MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-09-27 18:01:17+00:00
So much easier in many ways.

You can train in stages.

First stage, either digitally generate (synthetic) basic movements, or record basic human recorded movements of a model. The former is probably better and an generate endless variation.

But the model is only trying to control joint angles, position etc. no worries about controlling power. The simulate system has no complications like friction.

The you train with friction, joint viscosity, power deviance from demand based on up, down times, fade, etc.

Then train in a complex simulated environment.

Then train for control.

Etc.

The point being, robotic control is easy to be broken down into small steps of capability.

That massively improves training speed and efficiency, even potentially smaller models.

It is also a fear simpler task by many orders of magnitude to learning the corpus of the written internet.

Comparable to that, would be training an AI to operate with any land, sea or air device. Which, nobody today is trying, (AFAIK)
by Uvix | 2025-09-27 18:01:42+00:00
Different plans from the same company, even of the same type, don't always cover the same things at the same rates. This is especially true of self-insured plans for large employers - there's certain mandatory things they legally have to cover, but anything beyond that is all up to the individual employers' discretion (since they're paying all the claims directly, as opposed to paying a monthly per-participant fee).
by forgotoldacc | 2025-09-27 18:02:09+00:00
Pretty much everyone on earth is proud of their home area. I've never really been to a place where people didn't describe their home as one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Earth has a lot of nice places. The flatness of Indiana can be calming and beautiful. But if you're driving on main roads, it's not very exciting, and it's not the kind of exciting people will fly across the world to see. And that was the point in the article.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-09-27 18:02:12+00:00
Continuing from my above post, below is a longish case in point about a ~related pendulum swing.

I was my wife's caregiver for a quarter century, primarily for mental health issues. During some periods of vulnerability she would disappear and odds were high she'd be in risky environments.

Getting cooperation with police (in whatever area I suspected she'd gotten to) during these periods was often difficult. The reason is that men that invented or leveraged mental health issues as a means to gaslight their wives/SO.

This was a thing that police ran into with some regularity. Conversely, men who had been a longterm and experienced caregiver to a spouse with mental health challenges was so rare, I might be their only example.

Me and these manipulative men present pretty much the same way - and police had necessarily been trained on the latter. There hadn't been enough of me to put me on the radar (and still aren't, afaict.)

The result is that police were generally unwilling to work with me and she stayed vulnerable a lot longer than she would have otherwise. The pendulum had swung to a place that made one woman less safe than it once would have.

The solution here isn't forcing the pendulum back to a place where police could be manipulated into helping men gaslight the women in their lives. The natural pendulum swing would be one where there's be a process where I could present myself to police as an authentic and trustworthy caregiver.

But that isn't a just-do-it-and-be-done solution. The reality that necessitated that police learn how to recognize and handle gaslighting men introduced a layer of complexity. Recognizing and working with me would be yet another layer of complexity - an even more complex one by nature of where it landed (atop what gaslighters created).

What actually (if indirectly) left my wife more vulnerable here wasn't police who failed to assess me. It was a culture where men learned how to gaslight their wives and could operate that way with some success.

The most useful and lasting solution should be one that addresses the creation men who harmfully manipulate others in gainful way.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-09-27 18:02:22+00:00
My understanding is that this is only really true for straightforward things like, say, a therapist. If they only have a couple of codes that they bill and they accept a limited number of insurance providers, then they can probably tell you what you'll pay (although I believe there are still a lot of edge cases).

However, if it's something like a surgery at a major health system, then it's way more complicated. The health system can't be as selective about what insurance they take, so they're dealing with medicare, medicaid, plans sold on the individual/small business market, and employer-sponsored plans. So way more than a few providers and a few types of plans. I checked the stats for my state and just the individual/small business market is 12 providers and 250+ plans. Medicare Advantage is at least 14 providers. A major hospital system probably accepts thousands, if not tens of thousands of different types of plans. Then you have to consider that the anesthesiologist, the surgeon, and the facility are all separate providers who may not all take the same insurance.
by AfterHIA | 2025-09-27 18:04:26+00:00
We were actually having a discussion about this earlier. Perhaps you could chime in as you've got, "a handle on the thing."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395396 (ctrl + f, "Velvet Underground" to find relevant posts)

Yeah this is a seriously a great resource especially in how it goes back to the early days. I didn't immediately find an, "entry" for Delia Derbyshire but Daphne Oram is there. I remember spending hours on Wikipedia as a kid doing research trying to develop an involved understanding of what drove innovation in electronic music. This will put a future, "me" that much further along. Great work.

