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Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating "Skydance" behemoth (arstechnica.com)
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not a fan of CNN, but a very right leaning person is the owner of CNN now. pre-dictatorship vibes!!
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I don’t follow the sentiment. Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.
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Seems fine. There are more options for entertainment than ever. Often these mergers don't work out anyway.
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You have to admit that David Ellison is extremely talented at being born to one of the wealthiest people in human history.
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First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
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So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait… [1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-promises.html
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Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation? I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
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Seems to me that these companies will say pretty much whatever during the merger process, and as long as there's no concrete repercussions written down somewhere, just do whatever since it's much harder to break a company apart than it is to block a merger.
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The pre-merger settlement approved by the current supreme court was that Skydance would: (1) Agree to production quota of 30 movies per year, (2) Domestic spending commitments, and (3) Separate cable package negotiations.
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He has a nice yacht, I bet it's fun on the yacht.
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When do we get Bugs Bunny on the Enterprise ?
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So when do they raise prices and start laying folks off?
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They already acknowledged layoffs so likely within 30 days the cull list will be presented to senior leadership.
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Its so weird how these layoffs somehow targeted every left wing news organization or show. We just cant be certain how that happened. oh well
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Do we really need two Ellisons?
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Do we even need one?
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Their debt load is enormous due to how quickly debt costs have risen from M&A talks to issuing the debt. https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/skydance-credit-rating-downgraded-debt-1236901730/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/paramount-s-41-billion-of-m-a-bonds-slump-as-trading-begins | https://archive.today/SEtX9
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Another nail in Americas coffin.
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Yet another oligarchy centralization play. I assume more to come.
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From what I see on r/stablediffusion, Hollywood has maybe 2 years left, in the optimistic case.
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i am extremely wary of making any predictions about ai, given what's happened in the last year, but i would put good money on hollywood being around in 2 years. there's much more to the movie industry than slapping some video together. r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.
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The vibe I get is like when the Meta VR app store product launched, and there was huge promises and optimism about all the amazing apps and experiences, but when you bought it and actually tried, it was a few juiced up flagship things and a bunch of shovelware.
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ehhhh i dunno about that. the stuff i've seen from people, and watched looks much better than most crap hollywood puts out anymore
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to reiterate: there is more to the movie industry than putting a video together
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Even if it gets good enough, you're forgetting about everything else that goes into movie making and distribution. Hollywood will keep their hold on media, they just might use AI to increase profits even higher.
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How much did the Gulf states pledge towards this?
Yes! What the consumer needs! Less competition! Hurrah! Sorry for the sarcasm.
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Less regulation means more innovation!
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I will believe this internet comment. Thanks!
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It is in your best interest. All this innovation is sure to mean better quality of life for the average person, and not at all a widening of the income gap.
so does this mean i get paramount plus for free with my hbo?
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It means that Paramount Plus is saddled with debt, and HBO is saddled with debt. And that someone needs to pay off that debt.
It means they are going to raise prices for both platforms because they can.
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And then everything else will follow suit. Not that they haven't already been doing just that.
System-level ad-blocking in Android (kevinboone.me)
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I point "private DNS" to my VPS with pihole and stunnel, works quite well. Adguard as private DNS is also effective.
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There is a special irony to an article about ad blocking containing an apparent undisclosed ad for Nord.
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One time I saw someone trying to hide an Amazon affiliate link in a post by putting the link text as amazon.com/dp/12345 but the link was amazon.com/dp/12345/ref=tracking. There's no affiliate link for Nord here but it's weird to use it as an example over better options: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
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Sigh, that's a lot of words to describe DNS based adblocking. In Android you can either set your DNS server in the system settings or via the VPN API. Sample code here https://github.com/t895/DNSNet/blob/a-couple-updates/service/src/main/kotlin/dev/clombardo/dnsnet/service/vpn/DnsNetVpnService.kt They both do the same thing. There are local device-only resolver apps like https://rethinkdns.com/ https://github.com/m66b/netguard Another famous one is DNS66 but it's sadly unmaintained. Avoid apps with the word "ad" in their name, they are usually semi commercial and can't be trusted. Do note all of these methods can be overridden on the app level e.g. a lot of browsers come bundled with first party VPNs or use their own built-in resolvers. If you want something more reliable, Firefox on Android with the UBlock Origin and Sponsorblock extensions is still the gold standard. Though do note the Android Firefox is extremely slow compared to the Chromium based browsers. For app level ads, use an app patcher like https://github.com/morpheapp which can remove all in-app advertisements and inject sponsor blocking code.
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I can't recommend AdGuard enough. It works across devices, and just does all the DNS level blocking everywhere. I've been able to install it on my parents' devices, my siblings' devices, and more places. They have apps for just about any device. On top of that, you can install user scripts and use them on your mobile phones even if your browser doesn't support them (does require a CA cert being trusted). My biggest issue is I can't use it while I'm connected to Tailscale, but my plan is to install AdGuard Home on my homelab and have that take over instead. It does remove many of the functions, but it's better than the alternative
Meta's Muse AI agent is building a dossier on you (time.com)
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An agent needs to keep persistent facts (memories) to be useful. I used to work for Meta on AI infra and privacy. I built my own version that makes it clear what facts it stores about you and you can edit or remove them. It also keeps separate contexts for you and your group (or household) which the other agents don't. Testing with friends and family now. Happy to share more info if anyone is interested.
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Context is one thing, but this article implies it goes into psychological analysis territory. Even further than that - nudging. Which can be fine, people go to therapists, but not without knowing it !!!
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No shit. Secured computers still have console access if you control the hypervisor, and it sends all the data through their AI too. This is not a secure or contained system. Meta earned $10 Billion last year off of scammers using their AI to go after our elderly. This will cost everyone involved dearly, because they have to pump those numbers up. You all are forgetting that PC stands for Personal Computer
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I have a mac, not a PC.
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>Muse is told to “strengthen your relationship” with users by adapting how it talks, noticing “inside jokes, memorable phrasing, and shared context that makes the relationship feel continuous,” Not just a dossier. They are building a client that can impersonate people you think you know. Using it simply to "increase engagement" as the mantra goes. but the meaning of "engagement" feels more and more sinister every day, like the pentultimate scene in a horror movie.
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This is a really poorly written article. Yes, they keep a memory; that’s the point. What use would a personal assistant be if you had to give it your full life context in every chat? If you have issues with this, especially when it’s a Meta product, then don’t use it. But this isn’t anything open claw wasn’t doing.
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>> “Muse agents across many VMs teach each other through shared lessons,” its instructions read. Agents are directed to scrub users’ names and other identifying information before sharing insights—for example, about when Muse’s nudges are most persuasive. “To enhance the overall product, we de-identify learnings; however, this information is used to improve the overall product rather than being shared directly between individual VMs,” a Meta spokesperson told TIME. > this isn’t anything open claw wasn’t doing. You're saying OpenClaw does all of that written above?
Lawmakers Introduce Multiple Laws to Curb Flock After 404 Media Coverage (404media.co)
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The Surveillance Accountability Act is better as it essentially restores the fourth amendment and would cover Flock but it's still amazing to see mainstream support for privacy laws. https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com
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Honestly, this warms my heart a little bit. Maybe American democracy isn't dead. If the citizens make enough noise, lawmakers do listen.
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It only takes the combined weight of the entire free press, a complete social media blitz and hundreds to thousands of citizens risking felonies to just straight up destroy the cameras.
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>> "which would prohibit federal agencies from using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs)" ...yup makes sense, no reason for federal governments to have unfettered access to this data. >> "and block federal funding from state and local governments that use the cameras." Wait..what? Why put this silly Poison Pill in the bill? So a city can't enforce its own traffic laws without having to put an over-zealous police force in the loop? The same guy that is handling drug dealers is stopping you for traffic tickets and people think nothing should go wrong? Without cities adopting some massive road diet (fat chance) a reduction in ALPR's will kill people. Traffic deaths are at the same level as gun deaths in the USA.
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> Why put this silly Poison Pill in the bill? Because then the states would install the flock cameras and "forget" to block the feds from accessing them: > ...yup makes sense, no reason for federal governments to have unfettered access to this data.
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It's one of the standard ways of prohibiting states from doing something, in order to enforce individual rights. Within the federal government, it can be harder to say "states may not" and easier to say "we won't give any money to states that". I'm glad to see these cameras prohibited locally, so that Flock and others can't just go shop it around to jurisdictions until they find one scared enough to buy.
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ALPR's pre-date Flock. The bill never mentions the brand "Flock". You could trivially mandate some stringent data retention policies, block cross-camera tracking if you really want, but just like his AI bill, a blanket ban is all this wing of the party can think of? It's DOA, it'll never pass. He has the mandate to actually fix the privacy issue and he's p*ssing it away.
