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Deepfake of Washington County, Oregon, Candidate Goes Viral Nationwide (oregonjournalismproject.org)
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As much as I hate to have to defend Jack Fucking Posobiec (aka EndWokeness), saving the "real" screenshot from this article and uploading it to OpenAI's verification tool[0] indicates that it, in fact, was AI-generated. I welcome any correction on this. [0] https://openai.com/research/verify/ e: Okay, now I feel stupid and AI-psychotic for even bothering to do that. Look below her name and you'll see the leftovers of the old flag.
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Even more damning seems to be the video of the event and cached images from google, which does not have an openai watermark. https://x.com/kgallella/status/2112332869461045733 https://x.com/Honest_Bender/status/2112301833708519659 Of course it doesn't conclusively prove that the flag was definitely right side up, but you'd really have to bend over backwards to explain why Oregon Journalism Project's "debunking" is watermarked but the counter-debunkings aren't.
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Unless I’m missing something all of the pictures in the article and on X that it links to return as being AI generated?
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There's only two images in the article, the "real" (fake) image (which appears twice), and the screenshot of the tweet; the latter returns "No OpenAI signals detected" for me, unlike the other.
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I’m including all of the images linked in both. And now that you’ve said that I’ve retried the same image 5 times and gotten AI 3 times and Not AI twice. Something tells me that tools is about as reliable as Pangram.
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I don't understand why the people manipulated with lies aren't offended at the liars. They are primed to believe the lies, but aren't they mad that someone sought to manipulate them? This keeps happening because it works. But why does it work? Why isn't there blowback?
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Because they want it to be true.
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Truth isn't important anymore.
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This story is fake; the flag was in fact upside down: https://x.com/alx/status/2112383598934573506 https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/lookaside/crawler/media/?media_id%3D1664857285668706&tbnid=qJ6G-DrxSphfDM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https://www.facebook.com/SOMTVMN/photos/1664857285668706/&docid=MHCq1ftAS4MrZM&w=2048&h=1366&hl=en&source=sh/x/im/m5/0&kgs=40011a362c79434a&utm_source=sh/x/im/m5/0
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And you trust this source because?
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It's from their own Facebook page, it's the Google Image Search results from their own page.
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“Before they deleted them” aka no way to check if this is BS.
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And why wouldn't you question why they deleted the original lol
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That’s not the question. The question is “were they even there” before the “screenshot”. As an example, I can screenshot your comment and have AI edit it to have you say “I really enjoy misleading people on the internet for money”, post it, and then say “I took this screenshot before they deleted it.”
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Please just look at the bottom left corner of the "real" image.
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Nonsense, the google image search result clearly still has the linkage established. There's nothing fake about it.
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As opposed to trusting "Oregon Journalism Project"?
Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026 (reuters.com)
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Probably stocks based compensation or something like that.
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Important to note that $72bn of that loss is some accounting thing and not really relevant wrt. the solvency of Anthropic
Its revenue grew 12-fold year to year, and 50% just last quarter. Last quarter it reached profitability if you exclude convertibles etc. And if you won’t it is still well on track to be profitable this/next year. It is actually faring much better than other tech startups ipo’ing over the last 20 years.
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It reached profitability if you exclude all costs (so it isn’t profitable lmao)
"Anthropic's third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion" This is great for Anthropic, but who is increasing their AI spending in this climate?
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Wasn't their previous revenue increase more than twice as big? That would very much not be great for Anthropic, they need to be accelerating growth to keep valuation, doubly so as interest rates on corporate bonds continue to rise.
The corporate partners, who are also often investors, and have an interest in ensuring the world sees genAI as utterly required. Microsoft, SK Group, Meta, Google, Oracle, etc.
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Maybe they did it like SpaceX and sold their compute to a competitor and are booking that as sales.
Subaru is killing off gas cars and will only sell EVs in Europe (electrek.co)
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"Subaru is killing off gas cars and will only sell rebadged Toyota EVs in Europe." Subaru was talking about an electric model over 20 years ago! I saw the concept drawings. Whoever has run Subaru for the last 20 years needs to be given a watch and thanked for their service on their way out the door.
If you're buying a Subaru, you're buying it because you value safety and reliability of the car, because your life/livelihood depend on it. You're not concerned about the infotainment system.
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No you're not. You're buying a Subaru because how awesome was the WRX STi and how they did in WRC! Naturally I speak for the motivations of all Subaru buyers and you don't. We can't know what reasons people do buy a Subaru, but people buying them because of awesome things professional race car drivers do in modified versions of their car has got to be non-zero.
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You are buying it for the gas powered awd system. Which is like the only thing they did well. They have zero advantage or brand value in the EV realm
On AI writing (bolkunov.com)
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Claude resay that as if I was a mentally challenged child (but without your dumb metaphors) using as few words as possible in your best imitation of a Human speaking casually without jargon and ... (What it feels like to try and get a decent sentence out of my AI.)
> When you know the writer personally, it becomes harder to see the text from the author’s perspective if you know it’s not her style. I think this is why I absolutely hate reading AI-generated PR descriptions, Readmes or wiki entries at work. I work with these people every day, we talk to each other in meetings, but then I read perfectly formatted Slop in the freshly opened PR that has your name and picture attached to it, yet it's almost impossible for me to care about it because (subconsciously or not) i can't bring myself to see it as yours. Same or even worse for reviews.
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We agreed not to use AI-based communication internally, including PR descriptions. I’d rather not have a description at all than an AI-based one. I don’t understand how people aren’t embarrassed putting those kind of PRs online tbh.
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For me long texts (internal docs) were definitely the hardest part. However, my colleagues were nice and all agreed to limit AI usage for writing docs that are for other people to read (and not for agents).
Interesting perspectives, a couple of questions that I've been pondering, and am currently curious of your perspectives on 1. It seems we are starting to see more people write like ai, is this something you have measured yet? (I never used em-dash (big fan of the parens), and I resisted for a while, re: ai, but now am trying to use them appropriately) 2. I've been reading from paper again, and my own writing style is evolving, is this too something you can/have measured?
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Definitely noticed influence of AI on my writing (and probably on my speaking as well). I probably do not like most things I pick up from it unconsciously. However, when I use AI to critique or spellcheck me - I find it's much more useful and that I've learnt something. Though it's not exactly AI writing then.
