Unlurker

Oh, I remember seeing Jumperless a while ago, but completely forgot about. Combining this with something like Jumperless does sound interesting. What does your setup look like? Does Claude tell you: "try 1k resistor in parallel here"?

It's just measurements for now. But sourcing ideas from the model could be interesting!

George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four (openculture.com)

Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.

I'll believe it when I see it

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The beef is mainly that the book portrays Galt's Gulch as both a good thing and as something that would actually function, when the real world consequences of trying to run a society like that are that your town fills up with wild bears that destroy everything and eat your pets ( https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project ).

It could function, but not as a society. Ayn Rand explicitly rejected this idea [1]: Q: Why is the lack of government in Galt’s Gulch (in Atlas Shrugged) any different from anarchy, which you object to? A: Galt’s Gulch is not a society; it’s a private estate. It’s owned by one man who carefully selected the people admitted. Even then, they had a judge as an arbitrator, if anything came up; only nothing came up among them, because they shared the same philosophy. . . . But project a society of millions, in which there is every kind of viewpoint, every kind of brain, every kind of morality—and no government. . . . No one can guard rights, except a government under objective laws. . . . Rational men are not afraid of government. In a proper society, a rational man doesn’t have to know the government exists, because the laws are clear and he never breaks them. [FHF 72] [1]: Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A

Brave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency. 1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes. Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray. Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy? Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.

Atlas Shrugged, more charitably perhaps despite its manifest flaws, seemed to me to be about the dangers of putting “the needs of the many” over individual rights, and how it can ultimately be self defeating for the whole.

The four books you mentioned have very different methods of control. The primary thing they share is being dystopic. --- 1984: control through fear and pain. Brave New World: control through pleasure and distraction. Animal Farm: control through corruption and deception. Atlas Shrugged: control though guilt and regulation. --- Brave New World is the most prophetic. Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.

Wasn’t 1984 a bit more about control through surveillance and silencing, than about pain? Everything was a lie, and every refusal to accept the lie was a signal to Big Brother. Cast as such it seems rather more prophetic than Soma, IMO.

> Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics. Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?) In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time. Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already. This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

> certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing You would be correct if that were the whole truth about Atlas Shrugged: defending protagonists on emotional grounds. But it’s not the whole truth. The very monologue that you dismiss is the tool that provides the emotion with the principle. You know the characters’ reasons for holding their emotions. Ayn Rand never said that one shouldn’t feel or express one’s emotions. On the contrary, “. . . emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life” [1]. In fact, every emotional appeal used in the novel is supported by argument, sooner or later. You cannot say, for example, that the dismissal of James Taggart or Robert Stadler is purely emotional. > The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought Your claim would be valid if the jarring transition were not Galt’s speech but some other nonfiction. The case is the opposite: the story and speech are very much integral. The pause of events as such is a neutral tool, with precedents (The Battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables). [1]: https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html

Everything we like is a psyop (techcrunch.com)

Never thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates and it's a really nice article. Also, I understand why people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see. We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is. We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether. Value creators are inherently terrible at marketing. The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form. To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts. Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.

Socials being flooded across the board feels weird, but it's also how network effects are _supposed_ to work. I just hate the fact that I feel jaded and cynical about this as my default position.

Social media is not driven by network effects though. It’s driven by algorithmic engagement and its operation is opaque.

this is why oldschool chat > social media curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion

This is why influencers are making bank. Everybody still believes randos on the internet might be genuine.

They made up a number, and then quoted that number to other people (presumably with the intent to benefit themselves) without disclosing that they'd made up the number in the first place. That seems to jump right past 'lie' into 'fraud' or worse. I have this growing belief that what's wrong with America is that we've tossed a great deal of virtue (both personal and public) into the woodchipper, using a lot of euphemisms like "marketing" or "puffery". And the rot is not in any way confined to marketing - it's just that marketing is a very obvious example of it. The rot has made its way into education, relationships, entertainment, governance, infrastructure, what used to be called 'news', and on and on. We collectively gaslight ourselves to avoid dealing with the reality that we're constantly defecating in our own minds, contaminating ourselves with patterns of thought and action that are antithetical to our own continued well-being as individuals and collectives. To borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are poisoning the noosphere.

