MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-05 20:50:44+00:00
Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or anything really awful like that.

But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).

I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).

Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.

A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-08-05 20:51:06+00:00
Let's not also forget material use. According to [1], "Global AI demand is expected to consume 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters of water by 2027, surpassing Denmark’s total annual water withdrawal of 4-6 billion cubic meters." And there's also all the mining required for the materials to build the computers, and the fossil fuels shipping them and making them in the first place in places like Taiwan.

Reference:

1. https://unric.org/en/artificial-intelligence-how-much-energy...
by scott_w | 2025-08-05 20:51:35+00:00
I don’t think it’s quite as bad, though? It’s using a known compression library that (from reading other comments) has seen use and testing. The rest of PNG would remain unchanged, as the decompression format is a plugin.

I know it needs to be battle tested as a single entity but it’s not the same as writing a new image format from scratch.
by kasey_junk | 2025-08-05 20:51:46+00:00
I think maybe this is another disconnect. A lot of the advantage I get does not come from the agent doing things faster than me, though for most tasks it certainly can.

A lot of the advantage is that it can make forward progress when I can’t. I can check to see if an agent is stuck, and sometimes reprompt it, in the downtime between meetings or after lunch before I start whatever deep thinking session I need to do. That’s pure time recovered for me. I wouldn’t have finished _any_ work with that time previously.

I don’t need to optimize my time around babysitting the agent. I can do that in the margins. Watching the agents is low context work. That adds the capability to generate working solutions during times that was previously barred from that.
by kelnos | 2025-08-05 20:51:50+00:00
> Shoe shopping is pretty complex, more so than trialing an AI model in my opinion.

Oh c'mon, now you're just being disingenuous, trying to make an argument for argument's sake.

No, shoe shopping is not more complicated than trialing a LLM. For all of those questions about shoes you are posing, either a) a purchaser won't care and won't need to ask them, or b) they already know they have specific requirements and will know what to ask.

With an LLM, a newbie doesn't even know what they're getting into, let alone what to ask or where to start.

> By comparison I can try 10 different AI services without even needing to stand up for a break

I can't. I have no idea how to do that. It sounds like you've been following the space for a while, and you're letting your knowledge blind you to the idea that many (most?) people don't have your experience.
by neom | 2025-08-05 20:51:55+00:00
It's interesting to me people really hate AI gen'd music, some people I know literally won't listen to it and just like... get kinda angry I even tried to show them what I made (so I stopped showing people for now). I have a good memory for sound, but whatever neurodiversity I have makes learning instruments (and math, and written words, and and) super challenging. I loved screwing around remixing stuff in Abelton, but I've not touched it since suno. I just looked at my suno library, I've gen'd 1,100 tracks since March 18th, 2024. The levels of audiophile or...musicophile? is pretty wide, but I don't think I'm a total n00b and I think some of the stuff I've made is actually pretty good, even if I do say so myself (and I'm fine even if I just make it for myself to listen to, as that's what I always did anyway). :)
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-05 20:52:05+00:00
I'm fairly certain that literally every doctor tells literally every patient this. Mine sure did. It's also on the handout your pharmacy gives you, the website for the drug, and in fine print at the bottom of most commercials.

Nobody expects a single does of ibuprofen to cure your headaches for life. Similarly, this doesn't "fix" your biochemistry for life, you have to take it in order for it to work.
by tetha | 2025-08-05 20:52:19+00:00
Reminds me of 1213486160[1]

Besides that, I just spent way too much time figuring out this is an encrypted OpenTofu state. It just looked way too much like a terraform state but not entirely. Tells ya what I spend a lot of time with at work.

This is probably another interesting situation in which you cannot read the state, but you can observe changes and growth by observing the ciphertext. It's probably fine, but remains interesting.

1: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-08-05 20:52:19+00:00
I am not really into Hollywood, and would rather see investment in projects that I could see better success from when it comes to community impact.

Something like cheap open hardware, lowering manufacturing costs, or even just the development of open and free to access standards.