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> (I never used em-dash (big fan of the parens), and I resisted for a while, re: ai, but now am trying to use them appropriately) I started using the emdash after learning of the compose key feature of X11. Not tuning the emdash dial to 11 or anything, but occasionally. Now I avoid it to spare myself the indignity of someone confusing me for a chatbot. In general I prefer a more vulgar style of writing as a direct response to those chatbot tics. Of course, that now distinct LLM style was kind of a thing before, too, but if you weren't writing some bullshit on SEO on Medium or congratulating yourself for your achievements on LinkedIn, using elements of that style wasn't such a source of confusion. Now the chatbots will frame everything as though it's an insight on B2B sales strategies that struck them when they tripped on a dog leash while jogging to work.
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your comment was a pleasure to read :]
SimCity, but with Permits (permit.petercai.com)
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Parks and rec, the video game
Idea, digitize a town/city and apply all current codes, permits restrictions etc, and then run simulations based on permitting changes
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We have done this internally at our company (link in bio). We have an internal simulation game, kind of like the OP. The game was vibecoded, but it can run using the same rules as a city in our actual system. The simulation game is really just a toy that is fun to mess around with, but the rules engine is an actual thing in our product.
I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time. Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport. So a rule is added here, a process there, and everyone is fighting everything all the time. Can't build this because traffic. Can't build that because impact on the neighborhood. But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed. And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
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I don't mean to be pedantic but aren't democracy and zoning laws completely orthogonal and neither entail the other. You can have zoning laws without democracy and democracy without zoning laws. Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.
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"But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed." Seems more like a flaw of high density than democracy if you look at democracy in low density areas and citizen happiness in other types of government in high density areas.
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I guess you prefer this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Triumphal_Arch
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I first heard this on the Omega Tau Podcast [0], where the guest discusses an article he wrote [1] discussing, in part, the book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter [2]. > [1] Human societies historically act as problem-solving organisations that tend to develop ever-greater organisational and technical complexity in order to solve the social, economic and political problems they are confronted with. As their complexity increases, the problems they have to deal with become more difficult to solve, requiring growing investment in further economic and societal complexity. According to Tainter, however, investment in socio-political complexity eventually tends to reach a point of diminishing returns, where the marginal beneficial returns (i.e. problems solved) of additional complexity begin to decline, leading to a lowered capacity to solve the new problems that arise and to deal with their consequences. These returns may even turn negative, at which point societies struggle to uphold the level of complexity they have reached and may have to move down to a lower complexity level. This, says Tainter, is the pattern behind the rise and fall of most civilizations in human history. [0] https://ota.skadi.cloud/en/episodes/040O0P0C0P2C180H2B3z1W1N201f1J2E [1] https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/the-crisis-of-complexity-podcast/ [2] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies
I have a house in Costa Rica where there a lot of expats living in communities need to self organize because zoning and permit laws are slow, bureaucratic, and basically unenforced. I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services. And this is all done on a WhatsApp group over txt messages where nuance gets lost. People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
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> People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils. A point that comes up over and over again when discussing HOA's. See the recent submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144005
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The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did do and do get a break and not me five years ago? I don’t like plants why do we need a watering system? I’m allergic to mosquito foggers, can people just stay in at night, etc., etc.
"but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport." The only people who don't like low density are the poor, and this is why most of America is car culture, and owns their own houses. "Housing shortages" is another way of saying that existing home owners are earning strong equity. Yeah, I do want no traffic and lots of parking, so low density please!
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And oil shortage is another way of saying that existing oil owners are earning strong income. Why is either of those things the desired state? (Other than self-interest, if you happen to be sitting on a stockpile of oil.)
Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways while locating all of the toxic pollution producing manufacturing to the remaining lower-income minority neighborhoods, obliterating walkability and pedestrian safety everywhere. I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers. A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper
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Just because somebody suggests one extreme is a bad idea doesn't mean they are advocating for the other. The framing of this response, especially the "bulldozed over predominantly Black communities" line very much feels like an attempt at character assassination, as if you were trying to connect opposition to the status quo with racism.
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If I hadn't seen corporate lawyers representing multi-billion dollar investment firms regularly advocating my City Council with just this piece of rhetoric almost verbatim, sure. But it's been ten years since I've been involved with local community organizing and I know a dogwhistle when I see one. Whether or not the original poster intended it to be a dogwhistle or just formed that opinion memetically after uncritically absorbing astroturfed 'drain the swamp' rhetoric, it all leads to the same place where private equity and other investors get to run rampant with little regulatory oversight.
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Unironically yes Moses is a national hero who created some of the greatest public infrastructure in this country
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There are many ways to stop what happened with urban renewal, and we've chosen pretty much the worst one. Community process results in bad outcomes for the community, it is inherently undemocratic, yet it's been put on a pedestal as the goal of all planning. Take for example this ridiculous article from a transit planner bemoaning how Amsterdam may have wonderful transit outcomes, far more fair and equitable than anything in the US, but dangit where's all the process?? https://mass.streetsblog.org/2022/08/10/guest-column-europes-bike-and-transit-systems-are-a-marvel-but-only-for-some It's self-parody.
These policies that allow locals to push back against state or federal government overreach were made with good intentions, but the reality on the ground is that the people who take advantage of these policies are not the poor and disenfranchised but the wealthy, and the way they wield their power is to slow down development that would help the masses. https://yimbyaction.org/chapters/peninsula-for-everyone/posts/atherton-spent-145k-to-delay-caltrain-electrification-the-rest-of-us-paid-400-mi
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This is true but I'd rather close loopholes and have independent auditors that root out astroturfing than do away with the system entire. It's got good bones - it's just the flesh that's rotten.
What big city in the USA has not had redlining or had highways blasted over disadvantaged racial minority communities? I'll wait while you look that one up.
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Mesa, Arizona
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Have you considered there are other countries in the world?
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That's probably why the specifically called out USA anticipating this lame question
them: "hey this is a problem" > Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways you: "hey have you considered that actually you're a piece of shit?" yes, these rules exist for a reason. some places (like Atlanta) are still guilty. i'm not saying we should plow down Chesterson's fence, but your hostile tone also sucks
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this site has always welcomed posters who are incredibly shitty and rude, so long as most of the shit is kept as _subtext_. Then they can pretend they were polite, even though they weren't. HungryHobbit's response is just making that clear... he's actively defending what was objectively a shitty and unnecessarily snarky and confrontational post, because it adhere's to the HN norms of being smug, superior, dismissive, and dickish... but in a way that is just indirect enough that these maladjusted fucking nerds can pretend that they're polite and professional. You'll enjoy the site more if you walk in expecting that everyone you're talking to is a smug little asshole who needs to get punched in the fucking face.
