MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-06-16 18:19:22+00:00
Ontic randomness, which may be better called physical indeterminism, is given as the best explanation for epistemic randomness for which no conditional variable exists (in the best theories of physics, etc.) to remove the epistemic randomness.

So, for a given epistemic-random Y, "0 < P(Y) < 1" => Y is ontic-random iff there is no such X st. P(Y|X) = 1 or P(Y|-X) = 1 where dim(X) is abitarily large

The existence of X is not epistemic, and is decided by the best interpretation of the best available science.

Bell's theorem limits the conditions on `X` so that either (X does not exist) or (X is non-local).

If you take the former branch then ontic-randomness falls out "for free" from highly specific cases of epistemic; if you take the latter, then there is no case in all of physics where one implies the other.

Personally, I lean more towards saying there is no case of ontic randomness, only "ontic vagueness" or measurement-indeterminacy -- which gives rise to a necessary kind of epistemic randomness due to measurement.

So that P(Y|X) = 1 if X were known, but X isn't in principle knowable. This is a bit of a hybrid position which allows you to have the benefits of both: reality isn't random, but it necessarily must appear so because P(X|measure(X)) is necessarily not 1. (However this does require X to be non-local still).

This arises, imv, because I think there are computability constraints on the epistemic P(Y|X, measure(X)), ie., there has to be some f: X -> measure(X) which is computable -- but reality isn't computable. ie., functions of the form f : Nat -> Nat do not describe reality.

This is not an issue for most macroscopic systems because they have part-whole reductions that make "effectively computable" descriptions fine. But in systems whether these part-whole reductions dont work, including QM, the non-computability of reality creates a necessary epistemic randomness to any possible description of it.
by hellohello2 | 2025-06-16 18:19:38+00:00
Not a physicist either but this passage from the Feynman lectures seem related to what you are describing: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_07.html

"Many mechanisms for gravitation have been suggested. It is interesting to consider one of these, which many people have thought of from time to time. At first, one is quite excited and happy when he “discovers” it, but he soon finds that it is not correct. It was first discovered about 1750. Suppose there were many particles moving in space at a very high speed in all directions and being only slightly absorbed in going through matter. When they are absorbed, they give an impulse to the earth. However, since there are as many going one way as another, the impulses all balance. But when the sun is nearby, the particles coming toward the earth through the sun are partially absorbed, so fewer of them are coming from the sun than are coming from the other side. Therefore, the earth feels a net impulse toward the sun and it does not take one long to see that it is inversely as the square of the distance—because of the variation of the solid angle that the sun subtends as we vary the distance. What is wrong with that machinery? It involves some new consequences which are not true. This particular idea has the following trouble: the earth, in moving around the sun, would impinge on more particles which are coming from its forward side than from its hind side (when you run in the rain, the rain in your face is stronger than that on the back of your head!). Therefore there would be more impulse given the earth from the front, and the earth would feel a resistance to motion and would be slowing up in its orbit. One can calculate how long it would take for the earth to stop as a result of this resistance, and it would not take long enough for the earth to still be in its orbit, so this mechanism does not work. No machinery has ever been invented that “explains” gravity without also predicting some other phenomenon that does not exist."
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-06-16 18:19:42+00:00
And that means gravity is the root of all evil. And what is a root? The bottom of something. Therefore gravity is the distilation of pure evil. This is proved by the question Could there be evil without gravity? Nope. And where do we find the most gravity? Yep. Black holes.

Gravity is high entropy evil and Black holes are entrances to Hell.
by Strilanc | 2025-06-16 18:19:46+00:00
It could still be a pseudo random number generator behind the scenes. For example, a typical quantum circuit simulator would implement measurements by computing a probability then asking a pseudo random number generator for the outcome and then updating the state to be consistent with this outcome. Bell's theorem proves those state updates can't be local in a certain technical sense, but the program has arbitrary control over all amplitudes of the wavefunction so that's not a problem when writing the simulator code.

If the prng was weak, then the quantum circuit being simulated could be a series of operations that solve for the seed being used by the simulator. At which point collapses would be predictable. Also, it would become possible to do limited FTL communication. An analogy is some people built a redstone computer in minecraft that would detonate TNT repeatedly, record the random directions objects were thrown, and solve for the prng's seed [1]. By solving at two times, you can determine how many calls to the prng had occurred, and so get a global count of various actions (like breaking a block) regardless of where they happened in the world.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPmQ0rnJjNc
by Retric | 2025-06-16 18:20:14+00:00
You can agree to pay for them at a given prices via email or slack. It’s more or less guaranteed that contraband will get into prisons if someone is willing to pay for it. Thus the rules around no cash or phones for prisoners.

