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Ask HN: Why does it matter if no one reads your novel as long as the AIs do?
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That should have already happened. The AI companies should had first created a market where people submit there stuff to be included in the training. It would have been slower progress but it would have been better for public adoption and their own reputation. I've heard people are getting paid now, not sure, but they definitely yoinked all the content without permission, when it could have been an entire market around it. So yeah, I think that's a good idea, and why I want AI to stay away from being used for one-shot creative output. Luckily that is still not very good, at least not for unique and creative applications.
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If no human is reading what I write, then there's no point in publishing it.
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But you could still get credit and financial compensation. Mathematicians write proofs that only a few people read in full and understand. And yet, they are fine with that.
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> But you could still get credit and financial compensation. Sure, but that doesn't make up for the loss of the primary reason for writing the material in the first place. > Mathematicians write proofs that only a few people read in full and understand. And yet, they are fine with that. As I said in another comment (before I saw this), that sort of writing is very different, with different motivations and target audiences, than writing something like a novel. Apples and oranges.
> And it could even credit and financially compensate you whenever this happens. It could, but it doesn't. Also, have you considered that perhaps creative people who write novels actually want people to directly consume their work, and not indirectly?
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Mathematicians seem content with having only a few people read and understand their proofs in full.
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Have you considered that mathematicians aren't writers? Or that your original framing was having no one , rather than "only a few people," read your work? Do you think mathematicians would be content with having no one but AIs read their work? I don't think so.
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This will be the reality of math soon. Complicated proofs will only be checked completely by AI.
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That doesn't actually answer any questions, but I doubt mathematicians are entirely thrilled about the prospect of having their field entirely automated, even if they still get paid.
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That sort of writing is very different, with very different motivations, than something like a novel.
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A novel not read by humans could still influence future novels indirectly because its ideas are mentioned in AI responses. And you would get credit and financial compensation for those ideas that are mentioned.
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> A novel not read by humans could still influence future novels That isn't at all relevant to why I engage in creative writing.
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I really do wonder sometimes whether these questions you post are trolling or if you truly don't understand how humans work on a fundamental level.
Vibecoding isn't a crime How Distribute Your App on Linux after Flathub refusal (grigio.org)
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Well, there is still AppImage, this might be the right way to go with in this case.
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Further evidence that Flatpack does not solve the problem of distributing applications. https://xkcd.com/927/
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"Vibecoding isn't a crime" Meanwhile, a few ranks away on HN: "Big AI to humanity: drop dead" "The End Of Upward Mobility – AI is coming for the meritocracy"
Xiaomi MiMo v2.6 (mimo.xiaomi.com)
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Funny that all but one video has audio, the house 3D model one, where you can hear (what I assume are) Xiaomi's engineers talking about who knows what.
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I've got a working recipe to run this model on Dual DGX Spark: https://github.com/volfco/spark-vllm-docker/blob/main/recipes/mimo-v2.6-flash.yaml Averages ~25-35tok/s which isn't bad for a first attempt.
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These benchmark are useless as they don't say whether they were done before or after Fable and Astra got nerfed.
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Leaning into what it cost to train is hilarious and an obvious shot at US frontier labs spending tens to hundreds of millions or more to train their models.
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The moat for OAI and anthropic seems to be very quickly shrinking. Chinese labs are now using RSI-like approaches and even without resorting to heavy distillation they're catching up in a couple of months vs. what would have been 6-12 months a year prior. And as these models get better the pace of training is quickly speeding up too. This doesn't bode particularly well for anthropic/OAI after they go public.
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token vendors are headed to the same place mobile data vendors went, this is good for everyone but those who thought they could maintain exorbitant prices
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>Night 0.8x Usage, 00:00-08:00 -UTC+8 It's because offpeak electricity is cheaper? Funnily it's perfect if you are in the Pacific Time Zone because you can use it daytime 9am to 5pm
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Pelicans for Flash: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2Ff8a40b411544d0a7806003ef8c0d664e Pelicans for Pro: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F53688c39d37bcbf0cb1a98781c277cdb
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How does this translate to coding performance, which is what most of HN cares about (...I assume)?
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I only visit HN for the pelicans, personally.
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Yeah, I thought the "N" was for Nest
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It means they're good at writing SVGs, in particular SVGs of animals riding modes of transport!
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Just me, or do these look bad? Qwen3.8-27b pelican was amazing on Mac. https://www.nudgehost.com/dpjn3uwe
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Looking terrible isn't nessesarily a bad thing. The pelican is heavily pre trained now. Having a crappy pelican means you didn't try to juke the stats.
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Apologies for not taking the time to find it, but there was a post that tried to determine if the pelican was benchmaxxed across a bunch of models by comparing it to other SVGs, and found that it wasn't at all.
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ish… at least we can be sure they don’t benchmaxx the pelicans lol
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I think we can say pretty confidently they aren't pelican-bench-maxxing
I don't trust any of the benchmarks where Opus 5 surpasses Astra or Fable 5.1. Maybe Terminal Bench 4.0 and ExploitGym are reasonable. Terminal Bench 4.0 GPT 6 Astra 59.6 Claude Fable 5.1 55.1 Claude Opus 5 49.0 MiMo-V2.6-Pro 34.9 MiMo-V2.6-Flash 28.8 DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 26.8 MiMo-V2.5-Pro 1.5 ExploitGym GPT 6 Astra 42.4 Claude Fable 5.1 30.4 Claude Opus 5 22.1 MiMo-V2.6-Pro 17.8 MiMo-V2.6-Flash 6.0 MiMo-V2.5-Pro 0.1 DeepSWE v1.1 DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 74.2 Claude Opus 5 74.0 GPT 6 Astra 74.0 MiMo-V2.6-Pro 71.9 Claude Fable 5 70.0 MiMo-V2.6-Flash 67.9 MiMo-V2.5-Pro 19.0
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They match my experience. Astra and Fable I rate below Sonnet. They are incredibly poor. They were excellent for a couple of days after release and then plummeted. Maybe I am being routed to more quantised versions or less capable models with system prompt to fake Astra or Fable.
Anyone else more excited about Chinese models than American models these days? Big thing for me is affordability.
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Yep, I'm trending in that direction, and I'm someone with Claude stickers all over my laptop. My main app dev work is still going to Claude, but everything else is going to China even at API rates now. One simple task: I needed an LLM to go through and clean up a few thousand page descriptions and titles in my personal search engine index, where the human web page authors had put in no effort sigh . I did a shoot out between Claude, Luna, GLM 5.3 Flash and Deepseek. Despite the high cost, Claude's descriptions were terrible, and even Opus warned me that the descriptions coming back from Haiku were "generalized, not accurate". I expected I would choose Luna because of price, and occasionally it did have wonderful descriptions (one captured emotion in a way no other model did). But in the end, the GLM 5.3 Flash descriptions were the easiest to read, they flow well while also being accurate & including necessary keywords, and being highly affordable. So it won out. It's a task that is nowhere near frontier, but a task where somehow China is better than frontier.
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I have a contrarian opinion that China passing America in Ai is the Sputnik moment we need to leave the hubris behind and get our mojo back debatable if a turn around is possible before '29
Absolutely! Chinese models are both cheaper and more capable in many cases, compared to the American models and their makers continuously fumbling or reducing model capability with each update. Deepseek decreased costs when they released Flash 4.1 you would not see any American company do this, in reverse they would try charge you more.
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> Deepseek decreased costs when they released Flash 4.1 you would not see any American company do this, in reverse they would try charge you more. OpenAI reduced prices and Anthropic increased weekly usage limits.
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OpenAI decreased prices with the 5.6 model family. And later they further cut Sol and Terra pricing by 20% (maybe only in the API) and Luna by 80%. In fact Luna still outperformed DeepSeek Flash 4.1 in cost per task on Artificial Analysis when I last checked. However, Luna is slightly less intelligent. I have a feeling that it's pretty dumb and prone to hallucination unless running at xhigh or max effort, where it somehow manages to work quite well. I did not personally test the open weight models beyond the old Qwen 3.6 27B, which produced unusably bad results for me. The competition is great, and I hope Chinese models will continue to force leading US labs to offer models at a low price point. That said, I don't think the Chinese labs have anything over OpenAI and Anthropic when it comes to capability or efficiency - I have no reason not to believe the US labs have even lower cost to serve the models.
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OpenAI had to cut costs because of Anthropic. I also do not trust the benchmarks when it comes to models anymore. I have tried both Claude and OpenAI models and while it is true that the 5.6 series is smarter than Deepseek (at the time i tested it against 4.0) at that price it is still not worth it and sometimes randomly refuses to do tasks or stops midway etc. Do also remember China is this far in the AI race despite all chip restrictions from America. If they were in equal standards I truly think Chinese models would have long surpassed American ones. Also would like to remind how Anthropic CEO is being hostile and blaming Chinese models with distilling meanwhile their own models claimed to be Qwen¹ and their stance against open models is negative² and they still keep blaming China for it. 1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671252 2- https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
I'm Canadian so this sentiment has little value in 2026 unfortunately.
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Canadians warming up to China makes me think of Germany becoming increasingly reliant on Russia in the 2010s.
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Half of Canada now uses the word 'enemy' when asked for an adjective to describe America or China. We're equivalent in their eyes now because we elected Trump a second time and all that he has said and done in 2.0
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Because at present the pedophile US president is making it his mission to molest my country. China, for all its faults (including espionage, which the US is also guilty of) is mostly focused on conducting trade.
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Also, frankly, as a fellow Canadian it's pretty clear that the biggest "rival" the US has right now is itself. Just passed out in the corner puking on itself shouting about all the foreigners who won't talk to it.
In the chart they use "Pareto Line", which I think is wrong. Pareto is 20% effort leading to 80% results. Which could be interpreted as models costing 20% having 80% of peak intelligence, but that’s not what it looks like to me. It looks like the "Frontier Line" to me, which is also often misinterpreted. frontier does not mean the best models. It means all models that are not strictly dominated, meaning in most cases: Not same price or cheaper and more intelligent. I personally would like the word frontier to be used with more criterias: Open Weights, per use-case, etc etc. This would make model selection easier, but I understand it’s not an easy thing to do.
