MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1dom | 2025-07-29 17:52:00+00:00
It's a similar problem faced by CICD pipelines. e.g. engineers (delegator) trigger pipelines tasks via APIs (MCP) which sees pipeline run terraform (agent) code which makes stuff be built and changed on various platforms, including configuring and interacting with other (upstream) services.

I feel like when CICD systems are well built, they're built assuming the user/engineer is completely non-deterministic, like an unpredictable agent.
by hnfong | 2025-07-29 17:52:15+00:00
From TFA:

"In the last year, government ministers and intelligence agencies have warned that foreign states are using the industry to “carry out their dirty work” in the U.K. — sometimes through the surveillance and harassment of dissidents that have fled to Britain as a safe haven."

I guess the article discusses other things too, but even if your argument makes sense here, it doesn't negate the fact that once powerful foreign entities are involved, ones that have enough resources and motivation to hire ex-spies to do dirty work, calling the police can lead to disastrous outcomes.

I guess you're lucky in a sense since apparently you haven't experienced the situations where you know there are times where the normal law enforcement / emergency services process won't work.
by gertlex | 2025-07-29 17:52:29+00:00
Agreed, I'd add to the statement, "you're basically screwed, often, without investing a ton of time (e.g. weekends)"

Figuring out 'make' errors when I was bad at C on microcontrollers a decade ago? (still am) Careful pondering of possible meanings of words... trial and error tweaks of code and recompiling in hopes that I was just off by a tiny thing, but 2 hours later and 30 attempts later, and realizing I'd done a bad job of tracking what I'd tried and hadn't? Well, made me better at being careful at triaging issues. But it wasn't something I was enthusiastic to pick back up the next weekend, or for the next idea I had.

Revisiting that combination of hardware/code a decade later and having it go much faster with ChatGPT... that was fun.
by Goronmon | 2025-07-29 17:52:48+00:00
Having a law saying children shouldn't view pornography isn't abuse.

"Children shouldn't view pornography" is fine as an overall goal. A law that suggest the content providers track the faces and passport details of all users is a ridiculous way to fail to prevent that however.

It is however a great way to have an readily accessible log of exactly which citizens are viewing content the government finds questionable.
by kristianc | 2025-07-29 17:53:38+00:00
Largely, you've got it already - but a lot of the propaganda (and by far the most influential form of it in Britain) is aimed at propping up the mores and power structures of the prevailing establishment.

The propaganda in Britain isn’t loud or foreign (largely). It’s quiet, domestic, and politely credentialed. It's Otto English, it's James O Brien, it's the BBC. It doesn’t scream at you, it nudges, omits, and reframes until systemic rot looks like unfortunate happenstance.

The message from the BBC and the like is overwhelmingly don't think too hard about why things are the way they are, don't ever question the root causes, and if someone from the credentialed classes says something, they're probably right about it.

It's why the article is never "Wait why have your living standards fallen through the floor?" or "Is lockdown actually working?" but "Here's how to make a meal for £1" or "How to make a really good sourdough loaf".

By setting up a world where people can only access "pre approved" bits of information, you're not lessening access to propaganda, you're just picking winners.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-07-29 17:54:08+00:00
Yep, this is a marketing problem. Your users' goal is to learn, but they also want to expend as little effort as possible. They'll love it if you just tell them the answers, but you're also doing them a disservice by doing so.

Same problem exists for all educational apps. Duolingo users have the goal of learning a language, but also they only want to use Duolingo for a few minutes a day, but also they want to feel like they're making progress. Duolingo's goal is to keep you using Duolingo, and if possible it'd be good for you to learn the language, but their #1 goal is to keep you coming back. Oddly, Duolingo might not even be wrong to focus primariliy on keeping you moving forward, given how many people give up when learning a new language.
by rtkwe | 2025-07-29 17:54:08+00:00
I'm not 100% sure what you're saying. Yes there are obvious cases like but those instances also used to just get called other things before we figured out autism as a distinct disease and it became widespread knowledge. There's no field in the data that gives us (for lack of a better term) the level of autism for people getting that diagnosis over time and we're recognizing more and more things as being on the spectrum of autism as time goes on which really just feeds back into the "there's more because we're finding/labelling more people as autistic" hypothesis.
by Sayrus | 2025-07-29 17:54:10+00:00
Way worse. At least here the text looks like the original.

