activity.

Isn't censoring politics on your own platform in itself a pretty political decision to make?

This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like (thebulwark.com)

A few years ago we would have extra infrared cameras and scrutiny at airports for flights arriving from China or African countries depending on specific outbreaks in those countries. The idea that we could be doing that for flights from the USA is no longer unthinkable.

Those who want to exercise their judgement about their own personal safety with respect to preventable illnesses won't be allowed to - vaccines won't be available at any price. But even if they are, a substantial fraction of the populace will elect to do "wellness", making herd immunity an impossibility.

American pharma has an overhang on the world unequal to its size as a population. 350m consumers isn't nothing, but set against the world, its not everything either. So you would hope "the market" manages just fine with Canada, Europe, Inda, China, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Korea.. The problem is that so much of the R&D is tied up in the US markets cash, as IPR value to supply services to that market. We used to do drug design by charities, funded by the state through tertiary education and research labs. Thats how things like Insulin emerged from Canada. Welcome trust in the UK similarly. I liked that model. I'd like to think the EU drug funding, and Indian pharma production and Canadian (Apotex) models of manufacture and distribution have a role to play here. Novo Nordisk was a drug to investors. It single handedly rose Danish GDP by significant digits, and then .. it went away again. Thats a rush, a financial high. People need to stop drinking sugary caffiene drinks, and sip tea. It's healthier. We need to stop chasing the US drug market for instant billions, and instead focus on making mRNA production faster, safer and scaleable. Outside of the USA. I wish the american vaccine market wasn't in disarray, but I don't see this as necessarily harming anyone but Americans, IFF (and its a big IF and only IF) the rest of the world behaves rationally and reaches into their pockets. So yes, that does sort-of acknowledge America was "bankrolling" a lot of the worlds pharma development, but not without benefit. it was not zero sum, its not a trumpean problem. It was (within limits) win-win but none of us outside America like the market as much as that, and the downsides are now huge and apparent: American changes in habit will cost us global health, unless we wean ourselves off american drug money. We should buy vaccines from Moderna at european and asian market norms, not at US market norms, and they (Moderna) should be glad we're consistent in buying, not resentful we don't want to pay US inflated prices. I feel sorry for Moderna investors.

A key excerpt: > Administration officials speaking to media late last week hinted that something like that might eventually be possible, with one unnamed federal official telling reporters on a conference call that Moderna might have more luck with a second, narrower request for approval if the company showed some “humility” when it made the submission. But the idea that approval of a vaccine might depend—even a little bit—on whether the manufacturer says ‘pretty please’ speaks volumes about what role scientific judgment is now playing in the approval process.

AI is destroying Open Source, and it's not even good yet (jeffgeerling.com)

Isn’t it also destroying the internet with low-quality content and affecting content creation in general? Can LLMs still rely on data from the open internet for training?

>>... Crypto ... are [is] pretty much useless. Other than by corrupt criminals and mafia types who have a need to covertly hide cash. And then the current administration wants the government to 'protect' crypto investors against big losses. Gotta love it.

And anyone who is under sanction or lives in a nation under economic sanction, and wants access to a means of sending payments across borders that would otherwise be closed to them. And anyone who lives in a polity whose local currency may be undergoing rapid devaluation/inflation. And anyone who needs a form of wealth that no local authority is technically capable of alienating them from - ie: if you need to pack everything in a steamer trunk to escape being herded into cattle cars, you can memorize a seed phrase and no one can stop you from taking your wealth with you. And any polity who may no longer wish to use dollars as the international lingua franca of trade, as the global reserve currency, to reduce the degree to which their forex reserves prop up American empire. Sadly, all of these use cases appear increasingly relevant as time goes on.

>> Other than by corrupt criminals and mafia types who have a need to covertly hide cash. I’ve got an Argentinian friend who sends crypto to his mother because he pays less than 0.5 % in fees and exchange rates instead of close to 5% using the traditional way. From now on I’ll call him a corrupt criminal.

