MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exodust | 2025-07-01 07:41:39+00:00
Is it possible to develop a camera that takes pictures in a special format that records an encrypted signature, some kind ledger technology for images?

The idea is authenticity of images could be challenged. If in doubt, the original photographer or source can provide verification - automated or otherwise, that only superficial X, Y, or Z edits have been made such as lighting or contrast changes.

Copies of the images would contain this ledger or a link. In the future maybe photos without this technology are never to be trusted as a source, or perhaps disallowed on certain platforms.

So it's inverted from "we must detect fake" to "we must detect authenticity." The latter being easier to control.

I mean, nice things are under threat. There's no escaping it. If technology got us into this mess, technology can dig us out.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-01 07:41:42+00:00
Generalization across tasks is clearly still elusive. The only reason we see such success with modern LLMs is because of the heroic amount of parameters used. When you are probing into a space of a billion samples, you will come back with something plausible every time.

The only thing I've seen approximating generalization has appeared in symbolic AI cases with genetic programming. It's arguably dumb luck of the mutation operator, but oftentimes a solution is found that does work for the general case - and it is possible to prove a general solution was found with a symbolic approach.
by eru | 2025-07-01 07:41:57+00:00
You are comparing apples to oranges here. These are two completely different things.

Image the labour share of GDP could be a constant 100%, but perhaps the top 1% of workers (eg CEOs) get all the rewards and the other 99% get nothing.

(That's not meant to be realistic, just to illustrate that you can have a very unequal distribution despite a high or even growing labour share of GDP. No opinion expressed on whether the statistics you cite are any good.)
by esskay | 2025-07-01 07:42:31+00:00
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage

What a ridiculous statement. Even with your edit it's still an utterly stupid conclusion to come to.

Off the top of my head I can think of way worse things tech companies have done. Cambridge Analytica scandal, Gmail scanning, the Google Shopping lawsuit, Amazon's product clone hijack, Facebooks mood manipulation experiment, Ring doorbell viewing, Uber spying, to name just a few FAR worse things tech companies have done.
by easyThrowaway | 2025-07-01 07:42:44+00:00
This. I could excuse them (or reddit for the matter) if their translations were in any capacity decent or at least understandable. In reality most of the time they're plain italian or french word salads. Their automatic audio translations engine could be easily renamed "Mechanical Italian Brainrot Generator".

It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-01 07:45:14+00:00
When they are compelled to do it, they will not even know it is happening. Only the people doing it would know. That’s the reality of why it is done now. That there is a market for it should never have been allowed but the capability is necessary to troubleshoot the network. I guess it seems silly to say this is even a legal issue. They shouldn’t do a lot of things, but they are going to be legally compelled to do them, so the network structure’s form follows that function. If there is no market for that data, they will get the data by proxy by leasing access to the network or the customer or the metadata for security or other legal purposes via intermediaries or separate internal units. This is just how ISPs have to handle this kind of data request or other legal request. They have formal means to ask for what they need, and they will usually get enough data to find out anything they will need to find out that the CPE is emitting or doing.

I guess if you’re truly concerned you shouldn’t have WiFi at home or a mobile phone. Too bad 5G signals have similar capabilities, but at least the signals don’t propagate as well.
by benreesman | 2025-07-01 07:45:17+00:00
I think I have a pretty different view, though maybe it hinges on the bit about 9 in 10 software people being code monkeys, or what that means. To the extent I agree that LLMs are going to eliminate coding jobs (permanently), they're going to be the ones you could basically do with StackOverflow and Google (when those things worked).

I think there's a cohort thing going on here, because Google has been spam rekt for long enough that entire classes of students have graduated, entered the workforce, and been promoted all since search and SO went to hell, so the gizmo that has the working code and you just need to describe it seems totally novel.

But we've been through this before: one day there's this box and you type a question and bam, reasonable code. Joing a FAANG is kind of like that too: you do the mega grep for parse_sockaddr_trie and there's this beautifully documented thing with like, here's the paper where it shows its O(ln).