Here is an example of what that looks like: https://imgur.com/Q4J5BHi

In case it isn't obvious due to the zoom and lack of context:

- The texture on the top and windshield don't exist, it's plain gray.

- The letters on the card actually read something, here it's gibberish. Sometimes half a letter, sometimes a texture that doesn't exist.
by kelthuzad | 2025-07-29 17:54:12+00:00
I share your experience and view in that regard! There is so much criticism of LLMs and some of it is fair, like the problem of hallucinations, but that weakness can be reframed as a learning opportunity. It's like discussing a subject with a personal scientist who may at certain times test you, by making claims that may be simplistic or outright wrong, to keep the student skeptical and check if they are actually paying attention.

This requires a student to be actually interested in what they are learning tho, for others, who blindly trust its output, it can have adverse effects like the illusion of having understood a concept while they might have even mislearned it.
by croemer | 2025-07-29 17:54:19+00:00
> This data will make it easier for researchers and the public to track how long it takes for a fix to travel from the initial report, all the way to a user's device (which is especially important if the fix never arrives!)

This paragraph is very confusing: What data is meant by "this data"? If they mean the announcement of "there's something", isn't the timeline of disclosure made public already under current reporting policy once everything has been opened up?

In other words, the date of initial report is not new data? Sure the delay is reduced, but it's not new at all in contrast to what the paragraph suggests.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-29 17:54:23+00:00
Ya, I specifically remember solving word problems in school / college and getting distracted by irrelevant details. Usually I would get distracted by stuff that _seemed_ like it should be used, so maybe cat facts would be fine for me to tease out, but in general I don't think I'm good at ignoring extraneous information.

Edit: To be fair, in the example provided, the cat fact is _exceptionally_ extraneous, and even flagged with 'Fun Fact:' as if to indicate it's unrelated. I wonder if they were all like that.
by gronglo | 2025-07-29 17:55:12+00:00
Mark Zuckerberg himself predicted that AI would replace all mid-level engineers at Meta by the end of this year, with senior engineers continuing to work on tasks such as planning and architecture. With the release of Claude 4 it feels like, if anything, he was too conservative with his prediction — we're already there, and Mark must know it. So what's he playing at?
by unicorn_chaser | 2025-07-29 17:55:18+00:00
Mining is one of the oldest industries, and it’s also one of the most critical for powering today’s tech economy.

Forget pickaxes and canaries. Modern mining runs on automation, AI, satellite imagery, and advanced data analytics to extract metals like copper, lithium, and gold—the backbone of EVs, batteries, and electronics—with unprecedented efficiency and sustainability.

Here are some of the newest, game-changing technologies reshaping mining today:

- Autonomous vehicles: Driverless trucks and drills improve safety by removing humans from hazardous zones.

- Drones & UAVs: Used for fast, accurate surveying and inspections in dangerous or remote areas.

- Satellite & remote sensing: High-res imagery helps identify mineral deposits and monitor operations in real time.

- AI & machine learning: Algorithms analyze geological data to predict resource locations and optimize extraction.

- IoT sensors: Embedded sensors track equipment health and worker safety, enabling predictive maintenance.

- 3D printing: Onsite manufacturing of spare parts reduces downtime and costs.

- Robotics: Robots handle repetitive or risky tasks like sampling and underground exploration.

- Digital twins & data analytics: Virtual mine models simulate operations, allowing optimization before physical changes.

- Renewable energy: Solar, wind, and battery storage cut emissions and operational costs.

- Water recycling: Innovative treatment systems reduce freshwater use.

- Wearable tech: Smart helmets and devices monitor worker vitals and environmental hazards.