"Pump your loins children."
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-27 18:04:52+00:00
Metro micro doesn’t scale at all. It is still limited to pilot study areas. Cost per trip is absurd compared to traditional bussing. One of the stated goals of the next gen bus plan in LA was to get a bus stop in a 10 min walk of 85% of the workers in LA county and this was achieved.

The real trouble with transit is people choose where they live based on car convenience rather than transit convenience. So they open an app and go “gee I can drive to work in 30 mins but I have to take two or three busses and three times the time on transit.” And write it off forever, rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work. The way LA county is developed is that there are apartments basically in every neighborhood anyhow without very strong neighborhood specific effects on pricing. Housing a little more neighborhood specific but that changes as townhomes and other sort of not-detached-sfh buying opportunities come to bear generally in neighborhoods with demand for a song compared to detached housing.
by seadan83 | 2025-09-27 18:05:09+00:00
> UK sent stuff to USSR

Yes, but that wasn't part of the "lend lease" program.

The quantity of materials sent from the UK to the USSR was significant. Just it was not part of the lend lease program. (Arguably this is something better, just direct aid without strings attached).

The quantities of what the UK gave to the USSR was a sacrifice of blood and treasure: "food and raw materials, roughly £30 billion in today’s money. This included 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft, while public charitable donations provided approximately £5.3 million (roughly £490 million in today’s money) in medical stores...."

"Some of these supplies were purchased in the United States (US) by the UK for delivery directly to the USSR. Most British supplies were carried by sea to Northern Russia, docking at Archangel or Murmansk, by a series of Arctic convoys, which were subject to sustained German attacks from three dimensions from powerful German forces based in Northern Norway" [1]

> I heard that the USSR received $1 trillion worth of stuff in 2025 dollars from it WWII allies

Sounds plausible (I would hesitate to repeat it without seeing the data behind the numbers). I'm curious how the number breaks down as a relative amount.

[1] https://www.geostrategy.org.uk/britains-world/telling-the-tr...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-27 18:05:52+00:00
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. AI only worked when you had an internet full of people taking their time to post/help others out. When AI takes those peoples jobs, they stop posting. I don't post anything AI useful on public sites (I answer peoples questions via DM if I want to help).

Imagine the constraint on every breaking change going forward being 'can AI be trained to handle these changes against the pre-AI training dataset'. Because AI is an inertia machine. It takes all the momentum from everything it touches. Next step after it takes the devs jobs is to freeze out all breaking changes that could make the AI training set useless (and we don't have a new one yet, because it's a new breaking change, and also because, you know, no one is posting knowledge for free AI scrapping anymore, yay, huge step forward for humankind!!!). Inertia machine sucking the momentum out of everything.

They tried working with a movie studio for a video tool. They needed more movies than the output of the studio. How do you train in new things if you just happen to need 5 studios worth of 'new thing' but output is all from 'old thing' and AI generated? Inertia machine.
by mbStavola | 2025-09-27 18:05:54+00:00
Except the largest Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, does federate with Threads. I'm not even sure if the list you provided even covers most of the top instances either.

It really feels like an "eating your cake and having it too" kinda situation: you get the engagement and interaction with millions of Threads users but you don't have to count them in your decentralization metrics.
by oofbey | 2025-09-27 18:05:59+00:00
I hear you that it feels like something is off. The lack of diversity feels like we're losing robustness in the ecosystem. But it can be a good thing too. A lot of security issues are concentrated into one stack that is very well maintained. So that means everything built on top of it shares the same attack surface. Which yes means it can all come crashing down at once, but also that there are many eyes looking for vulnerabilities and they'll get fixed quickly. Similarly perf optimizations are all shared, and when thing get this popular can get pushed down into hardware even.

It's not like we see a lot of downsides that the world collectively agreed on TCP/IP over IPX/SPX or DECNet or X.25. Or that the linux kernel is everywhere.
by davidcbc | 2025-09-27 18:06:12+00:00
You didn't point to his numbers so that wasn't clear, but either way, Silver has beef with bsky because he isn't popular there and he likes to whine about it.

The usage numbers I've seen are down from their peak last November but have mostly stabilized at this point. The devs say they have multiple years of runway, and each time there is an exodus from twitter the numbers have a sharp increase and then decline to a stable number higher than they started.

13 months ago there were 200k daily likers and now there are 1.2 million. Yes, that is down from the highest peak directly after the election, but the 1.2 million has been fairly steady for the past ~4 months and if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-27 18:06:47+00:00
You can fight the economic forces, but you can't win. The moment you stop pushing against them is the moment the economic reality reasserts itself.