"If this was a problem already, OpenClaw's release, and this hiring by OpenAI to democratize agentic AI further, will only make it worse. Right now the AI craze feels the same as the crypto and NFT boom, with the same signs of insane behavior and reckless optimism." There are definitely people abusing AI and lying about what it can actually do. However, Crypto and NFTs are pretty much useless. Many people (including me) have already increased productivity using LLMs. This technology just isn't going away.

The tech isn’t going away, but its usability is probably going to be recalibrated once we factor in the long term danger ( effects on learning and acquiring/maintaining skills, maintenance costs of ai made code, etc). We’ll still have the “best code tooling ever invented” stuff, but if the market is assuming “intellectual workers all replaced”, there’s still a bubble pop waiting for us.

You should check out HN /new and /show the last couple of weeks. It's just like all the ICO, NFT, and other crypto launches, but for all the little things that you can do with Ai. Everybody or their bot has some new game changing Ai project. It's a tiring mess right now, which I do hope will similarly die down in time For clarity, I was a big fan of blockchain before it got bad, still am for things like ZKP and proof-of-authority, and I am similarly very excited for what Ai enables, but (imo) one cannot easily argue there is not a spam problem that feels similar.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips (arstechnica.com)

Mark my words: The era of “Personal computing” is over Large scale Capital is not gonna make any more investments into microelectronics going forward Capital is incentivized to make large data centers and very high speed private Internet, not public Internet, private Internet like starlink So the same way in the 1970s it was the main frame era and server side computing, which turned into server side rendering, which then turned into client side rendering which culminated in the era of the private computer in your home and then finally in your pocket we’re going back to server side model communication and that’s going to encompass effectively the gateway to all other information which will be increasingly compartmentalized into remote data centers and high-speed access

Title is currently: "OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips"

One thing I don't get about Cerebras, they say it's wafer scale, but the chips they show are square, I thought wafers were circular?

I believe the discs are a product of the manufacturing, having to spin them. The entire disc is not useable, so not really would you call it a wafer. If the entire cjip comes from the wafer, its wafer scale.

the hardware diversification story here is more interesting than the speed numbers. OpenAI going from a planned $100B Nvidia deal to "actually we're unsatisfied with your inference speed" within a few months is a pretty dramatic shift. AMD deal, Amazon cloud deal, custom TSMC chip, and now Cerebras. that's not hedging, that's a full migration strategy. 1,000 tok/s sounds impressive but Cerebras has already done 3,000 tok/s on smaller models. so either Codex-Spark is significantly larger/heavier than gpt-oss-120B, or there's overhead from whatever coding-specific architecture they're using. the article doesn't say which. the part I wish they'd covered: does speed actually help code quality, or just help you generate wrong code faster? with coding agents the bottleneck isn't usually token generation, it's the model getting stuck in loops or making bad architectural decisions. faster inference just means you hit those walls sooner.

> OpenAI going from a planned $100B Nvidia deal to "actually we're unsatisfied with your inference speed" within a few months is a pretty dramatic shift. A different way to read this might be: Nvidia isn't going to agree to that deal, so we now need to save face by dumping them first" I imagine sama doesn't like rejection.

If you are OpenAI, why wouldn’t you naturally want more than one single supplier? Especially at a time where no one can get enough chips.

With agent teams I’ve found CC significantly better at catching mistakes on itself before it finishes its task. Having several agents challenging the implementation agents seems to produce better results. If so, faster is better always as you then can run more adversarial/verification tasks before finishing.

>I didn’t have to worry about this even a week ago No, you didn’t realize you had to worry about this until a week ago.

Im actually very cpncerned people have yet to realize they dont need to put truth values on internet content. Once you default to 'doesnt matter if true' you end up being a lot more even keeled.

I have a question for those who closely follows Cerebras: do they have a future beyond being inference platform based on (an unusual) in-house silicon?

