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Show HN: Coding Interview Invisible Assistant (blind.codes)
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As an interviewer, the hard part isn’t whether someone uses assistance it’s whether they actually understand the solution. Tools like this might push interviews toward more discussion-based or system design formats instead of live coding.
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What is the biggest challenge for you as an interviewer ? I built https://spotlytt.com Would you use a platform like this to find a candidate or get to know more about him.
Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case (nytimes.com)
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I can't help but feel these are "revenge" verdicts. Public perception of these companies is dirt low, and there are so few levers the average person has to change what they feel is an increase in atomization, loneliness, breakdown of civic discourse, Cambridge Analytica level political targeting, misinformation, etc. Maybe the social media companies could do more to combat all these. They certainly have a level of profit compared to what they provide to the average person that makes people squirm. But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction? It's like saying cable television is responsible for people who binge watch TV. It's hard to square this circle while sports gambling apps and Polymarket / Kalshi are tearing through the landscape right now with no real pushback
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Huge if upheld. This was the bellwether case for thousands of other similar cases.
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Will they also find liable all the companies that produce addictive food by injecting sugar into everything? What about the "infinite" broadcasts found on all television channels? This is ridiculous and pathetic.
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"Libertarian demands companies have unlimited freedom until a corporation with unlimited freedom repeatedly eats their face with no consequences, wonders why the face eating leopards they voted for are actually allowed"
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In other countries that's the case so I don't know why it shouldn't be applicable in the US?
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There is a fairly low amount of details about the case in the article. This NPR article [0] has a bit more, but it's still fairly sparse. Though it's interesting how Zuckerberg thought it was a good idea to say: "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?". Given that this is a case about addiction, that feels like a shockingly bad thing to say in defense of your product. Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes? [0] https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-social-media-trial-verdict
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A good time to (re-)recommend the movie "The Social Dilemma".
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Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/technology/social-media-trial-verdict.html?unlocked_article_code=1.V1A.EPNF.Ewhv1syq31rt&smid=url-share
I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species. Anecdote, but it does seem like a lot of younger folks I speak with are exhausted by the dark patterns and dopamine extraction that top-k social media platforms create. If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
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It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad. Getting back to community is key.
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> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.
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I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
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I feel like discord is kind of like this used correctly, but with the recent drama and such it feels terrible
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The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?
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It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't). The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
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Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
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Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
Notably a different case from the other one in New Mexico: Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509984
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And one with much deeper implications on how they operate. It's easy for Meta to just hire more moderators or treat reports of exploitation with higher priority; if this verdict stands, I think they have no realistic choice but to abandon usage targets.
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Realistically they will hire expensive lawyers, pay out hundreds of millions to billions in settlements, fire lots of people (workforce is predominantly American), etc. Even if they do what you're saying, lots of people who've used any Meta property in the last 15 years has a potentially viable case, and no future work can swat those away
Tracy Kidder, Author of 'The Soul of a New Machine,' Dies at 80 (nytimes.com)
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Found this book in a little free library a few months ago and read it cover-to-cover in one night. It's crazy what Data General was able to accomplish with its little side project. Fun fact: Data General was purchased by EMC, which used the name until 2012.
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He was extremely proud of the other work he did, like "Mountains Beyond Mountains," but I'll always remember the bookcase where he kept every edition of "The Soul of a New Machine" in every language it was printed in. I think seeing that his work was worth being translated into so many languages was for him the biggest achievement of all.
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A book certainly worth reading for anyone who hasn't. It's interesting to see how little common (modern) project and management pitfalls and tricks have changed in 50 years!
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My favorite story from the book. Working on hardware, the engineers would often have problems where the whole machine would crash because some signal happend one nanosecond too early or one microsecond too late. Eventually one of the engineers broke. He left and never came back. He left a note on his desk reading "I am going to live on a farm in Vermont, and I will no longer deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."
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The Soul of a New Machine really grabbed me in college. Tracy Kidder wrote with a unique style that (to me) really drives the narrative forward while making you stop and consider the forces behind the story he's telling. The characters he writes about are real people and they seem like it. Moutains Beyond Mountains[1], another book by Kidder, is even more compelling to me. It's a fascinating story of Paul Farmer, who dedicated his life to fighting infectious disease, especially in Haiti. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_Beyond_Mountains
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He always spoke more about "Mountains Beyond Mountains" than his other works, I think because of what he had to endure to write it. It caused him severe illness and health problems due to the locations he had to go to.
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Mountains Beyond Mountains is a pantheon read for me. Farmer grew up incredibly poor, got into Duke and Harvard, had opportunities to make incredible money and traded it for a life of providing medical care to the third world on a shoestring budget while schooling organizations like the WHO on how to provide care along the way. Truly one of one.
Jury says Meta knowingly harmed children for profit, awarding landmark verdict (latimes.com)
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Does this mean I can sue Apple for raising my blood pressure every time I use iOS 26?
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The fine is just one of the costs of doing business for these megacorps.
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375 million awarded at $5000 per child harmed. Implying that only 75,000 children were harmed. Got away with it again, good profit, will repeat.
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Tststs.. it's only allowed to harm adults and the environment for profit.
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lol. And you think we will ever legalize drugs (and people can take responsibility), when large companies are being sued for being addicted to social media?
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There's a vast difference between accurately advertising the effects of drugs and the risks involved in taking them, versus lying to you about the drugs and creating an environment that furthers addition. It all boils down to consent. I might want to take some drugs that have some harmful side effects. But i knew about them and i willingly made the choice because I valued the high more. Contrast this with, I knew about the harmful side effects and told you they didnt exist and you should take more. And then i change the drug so its even MORE harmful because it also makes you BUY more. That's what these social media sites do. They use engineered sociology and psychology to create addictive products, and then refine them to maximize profit at the cost of anything they can pull a lever on.
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If you take actions to deliberately weaponize your product against children in particular , whatever it is -- you shouldn't be surprised when liability attaches. That's what this verdict is about.
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Wasn't Zuckerberg caught red handed in emails signing off on this? When is he going to be facing consequences?
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Consequences are for poor people.
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Name and shame the managers and leadership at this time. I dream of a world where they'd be recognized and shamed in the streets for all the damage they've done to society. Instead they get to do all kinds of side quests with their money.
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meh. hit the C suite and the board with life-altering punitive damages.
As part of the ongoing enshittification of the internet, tragedy of the commons etc., these big centralized internet platforms decided that instead of being responsible and making their products *slightly* less terrible it was better to maximize short term engagement metrics, and that, egotistically, the chance of there being real consequences for their actions was near zero. (Or, even more cynically, that their yearly performance review was more important). Now I'm afraid they've screwed everyone over and the idea of an anonymous open internet is now dead- we're gonna see age (read, real ID) verification gating on every site and app soon.... The dumb thing is to look back and see how umimportant it is that Facebook feed algorithm be this addictive. They already had the network effects and no real competitors. They could have just left it alone.
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Mass surveillance 'for your own good' instead of regulating social media in any way. You can purchase a scam ad it'll be up in 10 minutes. Lie to every anxious child they have ADHD and need meth, lie to every dejected boy that they just need to manosphere up and buy supplements. They think the public is stupid. They might be right.
