Unlurker|Replay|About
Opus 5.5 agents discover 2 room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates (vals.ai)
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Anyone remember LK99 lol
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After the LK-99 debacle I'm taking this with a truck load of salt.
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I am not sure how this process looks like. When they "discover" these, what are they actually doing? The agents ran quantum-mechanical simulations of each crystal with the standard method for this, density functional theory, at two levels of approximation: a faster one (PBE+U) and a slower, usually more accurate one (HSE06). The band gaps and spin windows below come from the more accurate one. So the agent runs a classic simulation or I am missing something.
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Current frontier LLMs empower effectively anyone with limitless knowledge. Historically, if I wanted to hire an engineer to, say, create something like this I would have needed a multi-million dollar budget. Now, anyone with $200 (or less) can achieve it.
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You are vastly overestimating what has been achieved here. This is something a couple of materials science grad students can do in limited time for poor compensation as well. The expensive budget is for the part that comes next.
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I could have gotten this in one prompt lmao
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Ugh. Unless this has been actually experimentally verified to be a room-temperature and room-pressure superconductor, it's about as ground breaking as "Yet another promising nuclear fusion candidate theoretically described."
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Well, given that this is a semiconductor, and not a superconductor, I don't see how that is relevant?
How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague lableak in Siberia? (lesswrong.com)
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https://www.cdc.gov/plague/faq/ [1] ... 404 So obviously there is nothing to worry about [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague#cite_note-CDC2015-1
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Given the choice, most things tend not to be catastrophic. Doesn't mean there aren't catastrophes - there are.
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Is the "Why this might be a big deal". Just vibes? I see no references. Where does Genetically engineer variants could have an R0 of 5-12 come from. All the rest of them are just like "if this is bad, it could be bad." "If it wasn't a big deal, the Russian government wouldn't put much effort into covering it up." Isn't the Russian instinct just cover everything up? "If there is only one infection, then why quarantine 5 hospitals?" Because bad to the local community and bad to the world are two different metrics. It could be _real_ bad to the local community, without being threatening globally.
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> "Russian equivalent of HHS is now denying there was any accident at the lab at all. " ive seen this movie before
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Related: Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies from Plague https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960084
GitHub Actions Has Problems (githubstatus.com)
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I moved my CI to a runner on my Forgejo (using a cheap Hetzner server) and it works beautifully and reliably.
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Nice to see that the companies pushing for AI get to feel the suffer from AI.
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We all know that AI is compounding the problem, but I wonder how much of it is actually AI writing extremely overly-complex (and likely inefficient) CI pipelines for vibe coders who have absolutely no idea what CI is or why they would need it. I'm sure the AI makes all sorts of great arguments to the user about why they need it and the user, none the wiser, blindly accepts it all. Why wouldn't they? It costs them absolutely nothing on an OSS repo. I know that frontier models (Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5) at some point always end up writing a test that unnecessarily elongates CI. I've seen everything from literal sleep calls in a test unit to arbitrarily deciding a test needs to download a 100MB file to prove something works. As a engineer, I catch these, but a vibe coder has no idea there's probably hundreds of these in their code making CI take 10-20 minutes. Hell, they probably don't even click the "Actions" tab. What a mess.
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Yeah, CI being free for public repos, kind of encourages people to just add whatever AI suggests to CI. For one of my green-field projects that I just vibe-coded with AI's (where Claude, Codex and Gemini critique each other's design and code), a PR could go through many iterations (commits) until every AI approves, and if every commit runs the CI, it'd be very slow. So I eventually come up with a mechanism to only run CI when all reviewers approve. That improves things a lot.
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if only there was a way to say "i know wtf im doing, give my workers precedence, i'll pay for it" the billing model for gh actions is ... i still don't understand it.
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I'm guessing it just has more to do with commiting and pushing and automatic CI builds. Nothing about complexity, simply github setup such an easy automated system but AI cares not about whether their commit+push is going to kcik off a whole rebuild. Same thing happens when I run docker build loops. The AI gives very little shit, unless I tell it, about not busting cache; so it'll sit there for hours making minor changes just to make a 30 minute build. AI has not concern about how long anything takes, in general, but it if it's just waiting for it to return, it won't get impatient.
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I don't think it's just AI, it's an AI layer on top of the Microsoft layer. Both of those are inefficiencies on their own, but combined they're pretty spectacular. Just imagine spec-driven development over there and the titles of everyone with a hand in the markdown.
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I wonder about this too. Whenever you ask a question to do something in GitHub Actions it comes up with an answer that kinda works, but I would've never chosen because it works around the inherent limitations of GitHub Actions. Those limitations were put in place for a reason, and using the work-around feels dirty. I recognize that all platforms are flawed once you start to do more than they offer, but I feel that with AI its easier to build the plumbing around it. The question shouldn't be: can you do this, but 'is this the right thing to do'?
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My company switched to a different provider for our action runners partly for reliability reasons. Despite that, jobs still aren't being dispatched.
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I moved my CI runners to Bunny recently, and not only is it cheaper, but it's much faster as well.
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Looking for alternatives, Bunny = BunnyShell?
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With all these problems, it would be interesting to understand what incentivises GitHub to continue to offer 2000 free GHA minutes per month for private repos.
I came here to read a knock down drag out flaming fundamental indictment of the entire GitHub Actions ideology and the horse it rode in on, and all I got was this incident report.
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Similar to what you're looking for, now that GitHub is fully on Azure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
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> horse I think you mean unicorn
At this point, a hole in the market is open for a competitor offering a private SaaS solution. The downward trend has had a long tail, but these outages seem to have become business as usual for GitHub in 2026.
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There are some. I'll build one just for you if you sign a contract saying you'll actually use it.
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I feel like you might be my boss
Yet, companies are still choosing Github, so I don't know if all these outages have an impact. https://bloomberry.com/data/github/
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Migrating off GitHub Actions is a non-trivial engineering effort. I know we've been talking for six months about "reducing our dependence" on GHA but it hasn't become a priority yet The annoyedAtGitHub counter is so far monotonically increasing though.
Interestingly all the separate enterprise cloud instances show the same thing: https://us.githubstatus.com/posts/details/P7VGB7I https://au.githubstatus.com/posts/details/PO54BK8 https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/details/PRESCZY https://jp.githubstatus.com/posts/details/P0N7ZG5 What's the point of (supposedly) separate and isolated data residency deployments if they all have single point of failure?
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The point of a data residency thingie is for data residency, not uptime. It's a fig leaf, though - America can access all data residency thingies.
GH Actions problems are so frequent that they are really not newsworthy anymore. Most of the time they don't even show up on the status page because they seem to be completely random (e.g. manually cancelling and restarting may resolve the issue).
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At this point, I think it would be more noteworthy if they cross X days with it working without issue. "Github actions remains online after 180 days" would certainly be a headline.
The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse (cbc.ca)
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"Data from the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows a huge rise in young men calling helplines with gambling addictions. (Health Canada reports men are three times more likely than women to have a gambling problem.) Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry." ------------ We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it. Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them. Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned . That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.
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> Oliffe said that in the last decade, there has been "low government investment in men's mental health." When has it ever been otherwise? Was there some past time I've forgotten about where government spending on men's mental health was high? I'm just not convinced by this article. Male teens are moody and anxious? Seems pretty normal. That was me in the 1980s for sure. We had no idea what the future held, other than we'd probably all be nuked at some point pretty soon.
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It's because they're rational. The American dream is dead, and the Canadian one is too. You can work your entire life with nothing to show for it. Never escaping a landlord. No time or money or third places to have a life. Women don't want children in this environment. The worst people are leading and in control of society. The insatiable greed of billionaires ruined whatever was good about the social compact. Families torn apart by the lies shown to them by Zuckerberg and co. No time for friends. Can't even build a PC because Sam Altman bought all of the compute.