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If you're going to be mad, at least be mad on main. Say it with your whole chest and not on a throwaway :)
Dude your posted to Hacker News and now you are getting your feelings hurt because a reply to a reply to your post mentioned 100% accurate historical facts? There is nothing like "you are a piece of shit" in the post you are responding to, so you are yelling at some guy providing relevant historical context because ...?
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> Right, it was so much better... No he's reacting to an accusation that anyone wants to go back to that
The irony is our reaction to the Urban Renewal era was to introduce so many veto points and red tape to projects (both public infrastructure and private property) that we are nearly incapable of fixing the problems that era introduced. When the NIMBYs of today work to protect and even double down on the bad decisions of that era it makes you wonder whether we've really moved on from it.
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I fully reject this POV. There's currently a bill working through ATL City Council to rehash our Zoning laws. The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members - they are lawyers representing private development firms, many of whom make five to six-figure political contributions to sitting council members. They're the ones pushing against any pro-social, community-oriented zoning practices (like ADUs, parking lot restrictions, and public transportation and pedestrian requirements). Believing that neighborhood units are the largest impediment to effective and efficient planning is to believe the corporate landowners at their word. There's so much astroturfing that happens in these spaces, largely rejecting density and public transportation. I can name off the top of my head a half-dozen community-oriented projects blown up by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in, pretended to be a movement-aligned mediator, and then proceeded to torpedo the drafted neighborhood deal over requirements for private developers to address rainwater overflow. This same director later went on to be hired by the same private firm for a six-figure job. The rot is real and rarely gets reported. David Simon was a rare one in his coverage of Baltimore, not all cities have skeptics like him who dig deep.
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"The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members" They are community members just not the ones who share your point of view. Those community members who might share your point of view don't show up. I've never seen community members fight for density either. We want to tear down our housing so large buildings blocking the sky can be built by corporate landowners. You know who owns large buildings? Corporate landowners. The people with little houses are average citizens. Public transit doesn't need density. Public transit exists in places with little density.
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One, they quite literally do not live in the city. Most of them live in the very rich ex-urbs. Two, the issue is with their disproportionate influence. If we lived in a perfect world where your regular-degular corporate lawyer had the same say in politics as anybody else, sure, you'd have a point. But that's not even close to reality: https://capitalbnews.org/georgia-lawmakers-real-estate-investors/
but do you think restrictive zoning and onerous permitting requirements would have prevented that? It's not like laws against murder prevented lynchings, I think in most cases these rules would have just been ignored by municipalities because they largely exist to protect monied interests not vulnerable populations.
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In Berkeley, CA, restrictive zoning in the early 1900s was used to reinforce and codify those outcomes that separated the rich and the poor. Those laws stayed in place for over 100 years, far longer than the term of a single elected official. So you have to be careful what kind of laws you pass. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/07/23/berkeley-zoning-has-served-for-many-decades-to-separate-the-poor-from-the-rich-and-whites-from-people-of-color-2
It evolves. Laws, rules, regulations accrue but are very rarely re-evaluated to see if they serve their original purpose. It's easier for most lawmakers to leave things alone. Eventually, the state declines or fails under the weight of a century of well-intentioned (maybe) laws that have outlived their usefullness. Knowing human nature, the best plan for a state that wants to survive is to set a 20 year expiration on laws. Broadly accepted laws would easily be renewed, but obsolete ones would be allowed to die.
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Not a new idea but its a good one. Its basically garbage collection but for laws. Another term for it is "sunset clauses" where a law must have reasonable conditions for expiring instead of being on the books for the rest of time.
>Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories. And despite that, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and an incredibly pleasant place to live. This should be a good lesson to everyone that "high density" does not have to be synonymous with reams of skyscrapers.
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> And despite that, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world I do think this gets into one of the traps of density conversations, because density numbers rarely make sense at the scale of an entire metropolitan city. Paris has been undergoing suburbanization for quite some time. The inner arrondissements have all steadily declined in population since the 1800s as people have moved outwards. > and an incredibly pleasant place to live Having lived there for several years myself, I fully agree with this.
Claude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins (anthropic.com)
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From the technical report: "Our prompt specified the targets, the design sets and their sizes, the rules for each design, the protein design and prediction tools, the scores and ranking formulas, and the novelty and diversity rules." I think most scientists would consider LLM to be an orchestration tool in cases like this. LLMs do work great for automating this type of drug discovery workflow! You definitely don't need the latest and greatest model, either, as long as you're careful in your specification. But attributing the designs to the tool (Claude), not the scientists who came up with the workflow, is distasteful and misleading.
And what makes you trust them, with the “gun”?
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It's less likely to have an omnicidal maniac in a group of 100 people than in a group of a few billion people.
Is it fair to say the source of the failures is we simply do not understand the complex relationship between the drug design (chemistry, cell therapy, etc.) and the biology (the complete system of the living thing). If we could understand that relationship, we could design better drugs? I know this is very hand-wavy. Probably so much so as to not be a useful thing to say, but I'm just trying to understand.
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Correct. The on-target effects of antivenin can be well-modeled along with a known subset of off-target effects, but the latter is far too complex and unknown to model completely. Trials are the acceptable middle ground that uses animal and human models to explore those unknowns.
> but apparently now it is so expensive They saw Shkreli hike prices 100x and decided that was the business model for them. Same thing has happened with rabies.
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A single shot of rabies costs about ~$3 in Asian countries where street dogs are common. It’s crazy how expensive post exposure rabies treatment is in the US.
How do you determine which one's ahead in what? OpenAI isn't just known for their models being used in mathematical discoveries, they've also been used in other areas as well? Anthropic on the other hand has not had anywhere near the amount of news coverage as OpenAI gets for their discoveries / efforts. If I were at Anthropic, I'd be making sure the higher ups highlight discoveries made using the models they make, because OpenAI is definitely highlighting those.
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>> How do you determine which one's ahead in what? We are talking about discoveries the labs have publicly showcased.
What shall I teach my son? (stevekrouse.com)
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> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son Did the author get their programming skill from their parents? I feel it's a quite weird question.
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"I will teach my children to lie. They will know it's wrong to be right. It's the only way they'll ever get paid. I will teach them to lie." — Mobius Band Twilight No, I don't agree with it. But on my most cynical days… I do enjoy the song.