My mental model of cerebras is that they have a way of giving you 44GB of SRAM (and then more compute than you'll probably need relative to that). So if you have applications where the memory access patterns would benefit massively from basically having 44GB of L3-ish-speed SRAM, and it's worth $1-3m to get that, then it's a win. Honestly not sure what else fits that bill. Maybe some crazy radar applications? The amount of memory is awfully small for traditional HPC.

very excited for cerebras, hopefully nvidia/amd will have less AI sales and bring back more consumer options when they realize they have abandoned/neglected the market that made them who they are

Nvidia bought groq, so they might be working on their own answer to low-latency serving. (I found this good explanation of groq compared to TPU [1]) [1] https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1pw8nfk/nvidia_acquired_groq_but_why_not_cerebras/nw1pmbz/

10 years building vertical software: are we cooked? (twitter.com)

Great theory, in practice I just expect things to relocate and shuffle around as it usually goes.

It’s worth asking: what do Wall Street traders know about building software companies? Almost nothing. Anyone who has attempted to start a startup knows that the software is always the easy part. Building the business is hard. The notion that we’re going to undo 100K+ years of specialization just so that companies can run mediocre, buggy versions of SaaS tools just to save a few bucks is crazy to me. SaaS stocks are currently the buying opportunity of a lifetime.

We spent the last 20 years building a whole set of specialised little tools on the web to do specialised little tasks for businesses. Now an LLM can do most of that, easier, and effectively for free. The first pass on a new problem is not googling to see if there's a SaaS for that, it's prompting an LLM to see if it can do it, or if it can build a tool that can do it. Case in point: in my job we have to data-enter invoices. I have dealt with or in this industry for 30-ish years. I worked on various projects trying to get computers to read invoices, to various degrees of success. It's a hard problem; there's no standard format, or layout. Every company does its invoices differently. Some are Excel files, some are PDFs, some are Word docs, etc. This entire problem vanished this year. You get an LLM to read the invoice. It does this more accurately than humans do. Job done. There are entire SaaS businesses that read invoices that are now obsolete and have no moat.

Look at his submission history, nothing but self promotion. His entire presence here is just an ad.

You both need to take this stuff to hn@ycombinator.com instead of hashing it out here. I think you're wrong, but either way: stop crudding up the threads when all you've got to say is "this person submitted their own post". People do that all the time. Again: if you think they've crossed the line, the guidelines specifically ask you not take to the threads with it. Mail Dan and Tom. They'll get back to you quickly.

Show me even a single trader who would prefer a slow-ass chat interface to 36 monitors full of stock tickers and charts.

I think using the BB terminals as the big example here was probably not the best move; there are other huge vertical software platforms where this argument is more of a layup. (Though: you can do a lot with IB, right? Same deal.)

Study: Self-generated Agent Skills are useless (arxiv.org)

Breaking news: Developers who yak shave their vim configs also get carried away with their LLM setups.

I only generate skills _after_ I've worked through a problem with the model - usually by asking it "what have you learned in this session?". I have no idea why people would think it can zero-shot a problem space without any guidance or actual experience...

> I only generate skills _after_ I've worked through a problem with the model. This is the correct way vast majority of the time. There are exceptions. When I know for certain that the models do not have enough training material on a new library or one that isn't often used or an internal tool. In those cases I know I will have struggle on my hand if I don't start out with a skill that teaches the model the basics of what it does not know. I then update the skill with more polish as we discover additional ways it can be improved. Any errors the model makes are used to improve existing skills or create new ones.

> Otherwise, you'd expect the effect to be similar to telling the model 'make a plan before acting, make not mistakes'. Have there not been previous iterations of these tools where such techniques were actually effective?