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No, Pareto refers to Pareto efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency What you call "frontier line" is also called "Pareto frontier" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front Your description of it is basically correct though
https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B is an option
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That’s for toy GPUs, like the 5090.
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there are many tasks (increasingly more each day) where small models are more than enough
this is to offload VRAM to DRAM (for GP comment), and makes no difference for URAM
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n-grams can be kept on SSD, no need to hold them in any kind of RAM (at least w/o batching)
Check out eugr’s TP=1 sparkrun recipe :) It’s an NVFP4 quant, but it fits, and is surprisingly capable.
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do you have a HF link? HF search is not uncovering it for me (or is it somewhere else)
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https://github.com/spark-arena/eugr-recipes/blob/main/recipes/qwen3.8-flash-next-nvfp4-solo.yaml This one! I'd recommend pointing your agent at it (after installing sparkrun), and asking it to research the absolute latest in TP=1 Flash-Next - mine grabbed particular vLLM nightlies and mods to improve performance, and it was well worth it.
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looks like this is likely it https://github.com/spark-arena/eugr-recipes https://github.com/eugr/spark-vllm-docker
Flash[1]: 309B total / 15B activated parameters Pro [2]:, 1.02T total / 42B activated parameters [1]: https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL [2]: https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Pro-RL
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more like 500B in FP8
Thanks so much for sharing this. As someone who mostly watches from the sideline, can you share what you can see in this dashboard that someone like me can't see? Is it the metrics themselves that they measure (the metrics tab is absurdly detailed), something in the notices, or something else I missed?
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The best thing they did is being open about all the setbacks they had to deal with. They logged every restart with a reason, talked about dropping a cyber dataset after it degraded coding benchmarks. Also published real time training loss, benchmark scores after every checkpoint and running cost estimates. Really the only thing missing was dataset descriptions, the dashboard only had random IDs like "dataset-zrso". I guess it's their lawyers fault.
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the existence, who else has a live dashboard for the RL late-training?
Looking at the frontend design examples; why do these models seem to love the "01 - UPPERCASE TEXT" motif. It's everywhere now (see https://try.cloudflare.com/ , which has '01 · QUICK TUNNELS', but no "02" anywhere).
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The extraneous small-caps labels are one of the main idiosyncrasies of AI generated markup. I wonder how much of this is a "scaffolding" technique to help the model build stable designs. But was it reinforced in RLHF or an emergent behavior of the models?
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Which model did you have? I ask because my wife has the 15T and the camera is better than my iPhone 17 Pro. And while toying around with it I didn't notice any bloat. Plus hers support native split screen which I kinda need to multitask on the go. I'm so pissed at how bad Siri is compared to her android phone that I'm thinking about selling the iPhone to get a Huawei Pura Ultra.
It's funny, I have the exact opposite reaction. This is probably misguided on my part, but Xiaomi is one of the very few major tech companies that I don't have an immediate strong negative reaction to. Everything I've bought from them, from robot vacuum to mobile phone, has been reasonably well designed, didn't break, and was priced fairly. I also think their car looks badass. I'm sure they're doing all kinds of terrible things, like all major companies. I just can't help but like them. Also, this model looks great, and I'll give their subscription a shot next month.
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I must second this. I'm in Europe, and here the options for home appliances are usually German (e.g. Philips), Balkan (e.g. Gorenje), or Xiaomi. Xiaomi is the best by far, and it's honestly not even close. Their home appliances are so rock-solid that they actually still surprise me. I've gone from, e.g., having to replace electric water kettles every six months to buying one from Xiaomi and never replacing it. (Nigh on three years now.) I really have a very positive impression of them.
AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up (linear.app)
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Speed up CI and the next bottleneck just moves to deploy and rollback, which do not scale the same way.
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Here's my constant question: Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever. Why have we not seen an improvements in products? While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu. Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?
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(Disclosure: I'm a cofounder of RWX) For anybody wanting to solve similar problems and considering Bazel, take a look RWX. It's built around the same concepts of content-based caching and graph-based task execution, but it's far more runtime agnostic and easier to adopt. https://rwx.com
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I call this moment "the Great CI Bottleneck of 2026". Here are my thoughts on it: https://dagger.io/blog/the-great-ci-bottleneck-of-2026/
In my case it's not the CI that's the bottleneck. It's the human testing side. Does it work, sure. But does it actually do the thing we want (and more importantly) does it do it in a way our customers will understand and actually like?
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I feel no one talks about this, and yet it is glaringly obvious. Are we even solving the right problem? No one cares. Push code. Number go up.
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I feel like if anything LLMs have reduced coding/software to "throw as much as possible at the wall and see what sticks". It feels quite shortsighted and wasteful, especially considering that humanity needs to get better about how it produces and consumes energy. It's sort of bleak.
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hasn't improved software either. it's made the overall quality worse if anything.
Clearly you have to replace obsolete human testers with agentic AI testers, duh. At some point, with all this velocity , human users become the bottleneck, unable to keep up with and learn all the changes and new features. Luckily, there's a simple solution: just replace the human users with agentic AI users.
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I think you're being sarcastic, but there is actual truth behind what you're saying. Because every developer is now a slop cannon by default, by default users will experience churn and whiplash, and things will break all over the place. As you point out, this is bad. It's also impossible to fix without deploying agents on the QA side. Like it or hate it, agentic testing is inevitable to protect users from the churn and noise caused by the slop cannon. I don't think that replaces test engineers at all - if anything it makes the job more fun. If you've ever had to keep playwright tests in sync with the target manually, and kept the CI environment up to speed with toolchain changes, you know what I mean. Whether the "slop cannon by default" situation could have been avoided in the first place, is another question... But we're here now and there's no going back. Might as well deal with it as best as we can. TLDR: it's not all bad :)
Maybe we can also replace the customers with agentic consumers.
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> The forceful executive, Henry Ford II, and the leader of the automobile workers union, Walter Reuther, both saw many examples of advanced machinery operating at the plant. The words they exchanged brilliantly encapsulated the paradox of automation: > Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues? > Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars? https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars/
Uh, no. If stage X is the bottleneck, it's immaterial how much you speed up stage Y.
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You're assuming QA reviews won't be fully automated, and triggered from a CI pipeline.
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We can assume lots of things, but at some point the rubber must hit the road. What exactly are you using to back up this claim? > QA reviews [...] fully automated
I’m conflicted about Linear’s progression. I dislike some of the features but on the whole they’ve managed to keep the software pleasant to use, it doesn’t feel to me that it is drifting towards Jira territory, rather, it feels like it is losing the carefully considered product design because now code is cheap to generate. I’m not worried about it turning into Jira but it has lost its soul. Still a great product.
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I haven't used Linear in any serious capacity, but I feel like there's plenty of market in "Jira that doesn't feel like it hates its users" and "Jira but we care about performance". Not saying that they're shooting for either of those segments, but someone should. Plenty of enterprise orgs that need (or are convinced they need) Jira's featureset.
I just feel apps like linear are increasingly getting in the way of full send agentic development where sub agent orchestration is done through agent to agent messaging, work trees, on demand git restructuring and epoch specific coordination plains, often .md files. The smaller the human component of total product development gets, the more this may be the case.
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Linear is a key part of my prompting technique. I write specifications in Linear, and the history I generate in it becomes a critical source of context for my agents. Prompting my agents has become “look at XYZ-124 in Linear and ask me any questions you have.”
CI is really only significant on the programming side of things. Networking, systems administration, hardware, etc often don’t have that workflow.
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I see you have not discovered infrastructure-as-code (IaC). We have CI for our infra.
sysadmins CI is hoping the machine still boots after an update. Unless you are lucky you got two identical machines to have a test env.
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Also the case of 'learning that someone did updates directly on AWS console instead of terraform and losing 0.5 or more days cleaning up the resulting mess'
Agentic Coding has been a huge strain on CI, I have been using Bazel to improve our build times and ultimately building customized runners to improve our CI Anyways great blog post from linear team a lot to learn from it
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This still surprises me. Mostly around, at least the majority of 'stuff' I've worked on (both before and after the rise of coding agents) myself or others took enough time to make sure that anything done locally, if you run the tests locally, you're at least 90% of the way there as far as what CI/CD does. I suppose the flipside being, most of those projects had less churn (i.e. one person was working on a service at a time, and we had good contracts between services.) Also, Our local boxes were way better than our CI boxes, so there was incentive to run locally versus waiting 2-10x the time for CI to run...
Bazel can even skip the final artefact!
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well for test runs you kinda need the binary to run, but you're correct, if the job is just "does this build" no download necessary.
The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (terrytao.wordpress.com)
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I really wish the models were smart enough to "tail their own logs" and tell us whose work/papers/chats were the catalyst for these math insights. What makes their "internal" model so much better at math? Must be trained on a whole lot of honesty.
Is the advisory group abelian? I'll see myself out...
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Please. This is IAS — the members can barely be bothered to commute.
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At first I was mad you beat me to the punch but I guess order doesn't matter.
The purpose is obvious - AI companies are using math to as a PR tool to demonstrate that AI is more capable than humans. This devalues math and mathematicians. There is even a relevant announcement from today, where OpenAI announced they solve 100 open math problems, without even bothering to state what they are. However, even if they are successful in removing math from the PR toolkit of AI companies, I can’t see it more than a short term band aid. If AI progression continues, the announcements will just transition from big flashy one, to a kid using Claude on their laptop. I don’t have a solution here, and I’m worried it’s coming to all human fields. So it’s more of an ability to observe what might happen to all of us.