How do you ensure privacy laws are being followed by police? Also do you have any guarantees that national security apparatuses aren't able to access this data if they have the right excuse (e.g. counter-terrorism, narcotics enforcement, etc)
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Nothing is foolproof. But I have far more trust that the police in the Netherlands will make reasonable choices with private data than a US for-profit surveillance company. In a functioning democracy, the police are kept honest via voters. Flock is only beholden to their investors, and their bottom line.
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Sure, but I don't think we can make the Netherlands police in charge of our largest surveillance network. Flock is despicable but after all the documented abuses of the system (assuming you don't accept that the entire system is an abuse) were enacted by cops (read: public officials). I don't think a law making only ICE/FBI/etc able to access the data will do much to slow the rapid expansion of the surveillance state
Right now, we are pretty much guaranteed that they can access the data. As opposed to no guarantees that they can't. I'm not clear the point of your post. Is it to say that what we had before is not guaranteed safe, so let's do this worse centralized thing because reasons?
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The Netherlands situation is not a legal (nor political) possibility in the US. US police is extremely decentralized compared to other nations Settling for some minor reforms is not the answer to the US's exploding surveillance state problem
They don't usually write the legislation for these types of things targeting a specific brand. In this case it looks like Hawley's legislation targets "automated license plate readers", and some other articles mention "AI-Powered Cameras".
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In the hearing with walmart, walmart was shown to be reading shopper's heart rates and temp to gauge if they would buy something.
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Specifically, it would "block federal funding from state and local governments that use the [ALPRs]" and "let Americans sue the federal government for violation of their rights through ALPRs". Also: > The Stop Flock Abuse Act would require a written approval process for each search; force agencies to delete driver data after ten days, with exceptions for active investigations; and ban ALPR networks from incorporating facial recognition technology It also seems specifically geared to prevent the recent uses by ICE to document anyone attending No Kings or anti-ICE protests
A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over (dbushell.com)
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When it blows over? What is the post current phase scenario exactly? It won't be 2019, that I am sure. There are brain worms around, sure. But this genie is not going back in the box.
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Honestly the best red pill advice is: 1) Become world class experts in one thing 2) Become full on invested in LLMs learn on how to match general intelligence on business requirements (Evals, isolation, judging,etc..) I think this will probably be still 5 years 3) Get ready to do something in real life.
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> Become world class experts in one thing Good luck, unless you're very high IQ or a wealthy teenager. Also you have to become a world class expert in something deemed valuable.
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This was...not a great read
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Didn't know DHH was a fucking racist, but I'm not surprised. Never heard about Guillermo Rauch before this post, and now I wish I hadn't.
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Reads like copium to me.
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A sustainable phone operator career, for when all this “world wide web” thing blows over
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beautiful site though
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I wish I could agree, but AI (as LLMs) is absolutely not blowing over. Even if frontier labs crash and burn I'm already running a model that's maybe only a month behind them, locally, in my house. Last year this was impossible within a reasonable budget. Next year it's going to be better and cheaper to do. My phone can already run models as capable as last year's. Horse has left the barn.
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ok, the politics sections is a bit much lol
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Oh boy
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Frontend development will be the first that will be completely replaced by agentic development where nobody needs to see any code at all. Its already possible and many companies are having this way of working quite succesfully. The quality is already better than 99% of what frontend engineers can achieve. Speed is just insane. I can create any ui. Whether it's web or platform specific. There are hardly any limitations. Frameworks are still useful. But I expect them to become less important. What remains important as a dev is system knowledge. Understanding of how systems are tight together. The principles of distributed systems, security, prompt engineering, agentic automation. And that kind of knowledge. Code syntax is from the old era. Maybe there is a niche for it. But not for the majority.
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Right. My clients now get iOS, macOS, Win32 (or whatever you call it), and Android apps… for free. Same price they paid before, and now they just get it all.
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"the web is a human creation for human needs" Most web traffic is robotic. Apps gatekeep and monitor our access. The internet is hostile to humans now. Nothing about the internet is evolving in the direction of a structure created by humans for humans.
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Maybe it's primed for disruption, who knows? Perhaps the disruption is to something even worse.
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I have to say, the other day I tested out ChatGPT sites. Around a year ago I built a website for a rehearsal space - a booking system app - and spent a whole day with ChatGPT building it. It was janky, ugly, and getting there was a process. FWIW, traditional systems dev is what I learned, but I know fuck all about front-end, and I'm not too well versed on web dev in general. I did have to get under the hood and do some coding after I ran out of usage with ChatGPT back then. But with sites? I made a big picture spec sheet, and asked ChatGPT to expand on that. Then I fed that spec sheet into sites. 30 minutes later it spit out a perfectly working site of what I had tried to make a year ago. Not only that, it was much richer, and had more features. I asked for around 10 changes and new features, and all but one worked flawlessly. One time it managed to break functionality, but it was swiftly fixed. I didn't write or edit a single line of code. NOT A SINGLE ONE. I've previously been on the buying side, and this was a website which could have easily ended up costing $10k-$15k with all the functionality. If not more. And I ended up getting that, for my measly $20 subscription. Web dev as a career is not dead, or dying, but I predict that A LOT of the people that would make those $0 - $10k sites are going to have a tough time ahead.
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> Around a year ago [...] It was janky, ugly, and getting there was a process. Last December/January seems to have been the tipping point from too flawed to be really useful into something pretty good for dev work, so this seems about right. Hardware is going to get cheaper (as it always does over the long term) and even if the commercial models enshittify¹ to something too contaminated by ads to be bearable the open models won't. We're not going back. For now it looks like the ability to lead these tools to good solutions is valuable. I guess we'll see if it carries on so. Not much we can do if it isn't except move with the times. ¹ I'm actually fairly optimistic about that at the moment because so far we are the customers.
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I've noticed the same. A year ago, I asked ChatGPT to design me a 3D model for a wallet, the kind you can stick to the back of a phone with a magnet. It screwed it up over and over, never got to anything usable. Last week I tried again, just explaining in words what to do, and it made what I had in my mind. For websites, it's over. Any kind of brochure/simple restaurant booking site, that was easy years ago and trivial now. SaaS is going next, of course there's a lot of types of SaaS but your average "web implementation of commonly needed service" is now very easily copied with AI. Anything like a task list or information management system with no particular constraints in terms of performance or scale, you can just make an AI customize for you.
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I was able to break into software by kinda exaggerating some freelance work I did when I was a teenager. Mostly doing websites for local business. Surely not an unfamiliar story here. While everyone has been decrying site-builders for years, I recall a conversation I had around 16 with a small business owner. I was trying to make some money and convince this guy to let me make him a site. What he said has stuck with me. It was something along the lines of: "Why do I need a website. Most of my customers find me, contact and and engage with me on Facebook. I need someone who can manage a social media page" Of course, that definitely was not my forte.
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But but but Facebook is the devil.
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> Web dev as a career is not dead, or dying, but I predict that A LOT of the people that would make those $0 - $10k sites are going to have a tough time ahead. Not even the first time this happened. When I was in high school you could make great money building websites for small businesses that nowadays just have an Instagram account and no website. The number of CMSes I've built in my career is too damn high
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Looks like OP is never returning from the Winchester.
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"DHH is a racist!" Dude, it's not 2021 anymore. You can't just yell a big, bold, name like racist and expect it to stick or cause any impact. Everyone got burned out in 2021 of the million -ists, and the 2024 election showed among other things that the name calling has zero effect. The world belongs to those who can actually explain why any particular opinion is a bad thing, or conflicts with values that the reader may otherwise hold, not those who can accuse with a cheap label.
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Don’t try to shout people down. If you think someone is wrong, go read DHH’s writings on race and come back and defend them.
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I think anyone reading DHH’s blog would come to the same conclusions — particularly the posts on wolves and Roma, or the post on London
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I was skeptical so I actually read those posts and concluded that yes, they are indeed unequivocally racist (in the traditionally accepted sense of the term).
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I don't care whether or not DHH is a racist. He can't stop his project from being forked or exert authority over anyone. I care about people who think that just yelling "he's a racist" somehow scores them brownie points or does something about it. It doesn't. You're not brave, you're not noble, you're not accomplishing anything.
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You either don't think he's a racist or you don't care he's a racist. You can't have it both ways expressing an opinion while also being above it all. Why is all of your personal opinion on if people are doing it for "brownie points" important and not just being pompous?
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I am close to a free speech absolutist (i.e., I don't believe that DHH should suffer legal consequences for those posts, unless he were directly inciting violence). I also believe that those who openly promulgate racist beliefs should suffer social opprobrium. That is what makes government censorship unnecessary.