But that's a reason you should expect it to stop working soon, just like all the older tricks like "my grandmother will die". If you have a universal 'blind' prompt which can increase performance a little bit... the AI labs can just toss that into the training loop to teach the model to do it automatically, whatever 'it' was, like 'trying harder' or 'writing down a useful idea'. And then the prompt stops working because the next generations do it by default. (This also suggests that you should expect them to generally be bad at judging novel self-generated prompts/skills - if they could judge those, they would already be using them! There is a generator-verifier gap, but it is already exploited heavily during post-training and not much low-hanging fruit left there.)

I guess when I was in class and took notes, then reviewed them later I wasn't "learning" anything.

Reading notes is only necessary because of how lossy human memory is. Reading notes doesn't give you new information, it just reinforces memory paths ... which will fade and you'll have to read the notes again later unless you frequently apply the knowledge, which again reinforces those paths (but lossily, so the bits of information not repeatedly used will fade, and you will again have to read the notes if you need those bits ... or just to re-mind yourself what they were).

"Self-Generated Skills: No Skills provided, but the agent is prompted to generate relevant procedural knowledge before solving the task. This isolates the impact of LLMs’ latent domain knowledge" This is a useful result, but it is important to note that this is not necessarily what people have in mind when they think of "LLMs generating skills." Having the LLM write down a skill representing the lessons from the struggle you just had to get something done is more typical (I hope) and quite different from what they're referring to. I'm sure news outlets and popular social media accounts will use appropriate caution in reporting this, and nobody will misunderstand it.

> I'm sure news outlets and popular social media accounts will use appropriate caution in reporting this, and nobody will misunderstand it. :D

The point of so-called 'skills' is to be short how-to reminders that the agent can pull into its context and then act upon. If the knowledge is already in the model, it will most likely be surfaced in reasoning phase anyway, so there's little benefit to writing it up as a skill, unless perhaps it's extremely relevant and hard to surface, and you want the model to skip that part of the reasoning.

I've been building a skill to help run manual tests on an app. So I go through and interactively steer toward a useful validation of a particular PR, navigating specifics of the app and what I care about and what I don't. Then in the end I have it build a skill that would have skipped backtracking and retries and the steering I did. Then I do it again from scratch; this time it takes less steering. I have it update the skill further. I've been doing this on a few different tests and building a skill which is taking less and steering to do app-specific and team-specific manual testing faster and faster. The first times through it took longer than manually testing the feature. While I've only started doing this recently, it is now taking less time than I would take, and posting screenshots of the results and testing steps in the PR for dev review. Ongoing exploration!

>AI companies don't want you to waste tokens, they benefit when you use them efficiently because they can serve more users on the infra that's the main bottleneck for them. No, the actual incentive is that people will eventually benchmark their models on bang-per-buck basis and models that chew through tokens are not going to be competitive. It's the same reason why the "Intel/AMD are intentionally sandbagging their CPUs so they can sell more CPUs" theory doesn't work.

Well, it only works when one competitor is far enough ahead they can play games like that. At least currently in AI there is no moat so we wouldn't expect that to be occurring

Thats actually super interesting and why I really don’t like the whole .md folder structures or even any CLAUDE.md. It just seems most of the time you really just want to give it what it needs for best results. The headline is really bullshit, yes, I like the testing tho.

CLAUDE.md in my projects only has coding / architecture guidelines. Here's what not to do. Here's what you should do. Here are my preferences. Here's where the important things are. Even though my CLAUDE.md is small though, often my rules are ignored. Not always though, so it's still at least somewhat useful!

People like to make the comparison between zip file compressions, where you can degrade something by continually compressing. Same with using jpeg or mp3. But I like to use the analogy of the game "Telephone" (also called "Chinese Whispers"). I think it also highlights how fraught natural language is and just how quickly it can degrade. I think a lot of people are insufficiently impressed with how good we are at communicating at all.

> People like to make the comparison between zip file compressions, where you can degrade something by continually compressing. What people have this misunderstanding?