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What's horribly frustrating with the age ID stuff is that the issue at question with Meta wasn't that they didn't know what they were doing and that they were doing it to children. They did. This wasn't an issue of "If only they had the the age, then they could have done the right thing". The laws being passed target exactly the wrong thing that wasn't a problem. They should have been passing "duty to care" laws aimed at social media companies not "give me your age" laws. I may have missed it, but almost all these laws being passed for this issue have been pretty much solely around data collection rather than modifying the behavior of the worst businesses in the game. It would be like seeing a car wreck kill a bunch of pedestrians and then passing a law that pedestrians need to carry IDs on them.
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Watching Mark testify before the senate it honestly appears like it may have never occurred to him that it is an option to have not offered a feature. He treats the product as if it is some kind of inevitable outcome that was destined to exist.
I haven't read this article, but I can tell you for certain that no verdict was handed down that will punish them in any way that matters. They have and generate more money than they could ever spend and they're functionally above the law because of the money and lawyers they can afford. The law itself is broken in this country and when you get big enough you can literally get away with murder.
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they should give voting stock out as punishment.
If history is any indication, only demonstrable threat of personal erasure will affect the behavior of people on this scale. By "erasure," I'm not referring to the death of the involved; I'm referring to the elimination of the individual's social capital. When the privileged lose their ability to influence others, they tend to get rather distressed.
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How would we do that here? Make Zuckerberg divest from FB or Meta as a whole? Would that be possible?
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Honestly he was more right with the death part. The only thing these people really fear is death. Anything else is a fine and a fine means nothing when you don't feel it.
Until we start to penalize companies by percentage of global revenue rather than some arbitrary dollar amount that pales in comparison to their revenues this sort of stuff is going to keep happening. $3m is nothing. 10% of global revenues (not profits) for each year in which this occurred would be something that might actually make them think twice about breaking the law and harming people for money.
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Once there's a pattern of abuse, you can go after the execs personally for purposes of the carrying out of justice. Courts don't like the idea of bad actors hiding themselves behind corporations. You don't even need to "piece the veil" — you just go straight for the Zuck.
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>you just go straight for the Zuck. Will literally never happen. It's impossible. I'm not talking figuratively impossible. At his level of wealth and influence, there are good odds he could murder someone on live stream and walk away. You are dangerously underestimating the influence the rich have in every aspect of society and law.
and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514916 It might be good to roll all the comments together.
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two separate cases.
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Both articles cite a New Mexico case about the Unfair Practices act. Though I don't see a link to a specific case in either article, I don't think they're separate cases.
Slovenian officials blame Israeli firm Black Cube for trying to manipulate vote (wsj.com)
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I thought we were all told a few years ago that it wasn't possible to rig an election, at least not to any degree that would change the outcome. A lot of people were called crazy or worse for believing it might be possible.
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Who would say that? Elections are rigged all the time.
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> lot of people were called crazy or worse for believing it might be possible Sorry, when were questions about Slovenia’s voting system considered crazy?
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Conflict of interests. We were told these things by the very same people who have an interest to rigging an election :-) at some point, this problem boils down to something like trusting trust and I think that the answer might be similar to how stage0 in compilers work in that smaller stages which can be easily audited combine/compile together to form larger stages. (Not sure if this allegory fits at the moment but I do feel like decentralization can definitely help in these cases which is my point but these same people who told that it wasn't possible aren't looking for/actively hindering any prospects of decentralization due to once again, conflict of interests)
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Interesting. I have vey limited knowledge of Slovenian politics, but it often seems that whoever gets elected ends up facing corruption charges and ends up in prison after the next election cycle. Since Janez Jansa will be prime minister he will be charged for corruption by end of his term and this could be the third time for him to go to prison (the first instance happened under the socialist regime, so maybe that does not count). Anyway, I do not think Israelis needed to work hard here to find some dirt.
So it sounds like these guys posed as investors, schmoozed politicians, and got them on tape agreeing to do corrupt stuff. The recordings were then released to influence voters. The thing about this is, the response to it will depend on who the politicians were. For example, if it was the "far right" politicians caught on tape, there wouldn't be the same furore about election interference. The recordings may of course be edited to be misleading.
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The videos weren't directly about bribing. They were more about people talking about someone else taking a bribe. Sadly all of the videos were edited, so we don't have full context.
Why are they like this... There are elite cultures that just live and don't bother anyone. Israel isn't one of them.
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When your religion tells you that you're the creator of the universe's Chosen People™, you're going to develop a society-wide narcissistic complex and behave like everyone else is inferior to you and fair game for manipulation, killing, etc.
Giora Eiland is the architect of "General's Plan". If anything, this scumbag criminal should have been locked up the moment he touched down in Ljubljana with his "company".
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"The plan, conceived by retired major general and former head of the National Security Council Giora Eiland and presented to the Knesset by a group of several retired Israeli generals, proposed giving approximately 300,000 Palestinians a one-week evacuation period to depart from the northern third of Gaza before designating it a military exclusion zone. Under this strategy, anyone remaining in the area would be considered a combatant. The plan would then implement a complete siege that would block essential supplies until militant surrender, denying all essential supplies including medicine, fuel, food, and water"
Quick question: Could they also be manipulating this message board's voting?
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I think a larger question to ask is if could they also be manipulating the people themselves who are reading these message boards prior to this post which later impacts such message board's voting.
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Online community spam/brigading has been a normal occurrence since I've been running a message board 15 years ago. At least in Europe. Seeing a sudden flood of new messages from low use accounts around elections or referendums is normal these days.
Of course. So are their allies in the Trump admin, note also the abuse of the flagging mechanism to take down any news that might not portray them in the best light.
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Politics are indiscriminately flagged. People don't come to HN to read politics.
So is the allegation that this private intelligence firm tried to induce members of the government party to offer a bribe. They then published the recorded conversations. I guess what is missing from the article is was the videos misleading or did they really get offered the bribe? Because if its the latter, its kind of hard to feel sympathy for a corrupt official getting caught even if the mechanism was problematic.
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The videos weren't directly about bribing. They were more about people talking about someone else taking a bribe. Sadly all of the videos were edited, so we don't have full context.
The desperation of the state is becoming apparent. Look for more election interference in the future. It will be more sophisticated. And likely can be traced in past elections.
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I don't think for a minute that this stuff is anything new ... to the contrary. I think what is new is that, every time they step in it, the whole world now quickly knows.
It's insane the power and influence Israelis have. In the US it's blatant, from the insane amounts of money and weaponry sent to Israel (why are american taxpayers subsidizing Israel exactly? It's not like they are neither poor nor US owes them) to the recent events in the middle east. But even in Europe. Here in Italy the coalition government has multiple high profile politicians that just happen to be shareholders or CEOs of security companies owned by Israelis. And just so it happens that the same security and communication companies get lots of work by the Italian government. And when journalists brought this up because they didn't report it to neither the government nor parliament, nothing happened anyway. It's a scandal really, but if you write or say it, you're labeled as anti semitic, so criticizing and surfacing this terrible stuff is always controversial.
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Actually - it's not Israeli influence. It's pro-Israel influence. Important difference. This includes lobby organisations funded or founded by wealthy Jews, conservative Christian lobbyists, pro-arms trade interests, and geopolitical interests (essentially Israel acts as a US military proxy they can use to keep the middle east in check). Not quite Israel secretly pulling strings (which is quite rightly dismissed as traditional boring anti-semetic conspiracy theory wearing a different hat), more of an alignment of interests, which dictator Netenyahu is currently taking advantage of to pursue his own career agenda (complete destruction of Iran and security of Israel from the mindset of a paranoid Israeli nationalist). Naturally, this involves attempting to buy out journalists and promote propaganda - and the Israeli attempts to do this are usually rather inept. What's far more effective is the already existing domestic pro-Israel lobby groups that have a completely above board, and vastly more effective way of funding Israel (and the vastly more powerful US military-financial-geopolitical interests).