Inmates are treated very differently by the legal system than regular people. Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-16 18:20:48+00:00
these get into logs, metrics, API contracts. now you're explaining isUserAGoat() to a partner team in a quarterly review. nobody’s laughing then

funny thing is, linters catch unused vars but not unfunny ones. maybe we need a linter that flags joke names after 90 days. if it’s still funny, you keep it. else rename and move on
by dghlsakjg | 2025-06-16 18:21:00+00:00
> To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.

To be fair, this is a real scenario for people in snowy/and or rural areas. It isn't uncommon for people in my area of Canada to get snowed in for a few days.
by amatecha | 2025-06-16 18:21:00+00:00
I only ever flash via CLI or via "drag & drop" method. The web flasher is great for first-timers but there are 100%-offline methods for all the devices.

The android client .apk can be downloaded directly from github at https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android/releases

I do agree though, I feel there should be more effort to support "long term lack of internet" use case.
by illiac786 | 2025-06-16 18:21:02+00:00
> In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp’s original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption

End-to-end encryption was added by Meta, they reused (part of) the Signal app code for this.

This was a big topic for years, I am surprised by this oversight.
by seszett | 2025-06-16 18:21:09+00:00
> port 53

I haven't needed it for... probably 15 years, but in the past (before 3G was common, and all you could rely on was WiFi hotspots) I have used iodine[0] as an IP over DNS tunnel.

My uni friends were always impressed, and it really helped me a few times. The throughput was never great though, but enough for some basic browsing.

Edit you have to be prepared ahead of time though, and it's the main reason I bought my three-letter domain back then (shorter domain means higher throughput as payload is a higher percent of the query response).

[0]https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
by strogonoff | 2025-06-16 18:21:10+00:00
When a game maker collaborates with human artists who contribute their individuality and self-expression to the final product, it’s amazing. When it supports those artists, either via commission fee or as a credit and word of mouth, it’s amazing. When game maker finds people who genuinely want to hear the story they want to tell, it’s amazing.

All of those amazing things are fading away when a game maker could instead be shelling out some bucks (not a lot for now, while they operate at a loss) to Microsoft or Nvidia, until a Frankenstein monster trained on the unlicensed works of those very artists spews out something passable.

Then, tomorrow there comes out a product that generates a complete game on demand (probably trained on scraped, unlicensed source code and assets) and puts that game maker in the shoes of the aforementioned artists. Good luck finding people who want to hear the story.

I wish I could believe that this will somehow result in creativity flourishing, but I am yet to see a convincing take on how this would happen. All I can foresee is creativity being stunted.
by fullshark | 2025-06-16 18:21:22+00:00
What depresses me is all these people that are leading us with these stupid decisions re: AI will get bonuses and promotions after the bubble pops. All the useless effort getting AI everywhere will be forgotten, no one will care or remember the idiotic decisions and we will all be chasing the new new thing.

Sincerity will not win in the end. VC money and the quest for insurmountable tech driven cash flows is what drives everything. The age of software being driven by sincere engineers trying to build is dead outside niche projects.
by andrewflnr | 2025-06-16 18:21:37+00:00
It's kind of hard to explain how widespread a usage like "solvent" is. A huge amount of chemical reactions are most convenient to do in a liquid, a liquid that can dissolve the materials you're working with. That's a solvent. Benzene can dissolve a lot of things, including some that are really hard to dissolve otherwise. So it can be used for a huge variety of reactions, but as the sort background player that you might not pay attention to unless you can't have it.

It's a little like asking "what are the uses of water in chemistry", where you're tempted to answer, "um, everything?" Not quite, but not that far off either. (And with more cancer of course.)

Edit: disclaimer, I'm not a chemist, just an interested layman.
by mandmandam | 2025-06-16 18:21:47+00:00
> where people don't do what they can to make money or increase the value of what they have for personal economic benefit.

That wasn't the argument. You've moved the goalposts to a different stadium.

What was claimed was that "milking every dollar out of anything valuable is burned into people's souls", and somehow, from that, you heard "people do what they can to make money for personal economic benefit". Curious.

> Americans are no less or more human than anyone else

No one said Americans aren't human, or less human.

> this idiotic posturing about some inherent difference

No one said it was inherent. In fact I said the opposite; that people are generally egalitarian unless warped.

> that makes one group of people or country somehow stupider, more wicked or more avaricious than others is a bad habit

Nope. Countries have different characters, and it's okay to talk about it. Also, some countries - cough - have extremely powerful and capable groups that have been working for decades to warp the national character; say, by instilling rampant Islamophobia, or working to undermine critical thinking and general education.