The problem is that the model doesn't know what you mean by "bad code" a priori. If you list specific issues you care about (e.g. separation of concerns, don't repeat yourself, single responsibility, prefer pure functions, etc) it's pretty good at picking them out. Humans have this problem as well, we're just more opinionated.

Yes, that's exactly what I mentioned earlier, if you describe the implementation, you can get something you can work with long-term. But if you just describe an idea, and let the LLM do both the design of the implementation and the implementation itself, eventually it seems to fall over itself and changes takes longer and longer time.

Show HN: Free Alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue (github.com/zachlatta)

https://github.com/rabfulton/Auriscribe My take for X11 Linux systems. Small and low dependency except for the model download.

This thread is a beautiful intro into our near future. Yet more and more custom coded software. Takes me back to the days of late 90s. Loving this!

I just vibe coded a my own NaturalReader replacement. The subscription was $110/year... and I just canceled it. Chatterbox TTS (from Resemble AI) does the voice generation, WhisperX gives word-level timestamps so you can click any word to jump, and FastAPI ties it all together with SSE streaming so audio starts playing before the whole thing is done generating. There's a ~5s buffer up front while the first chunk generates, but after that each chunk streams in faster than realtime. So playback rarely stalls. It took about 4 hours today... wild.

For those using something like this daily, what key combinations do you use to record and cancel. I’m using my capslock right now but was curious about others

Right option. Push to talk

Suicide Linux (2009) (qntm.org)

The 120 days of *buntu (2011) was maybe inspired by this? A collection of 120 strange, useless, funny ubuntu variants: https://yugo.at/projects/120days/ and pdf here (78Mb) https://yugo.at/pdfs/120days_of_buntu_Danja-Vasiliev_Gordan-Savicic.pdf

> As another, slightly more serious suggestion, if Suicide Linux randomly deleted a single file without telling you every time you made a typographical error, it might be an interesting look into the stability of your operating system and an educational tool for diagnosing and repairing corrupted systems. I seem to recall an experimental indie game that worked this way. If your character died, a random file on your hard disk was deleted. It was a really interesting idea to highlight our implicit assumptions around what games can and can't do, and a way to raise the stakes of the gameplay experience.

And here is thought sl was a pain in the ass. I hate that train.

Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers (lirbank.com)

I think you could still do it against a real database—you're already setting it up to a known state before each test, right? Obviously there'd be more runs but I'd expect (hope) that each task would be sufficiently small that the number of permutations would stay within reason. There would be some challenges for sure. Likely optimistic concurrent patterns would require an equivalent of loom's `yield_now` [1] to avoid getting stuck. And you'd probably need a way to detect one transaction waiting for another's lock to get out of situations like your update lock vs barrier example. I vaguely recall PostgreSQL might have some system catalog table for that or something. [1] https://docs.rs/loom/0.7.2/loom/#yielding

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more exciting this idea gets. The walkthrough in the article shows exactly why - I intentionally (to later show why that is wrong) place the barrier between the SELECT and UPDATE, which deadlocks instead of triggering the race. Getting the placement right requires reasoning about where the critical interleaving point is. An exhaustive approach would surface both outcomes automatically: this placement deadlocks, this one exposes the bug, this one passes. That would remove the hardest part of writing these tests.

Martin Kleppmann has this tool that's quite relevant: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2014/11/25/hermitage-testing-the-i-in-acid.html

Is there any good reason to use stored procedures in 2026?

I'd think so. Stored procedures let you do multi-statement sequences in fewer round trips. In 2026 larger systems are as likely as ever to run PostgreSQL on a different machine (or machines) than the application server. While latency between the two generally goes down over time, it's still not nothing. You may care about the latency of individual operations or the throughput impact of latency while holding a lock (see Amdahl's law). Of course, the reasons not to use stored procedures still apply. They're logic, but they're versioned with the database schema, not with your application, which can be a pain.