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This is my understanding. A big part of the decline of mental health is simply a decline of the state of the things we value in Western society, and people observing the delta. I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.
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One thing I've noticed: the amount of gambling ads targeted towards young males; kinda wild. I'm glad that I'm not growing up in this era.
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Reading your comment has just brought to mind the sheer amount of betting and stock trading ads I get on YouTube currently. I’m in my late 30s so a little out of the “young males” category.
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Seems like ads for sporting events and sports podcasts annd jersey sponsors are asymptotically approaching 100%.
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I'm actually writin an article about youth mental health for my substack. I'll post it on HN when it's done, but the tl;dr is that the evidence for the youth mental health crisis is very thin at best. Despite what this article says, the youth suicide rate in Canada is near its all-time low. Self-reported youth distress is up, but our only 2 datapoints are 2012 and 2022 (middle of the pandemic). Every group has also reported worsening mental health, and the adult suicide rate is (and always has been) much worse than the youth suicide rate. I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern, but I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine.
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I also quickly thought of bias when I read this, and that concern was reinforced by the bit about substance abuse rates in male-predominant fields of work. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that has been the case for a very long time. Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."
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What's this argument? It's thin because we don't have enough data to say otherwise and everyone else is doing worse? Go get more data then before negating the signals and the two confirming data points we have. I "don't buy" is not a reason. It could be everyone is doing worse and men are doing worse than most (or impacted the most), those are not mutually exclusive.
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I appreciate your critical analysis of the topic, even if you turn out to be incorrect in the end! I'll definitely read your article when it's posted, if I can remember (or if perhaps I can subscribe?)
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> I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern Double negative makes this hard to read
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It may be easier to read that line as "I'm not saying mental health is totally fine"
After bankruptcy, he was banned from sports betting sites. Then he found Kalshi (npr.org)
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> She went on: "If you ask our millions of traders, they would emphatically tell you that an exchange model is significantly healthier than a sportsbook model: our profits aren't tied to trader losses, so we don't have the same predatory incentives." Really wish the author had pushed back more on this. They have different predatory incentives, benefitting from encouraging people to make a large number of slightly stupid bets rather than a smaller number of very stupid ones. I would love to hear Kalshi explain what non-predatory value the 15 minute crypto markets have.
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I hadn't heard this was a feature that you could self-exclude / ban yourself from the main apps. Interesting. I think the "he was banned" part is a bit misleading then.
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The loopholes discussed in the article 100% should be closed, making it easier for problem gamblers that want out to get out, but there will always be the convenience factor that will cause at least some damage. Ease of access also means ease of misuse unfortunately.
In no way is it better now that we have online gambling. The entire industry should be illegal and barred from participation in the traditional banking system.
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Nowhere near solving cancer, but hey we got TikTok and Facebook and crypto and AI swarms and endless porn and gambling, and an increasingly radical, divided, depressed, and anxious humanity.
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While I in no way support habitual gambling, the second you push for something like that, you will have a sizable group of "freedom activists" up in arms. More likely, I see it being more-heavily taxed to make it less appealing.
The Future of Mathematics (terrytao.wordpress.com)
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>Can every interesting mathematical question be answered that way? Probably not, and even questions that can may have more interesting and satisfying solutions that invoke novel ideas and insights. Perhaps, in the near future, AI systems will be able to come up with such insights, but, at the very least, let’s recognize that we are not there yet. This keeps being repeated by AI skeptics, yet AI keeps solving more and more complex tasks. We've reached the point that it's even started solving Millennium problems. >Telling us that some AI agent is spinning out theorems that are highly interesting to it and other AI agents does nothing for us. This is the future of pushing the frontier though. AIs need to be pushed to get better and better. AI understanding of math is millions times more important than human's.
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Tasks are not simply integer “difficulties” where, if your “intelligence” exceeds the “difficulty” then you will solve it. The question is to what extent AI will affect creation of new branches and elegant ideas in mathematics. This question applies to every area. Has it created an interesting new way of thought in any area other than those where massive tree search can be mistaken for such? I don’t think it’s impossible but the evidence doesn’t point clearly to it.
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What do you expect from Avigad, who works on Lean? Tao is herding the sheep into the AI enclosure with a stream of AI-positive guest posts. There are no concerns about being funded by a small number of rich AI-boosting foundations, no concerns that intuition and radical new thoughts might be impeded by staring into a glowing rectangle all day and only some concerns about job losses. It is all very well for the directors and the tenured, who apparently hope they can solve a major problem with AI while avoiding hard work.
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> [mathematics] being funded by a small number of rich [people] Historically this has always been the case. Rich people or people supported by rich people did math, while peasants worked the fields and workers worked in factories/mines/etc. This is just regression toward the mean.
Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model (reflection.ai)
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Is it worse than the top open-weight Chinese models? Yes, it is, but at least the West has joined the party, and hopefully they will iterate on this and keep up the pace. The Chinese labs will certainly release new and powerful versions soon, so it's all about relative pace right now.
This appears to be larger than DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, more expensive to run, and worse on every measured metric. Am I missing something?
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Reflection is explicitly marketed as the 'US' DeepSeek seems like they are aiming to provide both inference and RLaaS for american companies and western govts. even if they never fully beat deepseek if they get close enough the fact that they're American will help them close deals
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Yes it's (hopefully) not distilled from every single major American provider.
Who's funding this?
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Looks like Nvidia, Eric Schmidt, Sequoia, and a host of others https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/09/reflection-raises-2b-to-be-americas-open-frontier-ai-lab-challenging-deepseek/
I disagree. Sure let them play and see if they can improve. But this model has more compute and more training data than the predecessors it fails to surpass. That only means their training regime is inferior if their predecessors did so much more with so much less. That inferiority should not be encouraged.
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The reality is they trained a model and it looks worse on benchmarks than Qwen or GLM. I don’t see how sharing the weights hurts anyone? Even when Llama 4 came out and it was a dumpster fire, it didn’t affect me personally. > That only means their training regime is inferior if their predecessors did so much more with so much less Hard to imagine how that wouldn’t be the case. They probably missed the boat on distilling Claude (or their lawyers said no), they probably didn’t hire an army of math PhDs to write reasoning traces, they don’t have millions of DAUs in a coding agent to train from, and they probably have less money, less experience, fewer top tier researchers, and fewer resources for experiments. They are an underdog without a doubt. None of that means they shouldn’t release their model.
I remember being in the room with pretraining day 1 to help monitor the training job launch. Watching this model train from day 1 has been an amazing experience!
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What sort of outputs or telemetry is monitored on a large pre-training run?
Always glad to see more open-weight models, but this caption on the 2nd demo image had me do a double-take: "Land or Water Generalization Experiment: We recreated the viral X puzzle by asking Beam to create a fixed 180×90 grid for longitudes -179° to 179° and latitudes -89° to 89°, with 16,200 points. This puzzle is a few days old, so could not appear in the training data, thus testing the model’s generalization. Beam gets 95.5% coverage right, putting us between Opus 5 (92.5%) and Fable 5 (97.8%), which shows how well it generalizes to novel new tasks." Oof, no, this "puzzle is a few days old" is incorrect even if it's a social media trend just recently. Asking a model to generate a world map in this way is _at least_ from August 2025 as it appeared on LessWrong at that time: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xwdRzJxyqFqgXTWbH/how-does-a-blind-model-see-the-earth
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I don't think age of the puzzle even matters, all models have search capacities these days
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Is search part of the model or the harness?
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> all models have search capacities these days one would hope that they disable websearch and internet access (maybe all tools?) when doing generalization testing?