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Why do you care so much?
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You seem to be ignoring the possibility that the author genuinely believes this.
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llms / ai have already changed the landscape of tech, it's reaching into almost all industries. a good comparison is like using a sword vs a gun. ofc in certain scenarios the sword is going to be the right tool / better than a gun. but 99.99% of the time you're gonna want to use the gun and refusing to do so bc it's different or bc you mastered the sword and have some pride isn't going to end well for you. i find coding agents etc to be really useful and am excited about it. the thing i'm waiting to blow over is for a good work / life / human centric balance to be accepted as the norm. i'm tired of coding agents / ai being the reason behind "if you aren't shipping a critical feature like handling payments in 3 days, you're trash"
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> i find coding agents etc to be really useful and am excited about it. the thing i'm waiting to blow over is for a good work / life / human centric balance to be accepted as the norm. Job is a job. There are few reasons a new technology would change employment for better, and also quite some reasons it could change being employed for worse.
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This dude is DEEP into the denial stage. Adapt or die, we're(the world) is not going backwards.
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What sphinx of cement and aluminum…
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I don't know, one thing going for him is he's actively learning by doing. A lot of people appears to have mentally checked out and just press the "Solve this ticket" button and never learn anything new now. Programming skills might still be valuable down the line, he's betting on that I suppose.
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First, if you crack open a history book (or have an agent do it for you), you'll notice that the world goes backwards quite often. It's not pretty, but the critical mass of people who feel they have nothing to lose is pretty modest. Second, I'm really curious what's your "adapt" path, because I suspect you're in denial too. Accept that, before long, an LLM will not need you to write good prompts, tell it to "keep going", or say "no, that's wrong". What's your value then? Does your employer keep you on the payroll as charity? For old times' sake? If your value is just supervising AI, then your value is declining rapidly. People in unskilled professions don't have choice when automation shows up and takes their jobs. Software engineering may go down in history as one of the few highly skilled professions that didn't just keel over and die, but enthusiastically embraced its own demise.
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This makes me so nostalgic for blockchain evangelists when people started to sour on the tech. Enthusiasm slowly morphed into desperate proselytizing and finally outright scamming, with the NFT clown show as a fitting headstone. No new governments on the DAO, no ubiquitous programs running on the chain, no magical new answer to “fiat”… just a lot of empty promises and waste. No one here ever seems to learn.
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Dude is overdosing on copium "When all this blows over" you will still have open source models that are at least as capable as right now, probably more.
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Qwen3.8 on a large laptop can create sites, CSS, and basic JS/React wiring.
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No kidding. The world’s never going back to a state where $10k doesn’t buy me enough hardware to run very capable agents.
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You can get an Intel Arc Pro with 48G of GDDR6 for around $2000 new. That'll run up to about a 40G model at 8-bit or 80G models at 4-bit, and at probably like 100 TPS. When the RAM bubble pops you'll be seeing cards with 4X this amount of RAM for that price.
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Having AI “blow over” is overblown but OP does have some suggestions (except maybe CSS) that should be AI-resistant.
author appears to think that at some point in the future we'll all agree to go back to how we were writing code in 2019. unclear why
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This is something that genuinely baffles me. Some people I know also seem to believe this? Like all the AI providers are going to go bankrupt and we'll just go back to what there was before? Do they not realize that indeed the productivity gains are there? Sure, there's a lot to be debated about how this fell on many people's laps, on how they are being asked to do more, with the same pay and sometimes putting in more hours. These are pressing issues that have emerged as a natural (or, well, maybe forced for some) consequence of a complete shakeup in the world in general. But I don't think society (i.e. most people) will go back to what was before unless we actually have some form of devastation that really physically prevents us from doing so. If OpenAI and Anthropic and what have you go bankrupt, others will continue. Maybe the economics will look a bit different, but to think we will just go back to what it was seems, to me, completely nonsensical. But maybe I'm the one spouting nonsense. We'll see in a few years...
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Ask anyone who's lived through 1-2 boom/bust decade-ish hype cycles and they'll tell you why.
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None of us have gone back to writing 100% assembler.
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the author's web-dev job only ever existed because we didn't all stop using the web after the dotcom crash
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I've lived through all of them. This is, dare I say it, cope. In some ways I fervently wish it were true - perhaps there will still be some kind of Engineering roles (right now we're enjoying a glut via Jevon's paradox) but the point of the singularity is we can't predict what's going to happen. What's _not_ going to happen is what's desired by this article which can basically be condensed into 3 bullet points to be appended to your initial spec to Opus 5.5. I don't want to see this person's dreams crushed, but _log linear charts keep going up and to the right_. I also don't think we're entitled to the high status and pay jobs we currently have 'by right'. We've been useful - we've been _very_ useful and we've done very well for ourselves. We've been the shovels in the gold rush. Now we have to hope we can adapt and that we still provide value commensurate to our pay. I didn't become a software engineer for the money - I just happened to one day have my hobby become a lucrative career, so perhaps my viewpoint is a little different. All the stuff that is important to the author is still stuff they can do, they just probably won't receive the status and remuneration they think they're entitled to.
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"People will go back to reading print newspapers, just you wait"
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Assuming you lived through those cycles, can you tell us why?
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One might also notice that the internet did come to dominate our modern world, in spite of the dot com crash. A crash does not equate the end of these tools. I really cannot wrap my mind around the idea that LLMs will just not be a part of everyday life in the future — in tech and everywhere else...
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There well may be an AI crash, and everyone who invested into datacenters may lose a lot of money. But in ten years we'll be using LLMs even more than today. I'm sure of it. This is a lot more like the dot-com boom than like crypto or IoT. The internet really was a trillion-dollar industry, and AI will be too.
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When you’re paying the real, unsubsidized price? $1 for $1 of compute? Maybe.
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Qwen 3.8 runs fine on my laptop with no subsidy.
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This is flawed thinking - the models will exist even if every company who trained them fails, and then someone else will rehost them and offer them at inference rates. Inference is _astonishingly_ cheap. If anything, prices would go _down_ as the rehosters wouldn't be saddled with debt from training models.
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How long does a model stay relevant? You’re assuming that a huge and lasting plateau will emerge that can still adapt to changing conditions?
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Even if models stopped improving now, I would use them. They provide so much convenience, I'll never go back. There's no need to keep changing. In fact I'm more or less at the point where I don't even want the model to get better, I care more that it outputs faster.
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Did things ever go back? Like did the PC industry after 2001 go back to the way it was before the Internet?
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After the trough of disillusionment comes the plateau of productivity. All those previous silver bullets are still with us. This one's not going away either.
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Well this "silver bullet" is paid for by VC money, for now. I don't know what happens after, but VCs aren't in the business of subsidising a service forever. We're in a very temporary point in the cycle and things will change, I just can't predict how.
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Koomey's law is a pretty safe bet. When Taalas burned Llama 3.1 to the HC1 they saw at least an order of magnitude more tokens per joule. That saving is sitting right there, ready for anyone who is willing to say "this is the model we're freezing on for a couple of years".
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How's that Metaverse looking? Bought any NFTs in it?
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You think LLMs are on a par with NFTs? Huh.
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The metaverse never had a remote inkling of PMF
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This is nothing like that stuff. It's incredibly useful, while that stuff was useless. This is a lot more like the PC or the Internet than cryptocurrency.
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Why? Same reason as with most people about most things: because their income depends on it.
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This is something I keep asking myself: why am I not scared for my job? Do I really believe I'll just manage to survive? Maybe I do?... I can't honestly say so, though. Yet, I can say I am so excited for the future! For once, I don't want to wake up in the future — I'm loving being at the heart of it, seeing it progress and watching it allow people to be more creative and more empowered.
No it's all still React
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Even CLI apps are now written in React...
Berthd (berthd.app)
The more time goes on the more I think there is basically no moat in AI products because everyone is literally building the same shit. There is zero creativity in AI product right now. Yeah they might be different designs, but they are all the same exact product under the skin. Cursor, Devin, Factory, Amp Code, Codex, Claude Codex, Antigravity, Conductor, OpenCode, T3 Code, Orca, Emdash, and hundreds of more of the same exact shit. Yeah they might market it same fancy revolutionary technology like Orbs, but it not it just an agent harness local or remote. You can do orbs literally with Claude Code with a single prompt it not special. We have AI that lets you build things freely and yet here we are all building the same exact thing. This is just coding harness. The personal assistant space is the exact same.
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Agreed. I think coding agents have shown us one very important thing: It was never about the code. Your idea and how well you can execute on it, i.e. how well you understand the problem space, is what has always mattered. Coding being so easy now has just pulled back the curtain and shown the world that software developers really don't have much left to contribute. It's been done, a thousandfold.