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I am a reader; I'm not interested in fiction particularly but I read absolutely extensively, constantly and on more or less any topic, so the internet always appealed to me. My siblings, also non-fiction readers, both learned to read before they went to school. I point-blank refused : I was confident I could learn to read, and with the now-long-lost confidence of a summer child, at the age of less than four, I said "no, that is what school is for". When I got there, I was reading well above my level within the first couple of weeks. I assume that as well as my parents showing what reading was, I had seen my brother reading, and he had read to me and had shown me what learning to read looked like. The point of this disjointed anecdote is: be engaged, be inquisitive, show yourself learning and exploring; if you are shown a puzzle, approach it as if you don't know it. Furrow your brow comically, make mock mistakes, show your working. Enlist others to play these learning game. You don't have to worry about teaching your son anything except that learning is great, and if possible that all sorts of adults have all sorts of things they can teach. Once your kid is at school, then you can fill in the gaps; then you can be the extra teacher who engages with the subject matter (which as an adult you will have long forgotten and really can approach with fresh eyes). It's your job to help make a learner, not to be a teacher.
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You should teach your child how to learn and think critically. This is probably the biggest skill that can be taught to a child now days.
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Get them cracked at Deadlock
> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son? Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list. Things like encouraging curiosity, agency and freedom to pursue things that I showed interest in even if it meant spending many weekends and many eurodollars on me that they would no doubt have found ways to spend otherwise come to mind first, along with general values about society and how (not) to treat people. Edit: there are "hard skills" they taught me, but they are more along the lines of "we want you to be a self sufficient human being capable of dealing with life" (cooking, cleaning, how to budget and think about money,...) and less about increasing my value as a participant in the labor market
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I hate to be “that guy” - but I truly believe there is a degree of so-called privilege in that perspective. Not that I don’t value or agree with it, those soft skills are incredibly important, but one can I hope have both the soft and the hard skills. Family and romance have evolved quite a bit in recent years - but all things equal are you wanting to marry into a family with productive skills, assets, etc? Would you pick true love with the peasant girl or marry to strengthen the alliance with Normandy? Would your answre to the latter change if you were the pauper?
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I don't doubt my comment comes from a place of privilege, but the OP seems like there is some privilege there too so maybe in a way, that makes it an even better fit ;) I also think both hard and soft skills are important, it just feels to me that a parent's job is primarily the latter, not the former. There are plenty of places that can teach your child very well how to become a programmer/electrician/younameit, but not many places that you trust to teach your child how to be a good human (amplified by the fact that a lot of social conditioning happens and is engrained before we really go super deep down the "tech tree" of hard skills in life)
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>> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son? > Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list. For better or worse, parents with lucrative professions have been able to give their kids a leg up to enter those professions. They know the path to get there, have connections, etc. That's especially important in increasingly competitive environments (like we have today). Thinking you had such an asset to offer your kid, then being forced to doubt its value, is a loss.
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that's fair, i haven't thought about it that way.
Terminator 2, Sarah Connor teaches her son to fight the machines.
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Teach them to be preppers!
If lifestyles support it, and parents are so inclined, I'd worry less about teaching the first few years and more about reading to them and with them, esp. with some silliness and improvisation, hiking, camping, and shopping as a family, especially at local markets. Spend meaningful, loving time together, and out in the world, as much of the small scale natural world as you can. Listen to their questions, answer when you can, learn the answers together when you can't. If they are accustomed to hiking and camping, especially wild camping, they will learn much from you and will ask for more. If you shop together at markets, they will start to develop a more complete relationship with their food supply and with the people working it. Empathy and kindness and resilience will develop in those experiences. Later, when they are closer to school age, be as honest with them as you can about the different personalities they will encounter, the conformist teachers and students, the rebels, the do gooders, the no goods, etc., and comfort them that their people may be there right away or may not be there for decades.
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Some kids love learning at an early age. If not, it’s easy to find out. Don’t worry about teaching too soon.
We demonstrably pay plenty for other people’s kids, at least through high school (and often Community College) - the resulting education isn’t poor because of lack of funds.
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Just look at what we do relative to other countries that get better results. Teacher pay is abysmal, teacher-student ratios are abysmal. Lack of social safety nets mean our schools end up being the backstop of last resort for children who are hungry and stressed and whose parents are overworked and stressed. We have this stupid obsession with testing all the time (best practice is no homework and no tests). But hey, if you can afford it you can pay for a private school or homeschool and contribute to the further starvation of the public system.
We finally have a chance to bring up our kids with kindness as the main charesterstic to improve. Given they wont have to compete for limited resources like we had. We get crushed, scammed and trampled on if show any kindness.
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>Given they wont have to compete for limited resources like we had Are you aware of some StarTrek like technology that can create everything society needs and wants? If not, then scarcity still exists.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. I strongly disagree with that. > In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere . One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal. > It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels. Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what. > Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do. Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it. The time when a single skill would get you from the cradle to the grave is over and done with. And probably has been for a while but it is going to be much more fractured going forward.
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> Why would it have to be shallow? If you spent your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what. Because when you ground this in reality, if you spend 3 to 5 years in a field and moved to another field and spend 3 to 5 years in that from a monetary perspective, you are always going to be a junior you are going to spend your entire life doing low-level tasks and getting paid at low levels.
I’ve done okay with my single skill (IT expert). It may be a bit broader than what some would call a skill, though :)
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Best of luck.
My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. My grandfather and uncle were mechanics... I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic. If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation. We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions. Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
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> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. "And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes. People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions. There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
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Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge. Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath. Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest. (But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area. I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)
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Right? Just because my professional career never took me in those directions doesn't mean I want to foreclose them for my kid! I did do electrical engineering classes in college wherein I needed calculus, I just never took a derivative/integral after graduation because I ended up on the coding side of a Computer Engineering degree.
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> Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest. A very common example is compound, continual interest accumulation. As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula), but it's actually a limit sum over infinitely small interest terms. Similarly, these techniques work to explain and derive numerical methods for calculating many natural constants like e, pi etc.
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The only intuitive definition of e I can remember is "how much $1 becomes after a year in a savings account with 100% interest compounded infinitely" funny enough.
I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus. That might mean you can’t derive physical equations yourself, but no one needs that who isn’t becoming a physicist.