- Blockchain: Ensures mineral supply chain transparency and ethical sourcing.

What’s often missed? Before any mining happens, someone has to find and de-risk these resources. That’s where mineral exploration startups come in—pioneering the tech-enabled frontier of discovery that fuels the entire industry.

Mining today isn’t just heavy industry. It’s a deep-tech ecosystem vital for a clean energy future. And the innovation is happening now.
by seabrookmx | 2025-07-29 17:55:22+00:00
They are extremely different workloads so.. everything?

The CDN servers are basically appliances, and are often embedded in various data centers (includes those ran by ISP's) to aggressively cache content. They care about high throughput and run a single workload. Being able to fine tune the entire stack, right down to the TCP/IP implementation is very valuable in this case. Since they ship the hardware and software, they can tightly integrate the two.

By contrast, API workloads are very heterogeneous. I'd have to imagine the ability to run any standard Linux software there would also be a big plus. Linux clearly has much more vetting on cloud providers than FreeBSD as well.
by sejje | 2025-07-29 17:55:35+00:00
I used llms to teach me a programming language recently.

It was way nicer than a book.

That's the experience I'm speaking from. It wasn't perfect, and it was wrong sometimes, sure. A known limitation.

But it was flexible, and it was able to do things like relate ideas with programming languages I already knew. Adapt to my level of understanding. Skip stuff I didn't need.

Incorrect moments or not, the result was i learned something quickly and easily. That isn't what happened in the 90s.
by munificent | 2025-07-29 17:55:37+00:00
> Rotring quality has been going down over the years, or their name outgrew the actual quality of the product.

This story is so common that I wish there was an established economic term for it. Something like "reputational arbitrage" or perhaps "sentiment stickiness".

The basic idea is that a business can change its quality much faster than its reputation changes. If the business rapidly cuts costs and quality, their sales will reflect their reputed quality more than their actual quality for some amount of time. That gives them a window of very high profits where they can basically sell shit like it's gold.

Eventually the reputation catches up with them, but it seems to take a very long time to do so, if ever, so it's an extremely tempting business model.

There is a related but different effect where a brand establishes some level of cachet or meaningful emotional attachment back when the product was good. The product tanks, but people keep buying it even while knowing it's garbage just because of the emotional associations they have with the historical product.

The line between these two effects can be blurry. I think Pyrex leans more towards the former where people keep buying it simply because they don't realize it kind of sucks. But Jeep is the latter where it seems like everyone knows they'll spend half the time in the shop but people just like Jeeps anyway.
by myfear | 2025-07-29 17:55:38+00:00
A little less sophisticated, but I've done something similar with Langchain4j and Quarkus. Ok, without the books. Just a Dungeon Master guiding you. But it's easier than one thinks to build stuff like this. https://open.substack.com/pub/myfear/p/ai-dungeon-master-qua...
by bombdailer | 2025-07-29 17:55:46+00:00
People don't care, in fact the average person finds LLM writing to be some of the best since it's so good at effortlessly conveying information (of what value..?). That ease of course comes with the loss of the real intent of the author. No longer their words, bearing no mark of effort and discernment, it becomes assimilated into the corpus of all that unthinking, unfeeling machination that lingers breathlessly with no pulse. No life exists in those empty words, no one who will take the stand to defend them, to hold them as true by the fire they alight in oneself. No, the LLM provides a cold flame, only pretty to look at - providing only the image of warmth. But perhaps the LLM reflects the soul of the modern person, who in becoming more machine like, comes to find their home amongst the shadows of that dim blue light.
by kmnc | 2025-07-29 17:56:18+00:00
How do tools like this avoid what I see in many of these types of narrative chat bots: the user becomes the only one steering the narrative, and the AI ends up just an obedient responder? Whenever I try these things it ends up very predictable, shallow, and repetitive, especially as time goes on. And if I have to prompt the AI to be creative or act differently... is that really acting different?
by ben_w | 2025-07-29 17:56:27+00:00
You don't have to leave LLM code alone, it's fine to change it — unless, I guess, you're doing some kind of LLM vibe-code-golfing?