But you call the thing and it seems to work and you send the diff and the senior person is like, that doesn't do IPv6 and that's rolling to us next quarter, you should add IPv6. And the thing was exploiting the octets and so its hard.

The thing is, a sigmoid looks exactly like an exponential when you're standing on it. But it never is. Even a nuclear bomb is exponential very briefly (and ChatGPT is not a nuclear bomb, not if it was 100x more capable).

Think about defense, or trading, or anything competitive like that: now you need the LLM because the other guy has it too. But he's not watching YouTube all day, he's still chain-smoking and taking adderall except he has an LLM now too.

So yeah, in the world where any of 9 TypeScript frameworks would all make roughly the same dark mode website and any of them get the acquisition done because really the founder knows a guy? That job is really risky right now.

But low effort shit is always risky unless you're the founder who knows a guy.
by wastewastewaste | 2025-07-01 07:45:29+00:00
Yea man, people say combine harvesters will eliminate agriculture jobs, but then who will operate these combine harvesters? Obviously every single manual farm laborer will just switch to being an operator of those.

God, will we never move this discussion past this worthless argument? What value would there be in any of these automatization tools, be in in agriculture or AI, if it just made every single worker switch to being an [automatization tool] operator?
by reify | 2025-07-01 07:47:11+00:00
Why are we taking any of these people seriously? Mark Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion for Scale AI, an AI data company, as a means of hiring its CEO Alexandr Wang to run his “superintelligence” team, has been offering random OpenAI employees $100 million to join Meta, thought about buying both AI search company Perplexity and generative video company Runway and even tried to buy OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s pre-product “$32bn valuation” non-company Safe Superintelligence, settling instead on hiring its CEO Daniel Gross and buying his venture fund for some fucking reason.

When you put aside the big numbers, these are the actions of a desperate dimwit with a failing product trying to buy his way to making generative AI into a “superintelligence,” something that Meta’s own Chief AI scientist Yan LeCun says isn’t going to work.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/
by oakstendheim | 2025-07-01 07:47:14+00:00
This is such a Google thing. I'm browsing from a German IP address, have my language set to English only and my region set to the US. This is still not enough for Google, and Youtube by extension, to not show me German search results. It is honestly incredibly frustrating. Same goes for the trending page on YT. This appears to only be based on your IP address.
by Theodores | 2025-07-01 07:47:20+00:00
Did you read the article?

You are imagining that the article said anything about gluten having anything to do with inflammation.

The article did not say anything about going vegan.

The Bolivian and the Malaysian tribes ate a whole food, plant based diet that was not exclusively plant based. They are on 2x the fibre of anyone in the West and they are not eating farmed animals that have been fed with commodity crops such as corn.

What this means is that their diet is incredibly low fat, and your summary does not point to that.

Regarding protein, animals get their protein from plants, and, if you eat enough plants, you will get enough protein unless it is processed. See Beri-beri and how that came about with American rice that lacked protein.

In the West, where we wash our food, we need a souce of vitamin B12, which can either be supplemented or come from meat. Plants have no need for vitamin B12 so they don't have any, even though they have everything else we need. If you don't wash your food then there is an abundance of B12 from bacteria in dirt, so it is not a problem.

Note that the tribes don't consume dairy, which is no surprise. Even the Romans thought it was a bit weird when they got to England to see grown men drinking milk from cows. In Rome the heat made that dangerous due to bacteria that get to the milk first, but the Celts had built a lifestyle around milk and they became lactose tolerant, to some degree.

Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't. Milk is for babies, and it is species specific.

Anyone that tells you otherwise is just a victim of milk marketing and has not left milk out of their diet for long enough to realise that life without dairy is better.

Sugar is not the root of all evil, it just rots your teeth and feeds yeast-like bacteria all the way down your digestive tract. It is the combination of excess fat and sugar that is to be avoided if you want to avoid diabetes and all of the other non-communicable chronic diseases.