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F=ma is slightly important for physics, no? And deriving the equations is kind of the point; it's the understanding of "why" something is true. e.g. I can tell you everything acts like a spring near (stable) equilibrium, and you can believe me, but why on earth would that be true? Well, Taylor expand the potential at equilibrium. Equilibrium means the first derivative is 0, so V(x) ~ V(x_0) + 1/2(x-x_0)^2V''(x_0), so F = -dV/dx = -(x-x_0)V''(x_0), which is a spring with spring constant k=V''(x_0). That's all a very conceptual explanation; the point is near an equilibrium, zoom in and you rock back and forth on a parabolic potential! This is basic Calc BC stuff, but it also justifies why we might care about about simple harmonic motion.
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> I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus. You need calculus to design a windmill or an auto engine or an electric motor beyond the "just sort of works" level. Most of analog electrical engineering is defined by calculus. Althogh, yes, you can get LTSPICE to do most of that for you.
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds I feel like this is a crazy take. Smart (and motivated) people are better at adapting to a different world than not smart people.
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If we have working AI, I'll be able to ask it what I should do to adapt.
‘Hey, Claude, make me a painting of a sunset.’ Voila, you know how to make art. ‘Hey, Chat, write me a sonnet.’ Voila, you know how to write poetry. But you don’t really though, don’t you. Text-to-speech didn’t come into existence with the advent of agentic AI, and yet you will have a hard time getting any job or being part of most communities if you are illiterate. It turns out technology did not make literacy obsolete. In any case, we already know that putting screens in front of children is harmful, so unless someone advocates harming children, using a modern computing device (touchscreen slate, keyboard and mouse, etc) as a replacement for basic education is highly suspect.
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Yes, you understand the problem.
> "Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending." People have been freaking out about this pending doom for as long as we've walked the earth. Most of it stems from either old age or political hyperventilating (both symptoms of perceived displacement). Humanity's still grinding forward ... faster than ever.
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Try telling that to the 20-somethings who already cannot afford to get on the property ladder and are being told AI will replace what few skilled white collar roles were available to them. Times already have changed. It’s not people freaking out about a theoretical scenario. It’s already happened for those entering the job market today.
Music can do so much more than just paying rent. You can impress your future wife with your playing or singing. It's a form of therapy for many. It's true it won't pay the bills, but knowing one instrument is a good skill that differentiates you from others.
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How are you going to impress your future wife with music skills if you can’t afford an instrument to play? Or are you suggesting one should also prioritise buying a guitar over paying rent too?
The sort of slop they tell children. Adult world is far more complicated than that.
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Hard isn’t inherently complicated and simple isn’t inherently easy. A commitment to those ideals is wildly complicated. To pick a child-rearing-relevant example, saying sorry and taking responsibility is simple and easy, but such a difficult thing to achieve, even for adults, and is rife with complicated and complicating emotions and relationships.
The dissonance is deafening. Especially since the most successful people in our society are not doing any of those 3 things.
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That you believe those people with all the money are "successful" is actually the entire problem. Yeah, I'm not stupid rich, but the evidence is that I'm far better put together than Elon Musk emotionally, and even happier in regular day to day life. Which is hilarious because I just had my entire life upended. But I've never felt a compulsion to pretend to be good at a video game to impress strangers on the internet because I have responded to difficulties and personal failings by bettering myself. I embrace recognizing my faults, fixing them, and knowing that I am human. Do you want a child like me or a child like musk?
Whoops: Grok Bot Spills Tech CEO's Bank Data in Public Slack (techdirt.com)
Your president and his wife both separately were involved in blatant crypto rug pulls only 18 months ago. The fact you still have freedom of speech has no bearing on whether the country is comically corrupt.
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I'm not saying there is no corruption; Hunter Biden kicked back 10% of his salary to his dad, and a literal illegal immigrant was elected to the House in Minnesota. What I'm saying is the US broadly has low corruption. I don't have to pay a bribe to get my drivers license or to get through the airport. Prices are the same for everyone, and campaign donations are tracked and made public. Broadly speaking you can't purchase bills or laws, and have to convince the public. People own houses worth tens of millions and nobody from the government comes to demand money outside of standard taxes. I don't love everything about our legal system, but it's largely predictable and public. There are lots of countries where they can just lock you up forever, or you have to go through closed courtrooms you're prohibited from commenting on that you may never return from. The US has issues, but any supposed lack of data privacy laws isn't due to corruption, it's due to the will of the people and the rights of the people involved.
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An alleged illegal immigrant.
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> a literal illegal immigrant was elected to the House in Minnesota. who?
> Your president and his wife both separately were involved in blatant crypto rug pulls only 18 months ago. Sadly that isn't even close to the worst of it. Trump regularly pardons people of federal crimes in exchange for money and forcibly shuts down insider trader investigations into his own family. We are living in a time of unprecedented open corruption in the US government.
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Also the funding of Trump Jr’s wedding by a Russian oligarch… Private sponsorship of personal vanity projects (White House ballroom)… Jet gifted by a foreign entity (Qatari AF1)… Ambassadors demanding personal payment for guaranteed audiences (Guilfoyle)… And that’s just in recent memory. The Left isn’t blameless either. The fix needs to be systemic (repeal Citizens U, re-build independent oversight and nerf the executive), but unfortunately I only see it becoming a deeper and more acrimonious blame game.
Voxtral 3 (mistral.ai)
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I've transcribed calls with Microsoft Teams and 8x8 and the transcripts are absolutely awful. Sometimes so poor that one cannot reliably use them with LLMs. I feel so incredibly left out when I see these models on HN and have to go back to corporate reality and deal with Microsoft Teams and 8x8. I wish these products could produce plugins where i could direct Microsoft Teams and 8x8 streams to them to replace underperforming stock models. Also, I dont understand why Microsoft cannot just buy some of these upstarts and swap in their awesome models.
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Peak suverenity, Doesn't speak most of the European languages
Still, all instances of Opus are identical and do not learn. As long as the rate of mistakes is nonzero, my point stands.
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Not really. You can still put limits on the rate or aggregate dollar amount of refunds or transfers. You can put alerting on spikes of approvals. You can put back pressure that forces manual review. You can have ML models detecting aberrant behavior against historical data. No one reasonable is saying, “hook up this model to do anything it wants with no other system available.” Will people fuck it up? Absolutely! But, “the model has to be perfect or it will bankrupt a company” is more cynical than reality.
