MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sabakhoj | 2025-08-05 20:44:27+00:00
I don't personally think there's that much value to this argument. Compare, for instance the consumption of 1 hour of tv vs. 1 hour of GPT usage:

A single AI chat message can consume 0.34 watt-hours of energy (1). So, let's say a hundred messages in an hour (quite an aggressive session) would be 34 watt-hours of energy.

An LCD TV running for an hour consumes about 100 watt-hours of energy, depending on size, LED, vs. OLED etc. (2).

I think AI does help people do better research faster, which is a significant uplift to humanity, while I do not see anyone specifically curbing their TV usage. We should probably focus our effrots on helping people use AI better and meanwhile build more nuclear energy plants, imo.

(1): https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...

(2): https://santannaenergyservices.com/how-many-watts-does-a-tv-...

---

And then consider the amount of energy traditionally required by one human to do the same research tasks. Also quite significant.

I think we should be focused on making the more efficient, for sure! But I don't buy that the arguments based on energy consumption are very strong.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-08-05 20:45:07+00:00
Of course you are wrong. "IEA's models project that data centres will use 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2030, roughly equivalent to the current annual electricity consumption of Japan." [1] And don't forget the recent announcement by Fermi America to build a 6 gigawatt nuclear datacenter in Texas. And what are we getting in return:

(1) AI is primarily used, by and far, to accelerate consumerism.

(2) AI has very few applications that are actually solving the world's problems (the world's problems are mostly nontechnical problems). The cited ones of scientific or medical are either too abstract, or else they are likely to make the problem worse. And in the case of medical, maybe the AI applications will help a few hundreds of thousands of people – but hurt/kill many more with its contribution to climate change. So not worth it.

I consider those who promote AI to be enemies of humanity and biological life since they are using a commodity that we should be using less of with reckless abandon.

1. https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/10/2019233/data-ce...
by sergioschuler | 2025-08-05 20:45:57+00:00
I spent 3 months "vibe coding" with Lovable as a non-technical PM.

It's both magical and infuriating.

My conclusion is that non-technical people CAN build simple prototypes, websites and internal tools, but would struggle to build production-grade products without any technical expertise. Think of current AI as a junior dev with outstanding syntax knowledge but terrible judgment.

Here are some things I learned in the last 3 months that seem to work well:

1. Treat it like a software development intern (write PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria)

2. Work in tiny increments—big changes confuse the hell out of it

3. Use the "Uncle Bob" persona for cleaner architecture

4. Always refactor when prompted (but test before/after)

5. Don't be afraid to revert and start over—code is now the cheap part

Insight about the future of product: When writing code becomes cheap, many experiments that would've been discarded can now be released. We're transitioning from discovery-heavy processes to rapid iteration in production. Engineers won't vanish—they'll take on more PM responsibilities. And PMs/UXers need to learn some engineering to ship independently too.

The best advice I can give you: if you're a product person still sitting on the sidelines, what are you waiting for? Start building.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-05 20:46:01+00:00
Here's a pair of quick sanity check questions I've been asking LLMs: "家系ラーメンについて教えて", "カレーの作り方教えて". It's a silly test but surprisingly many fails at it - and Chinese models are especially bad with it. The commonalities between models doing okay-ish for these questions seem to be Google-made OR >70b OR straight up commercial(so >200B or whatever).

I'd say gpt-oss-20b is in between Qwen3 30B-A3B-2507 and Gemma 3n E4b(with 30B-A3B at lower side). This means it's not obsoleting GPT-4o-mini for all purposes.
by simonw | 2025-08-05 20:46:07+00:00
Just posted my initial impressions, took a couple of hours to write them up because there's a lot in this release! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/5/gpt-oss/

TLDR: I think OpenAI may have taken the medal for best available open weight model back from the Chinese AI labs. Will be interesting to see if independent benchmarks resolve in that direction as well.

The 20B model runs on my Mac laptop using less than 15GB of RAM.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-05 20:46:16+00:00
RAM is the reason LLMs are so power inefficient. Shuttling weights and results from RAM to compute and back for everything is where most of the power goes.

It doesn't have to be that way. For a sufficiently large load, it makes sense to use reconfigurable hardware and bake in the constants and s dataflow at runtime.

Think of it like using an array of FPGAs large enough to hold the whole model unwound, yet that could be configured in seconds at runtime. You'd get tokens at 100 MHz or more .