I think the benefit a buyer sees when they look at the Hollywood industry, and a studio or movie is a complex web. You have value in the IP even if the movie did mediocre you could try for a game spinoff or a sequel. Then their is the publicity. You own the studio or movie, and if an actor does blow up people might suddenly return to watch your product and IP you own, even if it was considered a bad film.
by zahirbmirza | 2025-08-05 20:52:23+00:00
Design and aesthetics should be aligned for optimum function. Perfect design will almost always align perfectly with something that is aesthetic. Look at the form function of most phones, design and aesthetics have reached a singularity. Compare to the apple mouse, superficially ok, great superficial looks, but poorly designed as it does not do the job as well as a well designed product should.

The iPhone's invention was the result of deeply intentional design.

I do agree somewhat however; it is a pointless obsession to put aesthetics over function. The macbook 12 inch's keyboard is a case that proves your point.
by pcai | 2025-08-05 20:52:28+00:00
> For this argument to work you have to believe that decreasing the price of service delivery wouldn't decrease the price of health insurance.

I think we are talking past each other. My argument is not that lower prices for medical services wouldn’t lead to lower insurance costs. My argument is specifically that increasing supply doesn’t necessarily lead to lower prices for medical services. It would be quite a finding if US cities with more doctors per capita have cheaper medical services but if anything the opposite is true
by throw0101d | 2025-08-05 20:52:52+00:00
> Why are options like dropping the bomb in Tokyo Bay, further off the coast, or in less populated areas not treated as serious alternatives? Why did the bombs have to be dropped on cities?

To show their destructive power. That one plane could do as much damage as dozens / hundreds.

What would blowing up water show? What would blowing up an empty field show? What would blowing up an already-flatten city (like Tokyo) show? There is no shock value to dropping an atomic bomb on a non-target.

Arthur Compton, the scientist who led the plutonium side of the Manhattan Project recalled that:

> It was evident that everyone would suspect trickery. If a bomb were exploded in Japan with previous notice, the Japanese air power was still adequate to give serious interference. An atomic bomb was an intricate device, still in the developmental stage. Its operation would be far from routine. If during the final adjustments of the bomb the Japanese defenders should attack, a faulty move might easily result in some kind of failure. Such an end to an advertised demonstration of power would be much worse than if the attempt had not been made. It was now evident that when the time came for the bombs to be used we should have only one of them available, followed afterwards by others at all-too-long intervals. We could not afford the chance that one of them might be a dud. If the test were made on some neutral territory, it was hard to believe that Japan's determined and fanatical military men would be impressed. If such an open test were made first and failed to bring surrender, the chance would be gone to give the shock of surprise that proved so effective. On the contrary, it would make the Japanese ready to interfere with an atomic attack if they could. Though the possibility of a demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, no one could suggest a way in which it could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war.

Even with dropping the first bomb the Japanese War Cabinet wasn't willing to consider surrendering. It took two bombings for the message to sink in (and even then it was a 3-3 tie, and the Emperor had to be called in to break the stalemate): that is the fact any counterfactual has to contend with, that the two bombings barely got the ball over the line.

And even after the Emperor and Cabinet had made the decision there were still people willing to fight on and overthrow the government:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
by mindcrash | 2025-08-05 20:52:59+00:00
"The past year of headlines might suggest that jerking users around with unwanted new features is the domain of a select few companies pushing a specific sort of tech. It turns out tech businesses in a much lighter weight class can do it too."

1. I wouldn't call Atlassian exactly lightweight.

2. You can build a whole well-paid career around making one of their other "fantastic" products, Jira, actually work in a productive way
by nijave | 2025-08-05 20:53:48+00:00
I get notifications when packages are delivered which limits the window for porch pirates.

I have a daily news feed of animal activity so I can see what the little neighborhood cats, raccoons, and skunks were up to last night. I was originally using it to alert me when the neighborhood stray was on the back porch so I could come down and feed her (without risking other critters finding the food)
by eqvinox | 2025-08-05 20:54:13+00:00
> Keep in mind that X11 is a protocol, so the client might not be running as your user on your local machine, it could be a dedicated machine that's only running the client.