Quite funny that the agent starts speaking with a French accent after reading French :D
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Amusingly, the agent also spoke German with an English accent. I guess it takes a bit to switch contexts.
Sixteen Years After Deepwater Horizon, Deep Sea Life Shows Few Signs of Recovery (e360.yale.edu)
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There are plenty of beaches near Valdez, Alaska where you can scratch away beach sand and have black oil on your hands. That was 1989, 37 years ago. After years of appeals that the $5 Billion they were ordered to pay was excessive, they paid a whopping $507 Million in 2009.
I mean we can't know where they'd be in the counterfactual scenario. Glancing at Shell and Exxon shows BP is probably underperforming similar companies. How much of that is due to this event vs. other factors? I don't know. We wouldn't tend to expect the same extent of up-and-to-the-right behavior from dividend producing shares but BP seem to be failing to capitalize on the current oil price spike. My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.
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I didn't actually provide my view on that. I just said that the evidence that you are picking from tells a more complex story than "their stock is near an ATH" when it hasn't even recovered to where it was the day before the disaster.
We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries. Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
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Think it's still a mixed bag. There's not broad consensus (in the US at least) that continued investment in renewables is the future. We're still investing heavily in fossil fuels, we've had two military campaigns in the last three years to influence global oil supply and the sitting US President signed an emergency order to bypass restrictions on fossil fuel projects on literally his first day in office. There's plenty of people and policy makers who are fine with the fossil fuel status quo.
"It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again." Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
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You said something interesting: "... modern life requires accidents like this." This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.
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Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.
No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill. That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
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Just about every week there’s news of some kind of ecosystem damage by another negligent company that streams into my RSS feed. Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
> $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill). I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
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Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach. Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
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The stock price fell by 50ish percent, and they've spent 16 years recovering.
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BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.
It wasn't enormous enough in fines, since they're still in business and capable of doing it again, and again surviving such fines.
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Who is capable of doing what again? BP wasn't even the one running or managing the drilling, it was another corporation called TransOcean. If you mean human industry is capable of damaging the environment, then yes, but putting a Delaware C-Corp through Ch. 7 bankruptcy doesn't do anything to prevent that. The assets just get sold by the court to fund fines and legal damages. And sold to Exxon or Chevron who are also perfectly susceptible to experiencing drilling disasters. BP stock was at $110 the month before the disaster and is at $49 now, 16 years later. If your argument is that paying most of their market cap in fines and leaving the share price at basically permanent irrecoverable levels isn't sufficient deterrent, I don't find it compelling.
Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.
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The behavior that leads to the issue is individual consumers driving cars. Outlawing this would nuke demand for fossil fuels which encourages risky well drilling. But since 99% of Americans drive they tend to get very unhappy about the prospect of banning the vroom vroom. This is a real and challenging political problem. We can't get around it by pretending that corporations drill for fun.
IKEA – 3D Guide (sael.net)
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AI can't make visualization that work in different browsers yet.
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If you're going to produce slop then at least show us the prompts.
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What is the name of this website style that Claude et al loves to build so much? The light text on dark blue background, pill-shapes everywhere, pulsing indicators, etc.?
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I've personally been calling it "bad"
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The Lack table is probanly the esayest piece of Ikea furniture to build. But Claude or whatever llm seems to assume that you can screw the screws in fully by hand. But you just put them in a little and use the leg for the rest. As clearly shown in the instructions.
It's incredible. Please, Ikea, hire this guy and generate animated/interactive websites for all of your stuff.
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It would help if it didn't provide incorrect instructions lol.
Why do we have so many meetings? (nber.org)
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What I would really like to know, is: - why do meetings make attendees feel important? - why do everyone pretend to dislike meeting, yet obviously very few actualy do Isn't someone already working on a system were every employee has an AI companion that would represent them during meetings? The employee chat about the meeting's topic with her avatar beforehand until they are on the same page, then for all the avatars hold a meeting at the speed of light and come back with the overall decision that was reached. No more politics, and perfectly asynchronous. I'd love it.
Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway. If you don't like broccoli, it just means you're preparing it wrong. Don't steam it, boil it, or microwave it. Here's how I prep frozen broccoli. Preheat your oven to 400ºF/200ºC. As soon as the oven has preheated, put the frozen broccoli into a mixing bowl and drizzle 2tbsp / 30ml of olive oil over it, and toss with your fingers. Spread the broccoli over a baking sheet, sprinkle a small amount of salt over it, and bake for 20 minutes.
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steamed broccoli is great though. i think a lot of people overcook it at which point it switches from great to disgusting, but maybe its also a parsley/cilantro type deal where some people taste certain things as being extremely similar to piss?
Where do you work that _isn't_ like that? Every job I've had in my 11 year career has had geriatrics at the top of the management chain.
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Okay, you might be two-three layers higher than me.
> Much of the time the person I’m waiting on doesn’t report to my manager anyway But there exists a manager who is the nearest common ancestor of your and their manager.
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Sometimes that’s the CEO, but sure. This doesn’t change much though. If there is a general problem, it’s likely appropriate to pull in management to figure out the issue. But it’s probably not a management problem that my specific PR needs a review.
what is "build call"?
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Fair question. It might be internal jargon. Refers to making a go/no-go “call” on the quality/readiness of a new build. e.g. A new release candidate is built and tested from a commit. Some tests fail and each test failure is blocking unless the product area owner (or test owner) attests that the issue is not a blocker (test flakiness, test environment specific issue, extremely low priority bug, etc). The build can release only when all test blockers are closed out. Most build call processes I’ve seen burn more time investigating flaky tests than real issues and the person running build call (often the “release driver”) typically wastes significant time flogging people to close out the same flaky bugs from the last build. I strongly recommend not building one if you can avoid it.
I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.
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why have review or ownership at all? git bisect and page the cause automatically but also, you arent really blcoked on anyones review. just open a fork of their service and run a copy on your own team
An innovative approach. And by submitting a PR on Friday afternoon, you might get a free hand to do anything you like!
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or 30k lines of slop every 5 minutes, nights and weekends included
Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case (prestonbyrne.com)
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I think this is just one more case of “we thought we lived in Western Civilisation and all agreed on how to handle the problems of the world”. And we are discovering that we actually live in American Civilisation, and the differences are becoming insurmountable. The problem is America cannot stand alone - everyone needs friends
>It would rather pursue more business opportunities. You're agreeing with parent poster that they don't care to fight on principle (in the unlikely chance they hold any principle in the first place). You're just using avoidant terminology that skips the criticism inherent in parent's framing.