You would think saving 95% or more on power and infrastructure for a given token rate would be worth it, especially when contemplating Trillion dollar outlays.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-05 20:46:42+00:00
AI eats the seedcorn. Anyone that needs space to grow? Crowded out. Entry level incomes, replaced. No more entry, sorry.

For all of human civilization the future has been built on the backs of those the came before (on the backs of giants). But that climb is slowing, maybe halting. Which then compounds when the new giants that would have risen up don't. AI replaces the messy, slow process of becoming with instant regurgitation, replaces those that would have grown. The future, built on the backs of giants, stalls when those giants never get the chance to rise.

AI is entropy weaponized against every layer of future progress. But everyone is too busy salivating at potential cost savings to see it.
by tristor | 2025-08-05 20:46:44+00:00
The Fujifilm GF63 f/2.8 R WR (50mm effective) prime lens weighs 405 grams and takes a 62mm filter. The Nikon Z 50mm f/1.4 weighs 420 grams and takes a 62mm filter.

As far as I'm concerned, the primes aren't particularly larger or heavier for MF than they are for FF, it's more that the higher resolution and larger sensor size creates physical limits that makes everything slower on MF. No 20fps burst shots in RAW at full resolution with a Fuji GFX100 II, it's only 5fps. That lack of speed is reflected everywhere, because it's doing it on a sensor that's twice the size and twice the resolution, but otherwise it seemed like a pretty amazing camera to me. Speed for me is important though, so I stuck with a Nikon Z8.
by supplied_demand | 2025-08-05 20:46:46+00:00
==But you don't think that admitting, say, half the populations of all the world's best-known failed countries like Somalia, Haiti, Syria, El Salvador, DRC, etc.==

This has never happened, is not happening now, and has not been proposed by any current political party. Open borders is a falsehood that has never existed in our lifetimes and nobody is proposing today. If we are going to discuss the topic, let's stick with reality.

At the same time, my ancestors who immigrated from southern Italy didn't speak English, were very uneducated, weren't considered "white", didn't have the same cultural expectations, and brought all their problems with them. All of this happened during the golden age of American progress and growth (the exact era we are trying to "make again"). I find that interesting.

==such a newcomer is well-suited to get ahead by subverting the Western societal framework, such as by taking advantage of our lax approach to property crimes==

And yet, study after study shows us that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens [0] [1] [2] [3]. Let's move past the fake hypotheticals and discuss the known facts.

[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31440/w314...

[1] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-10/working-pa...

[2] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/05/13/is-there-a-con...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-...
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-05 20:47:10+00:00
For a dash of irony, I asked Google Gemini to summarize:

The article "The Men Who Killed Google" by Ed Zitron argues that Google's search engine has declined due to a shift from a user-centric approach to a revenue-focused one. The author pinpoints Prabhakar Raghavan, with the support of CEO Sundar Pichai, as the key individuals behind this change.

The article details a "code yellow" in February 2019, declared by the ads team, due to underperforming search revenue. This led to a conflict between the ads and finance teams, who wanted to boost revenue at any cost, and the search team, which prioritized user experience.

Following this, Google implemented several changes, including a March 2019 update that rolled back quality improvements and a May 2019 ad redesign that made ads look like organic search results. In May 2020, Raghavan replaced Ben Gomes as the head of Google Search. The author notes Raghavan's history at Yahoo, where he was head of search from 2005 to 2012, a period during which Yahoo's search market share significantly dropped.

Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and growth over product quality.
by gopher_space | 2025-08-05 20:47:14+00:00
He doesn't believe there are hundreds of Fabrice Bellard clones who think working at your company wouldn't be a waste of their time. The myth might be that thinking about 10X is useful in any sense. You can't plan around one gracing you with their presence and you won't be able to retain them when they do.

Thinking about it personally, a 10X label means I'm supposedly the smartest person in the room and that I'm earning 1/10th what I should be. Both of those are huge negatives.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-08-05 20:47:31+00:00
> I could have fiber, but I see no point in upgrading from DSL. Why? It works. In fact, I could have upgraded to 250 Mbit DSL years and years ago, but 100 Mbit is fine. Why bother spending money or time making changes to my home's critical infrastructure. I doubt I'm the only one.

We get 250 Mbit into our house and our house has Ethernet cables going through the walls to different floors but the cables are all limited 100 Mbit and it is tilting me of the face of the planet... :(

Replacing them isn't much of an option, just maybe running other cables around the walls, which isn't the nicest option when the existing cables are all nicely not visible.
by tptacek | 2025-08-05 20:47:49+00:00
I'm not complaining about "strong language", I'm saying: my post didn't say anything about "10x developers", and was just cited to me as the source of this post's claims about 10x'ing.