In summary, stay off the processed foods and stick to the government guidelines for nutrition.
by computably | 2025-07-01 07:48:45+00:00
Language is literally an abstraction of sensory inputs and cognitive processes. One can make similar arguments about image generation. These abstractions might characterize the higher cognitive abilities of humans, but it makes no sense to ignore "lower level" cognition. Embodiment is the foundation of our rich internal world models, in particular spacetime, causality, etc.

Current generative models merely mimic the output, with a fuzzy abstract linguistic mess in place of any physical/causal models. It's unsurprising that their capacity to "reason" is so brittle.
by eru | 2025-07-01 07:49:02+00:00
Unemployment insurance (and health insurance etc) should be split in two: the pure insurance component, and the solidarity component. The former can be handled by the private sector just fine, the latter can be done by governments.

> Personally I like welfare-with-net-worth-threshold.

The only thing that really matters are net payments (and marginal net payments, ie how many cents can you keep from the next gross dollar you earn). It doesn't really matter whether the effective marginal tax rate is made up of income tax or a phasing out of welfare benefits or a combination of both (and throw in some other taxes etc, too).

In the name of simplicity, you might want to have a single government agency that assesses your income and net worth. Instead of having both the tax people and the welfare agencies do that and duplicate work.

(Though ideally, we'd use forms of taxation like land value tax where the government doesn't need to assess your income nor net worth in the first place.)
by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u | 2025-07-01 07:49:34+00:00
I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit.

----

Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.

Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!

Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?

YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s

Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!
by eru | 2025-07-01 07:50:36+00:00
The only thing that really matters are net payments (and marginal net payments, ie how many cents can you keep from the next gross dollar you earn). It doesn't really matter whether the effective marginal tax rate is made up of income tax or a phasing out of welfare benefits or a combination of both (and throw in some other taxes etc, too).

In the name of simplicity, you might want to have a single government agency that assesses your income and net worth. Instead of having both the tax people and the welfare agencies do that and duplicate work.

So instead of having welfare payments phase out, you could just increase marginal income taxes by the same amount, and end up with exactly the same net payment structure.
by immibis | 2025-07-01 07:50:49+00:00
The author recommends zero penalties for production or use of mind-altering substances, and infinitely harsher penalties for addicts. Because people are perfectly rational beings, especially when using mind-altering substances, they'll look ahead at the penalties and decide not to be addicts. That's the author's argument, and it's obviously completely wrong.

The war on drugs has been a failure, but giving addicts the death penalty (as opposed to helping them stop being addicts) isn't very good either.
by xxs | 2025-07-01 07:51:20+00:00
that doesn't mean a single thing - google would auto-default to IP country resolution every step. It's funny in an awful way to have a road trip in Europe - every day it's a different language. While I speak 3 languages that's far from sufficient, morealso google translations leave a lot to be desired outside English (as everything is designed in US,incl. date formats [mm/dd], units - inches and miles, etc.)

Accept-language doesn't do anything at all for google, either.
by Nursie | 2025-07-01 07:51:51+00:00
I mean, that's pretty flexible. At $17.99 (AUD) per month it could fit into the $1 step model, which starts at $0.99, maxing at $139.99

They charge $19.39 for the same subscription if you buy it direct. By the logic of Apple taking a 30% cut thereby pushing up the price of doing business, you'd think they could charge $12.59 to direct customers and take the same profit out.

(This is month by month subscriptions to NordVPN)
by avereveard | 2025-07-01 07:52:33+00:00
Why you quoting Wikipedia to me?

I literally linked the paper. The paper doesn't mention density.

"First three website you found on Google"'s opinion don't matter for a lot when we have the original formulation, right there, archived

And Wikipedia passage you quoted doesn't mention density either, only count.

I really, truly don't understand where your comment is coming from and going to.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-01 07:53:29+00:00
Oh yes I agree it's all theater. But we are a very big enterprise (though not big tech) but we're a very traditional company unfortunately.