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I'm commenting on how non-US laws may affect businesses, descriptively speaking, without prescriptively stating what I think that the law ought to be. I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.) However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.
Think of the kids the world we failed to protect by not having passport checks and government snitch at the 4chan login. But don’t worry! We will check your passport when you open your phone (already live in the UK, efforts supported by the GBP 2M secret donation of Meta to NGOs). And what’s the worst thing that could happen? No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/palestine-action-arrest-facebook-police-raid-b2811996.html
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For some reason we keep forgetting to make it illegal school kids to have sex with adults too. I thought the Russel Brand case might cause someone to ask why it's even legal for a grown man to pick a kid up from the school gates to have sex with them, but apparently not. Would be nice if foreigners who raped 30+ kids could get more than 14 years in prison before we release them too. I get the concern about kids on 4chan, but it just feels like such low priority that I'm surprised the government keep forgetting to tackle the more important stuff that's happening in real life.
It is not blocked in the UK. I think OFCOM themselves recognize the problem with trying to ban VPNs, but extremely dim MPs and extremely angry newspapers (who are the underlying enemies of free speech here) don't.
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They only temporarily backed down on targeting VPNs, while also saying that online platforms should block all VPN users who don't verify their ages.
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[delayed]
Dammit, my edit window ran out of time. Alas. While the 22nd April, 3rd June, and 10th June sessions are from that committee, they are unrelated to the inquiry of constitutional safeguards. Skip to the 15th July session. Here's a link to the inquiry: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9861/the-uks-constitutional-safeguards/ Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.
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Failing to do anything constructive about the problems he’s identified is Cummings’ whole thing though. He’s like an incompetent Cassandra: people keep on agreeing with his diagnoses, giving him power in the hope that he’ll fix things at which point he makes a complete hash of everything and leaves in a huff having made things worse than they were before. If the right ever takes power in the UK in the near-ish future I expect us to go through exactly this cycle again. Cummings seems to be very bad at the politics of driving organisational change & making it stick, which is ironic given that criticising public bodies is what he spends so much of his time doing.
The write-up from the lawyers is unintentionally hilarious 1. 4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026. (sauce: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-4chans-case-against-britains-media-regulator-2026-09-16/_ The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity. 2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees. We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here: Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
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Sigh. The rantings of far leftists are so fatiguing.
The UK is Russia in denial? I am massively confused
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Oh sorry I assumed you were Murican Oh well, same thing. At this point the UK is basically the mutant kid sprouting from the body of that guy in Total Recall :) The same shitty some of the worst authoritarianism among the Western world etc.
I'm saying that right now, certain high-profile idiots are making it matter by definition. Once they stop using Twitter for that, then it'll stop mattering again.
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The high profile idiots might matter, their participation on Twitter doesn’t. Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
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The medium is the message. (Or at least, it heavily shapes the message).
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They would literally announce new decisions on Twitter before anywhere else. High-impact political decisions and international decisions. You would be a fool to ignore it just because of the platform. You'd die on that hill. > Twitter isn’t the active ingredient. The idiots aren't an active ingredient either. Russia and Iran could have used any puppets. These ones just happen to also twitch like a frog leg.
No need gor a china-style great firewall. Just compel your local dns providers to stop resolving that website. That's what they do for copyright violations Easy to circumvent ? Sure, but most people don't know how, so you've made the website inaccessible to the vast majority
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The infrastructure is already in place for a global great firewall. One need only to compel Google and Cloudflare to block a site in their DNS and most of the planet will not be able to reach it.
This is just laying down the ground work for Russia-style deep packet inspection. “We don’t have a capability to censor the foreign internet, so we need measures to cut off the violating sites from our side”
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Sorry for copypaste, but I still hope people will see true intentions of govt. Just a recap how it happened in Russia: 1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8 2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully. 3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push). 4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push). 5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push). 6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI. 7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc ).
EMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise (emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com)
"eMudhra is an Indian public key infrastructure (PKI) and licensed certifying authority headquartered in Bangalore, India" There is reason why company shouldn't cheap out and use foreign vendors like this....
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Certainly some American CAs aren't any better, flashbacks to Comodo 2011 (now Sectigo).
Since I haven't seen this mentioned enough yet: The private key for all 8 "compromised" CAs is a single byte: https://mastodon.catgirl.cloud/@49016/117474217042191790 One of the private keys is literally "4". I'm putting "compromised" in quotes here, because I can't call it that without cringing and cursing. [cf. also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50169109 ]
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Maybe somewhere in the code it says key_string = to_string(*key); instead of key_string = to_string(key);
More than that, they claim the key was in an HSM, so they likely could not look at it.
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i wonder how many keys they thought it had. reading them byte by byte xD 'this HSM is excellent we can litterally put _all_ our keys in it!' and thx for the context. i rly wonder now how it went down lol
Attestation is not required by the compliance standard for browser CAs (WebTrust) and it is also quite vendor-specific and not very interoperable, so it is not commonly done. The Root CA must sign requests after authentication, but a "manual" approval is also accepted if done with the appropriate oversight with witnesses (clearly not the case here).
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Of course it's not required, as we see here. The question is why not? Getting a simple code-signing cert seems to have more stringent requirements in that it either requires attestation or CA-issued hardware.
I believe Android updates things like CA certs independently of their monthly security patch. I'm not sure Android 12 uses the same system, but on newer Android I think those are shipped via Google Play system updates, which don't require waiting for the phone vendor.
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Yeah, in Android 14 they separated it out so that the CA store can be updated from Google Play. Versions below that you're reliant on the manufacturer to ship updates.
None of the roots were compromised. (Some of) Their own sub-CAs for TLS certs, which are also cross-signed by Sectigo (since their own roots are rather recent), are affected. How you have that root cert on your phone with a 3 year old CA set I have no idea, presumably something updated your CAs in the meantime? (Also, aren't you incredibly exposed to the general onslaught of vulnerabilities from the past 3 years?)
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Well that makes sense. The "emSign ECC Root CA - G3" root is listed as being originally issued on 18 February 2018, so would have been really concerning if that itself was the compromised certificate.
organized crime is generally as or more capable these days. they have bigger budgets than most nation states.
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They are not exclusive to each other. The most successful criminal organizations work with, and from within, nation states, their intelligence agencies and law enforcement. Oh hi, we see you.