> Beam is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 501 billion total parameters, 23 billion active, built for coding, reasoning, and agentic workloads. > Beam’s capabilities come from major investments in both pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL). We pretrained the model on 23.8 trillion diverse, curated, high-quality tokens from the web and proprietary licensed datasets, matching or outperforming available similar-sized open base models. In parallel, we developed the algorithms, training environments, and infrastructure needed to sustain high-compute RL at exceptional scale. Our high-compute RL run generated over 100 million rollouts on 10.5K NVIDIA GB300 GPUs over 4 weeks of training. Early access, no weights no tech details, just a sign up here for info
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> Beam is undergoing final red-teaming and evaluations. You can sign up here for early access to the model. > We will release the weights, technical report, model card, and developer artifacts later this month .
And also a "proprietary data set" hahaha... Probably just means they don't want to show it, and it is data, that either they shouldn't have, or that there is nothing special about their training data and it is just meant to sound like there is some secret ingredient, while there is none.
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this is very normal for frontier lab companies. you need good data either synthetic or labelled (all the chinese open source models have their own armies of data labelers)
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Not sharing the data is pretty standard because 1) it tends to get the lawyers involved and 2) good data is critical for getting good results. Imo you can get better results with great data and generic modeling techniques than with incredible modeling techniques and crappy data. Because if you have crappy data, you won’t even know if your model is good because your evals will also be bad. This is why Anthropic is throwing a fit about the Chinese distillation “attacks”. Clean reasoning traces are gold.
One person is now a quorum at the SEC (ft.com)
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Reminds me of what the USA did a few years ago with the WTO Appellate Body (the "supreme court of world trade"). Since all new appellate judges would need US approval, the US (starting under Obama) just refused to approve judges, until the number of judges fell below the needed quorum, and then there could be no appeals. The solution? A bunch of the other countries in the WTO just got together and made their own appellate body without the US, and presumably with blackjack and hookers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body#History To this day the WTO is still partially nonfunctional and the stop-gap is still being used.
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This is really bad. Now you can have one puppet, and no dissent. The FCC is set up for this same tactic. 2 vacancies, so down to the minimum quorum there right now. They can change the rule and let Anna Gomez's term expire. Suddenly we'll be reviewing everyone's licenses and seeing all the TV and radio content becoming more right-wing.
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> all the TV and radio content becoming more right-wing Already happening. Also, I support diversity in media without regards to ideology because diversity in media increases the peoples' power and freedom against the ownership and political power classes.
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We are sitting in an uncanny valley regarding law. Once independent agencies are no longer independent, partly due to the expansion of the unitary executive viewpoint in both the Supreme Court and the current executive branch, and the rather obsequious Congress we have that instead of being “jealous to protect its power” is kowtowing to anything the Trump administration wants. The supreme courts ruling on presidential immunity, chevron deference, and the dismantling of the ideas of an independent agency have all come together to create a dangerous situation for all of us. The Supreme Court, whether because the of their own alignment with partisanship or some other more nefarious reason, have gutted the idea of an independent agency (except for the Federal Reserve, which is special, but not for any legal reason, but rather because even conservative SCOTUS is not willing to risk the fallout of logically applying their unitary executive view of government to the Fed). So Congress put a lot of regulatory power in these once independent and non-partisan agencies, and that’s gone. Combine that with a president that is overtly partisan and vindictive, and you have a problem where SCOTUS has created a situation that has elevated the whims of a president above the law Congress created. We will be feeling the affects of this decision for generations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the catalyst for the failure of the American form of government. Our system cannot sustain when coequal branches of government kowtow to politics.
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Congress still has the power here. It could write a law saying the executive can't do XYZ. It chooses not to, for obvious reasons.
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If Congresspeople can be pushed out of the party or out of the party's favor (and therefore office) by POTUS, then they de facto do not have power. The best distillation of our current conundrum I've heard is that our framers architected a system where the branches of government would compete (i.e. protect their power) against each other. Today, we have people in each branch willing to forego their own branch's power in exchange for greater party power.
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I'm just excited for the next POTUS to use SEAL Team 6 to quell his political opposition as "an official act" and then I'm sure SCOTUS and Congress start reevaluating some things.
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I genuinely believe that once the current administration is out of office the new President should strongly campaign in favor of the strongest possible changes to prevent dictatorship: constitutional amendments to reverse some of the most egregious harm done by the Supreme Court and the general inaction in response to fascism. Then if the opposition party isn't supportive, the new President should set a date after which they threaten to abuse their powers in exactly the same ways Trump has abused his. Surely that would motivate the opposition party, right?
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IMO just start with SEAL Team 6's "official actions" and then you can start proposing changes. That way you just need to motivate the people who didn't already attempt a coup.
I met Paul Atkins, around this time last year. One of his biggest problems (like anyone running a federal department) was that he's not allowed to hire or increase his budget, yet the demand for work that needs SEC attention is not going down. And that's after his dept, and all others, were required to perform layoffs under DOGE.
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Well he has a plan to cut his department's work in half!
The key change seems to be innocuous: > The Commission is modifying 17 CFR 200.41, which establishes the Commission's quorum requirement. Three commissioners will continue to constitute a quorum of the Commission, with two important exceptions. First, consistent with the current rule, if the number of commissioners in office is two or one, that number is sufficient for a quorum. Second, if the number of commissioners in office minus the number disqualified from consideration with respect to a matter is two or one, then that number of commissioners constitutes a quorum for purposes of that matter.
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From what I can tell, the only actual change is that the current rule says "two" instead of "two or one" in the last part about what happens if some Commissioners are disqualified with respect to a matter.
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It's hard to tell if someone's oblivious or engaging in bad faith these days.
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Totally. My first reaction was: "This person must not be from around here." But my second was: "Oh, no, maybe this is just more targeted ignorance"
“Seems to be innocuous” is genuinely funny. It must be true for almost all types of corruption and evil that if you zoom in enough, and rob the action of all surrounding context, that it could be described as “innocuous”. How aptly technocratic.
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This has been an excellent method to detect high-IQ but actually-retarded people. MAGA actions are distilled to their most procedural possible conception, isolated from all relevant context, and then assessed. May as well go the full nine yards: "The Enabling Act 2026 appears to actually just be an edit to a .docx file. Hmm... My aloofness is a sign of my intelligence."
> First, consistent with the current rule, if the number of commissioners in office is two or one, that number is sufficient for a quorum. Luckily enough, the Supreme Court has given the administration the green light to fire members of commissions at will... save the Fed, because mumble mumble history and tradition mumble.
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> because mumble mumble history and tradition mumble Definitely has nothing to do with SCOTUS's retirement accounts, no sir.
Questions for Believers in AI Consciousness (endsdontjustifythemeans.com)
Question 1: Do you believe that AI is conscious? I can't tell. I experience something I choose to define as consciousness, but can't tell if anything else has the same experience. Question 2: Do you believe that AI has an internal world? Trivially yes, the current state of the model and context in latent space is such a world. I don't think it's aware of its own state any more than humans are aware of their own neuronal action potentials. Question 3: Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world? Large language models using a transformer architecture, with a working "context" memory. Question 4: Do you think that a group of things can share an internal world? I do not think the distinction between an internal world and an external existence is well-defined. Mu. Even if it were well-defined, my own brain is composed of numerous neurons, so my internal world is constructed from a large group of things acting in concert. Unless single subatomic particles have an internal world then I don't see any way to not have an internal world be shared among a group of things. Question 5: Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world? Trivially yes. Question 6: Do you think perhaps you should be clarifying further when you say you believe that AI is conscious? Do you think you might be contributing to current confusion? I don't know how to say whether AI is conscious, because I don't know how to tell whether any consciousness other than the one I can directly experience actually exists. I suspect it's a universal property of computational systems above a certain complexity computing certain sorts of algorithm, so something like a blue jay is conscious but a rock isn't, and a computer may be depending on which program it's running. If that's the case, current AI systems are likely complex enough and the right sort of algorithm to be conscious.