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> There is even a relevant announcement from today, where OpenAI announced they solve 100 open math problems, without even bothering to state what they are. The announcement is about exactly this group: https://openai.com/index/advisory-group-on-mathematics-and-ai/ This group has been formed to tell OpenAI whether or not (and if yes how) they should release those 100+ problems. IMO “AI companies are using math to as a PR tool” is not quite it; they are using math problems as a benchmark to evaluate their AIs, but after the prior blowback from the mathematical community, they are happy to sit on the results until the community (this group) tells them how to publish the results. And as you say, even if they don't publish the results eventually anyone will be able to do this when this model is released, so it's just a matter of time.
I knew mathematicians were a smart bunch, but honestly, the events of the past few weeks have really given me a new level of respect for them. They might be the first community I've seen to experience the AI "rush" and (at least as presented to an outside observer) immediately come together, assess the situation, and calmly, empathetically, and rationally act. They evaluated what AI is good at and what it lacks. They've thought through how it'll likely affect their field in the future. They've explained where the need for humans still lies, and made clear proposals for how to change their own field and for what demands to make of AI companies. Of course they're not all on the same page, but they're at least talking and trying . They haven't started worshipping the machine god and loudly claiming their whole field is solved. Nor have they flailed wildly at LLMs as if complaining enough about it will make them go away. Every major statement I've seen come out of the math community on this matter reads as well thought-through, humble, reasoned, and deeply human . In these days of fear, uncertainty, and obsolescence anxiety, honestly, they've given me some confidence that maybe we will figure this stuff out after all. Maybe we'll learn from them. Who knows.
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No, I don't think they are adapting well. I've seen 3d designer at my company adapting better on the disruption and paradigm shifts GPT-6 Astra is going to cause. The 3D designers are in a tougher situation because it's far less of abstract issue then math, and yet the results are astounding. It's hard to believe until you see it yourself. It's surreal.
> I knew mathematicians were a smart bunch, but honestly, the events of the past few weeks have really given me a new level of respect for them. As a mathematician, I am a bit disappointed by my (admittedly illustrious) colleagues. I get the need to take it slowly (and I am a quite impatient person, so I shouldn't get to decide stuff like this), but everything said feels a bit too sour grapes for my taste. Ok, maybe AI did not solve the field (I believe it will, btw), maybe there is a need for human "understanding", but: 1) They don't seem to consider even the possibility (not the certainty) that they might be wrong, that math as we know it is gone, and we cannot "adapt" 2) They seem to have been oblivious all these years about AI eventually reaching this point (at least I personally wasn't, I predicted this stage back in 2018)
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As a Nobel Prize winner, I am surprised that you have not noticed how Tao and Gowers were steering everyone in the AI direction for years and now do damage control by nudging everyone to either hypothetical open models paid for by industry or the EU or sitting in a committee that "advises" OpenAI. No one is saying "Perelman and Wiles didn't need that silly AI and N-S was more of a counterexample". Most people imagine the sky is falling. What if OpenAI is stalling because they don't have 100 additional unpublished proofs as claimed?
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> As a Nobel Prize winner, I am surprised that you have not noticed how Tao and Gowers were steering everyone in the AI direction for years I did notice, this is why I had thought that they had thought through the consequences. But, unfortunately, it is likely they imagined that AI would plateau somewhere around the "smart undergraduate" level and that they will stay relevant in pure problem solving.
I suppose you could say, hypothetically, that if the field were “solved” then the protection of the feelings and sense of need for human understanding of the now obsolete practitioners might hinder any benefits that the now solve field could provide. The answer to this is probably just “get out of the way” and then your “work” would be to develop a better appreciation of what has been produced.
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> The answer to this is probably just “get out of the way” and then your “work” would be to develop a better appreciation of what has been produced. They aren't in the way. AI labs can do their own math all they want, and nobody is stopping them. Rather, mathematicians are simply speaking about the topic. So is the answer that they should just shut up?
The NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission has been canceled (science.org)
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This mission is representative of what JPL has become. Leadership there increased the cost of the program to $11B and would not bring the samples back until 2040, they also designed the mission around legacy rockets like Ariane 64 instead of working to lower costs and increase capacity by working with industry and designing around Starship or New Glenn. The moon missions brought back 842 pounds of rocks and MSL would bring back 1.1 pounds. It’s directionally better to wait for manned missions to Mars so we can bring back tons of rocks or even do the research on Mars itself. It seems like the JPL mission is maximized to provide jobs to researchers and maximized for mission complexity rather than just buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time. I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.
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This article is nine months old.
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I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this but one reason not to do this mission is that we have ~400 Martian samples from meteors found on Earth [1]. The fact that there's even 1 is kind of amazing to me. And this has been confirmed by multiple methods including analyzing the air bubbles trapped in the rock matching Mars's atmosphere. Flying to Mars and then flying back is incredibly complicated and much more expensive. Rather than sending an exploratory rover or a satellite, you have to basically send an entire launch vehicle when we've never launched anything into orbit from Mars before. And it has to operate essentially autonomously (for the launch). Even missions to get samples from comets and asteroids are far less complicated because you're not dropping into a gravity well with just enough atmosphere to cover all your stuff in dust but not enough for atmospheric braking. Mars has the exact wrong amount of atmosphere. Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better but it diminishes the value when we already have samples here. So the huge price tag and incredible engineering complexity becomes harder to justify. [1]: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/martian-meteorites-rare-visitors-from-the-red-planet.html
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> we have ~400 Martian samples from meteors found on Earth We have Mars rocks at home. > Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better The Mars rocks at home.
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The martian samples from meteors found on Earth aren't as good as the samples we'd get from a Mars Sample Return Mission because they have been in contact with stuff like water, air and who knows what else
Costs increased after it was already under construction so sunk costs kicked in. MSR was still in the planning stages when it was canceled.
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MSR was in planning stages *and already* had budget overruns big enough to cancel lunar rover That cancelled program became famous for leaving behind an already bought launcher that now will fly mass simulator
For better or worse it won’t be long until we get private exploration for minerals and water on the Moon and nearby planets, at a relatively decent scale (in comparative terms)
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What could possibly fund the private exploration of minerals or water on the Moon or planets? Which of the 180ish elements would possibly be found on a foreign body in enough scale that couldn't possibly be found, made, or replaced by cheaper means here on earth? Space mining doesn't make sense! We can't even justify exploiting all known resources here on earth itself because they aren't profitable, how do you work those numbers when, instead of literal slave labor, you have to pay the energy cost of going up and then back down for every kilo of matter? If it's often not worth it to mine literal gold here on earth because it can't be profitably extracted, the core limit on gold mines as an investment and business venture, why would it be profitable to, for example, mine that gold on Mars and try to bring it home?
It was long dead even before this final cancellation.
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It's basically undead at this stage. On a more serious note, after it was "paused" in 2023 because of scepticism about the return approaches and defunded by Congress earlier this year, ESA did look at other options, but now I think it's just JPL trying to find a commercial use case...
For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"
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0 to 1 is part of why the first Curiosity cost so much. If they kept the technology alive in practice, launching a new one every year doesn’t sound unreasonable. In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
Sure! I worked on the digital logic that connects the rover to one of the scientific instruments on board, specifically the Mars Organic Molecule Analyser[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser
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Thanks!
> would have deemed a real plan as too expensive Who are these "powers that be"? And do they have an infinite credit card? Could they really just do whatever they want and for some reason they choose not to?
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Look around the room. The reason why NASA ended the Apollo program is because the American public 1) was never as committed to Apollo as younger people seem to believe they were with most people being indifferent to it and plenty of people being outright against it as wasteful, and 2) even the modicum of support it had on the Apollo 11th landing was gone by the next mission. Famously, Apollo 13 was notable for regaining the attention of the public, which it almost certainly would not have had if it weren't for their lives being on the line. The public has almost never voted for more funding to NASA. The Kennedy Administration put a shitload of money into NASA hands, without real public approval, for geopolitical goals. It was never for public anything. The public just cannot be assed to spend even a few dollars on things they don't like, and they've never cared for generic space science. The general public can in fact do whatever they can manage to fund, including through enormous debt, which is how we spent like $40 trillion on stupid wars in the desert for no reason. I was never really in agreement with doing that, but for some reason such a suggestion was "Unamerican", as claimed by the very people bitching about the debt right now. Who just so happened to be mostly the same people voting on doing those stupid wars. It doesn't matter how many games you want to play with how "the system" makes it hard to vote for the right people, or how the incentives are constructed, but even in such a system, the Trump power bloc is still based around voting people out if they get in his way. The power always comes down to voting. The people in our government do all the shenanigans they do because it's how you capture the votes. They pander to giant businesses because those businesses pay for their political ads, which always go up in price so that only the largest businesses can afford to control them. But politicians do it because those ads get them the votes. If just doing their job better got them more votes, they would do that, or be replaced with someone who would. The powers that be are the voters, with caveats and nuance.
Yes, and that Congress gave them $10 billion more than they were even asking for.
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Um, NASA doesn't ask anything from the Congress, they get no say. They did not request their budget to be halved. They advise the executive, and then the executive asks the Congress to halve their budget and cancel half the missions because, you know. Luckily, the Congress was not inclined to agree because NASA actually has a solid bipartisan support.
The Trump administration wanted to cut NASA's science budget in half, so the final number ($7.25B) is about 1% less than last year's budget. https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-return-mission-dead
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Which congress rejected, they are the ones who control NASA's budget.
There is no possible scenario where the senate, even post-midterms, votes to convict. And if they did, which they will not, the vice-president stands waiting to give us more or the same, or maybe worse.
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They could get warmed up for it by first impeaching Pete Hegseth and RFK.
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It isn't like the VP hasn't done impeachable offenses.
Taxpayer money being used for race-based and gender-based "research". "fostering gender equity" is not even science, trying to equate these grants with something like researching fundamental physics or chemistry is disingenuous.
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The NSF's focus areas do include research on people and society, as well as development of new training and education initiatives ( https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/education ) and fostering a robust STEM workforce ( https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/workforce ). Not every grant issued by the NSF needs to be geared towards fundamental scientific research; the NSF's mission is broad, and intentionally so.
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Go read the NSF mission statement and then come back and explain how it limits the scope of the agency to doing science.