14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight (smithsonianmag.com)

Whats unique or special about these particular tessellations? My students have been making similar ones for 10 years (and googled them)

This is very cool, but I don't really see the direct connection between a paper structure which is very strong in compression and emergency accommodation (which the article really focuses on). Tents don't need to be strong in compression - there's no weight on the roof. And obviously paper is not a material that scales up or would be practical for outdoor use. Just a bit confused by the obvious mismatch here - maybe it's the journalist putting more weight on the disaster application than the kid did.

I thought it was about the compressability of the material to save space, perhaps?

That’s already a thing. Infill. There’s lots of variations of infill that all have different strengths and weaknesses.

There is also 3d printing origami shapes [1]. But 3D printing is still plastic(usually). The idea of origami steel sheets has stuck on my mind ever since I found out about laser welding. Cutting thin 2mm sheets of steel, stitching them back together in different shapes, and holding tons of weight? That sounds very compelling to me. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNVBK7-h9Fs

Don't get hung up on "14 year old". Pay attention to "took up origami 6 years ago". That's 6 years of passionate learning, experimenting and improvement.

I wonder what was happening 6 years ago that gave him a chance to develop and explore the hobby.

I'm sure nothing of significance was happening about 6 years ago that allowed for more free time either... :)

Can you really say that unless you switched fields multiple times? Of course you'll pick up on math and physics faster in high school than in college or postgrad, but that's because the problems get way, way harder as you progress. I've found that even in my late 30s I can still easily pick up new skills outside my field of expertise as long as I start with the basics that could also be picked up by a high-schooler. I started learning a new language last year and thanks to modern study apps, I actually find it easier today. Of course it will still take a long time to become an expert, but I'm not sure it would need more total hours than if I had started 20 years ago. It just gets more difficult to allocate the necessary hours for learning.

ooc, what are the modern study apps that you used?

Privilege is bad grammar (tadaima.bearblog.dev)

Privilege is working at a startup

I've noticed this too when dealing with people with power. If you want to be seen as a peer, you have to stop caring. It's weird but it's definitely in the culture. As someone who learned English as a second language, it's especially weird since I worked hard to speak and write good English.

It's not intelligence, respect, signaling or status. It's saving time, the thing we can't bank or stretch or keep. Doing that reflects value priorities that are likely to lead to success and happiness. We would all be this brief if we weren't constrained otherwise. People who care deeply about their time are this brief even if they shouldn't be. You can even say nothing in ways that influence others in the ways you want (from spiritual teachers and parents to politicians and mafia dons). (Wealth and power trashing is all too easy these days. Pick a hard target?)

It's both. Saving time is a form of status signaling. Professionalism usually entails spending longer on something than is optimal for effective communication, which is a way of signaling "my time is less valuable than yours". Writing short messages with grammatical errors is a way of signaling "my time is more valuable than your comprehension".

Many people point to the bad spelling and grammar of these powerful, abusive people and they say wow, that's a flex. My own reaction is more like these people are stupid . It's not power that makes them write poorly. They're not capable of getting it right. Look at what Noam Chomsky wrote to Epstein as a contrast. Multiple paragraphs and usually coherent. He makes Epstein look dumb. (Which he was.) I don't support what and to whom Chomsky was writing, but he is better at writing.

Exactly. Remember this is a guy who was "best friends" with Donald Trump. It's just a group of idiots who became rich and powerful through a combination of luck and criminality.

Bad grammar is disrespect. Underlings have to swallow that disrespect. It is just a power game. The next level is simply to insult everyone, and everyone will still remain submissive.

Except they don't just talk this way with underlings but everyone including their peers.

You have to deliberately turn off autocorrection on most phones

I hare auto correct. It ducks me over all the time.

The boss was following Strunk & White's advice to omit needless letters.

You must be referring to the abridged Strnk n Wyt

In one ear and out the other, huh? Do you think deliberately misunderstanding words makes you clever? Are you sticking it to those got-dang SJWs?