But this does remind me of a previous co-worker. Wrote something to convert from a custom data store to a database, his version took 20 minutes on some inputs. Swore it couldn't possibly be improved. Obviously ridiculous because it didn't take 20 minutes to load from the old data store, nor to load from the new database. Over the next few hours of looking at very mediocre code, I realised it was doing an unnecessary O(n^2) check, confirmed with the CTO it wasn't business-critical, got rid of it, and the same conversion on the same data ran in something like 200ms.

Over a decade before LLMs.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-29 17:56:51+00:00
Yes. I'll say it however many times you need to hear it, nobody is looking at Apple's captive gatcha economy and saying it's a bonafide "gaming" market with a straight face. These "gamers" only ever get to play commercial failures that get ported to iOS as a contingency measure. RE8, Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding... if this was a console lineup it would be sadder than the Xbox. Oh, and the lootbox & microtransaction games that obviously account for the lion's share of Apple's game revenue. But we don't have to mention the ugly bits.

Instead, serious economists turn to markets that are representative of Apple's ability to compete, for example, the macOS App Store. When Apple has to compete, how much market cap are they actually earning from the App Store? We have the numbers, you just know they aren't flattering.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-07-29 17:56:53+00:00
I think we're talking past each other, which feels like the inevitable result whenever I try to engage in good faith on this topic with people that don't quite agree with me disproportionately more often than other topics. It feels like you'll have an answer for everything I could possibly say, which could mean that you're right, or it could mean you spend a lot more time than me having these conversations. It feels very tricky to ever criticize, even in small ways, any aspect of your movement, because there's always a reasonable, coherent reason that any critique should actually have been levelled at Israel, who's fault it actually is. It feels like there's absolutely nothing I could say to provoke you to listen, to hear my point, because you're already so confidently clear on 100% of all of this, and because your goal is to represent your movement's perspective, rather than to truly persuade and communicate. I think when you're (understandably) fervently convinced of your own righteousness, it's quite easy to shut down discussion and to experience it as successfully defending truth and justice.

Do you understand? I'm not, and at no point have I been, discussing or debating facts on the ground in Gaza. I'm making an effort to assume good faith. I am telling you about the experience of people that are "gettable" for your movement, people that largely agree that what's happening is abhorrent, but that are feeling alienated by the dogmatism, and you're telling me why dogmatism is correct. Iinot talking about what's correct, I'm talking about what's successfully persuasive.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-07-29 17:57:13+00:00
The big difference is that if you are recreating an entire image and there isn't going to be any difference information against a reference image you can't move pixels around, you have to get fractional values out of optical flow and move pixels fractional amounts that potentially overlap in some areas and leave gaps in others.

This means rasterization and making a weighted average of moved pixels as points with a kernel with width and height.

Optical flow isn't one technique, it's just a name for getting motion vectors in the first place.

Here is a lecture to help clear it up.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall19/cos429/s...
by ath3nd | 2025-07-29 17:57:55+00:00
Note the new features coming in the space:

- study mode (this announcement)

- office suite (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-designs-rival-office-w...)

- sub-agents (https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents)

When they announce VR glasses or a watch, we'd known we've gone full circle and the hype is up.
by SLWW | 2025-07-29 17:58:36+00:00
My core problem with LLMs is as you say; it's good for some simpler concepts, tasks, etc. but when you need to dive into more complex topics it will oversimplify, give you what you didn't ask for, or straight up lie by omission.

History is a great example, if you ask an LLM about a vaguely difficult period in history it will just give you one side and act like the other doesn't exist, or if there is another side, it will paint them in a very negative light which often is poorly substantiated; people don't just wake up and decide one day to be irrationally evil with no reason, if you believe that then you are a fool... although LLMs would agree with you more times than not since it's convenient.