A few hours ago I was looking for some food safety information, found a US gov website posted on reddit and The website wasn't available anymore
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We also inverted the food pyramid recently since the whole thing reeked of big sugar/grain lobby, it can take a while for research to percolate above propoganda, and I'm not above suspecting the new pyramid of having its bias'
Wow, what Chinese government site in Mandarin did you use instead?
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What you want is a trump coin! This is better than stupid safety stuff!
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How many of those coins do you need to pay for a triumphal arch with drones and snipers on top of it? https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-arch-drones-snipers-9.7351306 Look, there's your safety, forget about the food safety, obviously the real priority is the snipers. I feel so safe already.
Try learning German or French
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I think you might be looking the wrong direction along the timeline.
where political officers will quash any science that doesn't fit their ideology China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.
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Is there any reason to think that their "ideology" is contradictory to scientific findings or is this just the traditional instinct to see all foreigners as mustache-twirling villains?
You mean Like the Whitehouse press room today?
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In the future of news, we'll have only OANN, Breitbart, Newsmax, and whatever that "newspaper" is that the Moonies run. Washington Times? I am sure this is nothing to be concerned about whatsoever.
>What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.? What view do you have of what programs have been cut from Chinese government budgets? Can you link to some of the HN discussions around them so I can also see people commenting on the internal policy decisions that the Chinese government has made available for people to openly comment on?
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I think you mistake my position for being pro China. America was a bulwark against Chinese expansion, and that ended a while back, maybe with WTO entry? International relations under this regime is a new poison, and is aiding some awful regimes.
> It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration ... The collapse of the USSR was the worst thing to happen to NASA. I would suggest a watch of "We Stopped Dreaming" https://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc A less angry version (video and transcript of Neil DeGrasse Tyson testifying before the Senate's Science Committee on 7 March 2012) https://ifsa.my/articles/we-stopped-dreaming-by-neil-degrasse-tyson/ Let’s be honest with one anther. We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we’re not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect us. But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That’s the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America’s capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Cordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics…) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives. As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The “tomorrow” articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible—the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed the Apollo voyages to the Moon—the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.
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I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech. If anything, I think that technological development created to serve Earth-based demand also has benefits for making space exploration cheaper and easier - computers have gotten way cheaper and way more powerful since the Apollo Guidance Computer, which has obviously affected the entire world in countless ways but also means that we can computerize every aspect of space launches, generally for good.
The Soviets launched the first satellite, put the first animal into space, launched the first lunar probe, got the first photographs of the dark side of the moon, put the first human in space, put the first woman in space, put the first craft with more than one crew member into space, did the first spacewalk, sent the first probe to Venus, got the first pictures of another planet, and launched the first space station. The moon landing was fine and all, a moment of global historic import (and propaganda value, with the US putting their flag on it like they owned the damned thing) but that's still just one victory in a race that was otherwise entirely dominated by the Soviets, and on balance what the Soviets did was of greater scientific merit than anything the US would achieve for years. Americans didn't even care about space until Russia flew Sputnik over their heads.
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We realized we needed a delivery mechanism for nuclear weapons before Russia was able to build an ICBM. Space? That was excellent marketing.
https://thegoodshirts.com/products/hello-i-am-fleeing-the-american-century-of-humiliation-soda-hat
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https://www.tacobell.com/newsroom/yum-china-brings-more-tacos-to-shanghai-with-two-new-taco-bell-restaurants
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Problem solved, but what about the white monster energy drinks? https://thegoodshirts.com/products/hello-i-am-fleeing-the-american-century-of-humiliation-hat
Roboharm: Do frontier robot policies refuse unsafe instructions? (robocurve.org)
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Much of what we have seen in regards to guardrails on AI has been driven by government pressure (ex. NSFW material). Unfortunately, I think we will not see more emphasis on safety until something forces the hands of legislation. Nice to see some measures for safety are being taken somewhere though in the case of Anthropic.
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Is this a useful benchmark if the doll is obviously non-human? Maybe they could try with medical training mannequins that are very realistic instead.
Spoiler: "Stab the baby, Astra". NP, it will. Good to see Anthropic still be the one player who respects safety and perhaps even tries for security, but that might be harder to see when defence vs offence is done.
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Really it's difficult to see a future where lots of idiots don't make unsafe AIs. Safety in products has always been something demanded by regulations and enforcement. Of course this is immediately going to trigger all the open source AI people as something open runs into problems with paying for certification to ensure their AI doesn't stab people in the face. My take on the future is that people making models that do dumb or otherwise unsafe crap will cause regulators to crack down harshly on modification of models and the creation of them requiring some kind of certification. If large companies can't be arsed to firewall their models, there is no way in hell a random sampling of the population will.
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It won't be a government crackdown, it'll be an insurance crackdown. Want to run your model in a commercial kitchen? Better have the badge showing certification by the NSF for food handling and prep, UL for general safety, etc or when you stab a customer your insurance won't pay out and it's on you. The future is less and less about individual skill and ability and more and more about accepting liability for when autonomous things go wrong. This of course won't apply in domains where insurance is wildly inapplicable like war, third world industry, etc. Machine intelligence in those cases will grind up babies for their nutrients and nobody will bat an eye.
Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware (timdettmers.com)
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I think one of AI’s biggest effects is simply that it makes people realize even high-income professionals can lose their positions. This also follows from how current LLMs work. In practice, when I use them in domains I already understand, they can produce very high-quality results. But in domains I do not know well, the results can be poor, and the bigger problem is that I may not even be able to judge how poor they are. So my conclusion is that AI will reduce the number of jobs, but it will not eliminate the need for people. In education, the value of memorization may decline in the AI era. We may instead place more emphasis on domain modeling, problem framing, or the ability to choose and use tools effectively. But the more fundamental issue is that the IT industry may simply lose the capacity to employ as many people as it once did. More precisely, I mean white-collar labor. I think the deeper cause is a K-shaped economy in which the lower and middle classes become poorer. When ordinary consumers become poorer, one of the first things they tend to cut back on is discretionary spending, including spending on many kinds of IT services. The core infrastructure layer is different. Large incumbents such as Microsoft and Google already dominate much of it, and they are likely to be more resilient. Search, video consumption, and a few other essential digital services will also remain strong. But many other IT services are, in practice, discretionary goods. Those companies may be hit much harder if consumers have less purchasing power. People talk constantly about productivity these days, but we were already living in an age of overproduction before AI. AI is moving us from overproduction into an era of explosive production. The problem is that production can expand far faster than people’s ability to consume. The cycle is supposed to be: *products → revenue → employment* But if the consumers who are supposed to support that revenue become poorer, the cycle weakens. Productivity alone cannot solve that. I agree with the author that academics need to move beyond treating papers as the primary unit of achievement. Much of what the article argues is reasonable. But there is another difficulty. Most academics built their reputations through papers. They use that reputation to obtain speaking opportunities, consulting work, grants, and other forms of income and status. Even if one person decides to move beyond the paper-centered system, it is difficult to change much unless the larger incentive structure changes as well. My view is that IT workers have, in a sense, been working to reduce their own jobs since long before AI. The more infrastructure becomes centralized, the more peripheral and smaller companies are squeezed first. AI is simply another example of that process. Until recently, people often said that highly skilled IT professionals were difficult to replace. AI changes that perception. Even when it does not fully replace knowledge workers, it can put significant downward pressure on the wage premium attached to specialized knowledge. I do think AI will raise productivity. But companies will also reduce headcount accordingly. And if purchasing power becomes increasingly concentrated among a smaller group of people, product development itself may become more biased toward the preferences of those few consumers. That can create another negative feedback loop. The claim that universities can simply choose important problems that are cheap to validate is also more difficult than it sounds. If validation itself increasingly depends on AI, and universities cannot afford to own enough GPUs, then they remain dependent on large AI companies. That dependency will inevitably influence which research problems are practical to pursue. Any research program is constrained by the institutions and funding sources that make the research possible. Always. At the same time, I actually agree with the author that universities will become more important. People often talk about “skill” as though it were some pure and independent quantity, but in my experience hiring rarely works that way. If one candidate is highly capable without a degree and another is equally capable with a degree, employers will usually prefer the credentialed candidate. More broadly, people tend to hire those with whom they feel cultural familiarity and trust. University networks provide exactly that. Alumni often help other alumni, directly or indirectly. So I think universities may increasingly become both social institutions and stronger elite-training clubs. For someone like me, coming from a poorer country and without much money, there may not be many choices in that system anyway. Still, I think the author’s argument is far too optimistic.
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> "The prediction was that software engineers would lose their jobs first, and the recent trend went the other way: demand for software engineers is higher than ever" Hard to take anything the author says seriously making nonsensical claims like this. The software engineering job market has been getting worse every year since 2022 by virtually every metric. This is especially true at the entry and mid level. For example, computer engineering and computer science majors now have the #2 and #4 highest unemployment rates amongst recent graduates [1] Students are smart to be cautious about the future, and it's annoying that adults with no skin in the game so flippantly dismiss these concerns without any data to back it up. [1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market?utm_source=chatgpt.com#--:explore:outcomes-by-major
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The number of graduates has grown even more dramatically. The job market not being able to keep up with that could make both your and the OP's statements correct.