Hearing privilege is a real thing!

And getting away with it despite that is certainly a kind of privilege.

https://manhattanprep.com/gre/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2013/09/inigomontoyameme.jpg

Using this logic, all of the homeless people are counter signaling then. And there are plenty of executives who wear suits. Also signaling has one l, so thus you are signaling your importance. Or maybe you just can't assume you know what's going on inside someone else's head.

No... you have to actually be important to countersignal with your clothing. And yes, those plenty of executives are precisely in the "no signaling" category. Mere executives don't get to countersignal with their clothing in such a visible way. Majority owners do.

just to note, signaling has two L's in UK spelling

There's also: - No signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else because that's been my style since forever and I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.

Honest signalling is still a thing. In fact it's rather common, it's one of the reasons most poisonous animals actually look poisonous.

> You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences This is an incorrect definition of a signal. I agree that intention is irrelevant. But a powerful person blending in with their dress isn’t actually sending a signal. There is nothing to perceive because they look like everyone else. The signal is only in if they’re recognized. Your definition of signal is congruous with any trait someone thinks a powerful person has whether it’s real or imagined.

If you dress down in a context where formal attire is expected, it's a signal. What it signals depends on what happens. If you're shunned and avoided, then you're just a loser or a hobo. If you're clearly valued, listened to with interest etc, despite that mismatch, it is a countersignal. You could only afford to do this by having high status and importance in the community that outweighs such expectations. It doesn't matter if you simply don't care and never think about how you dress and this just comes naturally. The signal is still picked. The person to whom general expectations and rules don't quite apply the same way as to the average person is the one of higher status. In other words, it's not enough to flaunt the rules, you also have to get away with it for it to count.

On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart. But to expand on the spelling topic, good spelling and grammar is now free with AI tools. It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.

Have you actually read a research paper, ever? They are FILLED with jargon (that just as easily could be an ordinary English word instead) ... and giant paragraphs made up of ten sentences all combined into one with semi-colons ... and with all sorts of other butchering of the English language. Scientific research papers follow their own grammar, which is specific to the research community ... and that grammar is atrocious!

> On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart. I often find that to be true. Another important factor is that research skill is correlated with writing skill. Someone who's at the top of their field is likely to be talented in other ways, too, and one such talented is making complex topics easier to understand.

Informal or conversational tone has always been the gold-standard for most communications. People just piss on it because they like to feel smart. But, most writing has purpose. And usually fulfilling that purpose requires readers to comprehend what you're writing. Conversational tone is easy to comprehend, and shockingly less ambiguous than you'd think, especially when tailored to the target audience.

> But, most writing has purpose. Over the years, I've become an odd fan of documents that start with a "purpose of this document" section. Sure, it seems weirdly bureaucratic at first, but as time goes on, you start seeing documents that don't really know what their focus is anymore, because different authors decided it was the least-bad place to dump their own guide, checklist, or opinions. L for example, imagine four documents about an API: A how-to guide; fine implementation details; a diagnostic checklist; a primer for executives or salespeople considering it as a product.

> Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human Except that this signal is now being abused. People add into the prompts requesting a few typos. And requesting an informal style. There was a guy complaining about AI generated comments on substack, where the guy had noticed the pattern of spelling mistakes in the AI responses. It is common enough now. But yes, typos do match the writer - you can still notice certain mistakes that a human might make that an AI wouldn't generate. Humans are good at catching certain errors but not others, so there is a large bias in the mistakes they miss. And keyboard typos are different from touch autoincorrection. AI generated typos have their own flavour.

Yeah, I'd argue a large portion of what LLMs are being used for can be characterized as "counterfeiting" traditionally-useful signals. Signals that told us there was another human on the other side of the conversation, that they were attentive, invested, smart, empathizing, etc. Counterfeiting was possible before, but it had a higher bar because you had to hire a ghostwriter.