The "poisoning the noosphere" is a very good description. There is someone called Peter Ralston; on YouTube there's a few videos of him and in one bit from an interview he starts on honesty. "Honesty", he says, "is a skill most people don't appreciate". I was really impressed by that "is a skill" qualification. Never thought about it this way. But yes, it is a skill. First you learn it and then it changes you.

Not all are swayed. The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't. I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it. There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing. But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.

I, too, rely on your web of trust, please don't ever break my heart Jeff! It makes sense they'd be harder to find, I imagine there are more opportunities to make money by selling your soul than by offering honest review, and people with large investments have large incentives to dilute signal in their favor. It's sad that so many platforms let it happen, but it makes sense when the users aren't the ones paying the bills. I'm immensely grateful for those that resist though, and if I were a religious person I would nominate them for sainthood or reincarnation or at least a plaque on a nice park bench somewhere.

> It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product. Brandolini’s law strikes again: you really have to pay attention to catch a shill. 99% of the time when you’re not paying attention and intentionally shopping for a particular product is when they get you.

Yeah, really does not help that the internet seems to be built from the ground up to reward shilling. Click on a shill video in youtube and you'll have 20 identical videos on the same topic. But also, advertisers are smart and you have to assume they know you are on the lookout for a shill. I have to assume the why shilling works will continue to evolve as the way to detect shilling evolves. I expect we'll end up with something like this in the future [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gArU-BAO7Kw

New unsealed records reveal Amazon's price-fixing tactics, California AG claims (theguardian.com)

Is that actually bad for consumers? Wouldn't deranking the "not lowest" price make it easier for customers to find the lowest price (whether that is a different product on the same storefront, or the same product on a different storefront), and hence be good for customers?

It would expose distributors who are getting better deals than others when they can undercut the competition.

I'd be in favor of giving Lina Khan a lifetime appointment to heading the FTC along with 10x their current budget to tackle exactly this problem. A major part of the problem isn't even that we don't have laws on the books, it's that funding to the enforcement agencies has been gutted to the point where they can mostly just go after extreme egregious violations or very easy to win cases. The IRS is in exactly the same boat.

That would be great, but I think even her job needs new laws. Otherwise, one of the problems is even hardcore enforcement takes years and huge amounts of taxpayer expense. We need to make it simple, cheap, and quick to improve competition.

I don't disagree. I think she's about the perfect person to be involved in writing those new laws in some fashion.

clears throat Radical leftist lunatic antifa terrorists that want to see this country DESTROYED!!

Antitrust = Antifa = Communism As opposed to Most Favored Monopoly contracts, which are glorious Capitalism. Know the difference!

Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine (github.com/gainsec)

Cool demo, but letting an AI Agent drive a physical probe may have problems. AI is probabilistic, but hardware is precise. If the model miscalculates a pin's position by even 0.1mm, the probe may crush the board. I am curious how the author actually bridges the gap between the Agent’s 'guess' and the sub-millimeter precision needed to avoid damaging hardware?

I think this is roughly solved. Tell the agent to do all of its calculations in python.

It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting this to be real more than I do, but this is nowhere close to being ready to do actual work. Photographing real PCBs is hard, there is no fiducial maths, no actual probing is being done. It's just photos of a photo being piped into an agent. If it actually did what it claims, no reasonable person would exclude it from the demo video. https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/

Could an agent no develop a bespoke correction algorithm for the photos of the photo?

The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs (joanwestenberg.com)

As the old saying goes: the best way to make money on the internet, is to tell other people how to make money on the internet

I was in community college taking some real basic, entry-level I.T. classes. And one of my classmates seemed nice, normal young guy about 20, already married. And one day on campus I see him drive up in a Mercedes. And I ask him what’s going on. Well, he tells me that he learned a little bit about cryptocurrency, and now he had gone into business where he advises people on how to invest in cryptocurrency. And I thought, “That’s really wise!” and I hope he is still doing well! Basically a great way to stay above the hype and scams. Surely some sort of federal regulations would begin to apply... but good luck!

Running an online store isn't "passive income." Passive income is from rental properties, mutual funds and (my dream) a rich uncle's trust fund.

I’d argue that unless you’re using a property manager, rental property isn’t really passive, either. Do you want that call at 3 am to fix a flood?