I’m surprised to see this username above this comment. No, the cert can be issued with no (or invalid/junk) SCT and will work fine with clients who don’t check SCT, which is most non-browser interaction.
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To spell it out a bit further, an attack strictly in a non-browser context that is reasonably well targeted will most likely go undetected since what the attacker is up against is the chance of inadvertently running into a paranoid user who goes out of his way to perform verification.
“They can put SCTs in the cert, and still not publish to the logs, nobody is auditing the logs for every cert every browser sees” I don’t think you can get the SCT from a log without the log publishing it? That would defeat the purpose. “Certificates that support certificate transparency must include one or more signed certificate timestamps (SCTs), which is a promise from a log operator to include the certificate in their log within a maximum merge delay (MMD).[4][3] At some point within the maximum merge delay, the log operator adds the certificate to their log.”
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> I don’t think you can get the SCT from a log without the log publishing it? Well you can, but only if the log cooperates. That is, the SCT is merely a promise to add the certificate to the log by some particular deadline. Nothing technically stops the log from disregarding that promise. But if it does fail to log the certificate, the SCT itself is proof of its misbehavior. And it's not enough to subvert a single log, because browsers require SCTs from multiple distinct operators in order to consider a certificate valid.
If you're doing a MITM attack, you can selectively intercept certain clients, and only serve the compromised certificate in those cases only. Automated scanners won't pick that up. None of this actually works though, because browsers started mandating certificate transparency.
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Please be careful with your phrasing, as there are MANY other critical things on this planet that use TLS certs which are not browsers, and some are extremely difficult/impossible to update. VPNs, embedded software (IoT, automotive, aerospace, medical, industrial etc.), business systems, you name it.
are there any consequences to eMudhra?
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Google and Mozilla are banning their roots. There’s a good chance if’s a death penalty for the company.
All your eggs end up in one basket usually because it's a really good basket . All things turn and curve and degrade; Google used to be the "it's perfect" darling.
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Interesting to mention Google because the whole system still relies on them. They decide what certificate transparency logs can enter the program and offer the list of logs. If you don't trust Google web PKI falls apart.
The screening process has been more involved in that since around the late 2000's. I wouldn't call 20 years "very recently," especially in the context of the history of the web.
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circa 2007 I was looking over a college textbook on computer networking that I saw at a family member's house. It still said "While networks are inherently unreliable, it's not a stretch to imagine a future where one can stream video on-demand over a WAN like the Internet"
Web PKI is cursed. Why should anyone have to ship a new version of Go, Electron, webpki-roots, etc. (possibly over a now-compromised TLS connection!) just to revoke a certificate? Why are so many packages independently shipping high-sensitivity trust-bootstrap credentials? And why can any CA still vouch for any domain instead of each being limited to a specific ccTLD or other non-total shard of subject names? Also, it's quietly, in the email space, that we're seeing real innovation while browser vendors just say "no" to everything. We should be distributing trust, not centralizing it in browser vendor security teams and Let's Encrypt.
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What's worse is, if this hadn't come to light, how would you even know when an attacker issues a cert for your domain? Well you might think, oh I can monitor the certificate transparency logs. I would say well, good luck downloading and parsing terabytes of certificates as they are logged. Then there are CAs whose logs will rate limit you in a way such that you can't catch up to the certs being logged with one server and IP. The system might "work" but not for domain owners. Good luck.
DNSSEC key rollovers don't change who has custody of the keys. They're not a magic spell that fixes stuff like this. It is closer to the truth that DNSSEC is limited to recovery from incidents like this to doing rollovers, rather than immediate revocations. Rollover is not something that makes DANE more attractive here.
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I don't think I understand what you're trying to argue here; if you can't find a usable registrar for your domain… you can't really use that domain anyway, can you? They can just break it. But… let's not get into yet another DNSSEC/DANE discussion.
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I'm not sure I see what this has to do with how the DNS operates, beyond observing that key rollovers are not a reasonable response to incidents like this.
2026 is an exciting year for the Rust compiler (and me) (yoyo-code.com)
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Hexcat link is broken and leads to "https://https//hexcat.nl" instead of https://hexcat.nl
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Somewhat indirectly related, but is there any progress on implementing persistent caching in rust-analyzer? It would really benefit from faster startup times.
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I'm wondering about the future of clippy.
I'm curious about polymorphism. Should it be default on for debug builds just to save storage and compile time? How will rust decide whether to enable polymorphism? Will it be possible to provide source-level polymorphism hints to the compiler?
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> polymorphism I assume you ask about polymorphization, which is a term used to refer to a specific optimization mentioned in the blog post. The base version which Rust wants the most makes sense to enable by default for all builds, because it's purely just removing duplicate work - this is for cases like Vec<u64> and Vec<i64>, where we currently emit code for each one separately, even though it's pretty much the same for both. More general version will make sense for debug builds or in some special cases, like when optimizing for size. I believe people also want to experiment with it for some interop use cases (and for that, it'd be useful to have source level annotation). I think it's too early to tell how all of this is going to look like, though.
I've seen three outages at various orgs that were prolonged due to compile times. In these cases it was a root contributor to missing RTO. The compile times are a liability. One proposal I came across actually suggested breaking up a perfectly fine monolith into a dozen microservices to reduce compile times (at the cost of cumulative CI costs going up). When the alternative is massively rearchitecting your systems, Zig and Go begin to look really nice by comparison.
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Maybe the proposal you saw was breaking up into crates, which is Rust's compilation units and can be parallelized. They're not microservices, they're just libraries which still combine to produce a single binary.
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Zig dumps core and Go is slower and needs more memory though, and this matters, too. (not that Rust build times are really a price to pay for avoiding these things, it's more a result of not making fast builds a goal from the start)
Bevy is intentionally sharded across many crates, is small, and has the dev working on optimised build times. That isn't "Rust compiles are fast", it's another example of "Rust requires you architect your code a specific way".
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Fair enough but Rust also gives you a mix of safety and efficiency nothing else does
A good 4TB SSD was $1000 the last time I checked. The "throw more resources at it" attitude makes all but very top tier equipment kinda useless for many cases. I had to abandon several projects until I bought a significantly beefier computer because of disk space, which is ridiculous. A lot of it was rust target directories taking up tens of gigabytes.
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Yes it's a problem. Not dismissing it. Just a less expensive problem than CPU or RAM is all I'm saying. It's been a thorn for me too (being on a macbook myself, but now I have a dedicated build box). RAM prices are insane right now...
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