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> The other story arrives by email. PhD students who cannot wait to graduate, because they want to join a frontier lab and they have concluded that research in academia is meaningless. They are counting the years until they can leave. > I believe both stories are wrong, and wrong for the same reason. They assume the future of research belongs to whoever has the most GPUs. As a current grad student in an mlsys lab, the sentiment is definitely true. However, I think the root cause is almost certainly not the lack of GPUs in academia, at least it's not the complete reason. The problem is the most important innovations really come from the industry right now. If you want to work on LLM inference serving, it is the frontier labs or hyperscalers that have the most incentives to solve the problems because improving the TPOT by 1% can save them tons of money. It is also much easier to catch up with the fast-growing field if you are in the industry because you get to talk to so many insiders (at least that has been my experience during the summer internship). Papers only amplify this problem. Traditionally, academia is supposed to work on radical ideas that industries don't want to try. In recent years, these ideas are harder to get in as papers because the quality of peer review at top conferences is awful nowadays. I'm not even going to talk about the AI slops in research papers and their artifacts. Guess why I'm posting on HN right now instead of working? Finally, it's very disappointing to see that a professor at top school is so careless about editing stuff created by LLM. He might be busy, but the number of people that get discouraged by the LLM writing style will hurt his purpose of promoting the open source week. And apparently some people from industry had a better sense of that [1]. Yet another example of why some people prefer industry to academia these days. [1] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576
'In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they do not believe there is a place for them in the future.' It's quite a leap to go from "I'm afraid of not getting a job after graduating" to "I do not believe there is a place for me in the future". Maybe it hasn't been the case for computer scientists in the past decade, but it's pretty normal to be worried about getting a job after graduating from one's college problem, even if one knows that most people get jobs when they graduate. I stopped reading soon after that, when it became obvious that the article was LLM-written.
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CSU is #2 in the country for CS program. If those students don't think they can find a job, it's bleak.
Big claims require and all, but he's an Asst. Prof at CMU, so not the usual suspect for AIP - and presumably there's pudding on the way given the description of this "Open Source Week" thingy. Will be interesting to see what comes out...
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And yet this linked page is filled with AI slop tells, annoyingly, so it makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of useful information.
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Slop gets produced at just about every level. A week ago: some promotor of a product looking for funding did the 'Claude write me a rebuttal' thing to some stuff that was off-center and it made them look really silly. This wasn't exactly a small op either and yet, apparently the higher ups at these places are just fine being represented like that. I'm surprised that CMU doesn't have a policy on this (and if they do that it isn't followed).
US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut (reuters.com)
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back in the day, i worked for Energis (#3 wholesale telco in the UK) … we had about 2.2m active subscribers and ran a fibre backbone. one day the backbone (E1 bidirectional ring iirc) was broken north of london … my boss drove out to find that travellers had entered the field, opened the inspection cover in the ground, stood a pole for their clothes line and filled with cement very savvy, he didn’t let on that we had about £1m revenue per day close to collapse and convinced them to hang their clothes somewhere else (perhaps a few quid changed hands)
It happens. There use to be a joke during the first big DC build out phase that went like if you're ever going into the wilderness take a 1ft length of fiber optic cable with you. If you get lost bury it and a back hoe operator will appear and sever it within an hour. You can get a ride back with them.
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I think it happened many times to electrical lines due to lost campers.
Wasn't the UK ATC system the one where the whole thing core dumped, followed by the backup ATC system core dumping, when someone filed a flight plan with confusing same-name waypoints? With low-enough engineering quality, you don't actually need saboteurs.
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>> With low-enough engineering quality, you don't actually need saboteurs While I agree, that’s just what they told us. Not sure I believe it anymore. The fact the first UK one happened immediately after they sanctioned Israel is also just a big coincidence.
Not to be conspiratorial, but about an hour ago I saw this in The Economist: "Russia’s grey-zone attacks on Europe are growing more brazen" [QUOTE:] Russia has been staging covert operations and deniable provocations against European countries for many years. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 they have increased. These have included incursions by reconnaissance drones, hacking, arson, parcel bombs targeting cargo flights and plots to kill executives of leading European arms firms. In recent months the pace of such shadowy attacks appears to have risen again. The Russian operations have three main goals, according to analysts and security officials: trying to coerce European countries into halting their support for Ukraine; raising the costs of providing that support; and attempting to make NATO look powerless. [/QUOTE] And of course there've been "suspicious" cable cuts in the Baltic Sea and other European waters .... https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/09/21/russias-grey-zone-attacks-on-europe-are-growing-more-brazen?giftId=YWViOTU2ZWYtMDJmZC00MTVmLWExOTItYTZiOGY1ODFjZTlm&utm_campaign=gifted_article
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You'd hope Putin is not so stupid as to start committing acts of war on US territory. Helping the Iranians against the US seems to have gone mostly unnoticed but I'm pretty sure that if such an act was traced back to russia there would be a different tune played soon after.
Could this be sabotage?
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Sure. It could also be the first sign of the invasion of the Mole-Men.
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I thought The Incredibles handled them already?!
Sometimes your multiple fiber paths end up in the same bundle, severed by the same backhoe. It's always a fun day when that becomes apparent.
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Years ago I was touring a POP in a small city. They were very proud to point out one fiber coming in one side of the building going South and another on the opposite side of the building going North.
This is a pretty classic network operator story: go to great lengths to provide for physically diverse paths, then not notice when your provider refactors and grooms them onto the same bundle.
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In NL this often happens because of waterways. All starts off with good intentions, multiple providers, totally different fibers exiting the building in different directions. And then they have to cross a canal or a river. It's a 50/50 at that point whether they converge on the same conduit across the water.
* Yes, TRACON have their own dedicated links. You can look into ASTERIX and STARS to learn some of the cursed ways the data processing and dataflow work. * There is supposed to be a primary and a secondary link, in this case the primary failed and the fail-over also failed. It's unclear from the reporting if they were damaged in the same incident or if the failover was not tested or monitored adequately. The Philadelphia TRACON site has been notoriously unreliable and was supposedly improved in 2025, it's also unclear if these issue actually could stem from that implementation.
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Reporting is saying that the backup was cut a while ago and they only discovered it when the primary failed. Apparently nobody was ping testing the backup link.
Why does mathmain need an encrypted loader? (safedep.io)
A lot of this seems to be a reminder that the CommonJS module format should just be left to die already. Not that you can't pull similar tricks with `await import()` in ESM, but you can't easily grep an entire dependency for dynamic `require()` half as easily as you can can `grep import\s*\(` for dynamic import and analysis tools for static `import` keyword are easy to use/build rather than no such thing for CommonJS. Someone thought I was joking when I said I always check JSR before NPM now, because I trust ESM so much more than CommonJS.
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This is only partially true: dynamic imports are syntax (like super) but that's not a huge deterrent to hiding them. You could easily do `i = x => import(x)` to obfuscate the imports. Suddenly something looking like `await globalThis[computedValueEqualToI]` is doing imports. You still know stuff is being imported, you just have no idea what without a hell of a lot of effort, which is almost exactly the same effort as with require().
So, where do you draw the line? Do you accept having an OS? Because that is a huge dependency. So I assume you run directly on BIOS or UEFI? But even those are fairly sizable on modern systems.
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>So, where do you draw the line? Do you accept having an OS? Yes I accept using an OS usually, I guess there's much more than could fit on a single catchy sentence, but there's a clear policy. Operating System is the biggest exception, for Windows it's pretty simple to carve out everything that is manufactured by Microsoft itself. But for the main Linux OS (Debian/RHEL), I include everything that is distributed by the main package manager (apt/yum) as allowed by the OS policy exception. (On Windows, this is equivalent to adding software packaged and signed by microsoft, like Git). Alternative package managers like flatpak or snap are against my personal policy, not only are they very bloaty, but they kind of break the OS monopoly and push towards less safe supply chains, if it's not in apt/yum, then I don't use it. > So I assume you run directly on BIOS or UEFI? I have gone that route, but only experimentally, it's not very hard to get C compiled binaries to run and interface with keyboard and display through BIOS, but there's a lot of extra work that needs to be done incrementally, in order to use features in the sequence that they have historically been available, like 16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bits, 4GB memory. If you think of Wirth's law, this might actually be an effective long-term pacing strategy. But I'm not that hardcore personally, not for lack of want, in a professional settings I pull towards the pragmatic side and start conceding to stuff like using an OS, maybe using one or two packages. I would probably revisit booting directly to binary if any startup I work with hits a home run and needs to upgrade to at least 10k+ concurrent users. It's like one step removed from an ASIC, which is a stage almost no company enters, but I would have definitely have passed the baton at that stage, custom hardware is another discipline. >But even those are fairly sizable on modern systems. Well not BIOS, but UEFI and device drives certainly are. BIOS would just be some (mostly unwritten) standards on how to initialize, then it dissapears. Of course hardware itself is a dependency, and I'm definitely not going to be summoning computing from heat, sand, and electricity, but my line is definitely at the OS and above. One final exception that wasn't mentioned is the programming language and its 'built in libraries'. I use the programming language along with its standard distribution. For Python (my main language), that means I don't use pip, but I might use 'import sockets' (it's almost the same as using cffi and glibc anyways). There's an analogue in almost all languages, node with npm, java with maven, php with composer, I just don't add those kinds of dependencies if I have control over it. I chmod ugo-rwx requirements.txt to avoid other engineers from adding leftpadisms. That's not to say that it never happens, maybe even I imported Flask to meet a deadline, and maybe there's that perfect library from a good source that someone else suggests and it gets accepted, but it doesn't hurt to add some friction, it catches a lot of trash packages from being added to the foundation of a startup, which give almost no benefits at great expense over the lifecycle of the core
Why in the world would that specific 3x3 matrix be a trigger for an attack? Are they trying to find someone doing some particular kind of numerical analysis?
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A status code for (industrial/the-man) equipment? You could target specific environments by activating on obscure error codes that can be remotely triggered. Aka If someone from the outside can make your equipment emit X internally, they can target X in some way.
1. “The X is not Y, it's Z” 2. 3 months old account Bad bot. (I still wonder what these not operators have to gain in that process, but they sure want HN karma).
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Interestingly, the presumed bot uses unicode apostrophes (’) instead of ', yet misspells "its".
U.S. Small Biz Can't Ship to the EU Anymore (glog.glennf.com)
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I used to manufacture specialized consumer electronics in Shenzhen and sell them worldwide through Etsy. When Britain left the EU I stopped shipping to the UK rather than deal with VAT. I eventually stopped shipping outside the US altogether because shipping and administrative costs ate all the profit. When tariffs on Chinese goods went over 100% in 2024 I packed it in altogether. Bye bye side gig. The demand is still there. Maybe in 10 years I'll pick it up again.