This article really felt like a misdiagnosis to me. Sure, a lot of these people were just buying hype from these "get rich from drop shipping!" influencers, just like a million other suckers who got dollar signs in their eyes with real estate schemes, pyramid sale schemes, yada yada, a tale as old as time. I don't think this "passive income" trap is really anything new, and I don't think it was some unique thing that "ate a generation of entrepreneurs", as if that trap didn't exist then instead we'd see all these successful people. Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money. Just look at all the posts on HN asking about how much people make on their side gigs. You rarely see anything more than a couple hundred bucks a month. There are notable exceptions, but unfortunately a lot of those notable exceptions are scammy, spammy business models. It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys. Wealth inequality doesn't just apply to people, but also companies. For example, in the past many entrepreneurial types may have started retail stores, while now it's incredibly difficult to compete with the likes of Amazon et al. I read an article recently that the number of public companies has halved compared to a few decades ago. The Wilshire 5000 stock index, for example, actually only includes about 3400-3700 companies now.

My current read of the situation is similar. If you go to other countries, there are slews of small shops, even in run down areas. On top of that, in places within Asia, the malls are also open and full of regional chains. It also feels like there's such a wider variety of certain goods available, because the little bakeries are doing their own thing, while in the U.S. seemingly everybody is eating Costco danishes. "Passive income brain" people are not the only one's trying to "build revenue engines," that same sort of talk exists in corporate America. There are already people that that own companies which are there "to generate passive income for me," right now--there's a whole class of millionaires and billionaires that don't have to work. Passive income people didn't ruin the "content quality of the entire internet" and are far from the only ones doing so. Many of these folks are likely the ones that would have owned a hardware store if America didn't ignore it's regulatory duties while preaching about how "important" small business is. In the U.S. situation really seems to have fossilized into a few big players/platforms, and they continue to freeze up through the process of things like private equity roll-ups. There's a thread on the front page right now about Amazon's alleged price-fixing tactics, which hurt customers and small businesses. Further: Real-estate is an investment, so for most being able to pay commercial rents is a pipe dream. Healthcare is tied to employment, so people are less free to try and start something other than "on the side." American's choose "convenience" when shopping and to put people in power that serve these large companies or their owners, not small businesses or communities. Dropshipping, creating a "sweaty startup," etc... it's all just people trying to make do within the system they're trapped in.

> You rarely see anything more than a couple hundred bucks a month. There are notable exceptions, but unfortunately a lot of those notable exceptions are scammy, spammy business models. I suspect this is largely sampling bias. I host meetups for indie founders, and several attendees earn their living through solo businesses. When I go to conferences like Microconf, I meet lots more. The problem with measuring financial success by who posts about it on HN is: * The more someone is making at their solo business, the less they want to blab about it and attract competitors. * The people earning at the low end are more desperate for people to see what they're doing so they can pick up new customers, so they're more likely to talk about their work. * The more successful founders are busier and spend less time posting on HN.

So true. The latest rage on IG is "this guy built a trading system on OpenClaw and is now making 10k, comment MONEY and i'll DM you the recipe." No indy hedgefund algotrader gives away their golden goose, that would crowed out the trade.

Creating an additional 30%-50% on top of whatever a normal person would consider passive income in order to actually have passive income is NOT a realistic option for a huge % of the population.

The key is living below your means by ~30%. You make 150k? Live like you make 100k. Every time you get a raise, 30% goes towards investing. For most engineers this is achievable.

Everything I'd want to do on a "side gig to iron out the kinks and then eventual business" basis is regulated to the point where that path is economically impossible and the only way to be in the black is to take out a big f-ing loan, quit your job and go all in on your new business. And it's not just me, all my buddies have this gripe. We've all got skills and experience and equipment outside our immediate careers and we'd like to use those to provide value to people but there's just no way to do that inside the rules and none of us our interested in risking our retirements operating outside them. I just upped my retirement contribution and decided that the big evil BigCos can do all the value creating and the finance middle men can have their take. I guess that's the reason everyone does the slumlord or VRBO thing.

The YCombinator era where you could start a web business for low cost for a still unserved market was a short lived anomaly. The cost of starting a new business has returned to the historical baseline.