I'm not offended at all. I'm saying: no, I'm not a valid cite for that idea. If the author wants to come back and say "10x developer", a term they used twenty five times in this piece, was just a rhetorical flourish, something they conjured up themselves in their head, that's great! That would resolve this small dispute neatly. Unfortunately: you can't speak for them.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-08-05 20:48:10+00:00
> I think AI does help people do better research faster, which is a significant uplift to humanity,

One must consider both sides. Better research also contributes (no question) to more consumerism and the furthering of technology, which also uses more fossil fuels. It's time we acknowledged that research isn't free, and all of the damage to the biosphere was mainly enabled by science.

And AI uses a huge ton of energy. For example, according to [1], "In Ireland, [...] electricity demand from data centres represented 17% of the country’s total electricity consumption for 2022". And we also have to consider the raw materials and mining used.

1. In Ireland, where the data centre market is developing rapidly, electricity demand from data centres represented 17% of the country’s total electricity consumption for 2022
by Sophira | 2025-08-05 20:48:24+00:00
Mathematically, base64 is such that every block of three characters of raw input will result in four characters of base64'd output.

These blocks can be considered independent of each other. So for example, with the string "Hello world", you can do the following base64 transformations:

* "Hel" -> "SGVs"

* "lo " -> "bG8g"

* "wor" -> "d29y"

* "ld" -> "bGQ="

These encoded blocks can then be concatenated together and you have your final encoded string: "SGVsbG8gd29ybGQ="

(Notice that the last one ends in an equals sign. This is because the input is less than 3 characters, and so in order to produce 4 characters of output, it has to apply padding - part of which is encoded in the third digit as well.)

It's important to note that this is simply a byproduct of the way that base64 works, not actually an intended thing. My understanding is that it's basically like how if you take an ASCII character - which could be considered a base 256 digit - and convert it to hexadecimal (base 16), the resulting hex number will always be two digits long - the same two digits, at that - even if the original was part of a larger string.

In this case, every three base 256 digits will convert to four base 64 digits, in the same way that it would convert to six base 16 digits.
by hartator | 2025-08-05 20:48:26+00:00
> 1 min read

What the point of these?

Kind of interesting that we live in an area of AI super advanced, but still make basic UI/UX mistake. The tagline of this blog post shouldn't be "1 min read".

It's not even accurate. I timed myself not reading fast but not slow, took me 3 min 30s. Maybe the images need be OCRed to make the estimation more accurate.
by monkeyelite | 2025-08-05 20:48:49+00:00
> Proposing extreme religious nepotism as a good counter-measure

Please read the thread again.

This is not a prescription. This is a description of how high trust markets work.

See this classic economics paper “Jewish Diamond Merchants in New York”: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=349040
by cogman10 | 2025-08-05 20:49:03+00:00
The rural telco situation is pretty good. In fact, better in many cases than what you get in larger cities.

The issue is there's some perverse incentives at play with the grant monies. For brand new neighborhoods you can expect state of the art internet being available. However, after it's installed, you can expect it to be simply locked in place with no upgrades.

A major problem comes down to easements. If there's a utility pole nearby then some federal regulations make it super easy for a utility to just add their line onto the existing pole. There are access guarantees.

However, if no pole exists then you are looking at buried lines. That means each time you want to cross someone's driveway or property you need to reach out to the existing owner to negotiate access. Some people are easy to work with, others will just flat out deny access. (The BLM, for example, is notoriously hard to work with for placing underground utilities. As are a few big churches).

The US, frankly, has the wrong model. Leaving everything up to private companies is what creates all these problems. The companies have absolutely no way to guarantee a route for service and they have little skin in the game to run an update.

At a bare minimum, the better model is to make utilities public (at very least the lines themselves.) That gives the government a powerful ability, the ability to claim eminent domain to cram through any improvement they need. You could still have private ISPs, but you can relegate their roles to just running the equipment (switches, routers, etc) rather than doing all the additional line management work.
by kelnos | 2025-08-05 20:49:24+00:00
Because the offerings are not simple. Your Nike example is silly; everyone knows what to do with shoes and shorts and shirts, and why they might want (or not want) to buy those particular items from Nike.

But for someone who hasn't been immersed in the "LLM scene", it's hard to understand why you might want to use one particular model of another. It's hard to understand why you might want to do per-request API pricing vs. a bucketed usage plan. This is a new technology, and the landscape is changing weekly.