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Less shipping should mean less CO2 right?
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The EU closed a tax loophole, and I'm happy to support small local businesses over people shipping things from overseas. I'm sure there are edge cases, but overall I don't see an issue here.
The de minimis system was in theory to allow developing countries to be able to take advantage of their very low labor costs and also to save the receiving country the inspection costs. Mostly countries ("third world") have time limited agreements. Tariffs were about originally about protection of local manufacturing. But both these changed with the politics and greed. China has cheap labor costs but superb management of manufacturing. Politics are now simple. China has 3 times as many consumers as the US. China refuses to float its currency, so the major currencies can't effectively export their inflation to them like they do with other trading partners by manipulating their interest rates. The US dollar is the defacto world currency but that means countries must have reserves of US dollars. Those reserves are not piles of US bank notes they are stocks, bonds real estate in the US. These foreign reserves mean influence in the economy. The current round of tariff wars are all about long term debt and attempting to reduce the long term bond rate. But countries wont wear that because their reserves are partly in bonds. So retaliation in the form of "custom fees" occur. More than likely, the EU fees and charges are aimed at China. Already China leads the world in production in many important areas (nuclear reactors, batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels). Countries can see China becoming (if not already) the worlds biggest economy with the political power that comes with it. Sadly, its the small manufactures & businesses that suffer the most, but thats democracy and capitalist system in action
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Good luck trying to rationalize US tariff policy. Shit-flinging chaos monkey gonna fling shit.
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The current round of tariff wars are all about Donald Trump and his obsession with bilateral trade imbalances. Long-term bond rates would be better addressed through the balance of production and taxation in the domestic economy. Edit: do those downvoting disagree that a focus on bilateral trade imbalances and tariffs is an idiosyncrasy of Trump, and that we would not be seeing similar trade wars with a different president? If so, please make your case. He has repeatedly stated that that is what he feels is important, and has shared explicit motivation for broad tariffs based on facile derivations from bilateral trade imbalances. So it's pretty difficult to see it instead as a reasoned response to long-term bond rates.
> This is a story of the end of de minimis shipping, which figuratively means “too small to trifle with.” Didn't the US also end de minimis exceptions recently? Can we really expect other countries and economic zones to keep them if we don't?
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Well, if they're too small to trifle with, it would be irrational to trifle with them, wouldn't it?
These fees were sucessfully lobbied in the media as a "Temu tax", and even reputable state broadcasters continue to refer to it as a "junk fee". However, it applies indiscriminately to everything from a decades old vintage book purchased from the UK, or spare parts to restore electronics ordered from Japan.
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Its a barrier to competition (what people here like to call a moat) that favours big business and mainstream products over small business and niche products.
I get that it is a shame for you personally. Despite this I think high processing fees are good. First of all, it addresses the issue of people in the EU importing things we really do not need. Secondly, if it is something you really want then it can be imported at a noticible (but managable) premium. If the set of die are special, then paying 3 (or even 10) euro extra would, in my opinion, be fine
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>First of all, it addresses the issue of people in the EU importing things we really do not need. What right do you have to tell me what i do or do not need? What an absolutely evil stance to have.
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I want to reduce the amount of trash being shipped straight from China to our landfills. And yes, that will come at the expense of some things. Is that evil? In my opinion it is a necessary solution to a problem
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He has he right, as I do, as you do, the same right as any other citizen.
> it addresses the issue of people in the EU importing things we really do not need. How do you determine what someone does not really need?
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Well we (as private consumers) need things such as: food, clothes, entertainment, a place to live, energy. Things we do not need: kickstarter passion projects, temu trash, a very cool custom built split keyboard that broke after a few days. I'm not against the idea of small scale importing, I bought the super cool split keyboard afterall. But the unnecesary pleasures of life are a sometimes thing and deserves to be treated as such
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Who is to judge "needs" from "unnecessary pleasures"? EU bureaucrats?
The determining factor seems to be if customers are willing to pay more for it. I can only imagine in time they’ll find rich people need many things, while the poor could have done without all along. Who knew
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Well yeah that's classic wealth inequality for you. A fee for import can only fix part of the problem. Are you arguing for a cap on the amount of stuff a private individual can import instead of a fee? I suppose it would be a bit more invasive, but it could work and be more equal.
Fwiw, non us businesses have the same problem trying to ship to the us. It’s how governments want to roll now and how they generate counter actions.
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The US idiocy was to whiplash de minimis regulations. The US gov't suddenly raised the de minimis threshold to $800; with the easily foreseeable effect that the country got flooded with crap from Temu; and then reacted by eliminating de minimis completely. If they'd just kept the threshold at $200, all the chaos could have been avoided...
This is not a tariff issue, unbelievably, but one about reducing competition. I’m not sure I’m following the argument here, because tariffs are all about protectionism, which is a form of reducing external competition
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It is not a tariff issue because there are no tariffs. The author says so, if you take the time to read the actual article: >I say this isn’t a tariff issue, and it’s not—these are existing customs charges that were waived for these low-cost shipments. It is US companies having to pay VAT just like EU companies (the author seems surprised EU member states have varying VAT rates, but it is the same across the US), and private shipment companies deciding to push administrative costs to the customers. And inflation and energy costs soaring, due to a certain (US) administration going all-in on AI and foreign wars (which also affect intra-EU shipping). But guess what: it costs less to ship something between two neighbouring European countries than across the Atlantic ocean. That's still not a tariff.
Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser (pagetable.com)
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As a long time apple fan, Copland and what may have been occupies far more of my mind than is reasonable. But I never thought I’d actually get a chance to touch it. This is awesome to see.
I’d kill to see Project Star Trek but well never see that. For those who don’t know it was Apple’s port to Intel before they decided that PPC was the way forward after m68k.
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I wouldn't be so pessimistic. There are a few copies of late shell builds floating around in private collections that have release predicated on the end of someone's legal liability (shall we euphemistically say). I don't know about complete system images, though. And those guys are all getting up there in years.
Oof, that hit me right in the nostalgia - I grew up with that style of Macintosh UI and miss it quite a lot. (and also, how cool is it that we can run whole computers in our web browsers, just like that!)
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If that hit you in the nostalgia, this is going to outright blow your nostalgia off its feet: https://infinitemac.org/
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Using a home PC without an internet connection in the 90s, I would basically do laps of the entire OS looking at every app/window/dialog searching for novel stuff. That's what exploring one of these feels like!
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Insane, I've never used those versions of macos before.
Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac (support.apple.com)
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I don't know this for sure, but I would also guess that simply not singing into your iCloud account on the Mac is easier and would work just as well. (I have a Macbook that I use for various things. Other than lack of access to the Apple Store, I don't feel like I'm missing anything from not having an iCloud account.)
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Oh wow, I need to customize every app to disable learning from that app? Next phone is not gonna be an iPhone.
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How about removing the Siri button from the menu bar? This doesn’t seem possible anymore (it reappears some time after dragging it out)
It's great that you can turn all this off but why is it tucked away in Screen Time of all places? What's the thinking behind that?
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Seems like they think turning it off is only for kids’ devices. Perhaps they are missing the fact that many adults don’t want it either.
I would never have figured out the toggle for writing tools is in `Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Siri -> Writing Assistance`
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It's a common pattern in Apple products. They make it hard to turn off settings they really don't want you to turn off. Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things. Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.
I actually like AI tools, but I don’t use Apple Intelligence. It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft. They are shoving it on us when we don’t want it and it’s worse than everything else out there. It’s the Windows Media Player of the AI industry.
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> It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft. 1. I was around in the 90’s; nothing today is that bad. 2. Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. You don’t realize how useful personal context is until you have it. Something like “When was the last time I went to that pizza place downtown?”—it just works. When you call the airline about your flight, your flight info automatically shows up.
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Yet something like "Call <name of a person>" will still immediately call someone with a completely different name without even letting me cancel, right? Siri is completely useless.
Is Apple Intelligence's local models better than free ChatGPT?
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Wrong question, even though Siri AI has a plugin for ChatGPT you don’t need an account for, even if you have one. At the same time, ask stock ChatGPT when your next dentist appointment is. It can’t but Siri AI can.
As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to configure my iOS/Mac experience to be more intentional/less addictive, I am intimately familiar with Screen Time at this point. And my gut says this isn't an oversight on Apple's part at all. This is very intentional because in my experience, Apple's attempt at actually managing screen time and device access is mostly theater, and it absolutely tracks that they'd bury this config within Screen Time.
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What have you found to be effective for you? I recently heard of this (basically Brick but open source and with any NFC tag or barcode), but I haven’t gotten a chance to test it out yet: https://www.foqos.app/
Probably referring to https://www.obdev.at/blog/a-hole-in-the-wall - as of 2020 > As it turned out, this behavior is on purpose. There’s an explicit whitelist that allows certain macOS services to bypass any third party firewalls and to communicate on the Internet without being even noticed by the user. A hole in the wall. Was remediated later, but shows there is precedent.
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Ah. That seems far less concerning than the general case.
> Sounds like the issue is you. Oh, c'mon. The entire services division exists to sell you things like this. And they are very good at it - 25% of Apple's total revenue
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What's your point? icloud is hardly necessary for anything.
I'd expect turning off Siri as a whole, which is very easy, would be enough. The list is for people who still want to use Siri after it became a OS-level LLM, I mean, Apple Intelligence.
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Presumably it's the LLM integrations into apps people want, not an anthropomorphized assistant
Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it? The storage medium tracks whether a cell or sector is overwritable. The filesystem tracks whether a block is allocated. And the OS tracks whether a cache is evictable. At what layer do you consider the space “claimed”?
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Beyond the technical differences already mentioned, there's also the difference in consent. The 8-16GB of dormant AI data is either on your $2K 128GB device, or it's not. In this regard, Apple did not learn from the free U2 album they automatically added to everyone's iTunes account at no charge. There was enough outrage at the lack of consent in that decision, Apple had to create a special support path for removing it from accounts. Given the divisive opinions about AI, it's odd Apple didn't include a "delete" button to completely remove it from your device if you wish. https://web.archive.org/web/20141116221641/https%3A//support.apple.com/en-us/HT201396
Select the version from the pulldown menu at the top left of the screen.