> why are american taxpayers subsidizing Israel exactly? The same reason USA is subsidizing half the middle eastern countries - its a strategic location near extremely important transit routes, near important resources, and right between major powers so the region doesn't squarely fall in any major power's sphere of influence and thus up to be influenced. I dont know why all these conspiracy theories think the usa<->israel relationship is so strange, but dont blink at the relationship usa has with egypt, uae, saudi arabia, bharain, etc.
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Israel controls no strategic resources, unlike the other allies the USA has in the Middle East. Your comment completely ignores the long history Israel has of rigging the US elections by funding their pet congressmen.
We primarily fund the other Middle Eastern countries to keep Israel safe. Were it not for Israel, we would just have normal diplomatic relations with them.
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I wouldn't go that far. The U.S. and other European powers have a long history of involvement in Middle East politics. Significant parts of the Middle East were once parts of various European empires. Many of them gained their independence only to find there were still a lot of strings and (pipe)lines of exploitation attached. The U.S. did more than its fair share to glom onto those lines of exploitation and keep them alive at the expense of locals. e.g. Iran is what it is today because of U.S. oil interests. The CIA installed an authoritarian Shah when Iran's (at the time) democratic government started taking control of its own oil industry (American oil companies would have had to start paying taxes). Rule under the Shah was "unpleasant" for Iranians and revolution was the direct response. Hence, theocracy. Israel is a special case in the Middle East. The zionist movement gained state sponsors and convinced European powers (and the U.S.) to pour money in instead of sucking it out . How they did that is a question that stretches back well into the 19th century. I'd argue that a lot of it was the result of people who had their hearts in the right places. Things just went sideways when it came to Israelis and Palestinians co-existing peacefully. At least some of the idealists of the early zionist movement honestly believed the influx of Jewish people would be a benefit to Arabs already living in Palestine.
It seems to me that interfering in a foreign election should be understood to be grounds for war.
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Russia and China are definitely interfering in the US, so should the US formally declare war against them? What I do think is that nations should 1) interfere back, and 2) make their citizens more resilient to foreign propaganda. And I specifically don't mean building a firewall. In fact do the opposite: if a firewalled nation is leaking out propaganda, ensure firewall-breaking tools leak in.
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> interfering in a foreign election should be understood to be grounds for war Requires a rigorous definition of interference. The allegations here—trying to catch politicians on tape being sleazy and then releasing them-doesn’t seem to rise to the level of calling for a kinetic response.
Yes, and the EU, due to this fragmentation, seems to be a fertile playground for all this unacceptable interference by foreign powers.
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No because any attempt at interference would in that case trigger article 5 of NATO.
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That’s true but that fragmentation is also what limits the propagation of fractures. You can see it like sandboxing. A deal with foreign intelligence is a dead with the devil that comes with a lifetime of subservience. And subservience to foreign powers is a greater evil than yo usual internal corruption. At least the locally corrupt in a democracy have some interest in things going somewhat well in their country. The foreign actors only care about theirs.
Actually, no. The decentralization of power means that it takes a lot more effort to subvert each country individually, rather than propping up a few candidates for the entire region like they do in the US.
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They only need one country for veto rights.
"Black Cube" - wonder what they're going for there. Maybe "Sinister Obelisk" was taken.
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Just more cultural appropriation. Black Cube, Blackrock, Blackstone... And not a black person in sight. Someone even took Blackstreet which was already ours . /s
It's Saturn worship. Judaism is Saturn worship (all Abrahamic religions incorporate some worship of Saturn) - thus the obsession with black cubes, the number six, etc... There is no Star of David in the Bible - only the star of Remphan (a Saturnian deity). The god El is commonly associated with Saturn and commonly referred to as Saturn El. Saturn is the planet of limitations, constraints, agriculture, grain, the color black, etc... Thus the black cube is very fitting. If you look around hard enough, you'll find the symbolism everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remphan
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> The god El is commonly associated with Saturn and commonly referred to as Saturn El. This is demonstrably false; see Liber 777 cols. I, II, V, and VII. Saturn is assigned key scale 3 (col I) and is associated with the Name of God "Tetragrammaton Elohim," while "El" is traditionally reserved for the fourth sephira, representing Jupiter. Black is indeed the Queen scale color associated to Saturn, though just as commonly attributed to Earth, as the final receptacle of all the other "colors" of creation (see key scales 3 and 10 in cols XV, XVI, XVIII). Yes, I am an occultist. https://ia802906.us.archive.org/22/items/Liber777Revised/Liber777revised.pdf
Yes, the kabba is also a nod to Saturn (which is why I said all Abrahamic religions incorporate some Saturn worship into them), and the people walking around the kabba make the rings of Saturn (if you employ some time-lapse photography of them walking around, it's quite obvious). Saturn has a hexagonal shaped storm on its north pole (and the all-seeing eye on its south pole). If you collapse a cube into two dimensions, you get a hexagon.
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Ok, maybe put the hat back on. At least the abrahamic religions hardly knew about the hexagonally shaped storm.
This board sure attracts hordes of alt right apologists and anarcho capitalists. And in general a huge lack of empathy and obsession with power and money. I guess it's normal given the coupling to the #1 VC incubator of the #1 country that obsesses over power and money.
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You either find some of the most humble, down to earth, open source contributing people who value human life in it of itself within this forum who share as much knowledge/try to do good for the world, or you find people as you mention who completely disregard the previous ideals. There isn't much in-between. I do think that there is some utilitarian aspect to it. Some people might genuinely believe that the losses to human livelihoods/human lives because of AI (yes even with these AI drones now with the deal @OpenAI), the end reality would still make everything worth it and within this distorted view of the future, they believe that everything happening in present is alright for the future and that itself can be used to propose some disgusting idea like eugenics which people might become okay with, as such. And its very easy to switch somewhere within the past of a person being the former to the latter through the ladder steps of altruism to transhumanism to essentially the things we hear from AI hypebros. All the while, a benefit is that especially right now, selling AI sells for profit right now whereas people can question about the morality later/justify it through these distorted lenses that I mentioned. Worth a watch, Can't recommend this video enough, AI is a Eugenics Project : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SSxfa3da58
I want to talk about Ticketmaster. People hate Ticketmaster. For good reason. TM throws on all these fees, clearly engages in third-party selling, makings buying difficult and jacks up prices. All of this is known. But what's less known is that artists, especially big artists, like Ticketmaster. Why? Because TM is a sacrificial anode. It takes all the hate but adding junk fees that in part go to the artist. The artist can say they're selling seats from as low as $20 in press releases while the least they will get for a seat is $30 because of all the fees. Being hated is a service you can sell because it takes away attention from what you're doing. You get to blame this third-party but you're still absolutely complicit in everything they're doing. You see where this is going? Israel is America's Ticketmaster. Anything bad that Israel or an Israeli firm does, the US could end today with a phone call by simply saying "we're cutting off aid if you don't stop doing". The price of this is to be the sacrificial anode for what is actually American foreign policy. There are well-funded and organized efforts to whitewash Israel's reputation and those were successful up until the last few years. Israel is a huge supplier of spyware eg Pegasus [1]. Despotic regimes use this to spy on journalists and opposition figures and has likely been used to locate and kill them. You think we couldn't stop that? Of course we can. But we like that because, again, Israel takes the heat. So Israel interfering in Slovenia's elections is the least surprising thing I've heard. I'd be surprised if it wasn't true. You will find Israeli influence in probably every election. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
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All of this might be true if Israel didn't have undue influence over the American officials who are authorized to pick up that phone. But they do, and so the phone doesn't get picked up. Also, if your parable about Ticketmaster were true. But it isn't. Most artists do indeed dislike them; the paltry kickback isn't worth the... bad blood... it sends their way. And it's weird that your read is that most artists secretly hold their fans in contempt. I don't know what kind of person just assumes that of others, except that they're that way themselves, maybe.