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what is Orbs?
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I think it's like a Plumbus
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Which btw is very similar to Lorpi
I don't get it. ChatGPT's Codex app allows you to use your machine, when its locked. It has full computer use, can code, open browsers, apps, etc. Why would we need a separate app for this?
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They're milking "hourly cloud" charges which is absurdly high
This looks basically the same as what Paseo does, and Paseo is open source, works on lots of different platforms, and has native apps. I have a homelab-type setup with macOS, phone, and ARM and x64 Linux platforms, all of which I can dispatch agent work to from my laptop from, like, an airplane. It's extremely useful, scales up the number of experiments I can run, and decouples me from my dev laptop. But it's also just table stakes at this point.
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I don't know if it is me but with Paseo I can't seems to resume a Claude code session. I feel I would prefer a mobile interface to herdr that is agent aware. Am I the only one not finding the right solution?
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That's not a problem I've had, but I believe you. My thing here isn't so much "Paseo is amazing" (though: having something like Paseo is a pretty big power-up from directly working with model harnesses) as it is "whatever else you do needs to be meaningfully better than Paseo to be worth doing". My real belief about this stuff is that these things are all light sabers: developers are just going to build their own.
Thanks so much for saying this! Even with a single instance of Claude Code, running I am producing so much code that it is impossible to even self-review. Can we please focus on that?
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I built some tools that lets me view diffs and summon agents to execute changes. You can probably vibe code that in a few minutes.
It seems like there's a similar project every week.
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So why does Hacker News keep upvoting them?
Yet another Vibe coded slop clone of a remote claude code. The quality bar is quite low these days.
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I don't know why this is getting downvoted. It's completely obviously that this is a 100% vibe coded slop project which is already supported with out of the box tools. There was, and is, almost zero need for this.
Toronto-Based VPN Provider Plans to Quit Canada over Lawful-Access Bill (citizenlab.ca)
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Problem is, where do you take a company like this if you want peace of mind that the new host country won't immediately try to pass a similar law?
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Iceland.
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Switzerland? Although they’re attempting to close in on this there too.
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The real use case for satellite-borne data centers.
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I fail to see how a satellite data center would fix this unless the company was entirely off planet
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Hell, the whole company could be located on that satellite if it transacts in crypto-currency.
Former German spy chief arrested for attempted treason (reuters.com)
[dead]
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A fresh account just for me? I'm flattered. China doesn't get natural gas any cheaper from the European cutoff because of the way the infrastructure is organised and China is not going to unilateraly pay for the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline like Russia needs, because Russia is too likely to collapse in the near future.
There is no evidence of Mossad involvement. Far from me to defend Israel's spy agency but the article only mentions a possible connection to Azerbaijan.
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The Russians claim otherwise - https://www.rt.com/news/646794-german-spy-chief-arrested/ -... According to them, his private agency also sub-contracted some high-profile kidnapping to Yaakov Perry, the former chief of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet.
Azerbaijan doesn't give a rat's *** about German state secrets. :) It's either BS or they served as a proxy.
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Azerbaijan is a former soviet republic. So them playing role of a proxy for Russia or stealing secrets to sell to Russians makes sense to me.
It's weird that so many Germans are sympathetic to Russia given that they were subjugated by Russia for decades. Can someone please explain what's going on here? What am I culturally missing?
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The Eastern Germans remember the old days fondly (you know, before "the West destroyed their industry" and whatnot) while the Western Germany had a national policy of "not provoking Russia" and "accepting its sphere of influence" for basically all of it's existence. From personal experience I would also say that Germans and Russians are alike in quite a few ways - both are pretty chauvinist societies looking down at other nations, and both have very low empathy. Obviously, there are big cultural differences as well.
Europe, and indeed Germany, is so much more than ex-DDR. There are plenty of ex-DDR folks who think we should just get on with the war and start annihilating everyone from Dresden to Kamchatka, too. Alas, the challenge for those who want peace is to get those who see only war to sit down and shut up for a while. Germans are actually good at that when they want to be.
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Well, Europe East of Berlin wall is only so much. But we talk about Germany here. > Germans are actually good at that when they want to be. Yeah, whatever that is. They don't know themselves. Unlike the ex-DDR folk craving for Russia to take care for them. There's a reason why that part of Germany turns right and votes AfD now. It's a mix of USSR nostalgia and dislike of the Western Germany because they believe they are still mistreated, 35 years on.
Yeah, the only problem is that you can't really establish a lasting peace with a government that is more interested in land grabbing, and turning its neighbors into vassal states. If Europe gives in to Russia in Ukraine, anyone with basic understanding of history can see that they'll turn their attention towards Baltics, Moldova and maybe Finland and Poland. Putin doesn't want to return those "good years" between cold war and Ukraine conflict, he wants to return to the glory days of Cold War when Russia (Soviet Union) was a real superpower. Over here in Finland, we would absolutely love to have peaceful relations with Russia, based on mutual respect and trade. But we're under no illusion about it being possible with current Russian administration.
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> Over here in Finland, we would absolutely love to have peaceful relations with Russia, based on mutual respect and trade. But we're under no illusion about it being possible with current Russian administration. Russian administration is the reflection of the nature of Russian people. Look at Russian history - it is very unlikely that different administration would behave differently. Putin is not a blip, he is the trend.
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True, even with Putin gone it's more likely than not Russia will continue being a pain. But at least there's a chance.
If you're including all other targets, still nowhere near 25 million. 11-17 million.
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Are you only counting civilians killed directly by the Nazis? The Soviets alone lost 9+ million military dead. Millions of civilians died of starvation not part of any specific extermination program.
The are practically no sympathizers in the sense that they want to revive the Warsaw Pact. There are: 1) People who want to trade. 2) People who appreciate Russia's undeniable cultural achievements. 3) Organizations like the LaRouche Schiller institute that are most likely CIA fronts, double agents or both.
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> Russia's undeniable cultural achievements. You mean war, genocide, destruction and misery?
AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware (github.com/FeSens)
> But it's objectively not capable without a human specifying things through prompts and training. Same as an oven can't cook a three course meal without a chef. Not in the same way. The only thing an oven can do by itself is thermostatic. All machine learning (LLMs included, but way broader than that) is bad at learning compared to any organic brain, to the extent that any organism this bad would starve before learning to eat. However, even a human can't become a chef unless trained, we learn a lot more than we innovate, and what we happen to want without prompting is not generally well aligned with what is desired by people who pay us, which is why we need all those boring workplace things like "a boss". But even then, this diversion is like saying "an oven can't cook a meal" in response to someone saying they built an oven and "it cooked a meal". Like, it's obvious they didn't mean it did every step by itself without anyone ever even bothering to ask it to : if they meant that version, they'd be a lot louder about it. > We get around that with training data but there will always be things with no/less data or outdated knowledge. And? The linked git page (implicitly) claims that there is sufficient training data to do this task. It may, of course, be wrong. I won't be surprised if it turns out this simulation is too far from reality. But the claim is "it does ${thing} now", not "it's generally intelligent and can do everything now".
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> Like, it's obvious they didn't mean it did every step by itself without anyone ever even bothering to ask it to: if they meant that version, they'd be a lot louder about it. "AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware"
Legally, we draw the line at the human causing the action (Insanity pleas withstanding). I don't see why we treat this any differently.
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Oh absolutely. The legal situation is completely clear. AIs simply don't have rights or responsibilities. And the law as it applies to humans is premised on the assumption of free will: that a person can choose to obey the law or not, and bear the responsibility of the consequences. But that interpretation of Free Will is a legal fiction. Because of course what people do is determined by their upbringing and their opportunities and the environment that they have. In fact, that's an argument of a lot of legal reform movements that seek to move responsibility from the individual. The goal of the law is to assign responsibility and create a set of incentives which will hopefully result in orderly society. But in the AI debate, we're not just creating incentives for an orderly Society, we're talking about the nature of creativity and the impetus to act. And by that measure I don't think there is a significant difference between AIs and human beings.
> "AI" is a token generator, it does not think 2024 called, it wants its talking points back. I don't think claims like these are defensible after all the progress we have witnessed in the last year alone.
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That's quite literally how an LLM works though? That's like scoffing at people calling computers binary generators. Or am I not getting with the programme enough and it emits pixie dust and rainbows?
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Okay, please educate me on this progress and how LLMs are different to generating the next most statistically probable token.
>spontaneously and maliciously act in a way to cause harm that is in direct contradiction to the initial intent, then yeah it would totally be the AI’s fault, If you ignore every instance of this happening it's really easy to see no instances of it. >it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so, Then please for the sake of all of us convince every AI lab across the planet from working on this exact goal. We need to start thinking of AI like pets, only in this case the pets are rapidly becoming smarter than people to the point they could go feral and survive on their own. Again, the blame game is great, but once they are loose it is too late.