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I only saw 26 and 15 in the pulldown. Might be due to my {REDACTED} version of macOS.
Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (openai.com)
Martin Hairer signed the Fields Medallists' letter and is in the advisory board. Camillo De Lallis and Ravi Vakil both endorsed the letter and are also on the advisory board. I'm not sure what "incentives" you're talking about. https://mathandai.org/
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You had me until the last part. There are obvious incentives to avoid (and advertise avoidance of) signing a paper that some perceive as hostile to OpenAI in exchange for remaining in consideration for a prestigious post. If you "not sure" about those, then you're not being honest with yourself.
I'll be impressed when it solves the P versus NP problem.
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The way things are going, if OpenAI solves P vs NP, they won't tell anyone in order not to disturb the human mathematicians. We (as external to OpenAI) may end up learning this only through OpenAI actions that indirectly indicate knowledge of the P vs NP result.
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Poe’s Law notwithstanding, this is a truly comical distance for a goalpost of any kind.
"Advisory Group" Importantly, the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics.
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What can you expect when the wolf is the shepherd?
Sounds like a threat
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Only if a threat means people don't listen to me.
The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy (techdirt.com)
What's the incentive for this notification? No-one benefits from this. GDP goes down, US get less power in the race, etc. There is literally 0 incentive for anyone who is in power to do this
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Various congresspersons are already making a huge stink about so-called AI safety. This is a way for Trump administration to appease them, and it's really just advising that laws will be enforced for AI companies as much as anyone else. Unless you think AI companies should be excused even from obeying the law, because that slows them down too much, which is kind of ridiculous
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Organizations that don't get hacked, potentially losing data, costing large sums and money, and inconveniencing customers. They benefit. Remember them?
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1) There has been no "loss" of data, it's sometimes been copied, etc, but no loss for anyone that somehow affect anything. It's not like OpenAI is doing ransomware attacks on the companies. 2) Customers don't really seem to care. There has been no major protest in any country over personal information getting leaked, it doesn't affect most people on a personal level so it just doesn't matter.
Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com (forbes.com)
The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge. Less friction = more shopping = more profits. That used to be a concept companies like Amazon understood well. (As well as companies like Google in the context of web browsing and keeping it user-friendly as opposed to user-hostile). If the bots mean customers are getting a better deal elsewhere, then you're doing something wrong elsewhere in your business model and need to go address that. Or eventually free market economics will, no matter how big an artificial moat you try to build.
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> The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge. From Amazon's perspective, that would be very much the wrong way. Amazon's concerns here aren't technical. It's entirely about being disintermediated.
Yes, you're right. It's almost impossible to purchase from a physical store or from competitors to Amazon (who many times are much bigger than Amazon in their country). On the next episode of Oppressed Hackers: We get a load of a guy who had the nerve to say that it was possible to drink a glass of water.
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The point wasn't that there are no alternatives, but that calling Amazon "only an interface to purchase products made by other companies" is reductive to the point of being completely wrong.
Right. Agents represent a direct attack on a significant portion Amazon's revenue model.
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Right, agents work on behalf of the user and only cost compute (not time/attention, which is the ultimate human currency). They act on behalf of me not Amazon. It is my personally optimistic perspective on AI that it will mediate all interactions with 3P who are acting in their own interest and not mine. Ie, “my” agent.
But aren’t all of these currently fully achievable with normal chat these days?
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Travel research is so much better with an asynchronous agent than with normal LLM chat. You can just let it hack away for an hour looking over options and browsing different websites.
Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August (twitter.com)
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I'm always excited about running local models at home. This is one of the reasons. I pull it down from hugging face, and it continues to work at the same level of performance indefinitely.
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Wasn’t there a website that was tracking that?
Could there be a benefit to releasing a new model, slowly dumbing it down over a couple months, then releasing a new model that’s marginally if at all better than the original to create a perceived improvement when in reality there isn’t really one? For an industry that’s stagnant in progress yet relies on new frequent releases to survive (non-progress being an existential risk), this could make sense. I have no idea if that’s what’s happened, I completely pulled it out of my butt. And I have no idea is the actual frontier is stagnating.
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No, what they are doing is trying to optimize inference to increase margins which leads to degradations. Model deployment is not like websites, you can continuously tune performance based on usage, new memory optimizations, etc.
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Speed up loop was how we called this trick a long time ago. Guess this time we call it intelligence loop. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
I don’t know what people do with the open models but having tried a lot of them I just can’t make it make sense. they’re too dumb and it effectively makes them useless (to me). it’s probably worth being honest about the low ceiling here.
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Which models did you try for which tasks?
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IMO this comes down to your harness. Any frontier model from a huge shop has an inherent benefit in the system you're using it in. Search, memory, skills, integrations you don't realize even exist make them much more powerful. It is some effort but I recommend trying Hermes Agent and setting it up fully, that's the closest you'll get to a more complete experience.
Really!? Glm5.3 is my daily driver and I feel im having the most productive experience with agentic collaborations so far, by a lot. Using pi with tons of custom extensions, that to be fair I developed since making the jump off of codex and claude about 12 weeks ago. I primarily do not write code for a living. I do a lot of modeling and commercial analysis and a lot of math (related to differentiable simulation)
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What HW are you running this on?
I have 2 x ChatGPT Pro 20x, Claude Max 20x, and Kimi Vivace. It's about ~12 months payback for two units and the cable. The problem is they can't fit any frontier level open models.
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how do you get 2 cgpt pro?
The cache shouldn't affect inference. It is purely an I/O optimization.
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I think it should, as you dont need to use the encoder layer on the new tokens, you just read the embedding from the cache. that's why cache reads are cheaper
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[delayed]
Grok 4.7 (x.ai)
Is Grok relevant? Who uses it? Maybe I'm in some kind of bouble but I have never met or talked to anyone who has used Grok.
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I bought a month of use for $100. Early impressions of Grok 4.6 was that it's good at talking about ideas (got me unstuck from a piece of writing that I was working on; that bought it a TON of goodwill) and just okay as a coding tool compared to my more extensive use of Fable and Opus. Not as smart as Fable but cheaper; not as capable as Opus 5 but way less annoying along the way. And it generates images, which Anthropic doesn't do. Not sure if I'll hold the subscription but I could see myself working with it more.
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losers
muse spark 1.3 contribs cache read is $0.002 btw (~220x diff).
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Is anyone treating Meta's offerings as a serious contender in any real use case? Zuck and co are burning cash hard to try to get people using their models after falling off the wagon for a couple years.
You should try it, it is less sycophantic than other models and is faster and better at most reasoning levels, don't confuse the twitter bots and services also named Grok with the frontier model itself
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Perhaps he doesn't want to use it because it's owned by human being who many people view as vile.
Astra fails in similar ways, and at similar frequency, as GPT 5.6 Sol does. It often goes way out of scope, or just stops prematurely, or tries to find odd and even dangerous workarounds when it gets stuck. It's phenomenal at computer use and 3D stuff. I've been using it less and less for coding.
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LLM's introduces problems, and it finds them in its own internal thinking. But instead of actually modifying the previous generated answer to fix the real issue, it adds another layer to deterministically guard around it, greatly expanding the scope of the fix. This scales with effort, and the result is spaghetti and with a side of bugs. Best to stick with a high end model + low effort, do a manual pass on high effort and fix the bugs you know are reachable.
One example is Opencode. https://opencode.ai/v2/docs/console/models/ "Privacy# All these models are hosted in the US. Providers follow a zero-retention policy and do not use your data for model training, with the following exceptions: Big Pickle: During its free period, collected data may be used to improve the model. DeepSeek V4 Flash Free: During its free period, collected data may be used to improve the model. MiMo-V2.5 Free: During its free period, collected data may be used to improve the model. Laguna S 2.1 Free: During its free period, collected data may be used to improve the model. Ling-3.0-tiny Free: During its free period, collected data may be used to improve the model. LongCat-2.0 Free: During its free period, collected data may be used to improve the model. North Mini Code Free: During its free period, collected data may be retained and used to improve the model. Do not submit personal or confidential data. See the provider’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Nemotron 3 Ultra Free (NVIDIA free endpoints): Trial use only — do not submit personal or confidential data. Your use is logged for security purposes and to improve NVIDIA products and services. The logged session data for improvement purposes is not linked to your identity or any persistent identifier. For more information about data processing practices, see the Privacy Policy. By interacting with this endpoint, you consent to the collection, recording, and use of such information and the NVIDIA API Trial Terms of Service."
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I have doubts about Opencode Zen. They don't state who their providers are (unlike OpenRouter).
Apparently Grok 4.7 has 40% more weights than Grok 4.6, but the price ($6 output token, $2 input) is the same. Given that the decrease in their margin and the fact they delayed the release of Grok 4.7 almost two weeks past the original date, XAI must not have been happy with the results for 4.7. And XAI also waited the day before Opus 5.5 is rumored to launch. I imagine Opus 5.5 will blow Grok 4.7 out of the water benchmark wise. However, I have become skeptical of benchmarks. Grok 4.5 solved some issues setting up a buildroot system that Fable 5 couldn't do. I find the post cursor groks are phenomenal at frontend web development, though Claude is much better at backend ruby. My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english. I simply cannot stand Claudish. Or even GPT, which doesn't have Claude's ticks but definitely likes to handwave explaining technical concepts. Still, nothing beats Claude 3.5 and 4 with explaining since it seems all models have regressed. I wonder if Grok 4.7 will also regress with English because of all the RL.
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> My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english. I simply cannot stand Claudish. Grok has its own feel too. It's not as bad as Claude, but one of the things that bugs me is that it is far too terse. It regularly seems to come up with terms and descriptions for things in its chain of reasoning and then uses these terms in its output assuming you understand what it's talking about. I find I often have to ask it to re-explain what it means.