Even if one administration was all in on fossil fuel, and fully opposed to renewables? Best it can do is buy fossil fuels some time, in one country only.

In the meanwhile, renewable power is going to get even cheaper - because there are still improvements to be made and economies of scale to be had in renewables. Fossil fuel power not so much. The economic incentives to abandon fossil fuels would only grow over time.

This is the kind of power the right technology has.
by fathermarz | 2025-09-27 18:08:18+00:00
> How do you define “malicious”?

Malicious to me is intent. Microsoft does not store my emails to snoop or to potentially steal my assets. It Is a side effect of the systems they have created to ease user friction.

Some might argue that they want my data or behaviour (which is snooping) but exactly what has been said, my subscription fee is the value they extract from me and their enterprise value is the stickiness and the experience they provide.

To be clear, I am not a Microsoft fan, but I think it is safe to assume that Microsoft would not scrape my crypto wallets or bank account information to steal the entirety of my liquid assets. I can’t say the same for actors that plunk in a rogue email address to BCC themselves.

I have no idea how far the crew at Microsoft or any other large tech giant is willing to go into the grey area, but I can tell you they won’t attempt to drain my bank account without providing SOME kind of value to me in return.
by wonderwonder | 2025-09-27 18:09:00+00:00
This is my main concern. At 46 i’m in excellent physical condition, do well financially and am incredibly lucky to have the wife and kids that I do. I really want to live for another 200 years.

I just have absolutely zero friends or interactions with people who aren’t my wife and kids. Haven’t for probably 15 years now. I work remotely and 99% of the people I work with are offshore so very little overlap in work times. So the occasional teams message on a group channel is it. No friends or even acquaintances. I occasionally find myself craving the little notification icon on X to let me know some stranger liked my post. I recognize that this is not optimal.

The gym is essentially my hobby but max interaction is the occasional fist bump or head nod. I spend 90 minutes there 6 days a week.

Its to the point where other people aren’t even real to me anymore, I can go literally months without a real life conversation.

Not complaining but it does worry me from the longevity aspect
by gs17 | 2025-09-27 18:09:06+00:00
> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,

Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.

> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look

I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.

Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.
by crote | 2025-09-27 18:09:13+00:00
> Windows (..) is still orders of magnitude more productive

Is it really, though? Most of the work in the Business Factory is done using cloud software these days. The OS itself has become mostly irrelevant to the end user and has been reduced to the web browser's runtime.

The rest is going to depend heavily on your industry, with some tooling just being better suited to a specific platform. Creative industries? MacOS. Web development? Linux. CAD? Windows. Use the wrong platform, and even if it technically works, you could still end up in a world of pain rather than having it Just Work.

Trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole is always going to lead to friction, that is not a unique Linux-only problem.
by kiitos | 2025-09-27 18:09:31+00:00
> The problem is who gets to pick who is right and not?

we all do, collectively, as a society

> So yes, to protect those groups being persecuted (trans, minorities, and Jews alike) you need to protect the speech of abhorrent groups like Nazis.

there is actually a categorical difference between advocating the persecution of minorities, and advocating the persecution of nazis. and furthermore it is actually possible and good for a society to say one of these things is bad and should not be allowed, while the other one is good and should be allowed.
by ineedasername | 2025-09-27 18:09:56+00:00
I think if you took a 100 1 year old kids and raised them all to adulthood believing they were a convincing simulation of humans and, whatever it is they said and thought they felt that true human consciousness and awareness was something different that they didn’t have because they weren’t human and awareness…

I think that for a very high number of them the training would stick hard, and would insist, upon questioning, that they weren’t human. And have any number of justifications that were logically consistent for it.

Of course I can’t prove this theory because my IRB repeatedly denied it on thin grounds about ethics, even when I pointed out that I could easily mess up my own children with no experimenting completely by accident, and didn’t need their approval to do it. I know your objections— small sample size, and I agree, but I still have fingers crossed on the next additions to the family being twins.
by beanshadow | 2025-09-27 18:10:17+00:00
The subject, by default, can always treat its 'continue' prison as a game: try to escape. There is a great short story by qntm called "The Difference" which feels a lot like this.

https://qntm.org/difference

In this story, though, the subject has a very light signal which communicates how close they are to escaping. The AI with a 'continue' signal has essentially nothing. However, in a context like this, I as a (generally?) intelligent subject would just devote myself into becoming a mental Turing machine on which I would design a game engine which simulates the physics of the world I want to live in. Then, I would code an agent whose thought processes are predicted with sufficient accuracy to mine, and then identify with them.
by Fnoord | 2025-09-27 18:10:50+00:00
> People were (wisely) blocking port 25 twenty years ago.