At this point its extremely clear and important to understand It doesnt matter how men, bodies / hours / time / millions and billions you spend building a defensive They will infiltrate with less than 500k And come out on top 100% of the time This is a fundamental human problem that needs fixing across the entire planet It does not matter what country or secret groups are involved or how much life or death is truly at stake There is a 100000% chance some dumbass is willing to fuck if all up for a small bribe
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We should have some benchmark project that bluntly describes the issues with each democracy. Like, did elected officials dramatically change in appearance (length, ears, nose, teeth, chin, eyes), election agenda points that don't match execution, issues with method of voting, issues with vote counting etc
I'm SO surprised more people don't know about this... I'm always dismissed when I say the elections are rigged.
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I once made a list of various issues raised in various elections in various countries. The instances describe a whole spectrum of cheating. The only consistent factor is that no one believes there was cheating. The funniest was an order to change punchcards that made the holes not line up. People still found room to not see a problem with it.
Israel really needs to stop interfering in other countries' elections. That's not acceptable. We don't interfere when their population votes for warcriminals either.
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Is “we” referring to the United States? Sheldon Adelson's backing helped Netanyahu a lot, and not just by funding the free Israel Hayom newspaper (which generally assumes a right-wing, pro-Netanyahu editorial stance).
A Eulogy for Vim (drewdevault.com)
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This is a weird hill to die on. As much as I resonate with many of the concerns, I don't see refusing to use AI as something that will actually help any of those things. Forking a stable version of vim is something I guess, but I don't really see the sky falling with mainline vim or neovim. Personally the leverage I have as a bit of a cranky graybeard myself is that I understand how software works and I can distinguish between good and bad uses of AI and think critically about how to influence things towards better software. Just declaring AI as unequivocally bad and evil will do nothing more than make me irrelevant. At some point being right is useless without some measure of also being effective.
> defense of Jeffrey Epstein himself Do you have a link for this? What I recall of that whole scenario was that Stallman said something fairly minor regarding Minsky, and the nuance of the words written were lost on the mob and he was accused of saying something worse than that. I'm not aware of him providing any defense of Epstein himself.
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victim blaming is categorically defense of the actual perpetrator.
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here's the quote you didn't want to include “We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing,” Stallman added. “Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.”
"argued in an email thread last week that Marvin Minskey, the late AI pioneer and longtime MIT professor, was unfairly accused of sexual assault and that one of the underage girls in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation likely presented herself as “entirely” willing to have sex" MIT scientist Richard Stallman resigns in the wake of his Jeffrey Epstein remarks https://share.google/L9w5zAnDjbvnrWhex
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Yes, that is the Minsky comment I mentioned that apparently renders people illiterate and incapable of understanding what they read. What Stallman said is "the people who were trafficked, probably did not tell the people they were trafficked to, that they were being trafficked and were there unwillingly." I don't see how saying that is a "defense of Jeffrey Epstein".
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I'll explain instead of just adding the easily discoverable quote. He is assigning the blame to Epstein's victims.
The linked reference said: > The maturity of Vim9 script's modern constructs is now being leveraged by advanced AI development tools. Contributor Yegappan Lakshmanan recently demonstrated the efficacy of these new features through two projects generated using GitHub Copilot https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php#:~:text=The%20maturity,Copilot I am not sure I understand the author's concern, is he saying that VIM 9.2 is problematic because it enables AI integration due to the maturity of Vim9 script?
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Buried (IMO) in the post is: > sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software. ...where he links to a comment in a closed issue where someone accuses a contributor of using an LLM to generate patches: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099543 The tl;dr: Drew thinks Vim development has been tainted by LLM contributions, and is thus morally unsuitable to be used, and he will therefore be forking it.
In fairness he pretty explicitly states that he thinks people do understand it, but are pretending not to to wash their hands of the consequences. I'm definitely not reading it in the same way you are.
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It's a difference in values, not understanding. I understand that AI burns tons of power, and I don't care. Drew understands it the same as I, but he does care. The difference is in what people value, and relative to what.
The "upper middle class" is not strictly defined, but they are pretty clearly the folks below the wealthiest 1%. You can't be in the middle without something on either side. They certain consume far more than the poor, on account of having resources, but they also consume far less than the wealthiest 1%.
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In aggregate, the middle class consumes far more than the 1% just because there's more of them. Most of the wealth of the 1% is locked up in ownership of businesses that serve the middle class.
> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are the effects of any kind of industrial expansion. They're also the effects of population growth, in general. This stuff is a problem iff AI is a scam or hugely oversold and these resources are being wasted. But that's a different argument and a less clear-cut one. > It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself. I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".
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The cobalt thing is apparently misinformation. You've been misled. Technology Connections did a great video that goes into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Sony V. Cox Decision Reversed (supreme.justia.com)
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> Opinion (Thomas) | Concurrence (Sotomayor) If Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion, it is guaranteed to be a fundamentally flawed decision. He is reprehensible in the truest sense of the word. I wouldn't trust him to correctly determine the color of the sky. Even if it seems to be the right ruling in general, I'm sure once the text is examined closely, there's going to be something truly abhorrent in it that will negatively affect the lives of millions. Because that's what he does. Even with Sotomayor's concurrence, I have no faith in the decision as it has been tainted by his association with it. I'm positive the ruling will end up damaging our democracy even if it's not readily apparent now. Thomas is beyond the worst justice in American history, he's one of the worst people, period.
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This is huge. Sony is trying to make Cox into law enforcement to do their biddings. The Supreme Court struck that down.
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Hilariously (and appropriately), the decision cites Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. , also known as the "Betamax case." > (a) “The Copyright Act does not expressly render anyone liable for infringement committed by another.” Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 434. > In Sony, copyright owners sued the maker and the retailers of the Betamax video tape recorder. Id., at 422. The tape recorder could be used to record copyrighted television programs for later personal viewing, which would not constitute infringement. Id., at 449. On the other hand, it could also be used to reproduce and sell copyrighted television programming, which would constitute infringement. Ibid. The lower court found the Betamax maker liable because the tape recorder was “not suitable for any substantial noninfringing use” and infringement “was either the most conspicuous use or the major use of the Betamax product.” Id., at 428 (internal quotation marks omitted). This Court reversed, concluding that “[t]he Betamax is . . . capable of substantial noninfringing uses”—like personal use—so “sale of such equipment to the general public does not constitute contributory infringement.” Id., at 456.
If sony equipment was used in facilitating the copyright violation, would that make Sony liable?