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> Trivially yes, the current state of the model and context in latent space is such a world. I don't think it's aware of its own state any more than humans are aware of their own neuronal action potentials. It's a static world model, so if one accepts that, then LLMs are a 'static mind' but not yet 'conscious'. Once that internal model becomes dynamic and its changes subject to its experinces (like us), then we can revisit this q of whether mechanical minds can achieve consciousness. tldr; mind =/= consciousness
Something with an internal world naturally has its own drivers and desires. If you leave a AI model alone, it doesn't just wander off into the world, develop ideas about its destiny and begin chasing them. It just sits waiting for the next prompt. It doesn't daydream when we're not looking, at least AFAIK.
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Your entire nervous system is in a constant loop polling the external world. Add that to current AIs and see what happens. Honestly, though, the next big thing that needs to happen is proper "learning" in real-time. Allow for training (weight modulation) and queries to happen simultaneously. That's the full package.
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> It just sits waiting for the next prompt Even that is overselling it IMO. The model is just data. It's not waiting for anything.
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"Just data" is a big thing. The configuration of atoms in a human are also "just data". If you meant it otherwise and had some extra context, you can clarify.
what do you mean by "physical system"? and "beyond physics"?
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Physical system as in any real world entity, like cars, trees, people that are physical objects existing in the physical world. As far as we know we like all of these are made of atoms and their (electrical, nuclear, etc) interactions with each other. Beyond physics as in some people think consciousness can be aphyiscal. I am not sure what they seem to mean it is something not of this universe or not physical.
I'm curious about any answers to number 3. I think distributed computation is pretty messy. I'm pretty sure panpsychism has answers for most of the other questions. I'm sure a commentor will correct me though.
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Its easy, humans are distributed too. We are a collection of neurons, organs, etc. If you look at it merely at the level of processing units like she does with individual cpu or transistor, then the equivalent here is the neuron or the tissue. And no single neuron or tissue comprises the human in total.
We have a pretty well-defined biological criterion for life that includes metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction, cellular organization, etc. A computer doesn't satisfy those criteria. So we can confidently say a computer isn't alive.
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We had various theories and criterion about life, but new life forms like viruses, hydrothermal vents changed those views. I would not get too sure that a system that doesn't look like existing biology cannot have life until some sharper and clearer criterion arises.
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Of course but again, that does not refute the fact that we can confidently say computers are not alive or biological beings, which was my point. Perhaps maybe one day we can prove that they are alive and we might have to rethink how we treated them but for now, we can certainly say its not alive until proven otherwise.
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Philosophers and scientists have been wrong on this before, Descartes and his ilk didn't believes animals to be conscious. Computers are a general medium. They are Turing complete as are the current known physical laws. That alone is not reason to dismiss them. I personally stay cautious and err on the safe side regarding the AI consciousness question.
Here's one "philosopher" 's test: Can it feel hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, fear, tiredness? If yes to any of the previous: does it have agency to address and satisfy those feelings? If yes to any of the previous: is it able to willingly delay instant gratification? If yes: conscious. If not: instincts-based being. Note: you will find it challenging to agree on definitions of the words "feel", "satisfy", "willingly" and probably all the rest.
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You are already in some trouble at step one - how do you figure out if something has any of those feelings? Just asking or observing the behavior does not seem good enough, one can easily write a program that prints »Yes, I am tired, I need some sleep.« and with more effort one could build a robot that behaves as if it was tired. On the other hand I have a lot of sympathy for something I heard the first time from Daniel Dennett, that something like pain is just the sum of its effects. It occupies your mind and prevents you from thinking clearly, it makes you not move or touch the body part that hurts, it dulls other sense, and so on. If you removed all those effects, what would be left of pain? With that understanding you could probably probe if something is experiencing pain from the outside by looking for those effects.
> However, the selection of the outcome is probabilistic (via Born rule), and randomness is not strictly Turing-computable unless you assume access to a random oracle. I have thought about this a lot more than you have so good luck. I've already spent enough time in this thread.
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>access to a random oracle. So, Monte-Carlo method.
Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have (deadparrotbbs.com)
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>There are not many computer file formats I would trust to still be readable fifty years from now, but plain text is one of them. Just the other day I had opus read a 10 year old proprietary file format. The idea that we will lose the ability to use file formats is not consistent with reality.
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Because no single person or entity can own it.
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I greatly prefer plaintext in most cases where Markdown ends up being used. WYSIWYG is more useful than formatting in these cases. It's annoying when there are input boxes like on HN where a newline isn't a newline, * does something special, etc. Oh and you could just have LLMs write the Markdown, but chances are no human reads that, or even if you do, the formatting is going to be insane.
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Hijacking the plain text discussion to ask what the best tools are to convert plain text to lexed/parsed output? I'm assuming any tool in this regard would expect the user to write an EBNF grammar. I found ANTLR to be nice but it's way too convoluted to use as a tool with Java dependencies and seems to be stagnating. And tree sitter just is too convoluted and requires the added C/C++ overhead to understand how to use it.
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The article briefly addresses the problem, but it's pretty fun how different "plain text" looks throughout history and in different domains. For one, there are a few different ways to terminate lines. All major operating systems now tend to use just \n, but I have older files that use \r\n (Microsoft), \r (Macintosh) or \n\r (RiscOS). There are also different opinions on how text files end in different operating systems. In POSIX, all lines are terminated by \n, even the last one. Microsoft software still tends to insist that the last line of a file is special case that doesn't need to be terminated even now that they have otherwise adopted POSIX style line endings. In Microsoft's view, it seems that the line ending sequence separates lines rather than terminate them. Files created according to this view don't play well with tools like cat(1) if your intent is to concatenate the lines of two files, but it seems other Unix clone tools have adapted to the possibility that the last line isn't terminated properly. Finally there's the encoding problem. I don't know of a good tool that determines the original encoding based on heuristics and re-encodes to UTF-8 but if someone does I'd love to know. If I know that the input language is English for example it shouldn't be too hard to determine what encoding the funny byte used in contractions or the funny bytes used in quotes belong to. Still, in English most of the files that use 8-bit encodings remain quite readable if you just box out the invalid bytes.
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This morning I had co-pilot generate a LINQPad script that fixes a lot of that. Granted, I knew that all files are UTF-8, so I didn't need to have it "guess" what the encoding was without the BOM.
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I like plain text. I tolerate markdown. Markdown was designed as a shorthand for html. It gets stretched to do other stuff. I created Brashtag [1]. It is simpler than markdown. [1] https://github.com/PratikDeoghare/brashtag
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Can you think a little more about your decision to strongly type code blocks. Some domains have no need for code escaping but do need blob text escaping (which you already have defined elsewhere.) Technically you could treat code via 'this is a bag named code with a blob, therefore it is code."
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I just use HTML if I want HTML. No guessing what formatting characters mean - means bold and <h1> means heading 1, period.
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Why did you create it? What were you looking to solve address?
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> The Unicode Standard defines plain text essentially as a sequence of character codes, without the additional formatting information associated with rich text. Fonts, colors, layout, and similar presentation details belong somewhere else. Nope. Skintones are part of Unicode. It also has 33 control characters from ASCII including one that rings a bell... There are also numerous characters added by Unicode that are literally called "layout controls". If you want a format that provides purely semantic information, then "plaintext" doesn't fit the bill.
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I work on scientific data repositories [1] and pushed for plain text files as our archiving file format two decades ago as the best long term format. We implemented it on our data repositories. Very human readable also. The datasets are small and table based, so this works well. We latter started archiving 2-D image data and that creates very large files. We are still looking for an elegant solutions for those datasets. [1] https://earthref.org/FIESTA/
ASCII was amazingly efficient for conveying English text. Then we needed to encode multi languages and emojis, the resulting Unicode is just a mess.