For an X server to be network exposed, you first have to either SSH forward it or remove the nowadays-default "-nolisten TCP", and then either get the xauth secret or have the user do 'xhost +'.

At that point I'm gonna say the attacker earned their keylogger access.

And you or your distro might consider patching out the TCP variant.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-05 20:54:14+00:00
Now that I think about it, this really summarises why I keep paying for Kagi.

I can just search something, glance at the results and pick the one that seems the closest one to whatever I'm looking for.

With Google, I have to first go "is this an ad pretending to be a search result?", then I need to spend more time looking that the domain and preview to see if it's some listicle crap or AI slop. Only then I can click the result.
by lukev | 2025-08-05 20:54:17+00:00
This is precisely the wrong way to think about LLMs.

LLMs are never going to have fact retrieval as a strength. Transformer models don't store their training data: they are categorically incapable of telling you where a fact comes from. They also cannot escape the laws of information theory: storing information requires bits. Storing all the world's obscure information requires quite a lot of bits.

What we want out of LLMs is large context, strong reasoning and linguistic facility. Couple these with tool use and data retrieval, and you can start to build useful systems.

From this point of view, the more of a model's total weight footprint is dedicated to "fact storage", the less desirable it is.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-05 20:55:15+00:00
They're struggling because we don't have actors of caliber to the past.

Just look at Costner, Freeman, Kidman, Reeves, Jackson or Willis (pre 2010) and ask who in the f-ing world can replace them.

And it's not just about acting it's the willingness to be actively participating in making it the best damn movie possible.

The lack of all that HAS reflected in box office sales.
by zevon | 2025-08-05 20:55:33+00:00
Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.

I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
by atonse | 2025-08-05 20:55:43+00:00
I always remember the scene in Jurassic Park when they try to feed a goat to the T-Rex, he doesn't show up, and then Jeff Goldblum says "T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed. He wants to hunt."

This seems partially to be like that, mostly out of compassion. Nobody wants their pet to be hunted like in the wild, but at least the rest of the process can continue.

I think of this line (and the general sentiment) a lot in life. I don't want to be handed a reward. I want to earn it.
by rolfus | 2025-08-05 20:56:07+00:00
I'm one of those excited people! We haven't lost anything with this new technology, only gained.

The way I see it, most people aren't creative. And the people who are creatives are mostly creating for the love of it. Most books that are published are read exclusively by the friends and family of the author. Most musicians, most stand-up comedians, most artist get to show off their works for small groups of people and make no money doing so. But they do it anyway. I draw terrible portraits, make little inventions and sometimes I build something for the home, knowing full well that I do these things for my own enjoyment and whatever ego boost I get from showing these things off to people I know.

I'm doing a marathon later and I've been working my ass off for the prospect of crossing the finishing line as number four thousand and something, and I'll do it again next year.
by rglover | 2025-08-05 20:56:25+00:00
> There could be a crash that exceeds the dot com bust, at a time when the political situation through which such a crash would be navigated would be nightmarish.

If the general theme of this article is right (that it's a bubble soon to burst), I'm less concerned about the political environment and more concerned about the insane levels of debt.

If AI is indeed the thing propping up the economy, when that busts, unless there are some seriously unpopular moves made (Volcker level interest rates, another bailout leading to higher taxes, etc), then we're heading towards another depression. Likely one that makes the first look like a sideshow.

The only thing preventing that from coming true IMO is dollar hegemony (and keeping the world convinced that the world's super power having $37T of debt and growing is totally normal if you'd just accept MMT).
by satvikpendem | 2025-08-05 20:56:40+00:00
To an extent, yes, but companies are investing more into renewable sources of energy anyway, and you might even get a demand-side effect where the cost of supply of energy is incentivized to go down due to higher competition.

But I assume your friends are justifying this in more of an ideological way than you'd think, because there are lots of things that are more environmentally damaging than data centers, and even for data centers it's not like we haven't been using Google and Facebook for 20 years when the same concerns of energy would've been there.