I hope you ask yourself how you got this much wrong on a reading of a rather simple comment. Something clearly hit a nerve.
by TrackerFF | 2025-06-16 18:22:10+00:00
Internet on any ship is expensive as soon as you're out in maritime area - where data transfer is done via satellite services. So it is not necessarily because a captive market, where the cruise liners can fleece you. They pay crazy prices to the telecom/ISPs.

So if you're getting free internet out at seas, it is really at the cost of the ones actually paying the bills - or in this case, the cruise liner.
by ceefry | 2025-06-16 18:22:47+00:00
Recently a movie was released related to childhood cancer (not specifically leukemia) called “Audrey’s Children” starring Natalie Dormer (Hunger Games, Game of Thrones). I got to see a screening of it bc of my daughter’s involvement with Camp Ronald McDonald, which happened as a result of her brother’s (my son) ALL treatment. He is a survivor - it has now been 15 years since his last dose of chemotherapy.

The movie was much better than expected and it’s worth a watch imo. Definitely relevant to the advances that saved my boy’s life, and a glimpse of a few of the incredible people who contributed to those advances.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-16 18:22:47+00:00
In the video (starting at ~13 seconds), the Tesla is at least 16 and probably 20 car lengths from the back of the bus with the bus red flashing lights on the entire time.

If the Tesla can't stop for the bus (not the kid) in 12 car lengths, that's not p-hacking, that's Tesla FSD being both unlawful and obviously unsafe.
by sisve | 2025-06-16 18:22:53+00:00
I guess darklang was too far ahead in their thinking in some areas and choose the wrong path for other. I really liked the deployless idea, but would have loved in even more on-premise. No way to get the data to stay in Europe.

Making hard connections between the editor and the lang was interesting also. Seems like they have moved away from that.

Hope there is a easy way to set it up locally, i was really intrigued when they first launched
by frollogaston | 2025-06-16 18:22:56+00:00
XMPP is too loose. Easiest comparison is security alone. XMPP auth and encryption are complicated, and they're optional for each of c2s, s2c, s2s (setting aside e2e). Clients and servers will quietly do the wrong thing if not configured exactly right. Email has similar problems, so bad that entire companies exist just to help set up stuff like DMARC, but that's a simpler app than instant messaging. The rest of the XMPP feature set is also super loose. Clients and servers never agree on what extensions to implement, even for very basic things like chat rooms. I really tried to like it before giving up.

Edit: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Securing_XMPP

SSL is appropriately strict. Auth and encryption, both c2s and s2c, go together. They were a bit lax on upgrades in the past, but as another comment said, Google just said you fix your stuff or else Chrome will show a very scary banner on your website. Yes you can skip it or force special things like auth without encryption, but it's impossible to do by accident.
by 542354234235 | 2025-06-16 18:23:11+00:00
I am not saying that LLMs are conscious. What I am saying is that since we don’t really understand what gives rise to our subjective feeling of consciousness, evaluating a non-organic mind is difficult.

For instance, say we had a Westworld type robot that perceived pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, and reacted accordingly. But that we understood the underlying program, would we say it wasn’t conscious? If we understood our own underlying programing, would we not be “really conscious”?

We say we have LLMs “fake” empathy or feelings but at some point, digital minds will be faking it in a complex way that involves inner “thoughts”, motivations that they “perceive” internally as positive and negative, and various other subjective experiences. It gets very squishy trying to understand how our consciousness isn’t just a fake abstraction on top of the unconscious program, and a digital mind’s abstractions are fake.
by k__ | 2025-06-16 18:23:19+00:00
I did an internship at a chemical laboratory once.

The older folks told me that they aren't allowed to use the awesome stuff anymore.

Back in the days, they would use Benzene for everything, the only stuff that would get the lab floors clean at the end of the day.

Same with asbestos, leaded fuel, and whatnot. Compounds that are perfect for their use cases, yet highly toxic.
by ben_w | 2025-06-16 18:23:38+00:00
> Consider that countries known for stronger interpretation of human rights and freedoms, including intellectual property rights, are also the countries at the forefront of innovation, including technical innovation that laid the foundation for LLMs in the first place. I think that is not a coincidence, and we should keep it in mind when there is a push to be dismissive of these concepts (which predominantly serves the interests of commercial LLM operators and their supply chain).

Several fallacies there.