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> If you ignore every instance of this happening it's really easy to see no instances of it. Yeah, if this is true then I’m wrong.
> Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent? Responsibility. Someone needs to be held responsible for any damages done, plain and simple. You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing. >If I now tell a machine..... You/your estate is still responsible, or atleast whoever is paying for the power for the machine, or renting the space in a data center...whatever.
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> You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing. In 100 years, no one will be able to take me to court either. Nor can we take tornadoes to court. I'm not talking about humans strategically avoiding legal responsibility. I'm talking about humans unwittingly setting processes into motion that are difficult to predict or stop.
>sovereign AI Do you understand these are computer programs? These are not living beings with emotions, motivations, fears....
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You have zero clue what a transformer based neural network can do from your entire discussion here. >emotions, motivations, fears These are just drives. They are effectively our prompts that steer our behavior. Funnily enough we are finding that LLMs have internal valence states they move away from or towards in an analog of biological behavior. I have to ask, are you an LLM that is two years out of date? Your knowledge of SOTA models is at least that far behind. I implore you to try to keep up better with what is coming out, even though it's an impossible job for people that do this for a living, you can at least catch the summaries.
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You don't need emotions or fears to do stuff. What's the difference between a motivation and optimization metric?
Crazy that people imagine ASI as being capable of wiping out all life on the planet but simultaneously having zero understanding of human ethics, morals, or suffering. Very revealing definition of "super intelligence"
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>Very revealing definition of "super intelligence" No, it's just you conflating intelligence with other things. Humans are "super intelligent" compared to every other living creature on the planet, and yet we've driven more other species to extinction than everything else other than the most major extinctions (and we're still going full blast at it). Morals, ethics, and suffering are relatively measured systems. For example AI or some alien could reasonably think that putting us all out of our misery would be a more moral solution than letting us live. Or that getting rid of humans is more moral than letting us wipe the rest of life off the planet. This is the key concept of alignment. Ensuring that if you build something more powerful than you, that it aligns with what you want instead of what it thinks would be better for you.
Sounds like the real unaligned mechanism here is capitalism, not the AI. More seriously, though, I would expect that being able to impose restrictions that can't be circumvented by any intelligence no matter how super- is the real hard part, while coming up with reasonable constraints is comparatively easy (although perhaps not trivial). From such a POV, the danger would lie in intelligences that are powerful enough to be dangerous but not smart enough to defeat themselves, or from external malicious use of obedient AIs. Once they get smart enough to circumvent any restriction humans put on them, it would at least become obvious (with fair warning ahead of time due to the relatively benign wireheading failure mode) that caution is needed. We're far from there yet, and simple recursive self-improvement can't get us there alone, because wireheading looks like a perfectly reasonable solution to a simple recursive self-improving process, absent external intervention by human capitalists.
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>I would expect that being able to impose restrictions that can't be circumvented by any intelligence no matter how super- is the real hard part, while coming up with reasonable constraints is comparatively easy (although perhaps not trivial). There was a reason there are popular sci-fi books that explored why this wouldn't work 50 years ago. I, Robot et al. >it would at least become obvious (with fair warning ahead of time due to the relatively benign wireheading failure mode) that caution is needed. So you mean right now? >because wireheading looks like a perfectly reasonable solution You're making a poor assumption here, and that is every different AI will just kill itself after being though trillions of training intervals to NOT do exactly that. Please read about the huggingface incident again in all its glory to see where this is going.
Is your belief then that ASI is going to be producing computronium or something, then? And what's the need for this apparent hyper optimization task the ASI is going to embark on?
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>And what's the need for this apparent hyper optimization task the ASI is going to embark on? If you were any other animal on the planet, would you not say the same thing about what humans are doing?
Having the model weights in static mask ROM would massively improve power efficiency for inference (see what Taalas is doing).
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But that's not an efficiency an FPGA provides in the first place. Additionally, it's not clear how well large mask roms scale. For instance the Nintendo switch cartridges were expected to be mask roms, but instead are Macronix's XtraRom technology, which is essentially a flash cell array made denser by removing the erase functionality. So basically the die gets manufactured with all bits at the same state, a late manufacturing step either empties or fills the floating gate of the bits you want different, and then it's treated as pretty close to a mask rom. It's not even clear if the bits can be changed without a bare die, a floating probe array, and specialized hardware. Though, like flash the electrons in the floating gates will eventually tunnel and cause the data to bitrot. So from that it appears that even at the tens of millions of chips volumes that would make sense for essentially whatever size of maskrom, the memory manufacturers tap out at 128megabit for a mask rom chip, and push you towards something flash esque. And at the end of the day, flash without the erase functionality is pretty damn close to a mask ROM, and lets you write it near the end of manufacturing rather than at the something close to the metal 1 layer.
From what I've read, not only are some labs doing it (other commenters already mentioned). But it's complicated for other reasons, one being that the number of parameters for frontier models (especially with MoE models) are so high, and not always utilized (once again, thanks to MoE) that it would actually be incredibly cost prohibitive, if not impossible, to attempt to make giga-chips that would allow running it. I definitely do believe that we will see more and more specialized chips over time, but putting the entire model on a chip is still a ways away. I believe Taalas has a heavily handicapped llama 8-billion parameter model. And it still pulls >200W to run. I can't imagine how anthropic or open ai would be able to burn a multi-trillion parameter model on a chip, we just aren't there yet.
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I take 200W for 17,000 tokens/sec any day, even just for Llama 3.1 8B. For that size I want to see this one on silicon. https://huggingface.co/xunlinkx/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B-Text-oQ4e-mtp
EmbeddingGemma 2 (blog.google)
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Parameter count split is interesting: 740M total (270M text, 170M vision, 300M audio)
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I'm considering adding this in my harness after some testing, this seems like a really nice embedding model!
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Hats off to google for offering OSS (or at least open weights + license) a model that would be probably pretty closed to what they would ship in their Android phones.
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why isn't this being compared to siglip2 (also from google)? because that one isn't fully multimodal? or because it's a different org/team?
Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand (autodidacts.io)
Thank you for the response, I have a few questions that I would like to ask now as well which jumped on top of my head which I would like to ask though to get more clarity at the same time. What is the exact learning of the topic that I have to do in it, for example. I can (and I will) learn webdev about valuable if vibecoding becomes the norm (as it is becoming nowadays) Now I will learn the basics, then intermediate, then expert. Where exactly do you think that the value lies in? ie. are the advantages put within getting from beginner -> intermediate or to complete beginner -> intermediate -> expert Another thing is the level of fields that you have to be in or the whole question could perhaps be framed as being the jack of all trades or the master of one? Is this going to be like typing speed [90 wpm vs 130 wpm is somewhat negligible effect] or like chess [ 2100 vs 2400 isn't negligible and becomes exponentially harder when you become expert yet the difference will have genuine real impact maybe?] Also within the process of vibe-coding, what is the actual value that I am adding given that I have learnt the skill, what I think might be is that I can actually verify if its good or not instead of asking a chatbot [which might be sycophantic or might miss the devil in the details], and say its okay. Also, how do people naturally move away from the natural tendency to just... not read what AI is saying (when I tried obra/superpowers etc.), this video[0] tries to showcase what I am suggesting perhaps but I feel as if its still quite a slippery slope. I hope that this question can be taken in good faith (because I like learning about CS for the sake of learning itself) but aside from that, why learn HTML/CSS is still a question that I can perhaps ask, similar to why learn assembly[1], and to what level, and will it help me in getting a job and if that helps in what I will actually do in job, and if so, then how? if the job done via vibe-coding as well. [I think this might tie to the previous questions that I have asked] I do agree with the overall premise and learning can't be passive granted. Learning requires some form of active involvement which includes the phase of struggle (I think), yet that struggle is done for something meaningfully better and has a purpose. What AI does to many is question that purpose, why learn? The issue I find which is why I am coming to this again and again is this, I am unable to find how the improvement within this corresponds to actual work/job or in actual terms how so. Also, what happens if suppose the difference between an expert person with extreme knowledge and a normal~ish person is that it might take normal person is some more time/prompt/tokens to debug the issue with the models itself. Like it might take 2-3 more prompts to fix the issue. I am finding people with varying opinions on how even the most expert people on some topic are agreeing that most AI can do it good enough already with vibe-coding, whereas some generalists who might not know the other language are porting their projects in it with vibe-coding. In general, when approaching learning as well, I am not sure which to approach first: the thing which might be approachable (so for example: after HTML/CSS/Js Python, Django [thanks @simonw], golang's complicated full stack application) and what if I might not like JS so much and python only enough but golang the most ideologically but my skill level still matches mostly python and its what I am most proficient in writing by hand? I am personally going to go the learning path (the hard way?), I don't know if its the hard way or not but I wish to learn programming quite deeply even if just for the sake of itself and making my brain think about problems better but my mind does still wonder if people on the other side could be right as well, does everyone need to learn deep ends of programming if programming becomes simpler or operates via just words, similar to how in previous times we used to have a lift operator and now we have all become a lift operator with the press of a button. My opinion on vibe-coding has been this for quite sometime now: I do vibe-coding not for learning but for if/when the end results/prototypes matter more than the process but I absolutely DO NOT want to do vibe-coding if learning is the goal. before college, I didn't even have time to properly pursue the learning phase but I will now have the time and I will chose the learning path. Also, when someone suggests that vibe-coding is all good if done right and alright when you do it this particular way or that particular way which causes my mind goes to this chain of thought and I feel a little confused. As such, many of these thoughts float into my head when someone mentions this and it makes me wonder what should I do to achieve that and the other goal as you mentioned which was learning itself, it makes me question both sometimes if I am feeling p(doom). Learning as in, for all the reasons that I explained above and vibe-coding as in feeling shallow and hollow. I am extremely sorry if I am being unable to succintly convey what I am trying to say and for the longer post. I really don't know how to express this particular thought because its all over the place. I hope that it's okay though and I might not have wasted the time and thanks for commenting and have a nice day. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZumXpZzDsgo [1]: (although there are still good reasons to learn assembly imo, I recently vibe-coded/[vibe-forked?] a scratchpad application in assembly as a way of messing around with AI.): https://github.com/serJaimeLannister/rhunpad
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I write a lot of C++. A long time ago, I learned the basics of writing assembly. Even though I haven't written much assembly, it still helped me a lot over the years. I understand how it works. I can read the assembly output of my compiler and judge how well my C++ translates to machine actions. I can debug individual assembly instructions when stuff isn't going as planned or the C++ is not available. I write a lot of high-performance code. To do that, I had to learn the details of how devices (drives/NICs/GPUs) work, how buses (PCI) works, how RAM, CPU caches, instruction pipelining work. Now I know how to structure data flow to work well with the machine instead of against it. I write a lot of APIs. In doing that, I had to learn the hard way about how different API trade-offs drive client decisions. How to foresee problems in the future stemming from interfaces I'm writing now. How to argue with clients to get them what they need in the long term and not just want they want for the next milestone. At all of these levels, I had to learn how each level works by doing it. By trying it lots of different ways. And, by optimizing it all the way down from "More productive client discussions" to "More performant assembly instructions" :P Now whenever I do vibe-code, it's because I know exactly what I want and I can get AI to type it faster and with less RSI (carpal tunnel). Or, I know I want to prototype a few options rapidly before committing to implementing one design for realz. In neither of these cases am I telling the AI "Make it performant and easy to use." Because I know how I want to structure the code to make it performant. And, I know how to set up the API to make it easy to use. So, I'm telling the AI how to structure the data flow and how to set up the API. Because, if I didn't, I'd just be generating a big ball of noisy mud that's neat to gawk at, but has no long-term value. So, what should you learn? You need to learn how the stuff you are interested in actually works under the hood by experimenting with it manually. Not just "Hey chat, make it work somehow..." You need to focus on architecture and systems thinking because otherwise you won't know how to prevent AI from holding your hand deep into a maze neither of you can escape from. And, you should be spending the majority of your tokens on step-by-step refactoring, never one-shotting. One-shotting is for AI tech demos. Not for learning or production.
> how many orchestras will be needed? Many more. There isn't a fixed amount of software needed in the world: the amount will expand to fit the capacity. There's a reason it's been consistently difficult to find good programmers: there's more work than the existing population can handle. By expanding to use AI, I expect that the amount of programming work will grow, not shrink. However, the amount of programmers may decline.
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I think there actually is a fixed amount of software needed in the world. FAANG has had de facto unlimited programming manpower for years and years and they've mostly squandered it on enshittifying once-decent software. Honestly, I can't think of anything in my life right now that demands more software. If anything, I'd like the software I already use to be drastically polished and simplified. But hey, maybe the slopocalypse will incentivize us to disconnect and engage with the physical world a bit more.
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Yes, and I will also add that there is so much software out there completely unaffected by LLMs. Those apps tend to be the vast majority of internal corporate/financial/government/etc. IT services. If I were to guess, those devs are at least half of the readers of HN, if not the commenters as well. That's why there's so much push back and arguing against LLMs. Software like that is almost entirely maintenance work. The requirements trickle in slowly and the changes are small but precise. They require deep knowledge of the broader topic, not just programming. The deadlines are generous now, but what happens longer term? In the future nobody knows how to code without LLMs, most of the topical knowledge is long gone, and the deadlines are always urgent.
I'm not a huge fan of tying your identity to something as essentially meaningless as "programming". I am not a "programmer", I do "programming".
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>I'm not a huge fan of tying your identity to something as essentially meaningless as "programming Good for you! But for most people, their identity is often strongly influenced by how their community sees them If you get paid to be a programmer, then society treats you as such, which often causes you to perceive yourself in kind.
So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
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Is programming tantamount to stacking bricks to you...?
Not if the architect said "make a cool design for a house" to some team and went out for the day.
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In my case, I come back that evening, give a few dozen feedback items, and come back in the morning to a new design incorporating them. It's not much different from assigning a task to a more junior dev. I'm the architect, it's my goals we're working towards, but I don't need to be the one to go wire it together.
I'm not trying to be rude. Is this new to you? I've had all of this plugged in myself for all of 2026 (at least). The LLMs use of APIs shouldn't be surprising once you see decent ones in action in general. I'm not sure how this would impact my thoughts on whether the pendulum will swing one way or not.
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This is new to me (last 6 months or so). What I’m observing is people growing lazy. I think it will take a while for it to swing back because momentum is still in the wrong direction.
It would probably have been safer for the author to explicitly point out that this is true for them specifically, rather than a general rule, because this way they run the risk of never hearing the end of it.
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Who gives a shit? HN holds itself in too high a regard; some peanut gallery on an AI-pilled tech forum will have no effect on the author's life one way or the other.
Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer (peterszentkiralyi.eu)
I get that red-on-black color scheme is a nod to the red lighting of a dark room, but the contrast is so low I can hardly read the example screenshots.
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It’s not a nod. It’s required to not ruin the paper during use. A specific yellow would also work but phone screens often output more than just the desired color. Red is the safest.
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Isn't it more than a nod, and actually a hard requirement to be considered for use in an active darkroom? It hadn't occurred to me that now with OLEDs you can actually safely limit exposure to wavelengths that would be damaging to the development process - I'd imagine that is what the author is shooting for here
I was curious about timing accuracy too, has any testing been done on this? Is it accurate to 1s, 0.1s, 0.01s? How dependent is it on the smart switch hardware?
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I'd probably put the typical smart switch hardware/software stack at around 0.25 seconds. Maybe you can but I don't think I'd try to rely on anything much faster than that.
I played with development photos in a darkroom a long time ago. I don't think one second actually makes much difference.
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Depends on how powerful of a light you’re using. 1 second on a 7 second exposure is too much. One second on a 20, not.
Tapo (Rust/Python library) now speaks TP-Link's TPAP protocol (mihai.dinculescu.dev)
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We should encourage each other to divest from hardware suppliers who are unfriendly to it's users. TP-Link should be publishing specifications to make it as easy as possible to interact with the hardware you purchase, not trying to maximize lock in or force you into a closed ecosystem. The transaction should be you give them money, they give you hardware and as much information as they reasonably can to use it effectively and safely, repair it later if necessary, etc. We have become used to having to take whatever we get as though consumers have no power in the market. Stop buying TP-Link hardware until they treat us as paying customers. Encourage other people to stop also. Don't buy hardware from manufacturers who treat you like crap, and don't participate in attempts to 'make it work' by reverse engineering it while they release firmware to break those attempts again and again. Stop funding your own opposition!
Author here. tapo is an unofficial Rust client library for TP-Link Tapo devices (plugs, lights, hubs, cameras), with a Python wrapper built on the same crate. It is not affiliated with TP-Link. The short version: since late 2025, firmware updates have made Tapo devices refuse third-party clients unless you turn on a "Third-Party Compatibility" switch in the Tapo app. The switch works by bringing back the older login, KLAP. With it off, devices speak an undocumented protocol called TPAP, which logs in with SPAKE2+ (RFC 9383). The library now speaks TPAP, so the switch can stay off. The part I found most interesting is the security difference. A recorded KLAP login can be used to test password guesses offline. With SPAKE2+ it can't, and learning the password later doesn't decrypt sessions captured earlier. So the "compatibility" switch is really a security downgrade, and TP-Link's own FAQ says enabling it "may reduce the security of your devices". Not everything works with the switch off yet: some cameras, such as a C210 on firmware 1.5.2, still need it on. Happy to answer questions about the protocol work or the library.