What I've seen is people dressing up the Luddite argument of losing economics of living into a lot of other arguments like energy usage, when in reality I doubt they really give a shit about that over environmental degradation in other areas of their life.
by hughw | 2025-08-05 20:56:52+00:00
Is anyone else receiving crap like this? "Lucky"?

Dear Dr. [myname],

I hope this email finds you well.

My name is lucky,and I am a receiving editor currently handling submissions for multiple SCOPUS-indexed journals. These journals are dedicated to fostering high-quality research and advancing scholarly discourse across various disciplines. At present, they are actively seeking innovative and impactful research contributions, and I would like to extend a sincere invitation for you to submit your valuable work for consideration.

We recognize the significance of your expertise and the effort that goes into producing meaningful research. If you have a manuscript ready or are in the process of developing a research project, I would be happy to provide further details on the submission process, journal options, and any other relevant information. Our editorial team is committed to ensuring a smooth and transparent review process, providing constructive feedback, and facilitating the timely dissemination of quality research.

If you are interested, please feel free to reach out with any questions or for guidance on submission requirements. I would be delighted to assist you in any way possible. I look forward to your response and the opportunity to collaborate with you in bringing valuable research to a wider audience.

Best regards, Lucky Receiving Editor
by radicaldreamer | 2025-08-05 20:56:52+00:00
Apple’s App Store makes so much revenue (mainly through the slightly more legit scams like gacha games, but plenty through weekly subscriptions for outright scam apps too) that there are many incentives for that team to never clean this up.

It’s a huge driver of what Apple pushes as the future of the company: services. It has been this way for more than a decade now: "What the hell is this????Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings? Remember our talk bout becoming the 'Nordstroms' of stores in quality of service?“ - Phil Schiller in 2012 (https://www.imore.com/hilarious-phil-schiller-email-reveals-...)
by weego | 2025-08-05 20:57:01+00:00
It definitely has a use case for prototyping sound design, which can be either incredibly time consuming or require an awful lot of niche expensive gear. Something like playing around to get an unusual drone can take a lot of time and effort. Being able to 'describe it' and get 80%+ there is a huge win.

And if you're focused on chopping up samples and sounds on an ableton push or similar this can be a tool of endless possibilities.
by gruez | 2025-08-05 20:57:05+00:00
If you're talking about the stuff they added that detects crypto mining and then hobbles performance, that's not really a "killwitch", it's just product segmentation. Windows for instance has a totally arbitrary limit that non-server editions can't have more than one RDP session going on the same time. This is a purely artificial constraint, but you can hardly claim that that's a "killswitch".
by satvikpendem | 2025-08-05 20:57:48+00:00
> nuclear datacenter

Nuclear is good though, it's the single densest source of energy in the world (and, well, outside of it too).

I don't get your argument though, where has it "accelerated consumerism?" And you can't be serious about its medical applications, I doubt more people would die from its incremental climate change effects (as compared to, say, car accidents, much less car pollution in cities) as compared to being saved from death. Even outside of the scientific fields, AI sure is solving a lot of my problems, saying one is an "enemy of humanity" is the sort of hyperbole I'd only see on HN.
by j_timberlake | 2025-08-05 20:57:57+00:00
I don't know how on Earth people can think like this. Most people can find "value" in a slice of pizza. It doesn't even have to be a good pizza.

Or kittens and puppies. Do you think there won't be kittens and puppies?

And that's putting aside all the obvious space-exploration stuff that will probably be more interesting than anything the previous 100 billion humans ever saw.
by Animats | 2025-08-05 20:58:09+00:00
"Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined."

If this isn't the Singularity, there's going to be a big crash. What we have now is semi-useful, but too limited. It has to get a lot better to justify multiple companies with US $4 trillion valuations. Total US consumer spending is about $16 trillion / yr.

Remember the Metaverse/VR/AR boom? Facebook/Meta did somehow lose upwards of US$20 billion on that. That was tiny compared to the AI boom.