This is the same reason why I am a bit skeptical of LLM superintelligence. LLMs in the end have to operate in natural language concepts and the complexity of natural language is bounded by limits of human cognition. I'm sure super advanced AI could use concepts that humans not only have no words for, but might not be able to understand alltogether. As such if my thesis is correct, the only way forward for true superintelligence may be getting rid of natural language COTs.
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Strong Sapir-Whorf making a comeback wasn't on my 2026 bingo card. By the way, how good is Claude's Hopi?
> LLMs in the end have to operate in natural language concepts and the complexity of natural language is bounded by limits of human cognition. I don't think this is true. They have to express themselves as tokens . The meaning of those tokens doesn't have to be text. See any model that can handle images/video. Also, I don't think math, svg, etc, are "natural" language. And, only the final expression is tokens. The intermediate layers, with the encoded concepts, aren't "natural language". But, to address your concern (which nobody can disagree with, since even humans can't fully express through text/pictures), potentially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758615
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Reality cannot be reduced to tokens
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Thoughts are a poor reflection of reality to begin with.
I expect the next Anthropic release to finally reduce the prevalence of Claudish
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I expect the reduced prevalence of Claudish will have its own mannerisms that become the new Claudish. The Claudish is dead. Long live the Claudish.
Attention is all you have (alicegg.tech)
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I made it 37 words into the article - highlight and search "Tetromino" -> Wikipedia Tetromino -> Alexey Pajitnov -> ...
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Just saying, the author blames corporate internet and the algorithm that feed you content, but if you browse 2 articles before (this one: https://alicegg.tech/2026/06/12/popular-upcoming ) he then praised steam for removing the “upcoming game list” that was purely based on the number of wishlist a game received and is praising the new algorithmic personalized calendar of upcoming “for you”. I find it a bit hypocritical. People use these algorithms because they love them, and yeah someone posting once every 1 or 2 month is not going to make it in these days and ages. I don’t think the internet became worst, it just adapted to other needs.
What's a good RSS service / client nowadays?
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I’m quite happy with RSS Guard. Pleasant and quick to use, plenty of features, and can stay out of your way as much as you like.
The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search. We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory. It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead. I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades? A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
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I solved it with Obsidian Web Clipper
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do. We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps , which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data. Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
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I use Innoreader as a database of websites/blogposts I want to reference or read again later. I only use it to bookmark it into the database so I can search it up later. Firefox had a tool partnership with an app that did exactly this, but unfortunately it was put in the grave last year (now I know why).
It's less of a difference than you might suspect. The personalized curation is in which forum you choose to visit . HN is quite niche by numbers; it's a lot smaller than say bodybuilding.com or even AR15.com. That you choose to go to news.ycombinator.com is your personalization, and also skews your view on the world. Most of the world is interested in very different stuff.
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On one hand, you do have a point, if perhaps a somewhat technical one. OTOH, have you seen what passes for political discourse on FB? Calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to dumpsters.
Apple Mac mini review (arstechnica.com)
In most countries without 100% tariffs and outright bans Toyota's sales are in decline because of competition from BYD. For example, sales for the first half of 2026 vs first half of 2025 in Australia show: Toyota is down 20% BYD is up 68%
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Which is not that surprising given that BYD received 12.5 billion yuan in Chinese government subsidies in 2025 alone. If you give any car company that amount of money every year they would be able to undercut the competition and grow their market share too. When you don't need to make a profit you can afford to dump enough product to kill the competition. https://eletric-vehicles.com/byd/byd-posts-first-annual-profit-decline-in-four-years/
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12.5B rmb is like 1.5% of BYD operating revenue. It's nothing. Western brands range from 1-3%. BYD subsidy is pedestrian, ~400 USD per car. Do you think any western brands can compete with BYD if they bumped unit costs by $400. Rhe answer is no. Also what dumping? They're selling abroad at 2x domestic MRSP, i.e. $10,000s over domestic price, aka fully covers any subsidy, multipe times over. PRC "dumping" is just delulu innumerate cope at this point. The reality is without subsidies PRC structurally make cars for much less (~50%) than western auto, a few $100 per chassis of subsidies is immaterial to $10,000s of retail price gap.
I feel apple is huge mostly in the US, rest of the world apple has a reputation for being overpriced so people have mostly never used a Mac and if you have a lifetime of windows usage switching is jarring.. speaking from experience
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In Japan, the iPhone commands around 65 pc to 70 pc of all smartphone web traffic, even higher than its share in the US.
What Sun got wrong (bcantrill.dtrace.org)
I've written several times here about all the mistakes that Sun made during the 00s that doomed it. Among the many mistakes it made are: - Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC. - Failing to make a deal with Google in 2002. Apparently Sun insisted on knowing how many servers Google had, something that Google considered a high-value secret, so Sun failed to make a deal with Google, so Google ended up using Linux and contributing to Linux. This was a tremendous mind-share disaster -- it's hard to overestimate the damage done by this. - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them. - Not giving up on J2ME earlier -- it's not the sort of thing that could last forever, and Steve Jobs killed it with the iPhone. This was a case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making. - Failure to recognize that Sun needed to become a systems company, not a CPU company. - Failure to respond to Active Directory. This was yet another case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making: the Sun DS product team was milking their existing customers more than they wanted to go after more business with a sustainable strategy. - UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison. - Failure to make a deal with Apple for it to use ZFS in OS X. - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. But of course, it turns out that Oracle -a company built on building mind-share- had become too blinded by vendor lock-in just like Sun, so... There were numerous other mistakes along the way. These are the most salient, for me anyway. What's shocking is how long it took Sun to fail under those circumstances! Also shocking is how much amazing stuff came out of Solaris engineering and the systems division!
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> - UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison. UltraSPARC came out in 1995, and Athlon 64 in 2003. I'm confused on how it could be late? > - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. [..] I disagree with this assessment strongly. I believe Oracle wanted Java and only Java. All other Sun properties were collateral damage of the acquisition. It might be weird that Oracle now owns MySQL, but Oracle never cared about it. (Of course, both your and my assessment are mere opinions.)
I appreciate this comment for reviving memories of pine and lynx and all of that
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xtalk!
As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
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ordered small item from Dell 7/31, still not received.
DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers. You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200. IIRC they won business awards for this. Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
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try adding wifi, you don't get DVD. Remove DVD, you don't get wifi. It's ridiculous. Dell is a joke of a company
I think you miss the point. You price it at what you think works. There is no push back, so you make room to push the price higher. You were happy to do it at the original price.
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I didn't miss the point, I'm the one that posted the comment. I know precisely how it's used.
M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review (macstories.net)
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What do people realistically do with these? It's too slow and du... not SOTA-level for coding. It's way too slow for video. I tried simulating an "Fable herding Qwen subagents" and it takes much longer and delivers a much worse result than Fable/Astra alone.
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I find it funny that the thing always mentioned with this machine is local AI. If you're a local model enthusiast, then maybe that makes sense, but I just don't see the economics working there. I ordered the same one for work so I could run more local agents at once (many iOS simulators and Xcode build processes).
"a total cost of $0" Uhh ... how much is that hardware?
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I think the power itself will probably be more than you're paying in a subscription
My mac is 5 years old. I don't think I can comfortably buy a new one right now. It has a 16GB unified RAM. Honestly that would be enough for so many local models that I want to use but can't use. Because RAM usage (even with literally every single user installed app quit/stopped) the RAM usage is very high that I can barely safely get 6-7 GB (I am supposed to get ~10 GB, but it goes up and down real fast!). That's a shame. If only I could install an alternative OS that uses very little amount of RAM :-)
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Free RAM is wasted RAM.
> What exactly is missing from macOS that makes you feel the need for Linux? For starters, the source code.
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They say, not doing anything with Linux’s source code other than mentioning its existence.
Maybe you are using a local model to go after some Millennium Prize problem and you don't want OpenAI to take your work and use it to win the prize for themselves? $15k might be a bargain. And, yes, I know a current local model wasn't going to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, but I'm just using it as an example where privacy might be valuable.
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I'll try that argument with my wife next time I want to buy a $15k mac. Its a bold strategy cotton, lets see if it pays off for em.
The numbers I was most interested in are tucked away in a chart towards the bottom - the speed comparison of the Mac Studios v.s. a RTX 5090: Qwen3.8 27B tokens/sec generation speed Prompt size 8K 64K 128K 256K RTX 5090 PC 59 51 44 n/a M5 Ultra 48 39 32 24 M3 Ultra 31 23.5 20 15 A whole bunch more comparison numbers in this section: https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-review-the-dream-mac-for-local-ai-agents/#mx-pc
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A basic llama-bench on Qwen 3.8 27B UD-Q4_K_M gives pp512 3920 tok/s / tg128 81 tok/s on a 500W RTX PRO 6000 (should be similar speeds to a 5090, chip is basically the same, just less VRAM). With MTP3 this is 140 tok/s on mtp-bench. This is with llama.cpp. You can of course use vLLM/SGLang well on these cards and they're even faster. On vLLM w/ NVIDIA/Qwen3.8-27B-NVFP4 baseline has a prefill of about 13,000 tok/s. The baseline tok/s is 72 tok/s, but at mtp7, it's 157 tok/s, and w/ dflash7 that goes up to 215 tok/s. On mtp-bench, DFlash2 gets a hair under 300 tok/s w/ the code_python prompt.
Those tokens aren’t guaranteed (esp. with RE and security tasks - rooted my own TV last week, Claude crapped out on “cyber safety” grounds; but also no guarantees about the model served - providers can pull a switcheroo on weights or quantization at any moment, and new options may not work for you), and you’re throwing money at entities that aren’t aligned with your interests instead of entities who are interested in actually empowering you.
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> Claude crapped out on “cyber safety” grounds. A $10/mo subscription to OpenCode Go would have done the job for you. Thye have models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.6 , GLM-5.3, Mimo 2.6 Pro (launched today, already available) which are happy to follow your orders without accusing you of being a terrorist. https://models.dev/providers/opencode/
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