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That was already decided in an old case about Betamax recorders, quoted on the front page of the linked article.
> if someone uses a gun to shoot down someone, why is the company providing the gun not held accountable here? The gun company will claim they sold for self defense or just for a hobbyist's collection - They'll claim that the gun owner used it for something else is not their responsibility. Same for any or product that can be used to kill someone with.
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Let's not forget sports, which is a huge segment of the gun-owning public - trap, skeet, biathlon, PRS, USPSA/IPSC, High Power/CMP, etc.
There's a lot more 23 year olds to this time around. I don't think you can intimidate them down this time.
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They didn't exactly intimidate them down last time either. Piracy decisively won the war on piracy.
The ruling said that they don’t have to. Going with your point, it does not say they can’t monitor and then sell the list of pirates to Sony/etc. for some extra income. They just didn’t like doing it for free.
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Yes, but then the question becomes: which tactics does MPAA and the like will now resort to. Because we know they won't exactly say 'I guess that's it then'.
Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music (nytimes.com)
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> Holding Cox liable merely for failing to terminate Internet service to infringing accounts Imagine giving the power to rightsholders to terminate anyone's internet service with e.g, a DMCA takedown. I'm sure that won't be abused at all, and is a very necessary step to protecting "artists"
I have to pay property tax forever for a house I supposedly own. If I dont pay that, the government sues and takes my house. Basically I never actually own my house. (Of course, we have "Evil Communist China" where there is no property tax, and people own their homes and can live there. Id argue they're more free than we are.) But copyrights and patents and trademarks? There's no tax on those "properties". And gee, companies are the ones to likely own these properties, not individuals.
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What? You pay property tax because local services schools, streets, police and fire fighters need to be funded. Having a property in the area is a pretty great proxy for using some of these services, hence the property tax.
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I was expecting that as a response. There is no reason why tax has to be done as property tax. Property tax demeans actual ownership of a place for us to live. (And why the hell do corporations get away with no tax on intellectual property, or even pay on profits, whereas we humans pay on revenue and property?) Worse yet, property taxes also enshrine the idea that the community's schools in poor areas deserve poor education. Do children in poor areas deserve poor education? Cause that's how you end up with "great and slum schools". And the police in my area? Its sheriffs. And meh. I dont want them to keep getting military playthings. Street? That's what gas tax and EV tax is for. And those built in with gas tax funds per gallon, aka use tax. Or vehicle registration tax. Fire fighters? We have volunteer fire fighters. I'm seeing a whole lot of tax and tax and tax, and shit for return on this forced investment. And property tax HAS had people end up homeless. 1 family homeless due to property tax is 1 too many.
9-0 rulings happen all the time. I couldn't find an easy to consume list so I asked AI to provide the percentage and it said 65–75% of rulings in a term are 9-0.
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I believe it's the second half of parent's comment that is doing the heavy lifting. A 9-0 ruling written by Clarence Thomas which puts basic human rights (internet access) above civil liability - try asking a chatbot to find many of those.
It seems like you would still have to remove the infringing content , but no need to disconnect or ban the user who shared it. But if you’re a pure ISP and not hosting content on your own servers, then I guess, yeah DMCA doesn’t really apply to you?
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Actually, it looks like there is something in the law that only provides DMCA safe harbor to providers that have a policy of terminating accounts of repeat infringers. I'm still not sure if an ISP would even need that safe harbor though.
A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.
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I think it should be for a lifetime of the original author and non-transferable. The system is already rigged very much against artists, it's amazing how many people still contribute to culture under the given conditions. I don't see any reason why someone who writes a Christmas song or a novel shouldn't have a possibility to get payments for their works until they die, for example. However, I have a lot of problems with the bizarre extensions that companies and heirs have gotten for work they haven't created on their own.
Disney are able to pay that amount because their IP is still generating massive income. I'm not a fan of Disney at all, just pointing out what i belive might be the flaw in the argument.
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> Disney are able to pay that amount because their IP is still generating massive income. That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does. I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
Antimatter has been transported for the first time (nature.com)
Annihilation of Italian food is nothing to laugh at, and is in fact a tragedy
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I thought the entire point of being given a plate of Italian food was to annihilate it, followed by some tiramisu.
From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity. Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle. Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
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The confinement scheme used here is likely a Penning Trap. Such devices are limited in the amount of antimatter they can store by the Brillouin limit. The energy stored will be no more than the magnetic energy of the field of the trap, and so much less than the explosive yield of a mass of TNT (say) equal to the mass of the trap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma
From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon. Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
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The big advantage of nuclear weapons is they are very cheap per unit of energy yield. Bang for the buck, if you will. Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.
> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation. Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient. It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
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Antimatter is a completely different story. The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen. At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario. A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either. So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens. But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.
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Surely you understand there's a difference? Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match. Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors. And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.
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Volatility and energy content are not necessarily related.
Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.
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You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of fuel.
If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion. Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
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> antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion Maybe. Beamed propulsion makes a hell of a lot more sense in the solar system.
How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
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The more important question is not could we. it's should we
Ubuntu wants to strip some of GRUB features in 26.10 for security purposes (discourse.ubuntu.com)
This comment is particularly concerning (as is the functionality regression implied by this new "more secure" approach): > This means for example, that an encrypted system must use an ext4 /boot partition; it is no longer possible to encrypt the /boot partition. So, they want to let attackers modify /boot, including grub.conf and the kernel command line? This is better? Look at all these fun knobs attackers will be able to turn! https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/x86/x86_64/boot-options.txt This lets you disable machine check exceptions + the iommu. That means it'll force people to use a configuration that lets attackers stick a memory probe hardware device into the system + bypass a bunch of hardware security checks. Nice! I also found module.sig_enforce which lets the attacker disable kernel module signature verification. Sadly, I couldn't find anything that lets you directly load a kernel module from /boot. However, init.rd lives in /boot. I wonder if its signature is verified or not. At the very least, this approach implies that attackers can piecemeal downgrade stuff early in the boot process.
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All those switches and we still can't disable kernel lockdown when hibernation is enabled with secure boot.
If Ubuntu, the most widely used distro, is doing this, it's conceivable that other distros will follow. (Maintainers: "It solved some problems Ubuntu was having, so it will probably solve them for us, too.")
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Yea, like when Ubuntu switched from System V init to Upstart. Or when they created Mir to replace X. Or when they created Snap for distro-independent packages. Or when they forked GNOME into Unity. ...man, when did Ubuntu start losing every battle they fought?
I'd like a better boot manager but I sure as hell do not want systemd cancer to spread any further. Especially not after Poettering has started a remote attestation company.
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Wow, when did he leave microsoft? (I know some might be asking when he joined lol)
Apple Just Lost Me (andregarzia.com)
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I sympathize with the author's feelings in general, but also hope he directs some of the frustration towards his government for forcing the whole age verification scam (let alone everything else that is being broken in that particular jurisdiction)
You can get by just fine in the US without a credit card too. At least if you have a debit card (which can pretend to be a credit card in most situations). We were actually unscored by the credit bureaus for several years when we didn't own a house.
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You may be able to get by in the US without a credit card, but every purchase will literally cost you 2-5% more if you aren't making smart use of them.