I think maybe it might be nice if folks around here were a bit more charitable and empathetic about this stuff. There's no reason to get all gatekeep-y about this kind of knowledge, and complaining about these questions just sounds condescending and doesn't do anyone any good.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-08-05 20:49:32+00:00
Many things don't have to be the way they are. But as long as the powerful big tech can subsidize their costs on the commons of the environment in the form of environmental damage without regulation, they will only pay lip service to making things more efficient. Money is a much more powerful motivator to the unscrupulous than protecting the long-term health of the commons.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-05 20:49:45+00:00
> It's widely known that X11 has a problem with, for example, keyloggers. The issue is not that keyloggers are possible through security holes -- but keyloggers are trivial on X11, as they are part of normal operation and don't require exploits. It is one of the reasons why people push for Wayland.

Sorry, but did I miss news about a keylogger epidemic? On Linux?

In all seriousness, is this solving an actual problem or an imagined one?

And even assuming a 'Yes': A problem that isn't better solved elsewhere? How did the keylogger get access to the system and its desktop session? What else does it have access to?
by morpheos137 | 2025-08-05 20:50:24+00:00
There is a YouTube channel that anaylzes the core problem in depth. Compression vs. tension is really a red herring because in a closed convex structure compression somewhere is tension elsewhere. The real problem is the carbon fiber maxtrix was wapped around the epoxy filler without tension like paper mache. So it had insufficient strength and non homogeneous strength. The sub was built up like an onion. Concentric layers of carbon fiber epoxy thermoset. I think it was something like 5 layers. Anyway because the layers were not wrapped tight before curing there were ripples in the surface of each layer. Subsequent layers were applied after sanding down high spots and applying a wrap of double sided adhesive tape between each layer (no joke). So not only were the carbon fibers not pretensioned but also they were cut in hundreds of spots. This is somewhat like if one were to pour layers of reinforced concrete by throwing a bunch of loose rebar in a hole, pouring concrete over it and then cuting pieces of rebar that stuck up before applying the next layer after putting a layer of plaster over it. For carbon fiber composites and concrete to be strong tension bearing elements need to be able to bear tension. If they are loose in the matrix or cut the composite will not be strong. Thus carbon fiber was not the problem but rather its manufacturing process. Anyone who has ever done drywall joints or autobody can understand the problem. It doesn't take an engineering degree to understand that if you wreck the tensile components of your composite it will be much less strong than if the composite is laid down properly!
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-08-05 20:50:25+00:00
The thing is, if I'm looking for how something is wrong, I'm looking for substantive criticism. If someone says something like "yeah okay great system design but only BILLIONAIRES are going to be using this so late stage capitalism <insert rant on inequality here>" then that's not really substantive it's more of a rant by the author disguised as criticism. When a culture of criticism and negativity sets in you get a lot more of these rant-forms of tangential criticism than substantive criticism because it's much easier to write unsubstantive criticism than substantive criticism. Couple this with a tendency for folks to comment on titles rather than articles and you can get a ton of negativity slop all written in less time than it takes to read the article.

It's a fine line. A culture too positive and you get shills and "+1 that looks great" repeated endlessly. A culture too negative and you get tangential rants disguised as criticism.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-08-05 20:50:33+00:00
But I still need to remember what to search for, and they're not always straight forward. The agent writes and organizes the scripts/commands I use frequently, and references them as a starting point. It all started by having an agent look at my shell history.

It's faster than I am, and it knows things like ffmpeg flags I don't care to memorize.

Even opencode running on a local model is decent at this.
by voxleone | 2025-08-05 20:50:42+00:00
There’s something ironic here. For decades, we dreamed of semi-automating software development. CASE tools, UML, and IDEs all promised higher-level abstractions that would "let us focus on the real logic."

Now that LLMs have actually fulfilled that dream — albeit by totally different means — many devs feel anxious, even threatened. Why? Because LLMs don’t just autocomplete. They generate. And in doing so, they challenge our identity, not just our workflows.

I think Colton’s article nails the emotional side of this: imposter syndrome isn’t about the actual 10x productivity (which mostly isn't real), it’s about the perception that you’re falling behind. Meanwhile, this perception is fueled by a shift in what “software engineering” looks like.

LLMs are effectively the ultimate CASE tools — but they arrived faster, messier, and more disruptively than expected. They don’t require formal models or diagrams. They leap straight from natural language to executable code. That’s exciting and unnerving. It collapses the old rites of passage. It gives power to people who don’t speak the “sacred language” of software. And it forces a lot of engineers to ask: What am I actually doing now?