First because China and the USA are opposite ends of the spectrum on many of the ways "freedom" is measured, and yet China is doing pretty well on the innovation front, including with AI. And that China is beating Europe, even though various Scandinavian nations rank higher on such freedoms than does the USA.

Second, cum hoc ergo propter hoc: Correlation does not imply causation. For example in this case, a reason why one of the big IP groups in the USA (Hollywood) got big, was because being in California enabled them to avoid the IP rights of the Motion Picture Patents Company that dominated cinema in the East Coast. I would even suggest that it is the disregarding of IP rights that enables much of the web, not only how and why China is doing well, but also Google (which has had legal fights over the interaction between copyright and search results), social media, and cultural elements such as memes and reaction gifs.

Third: the point of copyright is to encourage new works, because this makes money which can be taxed. All this becomes somewhat irrelevant when AI can also create new works.

If you want to set a bar for creativity high enough that current AI can't reach it, I suspect quite a lot of human works also fail, e.g. that Pratchett's Strata is obviously Ringworld, and that you would exclude from copyright all parts of The Lion King that are based on Hamlet.

> I would still oppose the use of the natural vs. unnatural distinction as the basis of that argument, though.

I'm not sure what you're saying when you "oppose" this. Does that mean you accept that, in principle, there could be some AI which would deserve rights in the category currently (but in principle inaccurately) called "human rights"?
by xenadu02 | 2025-06-16 18:24:07+00:00
> The bombs not dropped here today remain available to be dropped elsewhere tomorrow

Yeah but humans on the whole are terrible at handling long-term consequences even when they are reasonably certain those consequences a) exist and b) are terrible for them personally.

Ironic is it not? Vaccination campaigns have been so successful anti-vax idiots who have never had to watch their child die of a preventable disease think vaccines are a scam.

Ever build something? You will get an earful about code and how stupid the regulations are. Nevermind that half the buildings in a city may survive an earthquake because of those rules. People often just don't connect the dots and they sure don't want to pay extra to make the building stronger.

Why are so many roofs in Texas ruined by hail? We have the technology to make a roof hail-proof for all but the absolute worst storms. But we don't. Too expensive. I'm still surprised Florida actually improved construction standards after Andrew which - shocking - has helped in the recent storms.

Or why isn't it required to make homes in fire-prone areas defensible and fire-resistant in California? Local control, too expensive, haven't had a massive fire until this year except ... oops Oakland Hills fires in 1991 that gave us a preview of the LA fires! Did we prepare? LOL.

And hey - what do you know. The USA's whole "pandemic preparedness" program was torn down because we haven't had one since 1917 and what a waste of money. Just in time for COVID.
by potatolicious | 2025-06-16 18:25:41+00:00
I think there's some overlap in the thrust of both pieces but they're pretty distinct topic-wise?

The first piece strikes me as a paean against "enshittification" - the idea that the industry has done good things, but now subsists on a combination of hot air and making existing good things worse. It further makes the specific point that LLMs belong in the "hot air" category and that it shares little with other innovations of the past.

It does touch on what he perceives as overly-friendly press coverage of the above, but I didn't read the piece as focusing on that point.

FWIW, I find Zitron to be an... unreliable commentator on this subject, to put it mildly, but I am not entirely unsympathetic to the point.

The second piece is more specifically focused on the overly-friendly press coverage, and the idea that journalists are either overly credulous, especially to fantastical claims about the tech, or openly corrupted by the parties they are meant to cover.
by TFYS | 2025-06-16 18:26:34+00:00
There’s no objective way to determine how much of a product’s utility is created by whom. For example, if I invent a thingamajig and hire people to build and sell it, how can we determine what percentage of the value comes from me, the workers, or the users who find new ways to use it? We can’t.

As a result, money gets distributed based on the relative power of those involved in the process. Business owners typically hold the most power, in-demand workers have some leverage, and others have less. So being rich doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a lot of value for others, it may just mean you’ve held positions of power.

Getting rid of these positions of power is the way to create a more equal and prosperous society.
by kennethrc | 2025-06-16 18:26:44+00:00
I have Wireguard (and OpenVPN off TCP/UDP 443 as backup) on a router connected to residential symmetric 1G fiber. Among the many uses for that means I can watch the NFL (et al.) when abroad just as if I were home; there's WG/OPVN clients for the FireSticks I carry when travelling.
by kashyapc | 2025-06-16 18:27:12+00:00
Not only the "Vexations" is to be played 840 times but he also instructs:

"It would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by staying very still"

I recently listened to a Sati recital by a Dutch pianist. The pianist told us the story, and said, "now I'm going to play this to you". Then played us a compressed recording of it that plays the whole thing in one second.