Currently, one is a surveillance company that is motivated to abuse my privacy in every possible way, in order to target ads (and, conceivably, Gemini). The other, currently, is a hardware company that's dipped it's toes in advertising and is motivated to sell me devices and services. If, at some point, they converge, I will trust Apple as little as I trust Google, but it's absurd to pretend they're the same thing, today or to "what if" yourself into knots. Google is absolutely an evil company, head to toe, that is aligned against you. Trusting them with anything is almost as stupid as trusting Meta.
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> Google is absolutely an evil company, head to toe, that is aligned against you. Trusting them with anything is almost as stupid as trusting Meta. You should never really trust a business with your information. At the end of the day all they care about is making money and most customers have no interest in the business making more money, so you're never really in alignment.
Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down (mariozechner.at)
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I really don't get the author's conclusion here. I agree with his premises: organizations using LLMs to churn out software are turning out terrible quality software. But the conclusion from that shouldn't be "slow down", it should be "this tool isn't currently fit for use, don't use it". It feels like the author starts from the premise of "I want to use AI" and is trying to figure out how to make that work, rather than "I want to make good software" and trying to figure out how to do that.
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I think this post should be directed to every Typescript developer. I think a lot of this is just Typescript developers. I bet if you removed them from the equation most of the problem he's writing about go away. Typescript developers didn't even understand what React was doing without agent, now they are just one-shot prompting features, web apps, clis, desktop apps and spitting it out to the world. The prime example of this is literally Anthropic. They are pumping out features, apps, clis and EVERY single one of them release broken.
What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments. Sure it will be - perhaps - possible to interchange the underlying AI for the development of the codebase but will they be significantly cheaper? Of course, the invisible hand of the market will solve that problem. Something that OPEC has successfully done for the oil market. Another issue here is once the codebase is agentic and the price for developers falls sufficiently that it will significant cheaper to hire humans again, will these be able to understand the agentic codebase? Is this a one-way transition? I'm sure the pro-AIs will explain that technology will only get cheaper and better and that fundamentally it ain't an issue. Just like oil prices and the global economy, fundamentally everything is getting better.
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this is a good point. Some of the ai companies are trying to hook cs students so they'll only know "dev" as a function of their products. First one's free as they say (the drug dealers).
That's a great shout because I'm sure a lot of people would otherwise just discredit this take as just another anti-ai skeptic. But he probably has more experience working with LLM's and agents than most of us on this site, so his opinion holds more weight than most.
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If you were going to dismiss an argument because of who it comes from rather than its content, that is a flaw in your thinking. The argument is correct, or it isn't, no matter who said it.
> You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it's basically uninstallable malware. Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?
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Maybe they meant un-uninstallable?
I think the core idea here is a good one. But in many agent-skeptical pieces, I keep seeing this specific sentiment that “agent-written code is not production-ready,” and that just feels… wrong! It’s just completely insane to me to look at the output of Claude code or Codex with frontier models and say “no, nothing that comes out of this can go straight to prod — I need to review every line.” Yes, there are still issues, and yes, keeping mental context of your codebase’s architecture is critical, but I’m sorry, it just feels borderline archaic to pretend we’re gonna live in a world where these agents have to have a human poring over every single line they commit.
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> It’s just completely insane to me to look at the output of Claude code or Codex with frontier models and say “no, nothing that comes out of this can go straight to prod — I need to review every line.” It's insane to me that someone can arrive at any other conclusion. LLMs very obviously put out bad code, and you have no idea where it is in their output. So you have to review it all.
You say it's borderline archaic. I say trusting agents enough to not look at every single line is an abdication of ethics, safety, and engineering. You're just absolving yourself of any problems. I hope you aren't working in medical devices or else we're going to get another Therac-25. Please have some sort of ethics. You are going to kill people with your attitude.
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Almost nobody works on medical devices... And some of you lucky folks might be working with mega minds everyday, but the rest of us are but shadows and dust. I trust 5.4 or 4.6 more than most developers. Through applying specific pressure using tests and prompts I force it to built better code for my silly hobby game than I ever saw in real production software. Before those models I was still on the other side of the line but the writing is on the wall.
> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever Air Traffic Controller software - sure. 99% of other softwares around that are not mission-critical (like Facebook) just punch it to production - "move fast and break shit" has been cool way before "AI"
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There's a lot of software in between Air Traffic Controller and Facebook. And honestly would Meta be okay with Instagram or Facebook going down even for just a few minutes? I'd think at this point that'd be considered a fairly severe incident. Even if we ignore criticality, things just get really messy and confusing if you push a bunch of broken stuff and only try to start understanding what's actually going on after it's already causing issues.
> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever. I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.
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Prod in this context doesn't refer to one person's website for their personal project. It refers to an environment where downtime has consequences, generally one that multiple people work on and that many people rely on.
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It is not a personal project.
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This is a bit of a no true Scotsman take but I agree with it anyway.
Then I'll read the diffs after the fact and have fix AI it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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That sounds better. I assume the stakes are low enough that you are happy reviewing after the fact, but setting up a workflow to check the diffs before pushing to production shouldn't be too difficult
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Of course. I could do a PR review process, but what's the point. It is just a static website.
[Note: It may be very risky to submit anything to this users site] I'm not sure doing silly things, then advertizing it is a great way to do business, but to each their own.
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So many assumptions. It is a static website hosted on CF workers.
I did this for a while… and until Opus 4.5, I couldn't fully trust the model. But at this point, while it does make the occasional mistake, I don't need to scrutinize every line. Unit and integration tests catch the bugs we can imagine, and the bugs we can't imagine take us by surprise, which is how it has always been.
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Even with 4.6 I find there are a lot of mistakes it makes that I won't allow. Though it is also really good at finding complex thread issues that would take me forever...
I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understanding of what you are building does not exceed the reality of the mess you and your team are actually building if budgets allow. This seldom happens, even in solo hobby projects once you cost everything in. It's not about agile or waterfall or "functional" or abstracting your dependencies via Podman or Docker or VMware or whatever that nix crap is. Or using an agent to catch the bugs in the agent that's talking to an LLM you have next to no control over that's deleting your production database while you slept, then asking it to make illustrations for the postmortem blog post you ask it to write that you think elevates your status in the community but probably doesn't. I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.
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As far as I can tell, the only reason agents exist is because large context increase the probability of context poisoning, purely by the inability of these models to actually make conceptual decisions about the context. I was interested in making a semi-automous skill improvement program for open code, and I wired up systemd to watch my skills directory; when a new skill appeared, it'd run a command prompt to improve it and cohere it to a skill specification. It was told to make a lock file before making a skill, then remove the lock files. Multiple times it'd ignore that, make the skill, then lock and unlock on the same line. I also wanted to lock the skill from future improvements, but that context overode the skills locking, so instead I used the concept of marking the skills as readonly. So in reality, agents only exist because of context poisoning and overlap; they're not some magicaly balm to improving the speed of work, or multiplying the effort, they simply prevent context poisoning from what's essentially subprocesses. Once you realize that, you really have to scale back the reality because not only are they just dumb, they're not integrating any real information about what they're doing.