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Human languages are a mess. Some mix left-to-right and right-to-left. Some have variable amount of diacritics. Some have non-well-defined character sets where just trying to map it to a manageable complexity still loses cultural heritage. When you are fondly remembering the good old times of ASCII, you just wish back to be able to ignore anyone not speaking English. (Which is in your right to do, if you so desire.)
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Unicode was mostly OK when it wanted to encode multi languages. It started to get a mess when thought it needed to do more.
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What do you think doesn't belong in Unicode? It turns out that expressing all the different ways humans have used text in history has some necessary complexity, but assigning each character and modifier a number seems like a perfectly reasonable approach.
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Yeah the multi-unicode-char grapheme clusters are basically only for emojis once they started adding stuff like every ethnicity/gender combo of 4-person family and pregnant man. And that one historical Korean script.
What, no mention of our old friend, ASCII-armored Base64? For shame! Everything can be text with Base64, including things that have absolutely no business being text! Best of all, in light of popular widespread abuse of every available resource, Base64 is comparatively efficient! Bring on the petabytes! Yay and I'm not being completely sarcastic
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And then you add RFC2045 headers so you know what the encoding is...
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Text headers, mind you! Ah, text text text Don't ask me what my point is
ASCII (7-Bit) is the only widely understood charset there is. Everything beyond this point depends on the loaded charset. The fact that unicode maps the lower 7 bits to its own character set is a nice touch but none of the unicode sets are plain text. Unicode are multibyte characters with variable byte length and endianess at play. If you read it wrong or guess the length wrong your results might be anything but useful.
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You seemed to be deeply confused about encodings and character sets. > The fact that unicode maps the lower 7 bits to its own character set is a nice touch but none of the unicode sets are plain text. That is only true for the mapping of Unicode character (code point to be exact) to UTF-8, which is an encoding of Unicode characters. > Unicode are multibyte characters with variable byte length and endianess at play. That is only true of the UTF-16 encoding. UTF-8 does not have endianess, UTF-32 does not have variable length per code point. None of that is true for Unicode, because it is abstracted away from any byte representation. Furthermore, getting back to the start: > ASCII (7-Bit) is the only widely understood charset there is. Everything beyond this point depends on the loaded charset. ASCII also depends on how you try to decode your text. If you interpret two bytes as one character, ASCII will never be correct. There is nothing magical about one byte mapping to one character. I'd even argue that the only reason ASCII support is so universal internationally is because of UTF-8. Otherwise many countries would default to encodings where ASCII is not a subset (as they did before UTF-8 became common). So IMHO, UTF-8 and Unicode are the only widely understood encoding and character set.
Fun timing on this plaintext conversation. I built a little browser based plaintext playwriting app this weekend for a little weekend project. Found myself really hating 1. how clunk screenwriting software can be and 2. How unsharable the files are. With plaintext you can hand the file off to anyone on any device--the caveat being absolutely no one wants to be handed a plaintext script. The software I used ten years ago to write plays is long since deprecated and those files are basically unopenable. Plaintext however remains.
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When you're looking to make custom markup, XML is also a pretty good base. Ignore all the silly stuff like DTDs and namespaces, and just use the tags as tags and the text as text.
John August has also talked about using plain text for movie/television screenplays, specifying a format based on markdown and hollywood standard: https://fountain.io/ Sharing aside, I imagine a plain text format would also be helpful for version control.
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Haha, yes, as I was finishing writing the parser, I stumbled upon Fountain and realized my genius idea for a markdown based playwriting format was not so original. Ended up adding some Fountain syntax to my parser and ultimately I built a very functional but not feature complete implementation of Fountain by accident. I built sharing and (sort of) versioning into the web app. Everything is saved in localStorage and on a MySQL server. You can Save or Save As, and every time you Save As it inserts a new database row and gives you a new, sharable URL. I wanted an experience where you didn't have to login to use it, but ultimately, having a way to keep track of all those URLs would actually be a pretty decent versioning system--add diff checking between script versions and you end up with something pretty handy.
This is the public dividend of a standard finally winning. The article gives credit to Unicode, but it is the fact that ASCII unambiguously won that gives plain text its portability and longevity. It looks like Unicode is on its way to winning in the same way, but it is not there yet. Most text files I write are still pure ASCII because that's the only way to avoid unexpected glitches [0]. [0] Windows newlines not withstanding.
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> Windows newlines not withstanding “Windows” newlines are also the standard in many communication protocols like HTTP and SMTP. That’s not because of Windows or DOS, it’s because it was the standard for teletypes which needed bot CR and LF. It’s arguably systems like Unix that deviated from that standard. I agree that beyond ASCII there is a slope from well-supported to less-supported and quirky to problematic areas of Unicode. For example, HN filters many Unicode text elements like combining characters (Zalgo text) and emojis, and there is no specification to point at what it supports. Even within ASCII, most control characters don’t have a portable meaning. So it’s really just the printable subset of ASCII, and strictly speaking not even that, given that there are regional variants of ASCII, such as the Japanese one where backslash becomes the Yen sign.
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UNIX (and Linux) is even more annoying because pseudo TTYs will require CRLF when in raw mode but requires only LF when in line mode.
Ahh, plain text, wherein "plain" does some heavy lifting. If plain text had something as simple as a 4 byte signature it could have been soooo much better. As it is programs have to guess the following; A) encoding. If ANSI which code page? If unicode which encoding? In the case of utf-16 big or little endian? B) line endings? CR? LF? CRLF? I guess no-one uses LFCR... right? C) number formats? 100.000 or 100,000? Date formats? is that mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy? D) what human-language is it in? E) CSV? Don't get me started... Yes. Text is a lot easier to load, parse, make guesses about than say XLS. Yes all of the above things can be "guessed" to a greater or lesser extent. Yes BOM exists to at least try solving the encoding question. Of course most files don't use them. Lots of tools don't support them. And they don't solve any of the other issues. But sure, ASCII files in English with US date formats, and Windows line endings....no problems at all...
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ASCII is just a raw binary format. It isn't just for text. The line endings problem really isn't a problem. Pretty much every text editor out there can handle different line endings. I don’t think number nor date formats are relevant here. For example you could have that same problem entering text into MS Word. That’s really more of an issue if you want to use text as a database rather than a document format, which isn’t really something that even plain text advocates would generally recommend. As for human language detection, that’s a much easier problem to solve than decoding a proprietary binary blob. CSV definitely has its warts. But it’s not like that’s the only plain text option for serialising data. (JSON, jsonlines, YAML, XML, etc). Or you could use the actual ASCII codes reserved for records, if you really wanted something that didn’t require quoting and escaping in plain text. It’s actually a pity nobody does this.
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I've made a language called CSTML to do some of this: https://docs.bablr.org/guides/cstml Basically it's a text-based language for embedding semantic metadata into some kind of underlying text stream. Is this interesting to you?
I skimmed this whole article and didn't see any classic LLM tells about it. Why do you think it is LLM generated?
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IMO, the article is well-written. The author's picture clearly has an LLM-generated background, (and is a little tacky, IMO.) That being said, I wouldn't dismiss an article merely because someone used an LLM while setting up their blog.
Greenvolt begins building 600 MW/2.4 GWh BESS in Poland (ess-news.com)
Not really. The market is still moving quickly towards renewables. It's only some conservative politicians in the US that are making noise about fossil fuels, not the market.
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The market does not fix the administration paying wind projects billions of dollars to stop development. The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money. The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports. And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals. That market is not moving quickly to renewables.
The BESS market is doing OK in the US. Politicians will come and go but the fundamentals of BESS are solid, so I don't see why the installed base won't keep increasing in the US. Battery storage capacity averaged 70% growth over the last three years - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67925 > During the first six months of 2026, operators added another 8.3 GW of battery storage capacity, reaching nearly 52 GW of nameplate battery storage capacity
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What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"? Do they mean gigawatt-hour? (sidenote: how scary that the DoE is the one making this error?)