The result of these things is a form of gatekeeping, give it a few years and basic knowledge will be almost impossible to find if it is deemed "not useful" whether that's an outdated technology that the LLM doesn't seem talked about very much anymore or a ideological issue that doesn't fall in line with TOS or common consensus.
by mindslight | 2025-07-29 17:58:58+00:00
It's irrelevant in the context of your own argument because you have not specified what you consider those costs to actually be (beyond the implicit financial dollar amounts).

I obviously do not support "advancement" at any [large] cost. But it's fallacious to extrapolate from that to not supporting it at any [small] cost, as the thrust of your argument implies.
by mattmaroon | 2025-07-29 18:00:08+00:00
That’s plain idiotic. Have you ever met a kid? Good luck with that.

And even if it were somehow feasible to control internet access points 100% of the time, do you think most parents could figure it out? I have friends with teenage children, I assure you, most of them would be easily outsmarted by their kids with anything tech related, and they’re above average intelligence.

I’m not necessarily saying this is the correct solution anyway, I don’t know what is, I’m just saying we don’t need to make up dystopian conspiracy theories to explain the motivation of the people who want to do it.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-07-29 18:00:17+00:00
I agree with you but my emotional reaction is similar to the parent comment because many of these parents vote for the party of "stop big government regulations" and "stop government censorship" while also advocating in general for personal responsibility.

So I'm actually against this because I hate the indirect hypocrisy. I want to teach a lesson to Republicans about using overly generalized principals as a political stance.
by o11c | 2025-07-29 18:00:49+00:00
Wow, Wikipedia is pretty minimal in giving examples. Clicking through various links in comments for more examples should be considered mandatory (though many of the 3D ones are actually "some effect on top of Truchet").

I suppose I don't normally think about how you're actually using minimal Truchet tiles when you play one of SGT's puzzle games, since it's the most boring tileset:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/slan...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-29 18:00:54+00:00
The juxtaposition between the cleanliness of the software and the absolute travesty of a schematic is jarring. But it still works!

I applaud the author for wading into analog electronics. Pretty much everyone nowadays would just put a timer on a micro and be done in 2 minutes. No fun in that. There is something to be said about the minimal elegance of purely analog designs, and a special rewarding feeling for wrangling electrons in their native habit rather than their boxed up binary bins.
by mcswell | 2025-07-29 18:01:08+00:00
Ideally, yes. But probably because of our world knowledge, we humans know that cat-facts don't affect mathematic facts (unless of course the cat is walking across the keyboard, in which case all bets are off). LLCs don't know that, and perhaps they're trying to figure out some connection by scanning their database for mathematical facts about cats. If they sleep most of the day, how many hours is that? Does that number factor (pardon the pun) into the math problem? What about six-toed cats (which do btw exist)? Spherical cows come up in math and physics, are there triangular cats (since the problem is about triangles)?
by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-29 18:01:25+00:00
I already avoid devices that require subscription rather than allowing ownership. If someone decides to change the terms of the deal after I bought the device to gate previously accessible functionality behind a paywall I guarantee that they will never see another nickel of mine for the rest of our shared existence on this earth. I don't actually care that your costs exceed your revenue. Shut down then. It's your problem to price things in a way that pays for your costs as a business, not mine, and it's your problem to uphold agreements you made or to fail as a business.
by trhway | 2025-07-29 18:01:40+00:00
>Sadly, hospitals are full of 80-90+ year old people who cannot ... and the family continues to insist we "do everything" to help this person.

so what? It is on their dime, not yours. If i'm a 90 years old and wanna drag my existence out it is my choice as long as i'm paying for it, directly or through insurance (and Medicare is an insurance too btw)

It is easy to suggest to terminate lives earlier when it isn't your life. History is full of such attempts.

One should be glad that such a large sector of economy - healthcare - has a great stable demand and a great labor market. Overwork - teach more nurses and doctors. The issue is completely self-inflicted as the labor supply is artificially constrained:

"In 2023, U.S. nursing schools turned away 65,766 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate programs, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN)"