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Hey Visual Basic is still there, and last time I checked it was still the goto option to do OLE Automation. RoR is no longer at its peak, but is still have its marginal stable share of the web, while PHP gets the lion part[1] Ok, Lotus Notes is really relic from an other era now. But it’s not a PL, so not the same kind of beast. Well, also LLMs are different beast compared to PL. They actually really are the things that evocate the most the expression "taming the beast" when you need to deal with them. So it indeed as far away as possible of engineering as one can probably use a computer to build any automation. Maybe to stay in scientific realms ethology would be a better starting point than a background in informatics/CS to handle these stuffs. [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/pl-php
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Software engineering is real engineering because we rigorously engineer software the way real engineers engineer real things. Software engineering is not real engineering because we do not rigorously engineer software the way "real" engineers engineer real things. <--- YOU ARE HERE Software engineering is real engineering because we "rigorously" engineer software the way "real" engineers engineer real things. Edit: quotes imply sarcasm.
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> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to shake the feeling that this looks like one big pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. > I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was. It was, and is. But not universally. If you formulate questions scientifically and use the answers to make decisions, that's engineering. I've seen it happen. It can happen with LLMs, under the proper guidance. If you formulate questions based on vibes, ignore the answers, and do what the CEO says anyway, that's not engineering. Sadly, I've seen this happen far too often. And with this mindset comes the Claudiot mindset - information is ultimately useless so fake autogenerated content is just as valuable as real work.
Software and bridges are entirely different. If I need a bridge, and there's a perfectly beautiful bridge one town over that spans the same distance - that's useless to me. Because I need my own bridge. Bridges are partly a design problem but mainly a build problem. In software, if I find a library that does exactly what I need, then my task is done. I just use that library. Software is purely a design problem. With agentic coding, we're about to enter a new phase of plenty. If everyone is now a 10x developer then there's going to be more software written in the next few years than in the last few decades. That massive flurry of creativity will move the industry even further from the calm, rational, constrained world of engineering disciplines.
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Software packages are more complicated than you make them out to be. Off the top of my head: - license restrictions, relicensing - patches, especially to fix CVEs, that break assumptions you made in your consumption of the package - supply chain attacks - sunsetting There’s no real “set it and forget it” with software reuse. For that matter, there’s no “set it and forget it” in civil engineering either, it also requires monitoring and maintenance.
People don't realize how much software engineering has improved. I remember when most teams didn't use version control, and if we did have it, it was crappy. Go through the Joel Test [1] and think about what it was like at companies where the answers to most of those questions was "no." [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/
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Version control is useful but it has nothing to do with software engineering per se. Most software development is craft work which doesn't meet the definition of engineering (and that's usually fine). Conversely, it's possible to do real software engineering without having a modern version control system.
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And maybe it's dangerous for one to think they're doing engineering when in reality they're doing craft work.
At the same time, systems have become far more complex. Back when version control was crap, there weren't a thousand APIs to integrate and a million software package dependencies to manage. Sure everything seems to have gotten better and that's why we now need AIs to understand our code bases - that we created with our great version control tooling. Fundamentally we're still monkeys at keyboards just that now there are infinitely many digital monkeys.
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Perrow’s book Normal Accidents postulates that, given advances which could improve safety, people just decide to emphasize throughout, speed, profits, etc. he turned out to be wrong about aviation (got much safer over time) and maritime shipping (there was a perception of a safety crisis in the late 1970s with oil tankers exploding, now you just hear about the odd exceptional event.)
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> Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.[1] This is definitely something that is happening with software systems. The question is: is having an AI that is fundamentally undecipherable in its intention to extend these systems a good approach? Or is an approach of slowing down and fundamentally trying understand the systems we have created a better approach? Has software become safer? Well planes don't fall from the sky but the number of zero day exploits built into our devices has vastly improved. Is this an issue? Does it matter that software is shipped broken? Only to be fixed with the next update. I think its hard to have the same measure of safety for software. A bridge is safe because it doesn't fall down. Is email safe when there is spam and phishing attacks? Fundamentally Email is a safe technology only that it allows attacks via phishing. Is that an Email safety problem? Probably not just as as someone having a car accident on a bridge is generally not a result of the bridge. I think that we don't learn from our mistakes. As developers we tend to coat over the accidents of our software. When was the last time a developer was sued for shipping broken software? When was the last time an engineer was sued for building a broken bridge? Notice that there is an incentive as engineer to build better and safer bridges, for developers those incentives don't exist. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
>After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. That's increasingly not possible. This is the first time for me in 20 years where I've had a programming tool rammed down my throat. There's a crisis of software developer autonomy and it's actually hurting software productivity. We're making worse software, slower because the C levels have bought this fairy tale that you can replace 5 development resource with 1 development resource + some tokens.
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That lucky? In 18 years AI is the third or 4th tool forced upon a shop/team, I will say of those it is the forst one that is genuinely able to make me more productive overall, even with the drawbacks.
At the same time, if you remove 'engineer' , informatics should fall under the faculty of Science, so scientists, which are even more rigorous than engineers ;) Maybe software tinkerer?
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Computer Science (kind of a misnomer) should be in the faculty of Mathematics. Software Development should be in the faculty of Performing Arts. Informatics should be in the faculty of Business Administration.
I was won over by this distinction from another senior some years ago. I think he said… “Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.” I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.
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I like this one from Russ Cox: "Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers."
Unfortunately, I think the lesson from recent history seems to be that outside of highly-regulated industries, customers and businesses will accept terrible quality as long as it's cheap.
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Nah, there is a quality floor that consumers are willing to accept. Once you get below that, where it's actually affecting their lives in a meaningful way, it will self-correct as companies will exploit the new market created for quality products.
Local LLM App by Ente (ente.com)
I hate to say it, but this looks like the sort of thing a CEO told their team to build on Monday morning in a panic because they are grasping for ways to participate in the AI craze. And the team did just that: they built it that morning using Claude Code. There is truly nothing original here and the product doesn't have a chance in hell of earning money. Local LLMs on-device will be dominated by the device vendors, whose control of the hardware stack combined with their ability to subsidize billions of dollars of machine learning research gives them an unfair advantage. Apple knows what the next generation of silicon will deliver, and their ML engineers are already hard at work building models that will be highly optimized for that silicon a year or two ahead of time. Open source models are really great and are backed by well funded labs; however, delivering these models on-device in a way that pleases users will never be easier than it is for the vendors of the devices. Plus, device vendors have ways of making money from local LLMs that third-party app providers do not. They can make their local LLM free and earn money on the hardware play, without skipping a beat on the billions of dollars of ongoing R&D. I don't see how third party app vendors make money here when they will be competing with the decent, totally free alternative that Apple and Google (and Samsung etc.) will load on in the next year or two.
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Counter position (not sure it's better than yours): what are the chances that device makers would actually offer seriously local, and not just something that does work in airplane mode, but then still connects to their cloud later, if not for post-sale monetization then at least for features providing better brand lock-in? I mean just look at how well the market for TV sets that don't try to shove "services" down buyers' throats is developing... But sure, making money with standalone "local first is our headline feature" will be incredibly hard against those, no doubt about that. In light of the limited quality of what local models can achieve, the privacy bonus just won't compel many to pay. But that only means that this "morning with Claude" you are suggesting might be just the right amount of investment for the result you'd realistically expect. But is that so bad? I'd argue the reverse: bundling up the low hanging fruit but not by some hobbyist who will lose interest two weeks on but by a company big enough the keep it going while small enough to not be a VC furnace that will inevitably turn on users once the runway runs out (*), that's an opportunity to fill a niche few others can. Valuable for users who don't want to roll their own deployment of open source models (can't, or unwilling to commit to keeping them up to date, assuming that Ente does keep that ball rolling), and also valuable for the company of the investment actually is so low that it pays by raising awareness for their other products that apparently do earn them money. (*) I was googling around a little wondering if they actually are as close to bootstrapped as they seem on the surface, and yes, that's supposedly the core idea [0], but despite that they also took 100 kUSD in "non-diluting" (basically a gift then?) from Mozilla with the explicit goal "to promote independent AI and machine learning" [1]. So not a CEO whim but following up to a promise made earlier. If they actually did avoid spending all that money on a one-off but went smaller planning to keep it current for a longer time horizon, I'd congratulate them on an excellent choice. [0] https://ente.com/blog/5-years-of-ente/ [1] https://ente.io/blog/mozilla-builders/ The hn discussion for [1] seems to be completely missing the point, that Mozilla program isn't about funding an image host (yeah, I'd also prefer if Mozilla focused on the Browser and perhaps Thunderbird, but the foundation is what it is): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681666
>not
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Ope
It’s a platform play so they can get people onto their defunct photos platform. “Big Tech” in a little suit.