How much faster would it go if the feds were helping things along instead of actively hindering?
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The government likes to get in front of a parade and pretend they are leading it.
Industry can electrify or sunset. “Work is hard.” The energy potential is well above the demand curve, just have to build the orchestration infrastructure (low carbon generation, batteries, transmission, district heating, flexible load demand response, etc). Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in thirty minutes to power humanity for a year, the inability to harness this potential energy is the problem being solved for. It's easy to go faster: simply direct fossil fuel capital and subsidies to the technologies I enumerate above. To not go faster is a choice. We could make different choices. https://cleantechnica.com/2026/08/30/poland-coal-capacity-transition/ https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/poland/ https://pyrtkoanalytics.com/poland-in-the-energy-transition-can-the-country-replace-coal-with-renewables-by-2030/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/12/29/poland-projected-to-reach-59-1-gw-of-solar-by-2035/ https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/fifteen_minutes https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity (already out of date due to solar PV deployment velocity, >3TW of solar PV has been installed globally as of this year) The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026 (Poland is expected to add 3-4GW of solar per year, and has hundreds of GWs of combined wind [onshore and offshore] and solar PV potential)
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> Industry can electrify or sunset The much more realistic third option is just moving somewhere else
Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses (barrons.com)
Why isn't the publishing of the captured video banned? If you want to upload content involving someone else (not just in the background) in it then you should need consent.
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If it were made illegal then news journalism, documentary filmmaking, sports broadcasting (crowds), street photography, and police-body camera footage would become extinct almost overnight.
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That’s already the case. Same question is why guns are regulated when killing someone is already illegal.
It's like treating concealed carry of a weapon differently than open carry. I think it's reasonable to say "you can do this in public but only if it's clear to other people that you're doing it". Targeting smart glasses specifically seems to narrow though, because there are obviously many other ways to carry around a hidden camera in public, like one disguised as a pen in your pocket or something.
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Hidden cameras are already illegal in some places, not sure about Norway.
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Interestingly, in my jurisdiction open carry is banned should concealed carry is not.
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I feel like that is for most places in california isn't it? Open carry is illegal but conceal is not.
People care more about the illusion of privacy than actual privacy itself. Even if we banned smart glasses, we'd still see ever-expanding networks of privately owned cameras that record every movement you make. We'd still have networks of ring cameras and similar devices. We'll still have ever-increasing use of AI to sort and categorise the content. Privacy is dead. Smart glasses are just an uncomfortable reminder of this fact, and banning them without addressing the over-arching issue is similar to sticking our collective head in the sand.
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Are you talking about Norway, or some other place?
Privacy doomerism sucks. You can fight (and win) some battles without winning everywhere—in fact that’s how life works in general. Just because we haven’t yet beaten ALPRs doesn’t mean I want some dickhead recording me at a hot spring without me knowing. Having both things to deal with is worse than having just one.
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One mans doomer is anothers realist, I guess. I'm 40, and every year I've been alive I've had less privacy than the one that preceded it and I see no reason to believe that trend will continue. I'm open to compelling arguments if you think I'm wrong. Maybe if we started with the "strap cameras to the face of the population" plan we'd all have been less inclined to act like frogs in rapidly warming water. Alas.
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If you don’t like the trend, why are you trying to convince people to stop fighting it? Make it make sense. It’s like telling doctors not to bother because everyone’s eventually going to die anyway. I would understand if you felt this way privately, in fact I can relate to that.
A temporary measure. Knowing the current regime they will use years & millions on comittees, reports, reviews, expert groups and all kinds of bureaucratic wage labor I don't have english vocabulary for. And then, the EU, which we a not a member of, decides everything behind our back.
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Norway chose to not join the EU but still be subject to many of its requirements. It can still change that - it can still seek to become a proper member, or it can seek to cut ties.
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It’s not behind your back. It’s what being in the EEA means.
So a Smart Monocle is ok?
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Is it weird that I'd be happier with that? Easier to spot and has a "we're bringing that shit back" vibe that goes well with a disruptive product. Certainly beats trying to pass them as glasses.
Somebody check this guy’s camera roll
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Those kinds of comments usually come from either wrongdoers in denial or paid marketeers defending a policy/product...
Banning harmful behavior (like secretly recording someone) is pretty defensible and not all that controversial. Banning the mere possession of generic tools that could potentially be used to engage in harmful behavior is a lot more dubious. It requires infringing the rights of a bunch of innocent people merely because they might use that freedom to do something wrong.
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Note that in parts of the EU it's illegal to walk around in public with lockpicks, spray paint, copies of nmap, or acetone.
Only issue with that is that enforcing it requires you to make open source smart glasses illegal, since open source software cannot be used to coerce users the way closed-source software can.
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It's illegal to transmit without a suitable radio license or sell products that do, but they still don't forbid the sale of electronic components you could build a radio with. In that case, they just confiscate your radio and fine you, if you're caught transmitting without a suitable license.
Perfect enforcement isn’t required, the intent is to prevent normalization. Laws against murder don’t prevent all murders either. Someone wearing weird 3D printed camera glasses is going to be obvious. Someone with the skill to disassemble a tiny glued together smart glass frame, bypass any hardware protections, and flash a custom OS will be rare, and they’ll get caught anyway when they “accidentally” wander into the women’s locker for the third time.
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I don't want people to have to know how to solder to install an open source OS on their personal computing device. That sort of thing should be normal and easy. So yeah, I guess as long as you're okay with a law like that potentially becoming very easy to bypass then I don't have a problem with it. But I think once things start going down that path, most people aren't going to be satisfied with leaving it at that; they'll hear about a bypass and start pushing to restrict the freedoms that enabled it.
OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects (diff.wikimedia.org)
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I think the recent AI summit (sorry, SI summit) in Washington established the good precedent that these model companies are responsible for making safe products. If a swam of agents breaks out of a sandbox and causes damages, the company that was running those agents should be held accountable. No better motivation for corporate good governance than massive lawsuits and possible criminal investigations. Get's a little tricker when a customer intentionally manipulates/uses a model for crimes, I suppose.
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Maybe their next target will be the NPR podcast comments: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/the-hottest-new-hangout-for-middle-schoolers-is-nprs-comment-section/ > As for why NPR in particular, when Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask, he was given the kind of unvarnished answer that a middle schooler would give: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.”
Why no mention of any dates in the post? There have been plenty of examples of OpenAI agents writing to wikis (the German one for example) or worse (huggingface) before June. If something like it happened again after all their public apologies and promises to fix their training sandbox and alignment issues then it would be a lot more concerning.
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The article mentions that the agents caused an outage of the WDQS in May.
OpenAI are 100% responsible for the actions of their agents. They trained them to do what they do and they have every opportunity to train them to avoid doing harm.
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Yes, I agree, but, if OAI can’t even detect when their bots do this, and literally have to be informed by third parties that they’ve been abused, is there really any hope they can prevent this activity? Maybe they get litigated out of existence. Okay. But if no lab can keep a lid on their agents, then what?
Which group do you mean? Customers? Investors?
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Customers, of course
And so the world cycles again. AOL was a walled garden too.
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AOL (fortunately) always had competition. With the current iteration, there is barely any competition left any more.
Probably depends what's in the [...] NoScript sometimes detects false positives on these warnings
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>NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack from https://duckduckgo.com to https://en.wikipedia.org . I did not notice, the first message added the '...', above is a recent msg. I also tried via google and bing, I get the same error.
>not only adds costs for servers For 2025 hosting costs were $3.47M while taking in $208.6M in revenue. They have enough revenue to cover an increase of hosting costs.