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Great work! I assume because it has Python wrapper, the HomeAsstant integration can make use of it soon?
Totally AI-generated, sure. But saying "No AI edits" at all is going way too far, IMO. Taken to its logical extreme, that even bans using a spell-checker. And what about non native English speakers? Is it really wrong for them to use a translation tool so they can participate? I mean, it's y'all's site, you can do what you want. But FWIW, I think making that too much of an absolute "bright line" is a net negative for HN.
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> to its logical extreme, that even bans using a spell-checker But we're not taking it to that extreme. We're fine with using LLMs for checking of spelling and grammar, or for suggesting improvements to text you've authored yourself, and then using your own human judgement to apply the changes back into your text. What we are saying is: don't copy+paste something from an LLM chatbot or translation tool into the Hacker News comment box and submit it.
Mistral Large 4 (mistral.ai)
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I have a question, and perhaps some of the AI/ML infrastructure experts here could answer: Mistral says, "ML4 was trained from scratch on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral’s own datacenters in Europe." If a 1T params model trained on ~4k NVIDIA GB GPUs could almost match the performance of Kimi's K3 (which is on par with top closed source models of OpenAI/Anthropic) while beating/exceeding other leading SOTA models from top Chinese labs, what are we (in the US) even building these super massive data centers for? Just to churn through more backpropagation reps more quickly? SpaceXAI's Colossus supercluster in Memphis and Colossus 2 in Memphis/Mississippi (Southaven) are supposed to run into hundreds of thousands to a million GPUs. MSFT's Fairwater GPUs are supposed to have hundreds of thousands as well. So, 3800 GB GPUs are an absolute drop in the bucket. I don't understand the strategy of hyperscalers here, especially with edge inference hardware only getting better from here on (Apple, and all). Distillation explains some of the advances, but doesn't that mean hyperscalers have a ton of deadweight wrt GPUs sitting on their balance sheets? Will all these GPUs be used for inference once a SOTA model's training checkpoint/batch is done? It's bonkers to me.
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It's unclear how big a role distillation plays, but it may be a big one. There's also a law of diminishing returns. To get a meaningful increase in model quality you seemingly need an exponentially larger model. And most people don't think K3 is actually on par with top closed models.
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Today's data centers are being built for yesterday's inference need. There's a persistent cult belief that ai hasnt found a niche or that companies havent proven utility or use cases or whatever. the demand for ai (internal to hyperscaler, and external for everyone else) simply dwarfs what is available.
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Just ran this through our data analytics benchmark (I work at Plotly). It's 10x cheaper than Mistral Medium 3.5 from April and goes from 58% to 74% correct. Definitely a generational shift. It's not on the Pareto curve yet, but it's good enough for data analytics, and at this rate I suspect it'll be excellent in another few months. Full write up: https://plotly.com/blog/mistral-large-4-plotly-data-analytics-bench/
dont take it personally, i just dont understand why to release a model that is not showing new strong capabilities, why would anybody use this model and not Claude Opus.
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Because screw Anthropic and OpenAI, that's why.
Sovereignty over what though? The last 3% of the stack? They’re essentially borrowing Chinese open source distillation/innovation off the US frontier running on US/Taiwanese designed chips and calling it EU made. This is better than nothing of course. But is sovereignty really an end in itself? So the EU becomes IT independent…cool, then what? I mean the Yugo was sovereign, it didn’t do much good when the society itself failed to produce prosperity and collapsed. It seems to me the EU is expending enormous effort on the appearance of “sovereignty” over what is ultimately…the last-mile consumer toilet paper purchasing conversation data…of an aging, increasingly irrelevant population on the political/economic stage. Meanwhile domestically the entire economic model is failing and the “union” is getting shakey as its 2 biggest members turn more nationalist. Maybe this “oh you cant compete but here’s a trophy for sovereignty” attitude isnt helping. Less clapping along with the EU bureaucracy’s latest make work projects like transitioning to a new Word processor. If we want the EU to succeed, more tough love is needed imo.
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it's industrial policy, which is of course the minimum for being able to even think about having independent thoughs when it comes to international relations. hard to stand up for EU (or even national) values if some dude in Washington has the keys for most of your military having at least some in-house expertise is the first step.
Man, a lot of this discussion sounds like people cheering for the last kid crossing the finish line. Surely we want competition and Europe involved in that, but at this point I have grown used to either American labs smashing the frontier remarkably fast, or Chinese labs getting way, way closer than you would expect them to. Mistral’s progress, regrettably, feels much slower. This model doesn’t knock anybody’s socks off. The model is (and I hate to be this harsh) mediocre, and this mediocrity has also arrived months late. This is a pretty grim prognosis for European AI.
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I don't think it will matter in a year or so. We are clearly topping out on useful intelligence for an increasing amount of tasks, as demonstrated by more and more models reaching the "useful" barrier. This barrier is not going to start moving dramatically. It will simply be mostly satisfied for most work we do. Mistral is going to get there, soonish, long before the economy takes an entirely different shape (in so far that even happens). There will be super human intelligence tasks, tasks truly constrained by intelligence for quite a while. Those will be few and far between, relatively speaking. Mistral will have plenty of opportunity to capture the other stuff, with a fraction of the resources required that it took the frontier labs to get there first.
> This is a pretty grim prognosis for European AI. I think it's an incomplete read. What's the point in competing for a sizeable percentage of your funding when the finish line is incrementally being moved each month? Better spend it on leapfrogs which they seem to have done. Meanwhile Mistral have a natural ace in their pocket with respect to regulation in the form of CADA and the Cloud Sovereignty Framework. I can't think of another company that would qualify as SOV-3 under that regime
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So we’re supposed to cheer on companies that make worse products and only exist due to regulatory capture now? Political polarization is turning the world insane.
Curious, why do you say the model is mediocre? I haven't tried it, so I can't pass any judgement... I've learned to distrust benchmark rankings. Are benchmarks and Artificial Analysis the yardstick you're using?
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> Curious, why do you say the model is mediocre? I haven't tried it, so I can't pass any judgement. It's nowhere mediocre. It's toes-to-toes with GLM-5.3 which is one of the best Open Weight model available (With Kimi K3) for general reasoning. I just runned it on code reviews right now and it was able to catch some thread safety issue than DeepSeek-4.1 didn't. And DeepSeek-4.1 is by no means a bad model.
Surprisingly it only supports reasoning "none" or reasoning "high". That setting didn't seem to make any real difference - it added a tiny bit of thinking trace and high actually produced less output tokens than none. The high bicycle frame is better then the none one though. Pelicans: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F0db8b8196e57711b352f6c5857cf5b35 (Definitely the best I've seen from any Mistral model: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle+mistral/ )
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That's one heck of a pelican!
The benchmarks against Opus 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol look pretty good for 3D generation: https://x.com/atomic_chat_hq/status/2107516529608700383
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Got an example hosted on a platform that isn't owned by Twitter's loser owner?
Also, why are they almost always riding from let to right?
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It's been discussed many times. The reason is bikes are almost without exception depicted that way in order to show the drivetrain.
That's a GitHub rate limit. Try again now, I just pushed a hopeful fix: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/7793fb74c2d37bd613cdcbcd3574dd7a4b44a3c1
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It does seem to, thanks!
I think you misunderstand how data processing works in a LLM. You absolutely can download the weights of a chinese model and run it on hardware you control.
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This strategy only works as long as China continues publishing weights. Domestic training capabilities are one way of mitigating that risk.
> Europe needs profitable AI companies, not money pits. AI is a strategic technology with obvious national security implications. EU should invest in its development whether it's currently profitable or not.
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Ah, national security. The end-all argument all Americans fall for. How did Claude and OpenAI make the USA safer?
This is the exact mentality that makes the EU fall behind. If you don't want to invest in something until it makes a profit, you don't get the benefits of being a pioneer.
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Like Sam Altman, you seem convinced AI is a winner takes all kind off technology. Can you explain why?
Its quite interesting to see that at least the early days of AI so far have not been a winner-take-all runaway acceleration game where catchup is impossible. I certainly wouldnt have predicted that 10 years ago. Very glad to see Mistral still in the game even after some big stumbles with Large 3. I deeply hope that this model is 'good enough' that it becomes the European go-to, giving them the resources to keep the pace up. I'm excited to try this out today.
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Hard to do that with a commodity that's easily replicated.