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Defunct? I just switched to it a couple months ago, and it seems actively developed. (Though I think this announcement is sufficiently unpleasant I'm starting to reconsider)
> Anyone could've one-shotted this in Claude in an hour (I'm not exaggerating). This probably could have been one-shotted with Sonnet, not even Opus. Given how over indexed they are on LLM coding, Haiku might even be able to do it. This is actually an interesting coding model benchmark task now that I think about it.
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You'd think any one of these great LLMs that claim coding is over would take a non-trivial app and just clone it while fully documenting the process. If it's so great, why is there so little viscera documenting it's greatness? Just lots and lots of words.
>but really annoying with the amount of Ente products mentioned in every occasion https://github.com/ente-io/ente/blob/f254af939ff6950b63edf5f13562f40d3d67c335/web/apps/ensu/src/pages/chat.tsx#L189 Here is the system prompt, kinda embarassing
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what’s embarrassing about that?
> otherwise small models can be very effective within the right use cases and orchestration very limited amount of use cases, perhaps. As a generalized chat assistant? I'm not sure you'd be able to get anything of value out from them, but happy to be proven otherwise. I have all of those locally already, without fine-tuning, what use case could I try right now where any of those are "very effective"?
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Judging from my experimentation with local models: You can use a small coding model to produce working code with a deterministic workflow (ex: state machine) if you carefully prune the context and filter down what it can do per iteration. Instead of letting it "reason" through an ever growing history, you give it distinct piecemeal steps with tailored context. I think this can be generalized to: Anything that can be built from small, well understood pieces and can be validated and fixed step by step. Then the challenge becomes designing these workflows and automating them. (I'm not there yet, but one thing I have in mind might be a hybrid approach where the planning is produced by a more expensive model. The output it has to produce are data driven state machines or behavior trees (so they can be validated deterministically). Then it offloads the grunt work to a small, local model. When it's done, the work gets checked etc.)
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
My Astrophotography in the Movie Project Hail Mary (rpastro.square.site)
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A bit indiscrete, but how much does the licence cost? Is it around hundreds, 1k, 10k?
Hey everyone, I’m the astrophotographer, but I’m not OP. I’m assuming OP picked up my article and posted here and that’s ok! So I quickly created an account here to comment. Having a quick read through the comments I just want to say thank you for the kind words! Please follow my IG to see more of my photography, and the reddit article if you want to drop a comment with any questions :) https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectHailMary/s/NbRv3sj3fs Cheers, Rod Prazeres
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Hey Rod, your last name seems portuguese(?) Congrats on this, not only you got credits on a feature movie, you got one of the good ones. Cloud 9 for you, enjoy!
This is why the bad reviews are important and support my argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518428
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Since you have multiple times refused to answer the question of whether your have read the book, I'm going to assume you have not. I found the movie to be a pretty close adaptation to the written material, so your strong feelings seem entirely misplaced (and I guess you don't like Ryan Gosling, fine). That said, my family - both kids and adults, with entirely different interests and preferences - enjoyed the hell out of it. That, to me, makes for a good movie, whatever your definition of "objectivity" is. Listen, it's OK not to like something popular, but consider that the downvotes and responses you're getting are not astroturfing, but simply you swimming against the current. Sincerely, - real human.
> If there is no objectivity....then you would have no basis to explain why a film is better or worse than another, A student first iPhone short would be equal to The Godfather. A child banging pots would be indistinguishable from a Symphony. What is the purpose of "art": in general and/or particular works of it? What makes (a work of) 'art' 'good'? Is PHM 'good' in its purpose? Is The Room ? Was 2023's Barbie ? When a child is banging on pots, is he accomplishing his purpose in his 'creative act'? Is Schoenberg's atonal music objectively 'good'? * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJg4XbzSV9Q * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonality > I think Michael Bay sometimes sucks (“Pearl Harbor,” “Armageddon,” “Bad Boys II“) but I find it possible to love him for a movie like “Transformers.” It’s goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good, and it has the grace not only to realize how preposterous it is, but to make that into an asset. * https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transformers-2007
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>> What is the purpose of "art": in general and/or particular works of it? What makes (a work of) 'art' 'good'? So many things...But anybody at The Juilliard School or Berklee College of Music can tell you if you are good or bad on your musicianship...Anybody at the California School of Cinematic Arts or American Film Institute Conservatory can advise you on your future as a future Director...and anybody at the Pratt Institute can comment on your quality as an Artist. Why do you dismiss the concept of Quality?
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> So many things...But anybody at The Juilliard School or Berklee College of Music can tell you if you are good or bad on your musicianship...Anybody at the California School of Cinematic Arts or American Film Institute Conservatory can advise you on your future as a future Director...and anybody at the Pratt Institute can comment on your quality as an Artist. Can anyone else tell us that, or only certain 'gatekeepers'? Who gets to judge the amount of Quality in a thing, or whether something is Good for its Purpose? > Why do you dismiss the concept of Quality? "Quality" as in the amount of 'Goodness' something has? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_(philosophy) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_Good An Axe is a bad Chair because it does not have the Qualities for (e.g.) sitting, but that is not its Purpose. Were the folks that made PHM trying to make Art or Entertainment (or a mix of the two)? If PHM was made to be Entertainment, and people were entertained, was it not Good at its desired Purpose? Did 2007's Transformers have the Quality of Entertainment that it set out to have? Roger Ebert seems to have thought so.
> If there is no objectivity....then you would have no basis to explain why a film is better or worse than another This is indeed the case. You can consult many film experts and get very different top ten lists. Some critics may hate The Godfather. Some won't get Citizen Kane. Some love a good popcorn fluff movie and find this year's Oscar contenders pretentious. It becomes a matter of general consensus. And that consensus appears to be that it's a pretty satisfying movie; https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/project_hail_mary . (High art? No. But that wasn't its goal.)
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You say there is no objectivity, but then you immediately appeal to consensus, Rotten Tomatoes scores, and whether the film achieved its goal :-)) Those are all attempts at objective measurement. You are using objective frameworks to argue objectivity does not exist. :-) The fact that critics disagree does not prove there is no objectivity. People disagree about scientific questions too, but that does not mean science is purely subjective. Disagreement just means the question is hard, not that there is no answer... The whole reason you cited that score is because you believe it points to something real about the film quality. That is an appeal to objectivity whether you realize it or not. :-) I argue those manipulated reviews [1] are not... [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520761
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