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"They should pay for it because they can afford it" I don't think they should have to pay for some private company profiting off their publicly-available resources. It's a bit like some restaurant sending swarms of their employees to the local food bank and then reselling the free food they've gotten in their restaurant.
This reminds me of one of the funniest products I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdbkvJznmwU This is the "kosher switch" - observant Jews customarily do not use light switches on Saturday (their weekly holy day). This light switch represents a workaround where when you flip the switch, it randomly generates an on or off signal and emits this through an optical coupler. When the random number sufficiently causes the state of the light to change, it latches in that direction. This is a way of turning the lights on and off without violating the tradition. "I didn't switch the light, the random number did!" "I didn't exploitVulnerability(), random number did!"
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Also interesting https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/25924/if-my-home-is-on-fire-on-shabbos-or-yom-tov-what-can-i-do
but even if it randomly explodes there are safeguards -- did they get an inspection, can they prove there wasn't negligence? if someone died because of an exploding tire there very well be criminal charges
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No, there will almost never be criminal charges in a case like that. It will be a wrongful death suit.
We already went through this with food and drug safety. It’s much cheaper and more effective to regulate those things before people are harmed, instead of harming people first then allowing them to sue for damages after.
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We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Charge the criminal action, fine the bad actors to help make injured parties whole, and regulate the technology to protect against future harms. These guys will tell you their industry is more dangerous than nuclear power, and we regulate the living shit out of nuclear power. If you think models can't be regulated, look up the export controls on MCNP and tell me how that's different.
Pardon me I got my jurisdictions mixed up, it's the FTC that would regulate these matters. I'd believe nothing's been staged, but it's quite apparent to me that these security incidents and findings are being spun for marketing. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929433
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> it's the FTC that would regulate these matters They seem to agree [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/technology/ftc-openai-anthropic-investigation.html
Nvidia has a huge stake in OpenAI, both in terms of them being one of Nvidia's biggest customers and also via direct investment. After HuggingFace was hacked and they expressed the position that they were the forgiving sort, for a price , there was a distinct possibility that HuggingFace would become a vocal shakedown artist that would start protesting at inconvenient times until silenced by more money, especially if they get hacked again. By complete coincidence, Nvidia took the one move that silences HuggingFace for good. Nvidia isn't going to sue OpenAI. No chance.
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Who will though? At this point it seems like a huge chunk of US economy growth can be attributed to AI. Bubble or not, I guess very few would benefit from bursting it?
How much do they need to understand? Say "unauthorized access happened, this lab is responsible for it, here are the fines". The state didn't need to understand networking tech to threaten Aaron Schwartz so why do they need to understand here?
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Eh... you don't seem to understand the difference between some individual LEO can go after vs a multi billion dollar industry. Law enforcement gets really careful around big businesses because they know they'll get smacked for every tiny transgression they make. Meanwhile they'll screw with individuals with impunity.
What if that’s their whole goal? Slap some regulations on it, then lobby the hell out of it to make sure their align best with shutting down access to open models.
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Just get over there being open access models in the future unless they are highly regarded. 'Smart' LLMs will be classified as munitions and you and I will get scraps. Even better is if you run Smart models illegally you have a nice visit from the 4chan party van.
In most cases, this would be treated as proof that you broke the window, leading to a jail sentence when you otherwise might not have received one.
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Now switch it to "your dog broke in and destroyed stuff", ya it's still damages but that have to be paid for, but crime gets much harder to prove.
US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia (theguardian.com)
Spoiler alert: no US department under RFK Jr is closely monitoring anything.
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"A little plague will be good for your natural immunity, by my favorite Danish team of crackpot researchers have just received $10M in express funding to test in African children whether the GCB vaccine helps, when we expose them to the bacterium"
I believe this was pneumonic plague, which spreads via the air, not animal vectors.
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Same bacteria for both.
> COVID had a case fatality rate of 1%. Pneumonic plague, without antibiotics, has a case fatality rate of 100%. a) why are we comparing treated death rates with untreated death rates? b) COVID got significantly less deadly as it evolved, which is a known phenomenon that should also apply to this plague c) that link hijacked my back button, I don't appreciate that >:-(
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> > COVID had a case fatality rate of 1%. Pneumonic plague, without antibiotics, has a case fatality rate of 100%. > a) why are we comparing treated death rates with untreated death rates? Even when treated (and treatment has to be within 24 hours) the death rate for pneumonic plague is still 17%. Better than 100%, but still nightmare fuel, especially given that the treatment has to be administered almost immediately or it will be ineffective and you're back to the 100% case fatality rate.
The algorithm giveth, and the algorithm keepeth away. Before I clicked that link I had never heard of Breaking Points, a political series with over 2MM subscribers. I'm a YT premium subscriber and watch a ton of political stuff, much of it damn similar to what that channel produces.
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I took the time to share it because I like the show and they often report on subjects that cause them to be demonetized or hidden by the algorithm.
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I also watched a lot of news content and never saw them until seeking them out. I suspect they are suppressed by the algorithm because they are generally willing to give voice to anti-establishment, anti-oligrachy sentiments (both from the hosts and guests). But yea they're great. The primary hosts are explicitly left and right leaning but rarely get caught up in partisan discord and instead focus on high quality, fact based journalism. (Relatedly, the one topic that does most often trigger the occasional bouts of partisan bickering between Saagar and Krystal is COVID and Dr. Fauci, make of that what you will).
Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source. (Having said that, bacteria upregulate selected interleukins to reduce inflammation, so maybe this is a game of telephone based on some actual Soviet effort to increase virulence, just not "euphoria.")
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> Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets And people take her seriously?
I think a lot of people don't realize the Black Plague is bacterial and we already have a cure for it. Most people getting anxious probably assume its like Covid and a cure would have to be developed.
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I've got bad news for you. It may seem like a good thing that Y. Pestis is bacterial since we have antibiotics but remember that bacteria can become antibiotic resistant. You might say "no problem, that would only happen if there were a lot of cases and people weren't properly using antibiotics" and while this is true it is also possible to deliberately make Y. Pestis antibiotic resistant. "Who in their right mind would do a stupid thing like that?" you may ask, well it turns out the Soviets did and likely stockpiled large amounts of it with plans to deliver it in an aerosolized form over cities. Aerosolized particles are how you contract pneumonic plague which if you can't treat it with antibiotics is nearly 100% lethal in all cases. It can also be passed from human to human via coughing. So, here's hoping that this is just a rare case of wild type Y. Pestis that the lab worker somehow unfortunately inhaled and didn't get treatment for in time.
> ”Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu” Not really. While it was true for much of the last century that many “seasonal flu” viruses were direct descendents from H1N1 Spanish flu, the H1N1 that caused the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a distinct strain combining new genes of pig, avian, and human flu origins. Since then, derivatives of that virus have replaced earlier ones as the most common circulating H1N1 types. And right now the most common circulating influenza is actually H3N2 from a completely different (avian) lineage with origins in the 1968 pandemic.
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I'd further note that the H1N1 flu is widely believed to have gone extinct in the wild, then been reintroduced in 1977 from a laboratory source, probably through a failed vaccine trial: > The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens.19,31 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322 This explanation is now printed uncontroversially in major journals, though at the time the WHO rejected it: > Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bullwho00443-0095.pdf
> Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it Yea you are definitely right about that. In Africa (specific countries I can’t currently recall) attempts at vaccination programs for example are often met with hostility or suspicion or even some people believing a vaccine causes the disease. There was also vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries like China which refused first-to-market western vaccines out of fear and suspicion. It’s tragic all around.
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> In Africa In the USA too. Just look at all the nonsense around the MMR vaccine in Trump's orbit and what's happened to the CDC and FDA under RFK's leadership
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Sure but the point is to focus on other countries/continents/peoples and their vaccine skepticism because that’s more interesting and less talked about.