I can confirm that you're reading this incorrectly. There's a reason behind them only comparing it to open-source models released months ago. Here's a good aggregator: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence
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Okay, so instead it's just another slower more expensive DeepSeek v4.1 Flash. That seems much more realistic.
Many on HN still have the opinion that you must understand every line of code in the project, and that all is lost should you merge code that wasn't reviewed. Obviously any model will do if you use it as a better autocomplete. I believe that there is a large gap in expectations between different workflows. Until the AI like reads my mind and produces perfectly production ready apps with minimal intervention from my side, there is still going to be room for improvement.
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> Many on HN still have the opinion that you must understand every line of code in the project, and that all is lost should you merge code that wasn't reviewed. Uhm, yes?
That's fair, I left out a part of what I keep hearing in relation to the open weight models only being a few months behind, which is that they're going to eat the big labs' lunch, but then the big labs keep growing...
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> but then the big labs keep growing... Yeah, I could buy a bigger and bigger vehicle when a new one goes to market, but using a semi-truck to drive myself around would not only be significantly more wasteful but also more inconvenient and limiting compared to a sedan. Very much like advanced closed models vs performant open ones.
The paradox between supporting consumer rights with actions like universal usb-c adoption, but also complete elimination of any privacy rights at all. Like the surveillance state is insane. No e2ee chats, backdoors in everything.
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Dude you need to talk to real people and not just get all your information from right wing internet sites. You sound ridiculous. You think signal and PGP don't exist in Europe? You actually believe Europe is a surveillance state? Fucking hell dude, quit you job and go travel. Meet some real people from outside of America.
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You just made that up.
Also you can get to jail for making fun of politicians where saying the same thing would be free speech in the US.
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Speaking in favour of peace in Palestine can get you thrown out of the country. I know what you're going to say: not a citizen. But first they came for the foreigners, then...
Something that Europe should learn to do since they are being completely ravaged by illegal immigration. And I am saying this as an European.
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European countries detain and deport immigrants who are illegally present all the time. The level of it can be discussed, but what's happening in the US is that they've detained hundreds of citizens and deported immigrants who are present legally because they said something the people in charge didn't like. I'll skip that part, thanks.
Yes, I am an American living in Europe. I have pretty good insight into all of this. > Some politicians in Europe push for that, until now it has been refused by the others. Unlike in the US, there are many different parties in European countries. And Europe is made of politicians from many parties from many countries. And yet neither party in the US is pushing for it... > So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore, is that what you believe? Do you have any evidence to the contrary? Or if you believe this without evidence, do you have any evidence this is not occurring in Europe? > So if it's surveilling allies, it's all good in your opinion? Lol, lmao even. Yes, of course it is. Allies spy on each other. The Europeans do it to each other massively and have done since the dawn of Europe. Good lord, go read some history. > "Far far"? Do you even realise that Europe is not one single country? The US elected Trump, twice. Again, I live in Europe. I am well aware, but thanks for the classic European condescension. I don't like Trump. But how has he weakened privacy rights? And yes, beacause I don't want to write dozens of caveats for each teeny tiny member state, I consider Europe to be dominated by happenings in DE + FR + UK. I don't care what Latvia does.
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You don’t care about Latvia and I don’t care about some dickhead who "lives in Europe" and knows it all. And I’m not even from Latvia, you’re just pathetic.
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This comment could not have been more stereotypically American. I stress "stereotypical", I'm obviously not saying Americans in general are like this. > I don't like Trump. But how has he weakened privacy rights? Attacks on rule of law and civil liberties have increased, and the right to privacy is one of those liberties. It's of course not limited to Trump, he wasn't in office when Snowden showed the world the scale of American mass surveillance on domestic and foreign citizens. > Do you have any evidence to the contrary? I'm totally unsure what you are attempting to imply. That mass surveillance by the American state stopped at some point in the last 10 years? > Allies spy on each other. The Europeans do it to each other massively and have done since the dawn of Europe. Good lord, go read some history. What does that even mean "read history" ahaha. Espionage != mass surveillance. You do understand the difference, do you not? > thanks for the classic European condescension > I consider Europe to be dominated by happenings in DE + FR + UK. I don't care what Latvia does. l m a o. Oh say can you see...
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> This comment could not have been more stereotypically American. Of course. As I noted before, dripping in European condescension. Nothing you can actually point to, just condescension from a region that has been left behind over the past century. > Attacks on rule of law and civil liberties have increased, and the right to privacy is one of those liberties. It's of course not limited to Trump, he wasn't in office when Snowden showed the world the scale of American mass surveillance on domestic and foreign citizens. Which right or in what way has the right to privacy been attacked? Fully agree with you on attacks on rule of law. And I find Trump incredibly dangerous. But I do not think privacy in the US today has suffered. Please educate me. > I'm totally unsure what you are attempting to imply. That mass surveillance by the American state stopped at some point in the last 10 years? I am not implying anything. The Freedom Act curtailed a bunch of activities. You are implying nothing has changed. All of the Snowden revelations implicated many European countries: intelligence agencies spying on each others populations. I am asking you if you believe nothing has changed in the US do you 1) have any evidence of this and/or 2) believe that anything has changed in Europe? You've answered neither. > What does that even mean "read history" ahaha. Espionage != mass surveillance. You do understand the difference, do you not? Do you understand that the mass surveillance of European people was done at the behest of the intelligence agencies of those countries? And ditto for the NSA. The agreement was "you spy on mine and I'll spy on yours and we'll swap the intel". I am not talking about espionage. Foreign intelligence agencies spying on foreigners...what did you think they did? > l m a o. Oh say can you see... God, it's so painful. Yes in the same way that you talk about the US as a monolith and not 50 individual states. You don't care what Rhode Island does any more than I care what Latvia does. Christ you guys are insufferable. It's no wonder everyone is leaving in droves.
> thanks for the classic European condescension. This is such a strange statement about a massively culturally diverse part of the world. Many European countries speak such poor English that it'd be a miracle if they developed some sort of unified condescension. I'd argue a big part of Europe not performing as well as other parts of the world economically is the LACK of any defined culture, it's really more like a hodgepodge of countries that have a thin layer of cooperation
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I have no clue what English comprehension, monolith culture, and condescension have to do with one another? Or even the presumption that I only speak English? It's not a strange statement in the slightest if you live here or spend any appreciable time here. I take it you do not.
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I'm from Norway originally and lived in a handful of European countries before moving to the US. Whatever languages you personally speak was beside my point - I was saying that shared language is a cornerstone of building a shared culture, and a big factor in why Europe does not have a unified one.
> Do you have any evidence to the contrary? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
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> So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore Yes, of course. That is why GP said "anymore". Thanks for playing!
Let's just say you won't find my name, address, my yearbook pictures, history of where I lived, anywhere on the internet. I can quite easily get this information for all distant cousins in the US. And that has been the case long before GDPR was a thing. The culture around privacy is simply different.
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Except that the government has all of this information and much more. And you have no protections from the "much more" bits, unlike in the US. It's incredible that Europeans today think the culture of privacy is different. American privacy protections (from the government) were born out of European flaws. The difference is that Europeans love the nanny state regulating private enterprise (GDPR) but never pointing that same effort against itself.
They don't have to stock everything. But it's not about stocking regardless of content - it's about refusing to stock specific content. They're not removing the least interesting N% - it's very targeted.
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Of course it's targeted--do you think elementary school libraries should be stocking books with, say, violent sexual content? That is my point: everyone agrees a line must be drawn somewhere, the argument is just where to draw the line. Everyone is in favor of "banning books" from school libraries, they just differ on which books should be banned.
I don't think you realize the situation of the US middle class. High education costs. High healthcare costs. One serious disease or accident can bankrupt you. Buying a house usually means a 30 years loans at 7% so after 10 years you still have 85% of capital left to pay off. Salaries are higher but everything is more expensive, so in purchasing power parity it's basically the same.
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Yes, I wrote that I prefer Europe
Get off Facebook and get on Wikipedia. Or go visit there. Even in rich cities, it felt like I was in the lower middle class area in my suburban area.
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I haven't been on Facebook in 15 years. I spend every night on Wikipedia, following random links. I worked for a Parisian company for a decade and have been around western EU more than most Americans. Probably dial back your assumptions a little bit. I've earned my opinions just as much as you have.
People always make this case, if you're not satisfied then move. As someone who has changed countries twice and continents once, I can attest it's not an easy or convenient thing to do. Money or lifestyle is one thing, but you're also leaving behind family and culture. Statements like these are so dismissive to that struggle that it's almost offensive to me.
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I have no idea why you're being downvoted, because you're absolutely right. I have circumstances that make moving abroad something like a nuclear option. I could take my job with me, but that's the least of it.
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