We're also still working to go "on cloud" as our CIO wants. Because they want to be hip too.

Which in our case means lifting up an image of every server in our datacenter and moving it to a compute box on AWS that runs 24/7. This is not "cloud". It's just paying much more for someone else's server. There is no dynamic scaling or consumption-based billing. It's just setting money on fire so we can tick a box.

Of course we're also "on modern management" yet rely extremely heavily on SCCM policies. Always the same story here.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-01 07:53:48+00:00
Having IT roll up into me, I've seen way, way more batteries fail than SSDs. Screen failure [and hinge failure] is far more common than SSDs failing. Keyboard/touchpads fail more often. Charging bricks/cables also fail somewhat more than SSDs. Beyond that, in the low end of the laptop re-use market, "just blindly always buy and install a new SSD" breaks the economics pretty badly.

Look at the SMART stats, format the drive, and install your OS. For people shopping laptops under $250, that seems like a better path than a new SSD.
by scotty79 | 2025-07-01 07:54:42+00:00
> there's an intermediate step where somebody actually set a higher price

Yes. But the most common reason for setting up higher price is because you can, because there's more money flowing in the economy than it should be. Going into details is in the grand scheme of things about as useful as rearranging chairs on the Titanic.

> Why aren't there cheaper cars? Not because there's more money, but because nobody decided to make and sell a cheaper car. That's the stuff that we should be asking about.

Yes. But we should be asking why cars are 3% more expensive, because their prices rose by 29% while the inflation is "only" 26% (don't remember exact numbers), not why car prices rose 29%. If you don't deduct inflation you are interested in wrong things because large numbers make you think there's a drastic reason.

Does 3% even deserve and explanation? Isn't it fully explained by toxic advertising making consumer want heavier car year after year, that naturally cost more?
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-01 07:55:22+00:00
In most walks of life they're separate. The bulk of all education takes place outside of PhD programmes, and private sector research isn't done for its educational value. It's only universities that conflate the two and only at the upper levels. You can be pro-defunding-the-NSF and pro-education, they're not contradictory positions, especially for people who believe universities aren't providing good educations to begin with.
by scotty79 | 2025-07-01 07:56:17+00:00
> Inflation is completely possible with no change in money supply.

Money supply always changes. But yes, inflation is possible without changing money supply, if for example economy shrinks or there's some process that reactivated dormant capital that people had just sitting around and not being used by the economy.

In the end it's always the same thing. More money than it should be. It's just that "should be" is very complex and "more money" only a little bit simpler.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-01 07:56:39+00:00
This seems in stark contrast to others complaining enough about breaking updates that I haven't bothered to try it until it is deemed "stable".

Is it really that stable and flawless in terms of updates?

Because I'm sat here with ZFS, snapshotting and replication configured and wondering why people scare others off of it when the tools to mitigate issues are all free and should be used anyway as part of a bog-standard self-hosted stack.
by wezm | 2025-07-01 07:56:41+00:00
> - What's the package manager like, and how does it compare to say, pacman (especially in terms of update speeds and dependency handling)?

It's apk, so well known through Alpine Linux already. Dependency handling is elegant: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/apk/world

> - What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?

It's unremarkable in a good way. It works and I've not encountered any issues as a user. I've not run into any compatibility issues, most systemd units are usually easily translated. I kinda miss having a centralised journal. I think that's something q66 wants to address at some point.

> - Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...

Aside from the diff issue it's a non-issue. The Mac OS X userland is/was derived from them too, so there's already a lot of compatibility work been done. Most scripts that are intended to be run by a broad audience already stick to POSIX features.
by wickedsight | 2025-07-01 07:57:22+00:00
The best way to understand a car is to build a car. Hardly anyone is going to do that, but we still all use them quite well in our daily lives. In large part because the companies who build them spend time and effort to improve them and take away friction and complexity.

If you want to be an F1 driver it's probably useful to understand almost every part of a car. If you're a delivery driver, it probably isn't, even if you use one 40+ hours a week.