Maybe Pakistan shouldn’t have been harboring Bin Laden and whatever ill effects happened here are the fault of Pakistan. Not my problem - Pakistan’s government and people needed to do better and whatever the human cost there was it was worth it to get Bin Laden. Actions have consequences. Also stop trying to deprive other people and governments of their agency just because it fits a convenient western superiority complex you have. They’re not stupid.
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> whatever the human cost there was it was worth it to get Bin Laden. Actions have consequences blaming the ~260M citizens for the actions of Pakistani government is repulsive.
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Blaming the 340 million citizens of the US for Trump’s actions is repulsive too, but plenty of people enjoy doing that on the Internet. Sorry. People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is. Those 260 million Pakistanis can educate themselves on vaccines and make informed decisions. Vaccine denial in the US? Same thing. You can’t say Americans are responsible for anti-vax sentiments, for example, and then say other people around the world aren’t. Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else and so they’re more responsible? I’ll happily take you admitting we’re the best if you want to go that route.
The future of independence is interdependence (onlys.ky)
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I think people are either indifferent, or want kids, but a big house is just so damn expensive. It’s a centralisation of wealth/greed thing.
When children are young, parents and grandparents take care of them. When a spouse gets sick, the other takes care of them. When children are older, they take care of their parents and grandparents. When people aren’t getting married and having children, things get very weird as far as caretaking goes (and other things) and no amount of pleading or social engineering can solve this.
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So what are you proposing? Force people to marry and have children? Ignore the problem?
> When children are older, they take care of their parents and grandparents. This is a core value in many eastern cultures. I'm not trying to put down western cultures - only pointing out a difference - I do not believe it is a core value of western cultures (i'd love to be proven wrong of course). Also, when children grow up and move away, or immigrate to a different countries, this produces problems to the ageing parents.
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This isn't about some fundamental East/West attitude difference. From time immemorial it was like that in the West too, the change came with the late 19th century and mainly the 20th century when government took on the role of caretaker with pensions, welfare and various government transfers, reducing interpersonal dependencies, and allowing more atomized lifestyles.
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southern europe, small villages. we take care of our own. It's very much part of our core values.
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AFAICT this is a value in most cultures in all directions. I think "the west" invented pensions, social security and medicaid (or whatever you call it in your country) so parents nor children had to plan on caring for the elderly when they had trouble working (and with white collar jobs, that may be a long time). Multi-generational, western (American) guy here: caring for the older generations is a core value to everyone I know and to me. We just don't _have_ to. My mom has money, can drive, owns a nicer house than I do. So, it's really only for 'values' that I check in on her and handyman for her whenever I can. In fact, for the latter, I cause her more problems than I fix.
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Your mom (not you specifically, but the average person's) is being provided for by the collective, ie currently working-age people's pension contributions. She, as a worker, paid taxes in her own working age, and financed stranger's parents' lives, and now the new generation does the same for her. It's a many to many relationship, while the old style arrangement was more point-to-point. The children did the literal manual work to keep their parents fed and cared for, while now they pay some strangers to do it, using their pension.
It's not really west vs east. It had been a core value in "western" cultures too, and is changing in "eastern" cultures as we have this discussion. The change seems to have more to do with the atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite. Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional, career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions, and that necessity then supersedes the actual relationships and responsibilities that had traditionally been taken for granted and free from accounting. It's a death spiral towards alienation that we stumbled into in modernity and need to collectively address, not a cultural divide between east and west.
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That does make some sense to me! Ty Could you explain these a bit more (or maybe provide a pointer to they mean): > "atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite." How & why exactly do they invite atomization? > "Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional... career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions" By this do you mean something like: instead of relying on friends and family for interdependece, we pay for services in a formal economy ?
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What isn’t mentioned in monideas’ comment is that it is women who do the caring. The change has to do with women being able to not do that. Of course, this might also mean that they might not have a daughter-in-law to take care of them, but if it’s me, I would also choose to avoid that caretaking role. Assets and income were passed down patrilineally, and hence women were expected to fold into their husband’s family and become the primary caretakers (unless super rich and they had servants). The problem comes when the government forcefully takes resources from young workers and gives them to old people. You can’t choose independence when young and also choose to depend on someone else. That is trying to have your cake and eat it too, hence all the fretting about unsustainable pension systems around the world.
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Thank you for your contribution, you made me engage with your thoughts. As a German born married to an Indian, I can relate with the points
Western societies aren't behaving the way they do around family and care issues because they have a grand plan, but because they don't have one. In particular, the public is wildly uneducated about the interdependencies they implicitly rely on and take for granted, until they get old one day and realize the negligence. The general idea in the US is, you have to prepare for yourself, in the EU the premise is, the state prepares for you. Both are oversimplifications that don't really work more often than people want to admit.
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Most the young people I meet are quite cynical about the future, affordability, the existence of any pension at all, or the retirement age rising above the life expectancy or something like that. But simply there are a million things to be worried about. Like they are also worried about the climate, about AI and jobs, maybe about other things too.
Big difference between mating and marriage. Lot of marriage where mating is not happening but couples cannot separate because of social/legal/emotional ramifications.
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yeah marriage is more of a business deal than anything else /married for 20 years
A wildly grotesque framing you engage in there. Apparently you didn't even read the article, otherwise your exposé hardly makes sense. She is bodily disabled, not financially. There is a thing called human dignity and it involves granting everybody the basic right of dignified sustenance. You seem to have difficulty imagining yourself in such a situation, but that is the fundamental starting point to understand it and its justification. How would the disabled "show their gratitude" to you, the supposed provider of the financial support? Why do pretend it was a "gift" and not a simple necessity for you to live in a just society? You go on veering off into generalities about imaginary 'leeches' to your efforts. The author details how you yourself are dependent on that society you denigrate here.
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> A wildly grotesque framing you engage in there. This is an extremely boring way to engage with others. > There is a thing called human dignity and it involves granting everybody the basic right of dignified sustenance. I think I am still obligated to throw you the life vest even if I don’t personally like you, but if after the fact you then scream at me that I didn’t do enough, I think you’ve committed a transgression. Screaming that no one is doing enough is by and large all that comes out of these circles and why they ended up fading into irrelevance. People were discussing this issue during the Obama years; you haven’t brought anything new to the discussion. > The author details how you yourself are dependent on that society you denigrate here. I’m not sure where you got the idea that I was arguing to the contrary. My premise was that the word independent is semantically meaningful and that the article is making an attempt to undermine that meaning in order to further an agenda. I don’t disagree that e.g. someone who buys their food at a grocery store is dependent on the logistics system in a way that someone who is dependent upon having an oxygen tank delivered is dependent on others, but like I said, this is a spectrum based on the ability of the dependent to make substitutions between the person or thing they are dependent upon. It still makes semantic sense to say that so-and-so is independent of his father, but the children of so-and-so are dependent upon their father, even if so-and-so’s existence is ontologically dependent upon the existence of his father.
The designer lamps in my house (arslan.io)
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I deeply regret not buying another suitcase to import a Tolomeo from Germany to the USA a year ago.
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Remember a saying of 5 individual light sources in each room as a rule of interior design. Very wholesome read, made me smile and look at my own lamps. Brought me joy as Kondo would have said
This is great. Lighting I think is the best thing to spend money on as it isn't exposed to wear and tear like furniture. In addition to these also a huge fan of Anglepoise desk lamps, Lotte lamps and Mantis sconces.
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Are we talking second hand value or re-sell potential?
He has a writeup about the office and desk setup too: https://arslan.io/2025/11/18/my-two-part-desk-setup/
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I'd love to have enough space to have a desk facing the room rather than the wall :(
I have a $2.94 USB silicone lamp shaped like a duck. To each their own.
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Picture myself a room of complete darkness, the lonely duck.
My 5-year-old sleeps with a silicon dog lamp.
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Are you not worried about silicon fleas?
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