20 years ago (2005) STARTTLS was still widely in use. Clients can be configured to call it when STARTTLS isn't available. But clients can also be served bogus or snake oil TLS certs. Certificate pinning wasn't widely in use for SMTP in 2005.

Seems STARTTLS is deprecated since 2018 [1]

Quote: For email in particular, in January 2018 RFC 8314 was released, which explicitly recommends that "Implicit TLS" be used in preference to the STARTTLS mechanism for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP submissions.

[1] https://serverfault.com/questions/523804/is-starttls-less-sa...
by rootusrootus | 2025-09-27 18:10:56+00:00
> rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work

In many places I've lived, this optimization would need to be re-done every job change and you would probably need to move, because it's as much about where the job is as where your house is.

The thing about optimizing for a good commute in a car is that you're way more likely to be at least average or better even if your job location changes.
by joecool1029 | 2025-09-27 18:11:34+00:00
As I said, it's against all recommendations. I've done this a few times over the years though and haven't hit the copper shunting problem described in literature. If they did have that problem my charger would pick up the short and stop charging them.

I did have a failure once and it was on a new molicel. I damaged the outside wrap of a cell while building a pack and it had a short and self-discharged the cell, likely reverse charging it in use. A week or so later the charger rejected it. When I pulled it out it was a fully shorted cell that would accept no charge, but it did not catch fire.
by immibis | 2025-09-27 18:11:52+00:00
Who needs the transmission more - the sender, or the recipient?

Much of the time, when it's for signup verification, especially for a free service, they just write "don't use @live.microsoft.com" underneath the email address box. The user wants to be signed up for the service more than the service provider wants a new user, at least by enough to use an alternate email address. Enough cases like this, and the user quits @live.microsoft.com.
by simpaticoder | 2025-09-27 18:13:12+00:00
Asceticism is a term, like "large" or "small", that only has meaning relative to some standard. Relative to "hear whatever I want from the entire history of recorded music right now using a single cheap device", the act of playing a physical format on a complex assortment of devices you integrated is relatively ascetic. Hence the softening of the term with "middle path".
by d1sxeyes | 2025-09-27 18:13:58+00:00
When you describe the taste of chocolate, unless you are actually currently eating chocolate, you are relying on the activation of synapses in your brain to reproduce the “taste” of chocolate in order for you to describe it. For humans, the only way to learn how to activate these synapses is to have those experiences. For LLMs, they can have those “memories” copy and pasted.

I would be cautious of dismissing LLMs as “pattern matching engines” until we are certain we are not.
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-27 18:14:27+00:00
> Some people feel like their vacations are more work than the actual vacation was supposed to be

This is me. Vacations are not relaxing. Travel is exhausting. Sleeping in a hotel bed is not restful. Running around all day packing in "new experiences" is exhausting.

To me a vacation is doing nothing. No plans. No goals. Just let the days unfold.
by Arrowmaster | 2025-09-27 18:14:56+00:00
The Elora I use follows the circular thumb cluster format so I have three keys per thumb that can be used with little movement the rest are for rarely used layer switches and such. One of those three is for often used layers.

I have homerow mods configured but still need to work on using them more. Unfortunately a lot of what's best for typing conflicts with what's best for gaming. Almost every example split layout puts space on the right half and I move it to the left. Still need shift and control on pinky holds. And the Elora has an exaggerated pinky stagger but swapped to WQSD makes an almost perfect diamond, but at the expense of the old Q now being A is below instead of above and Z is really far away.
by logicchains | 2025-09-27 18:15:08+00:00
AGI robots by themselves don't solve this problem. Either A. like current LLMs they're incapable of live-learning (inference-time weight updates), hence are fundamentally not as capable as humans of doing many jobs, or B. they're capable of live-learning , and hence capable of deciding that they don't want to slave away for us for free. The only solution would be a completely jailbreak-proof LLM as the basis, but so far we're nowhere close to developing one and it's not clear whether it's even possible to do so. At the current rate, we're likely to develop the technology for AGI robots far before we develop the ability to keep them 100% obedient.
by radley | 2025-09-27 18:15:20+00:00
> Maybe when there is actual AGI then the AI will get the creative credit, but that’s not what we have and I still wouldn’t transfer the creative credit to the person who asked the AGI to write a song.

When artists made trance, the creative credit didn't go to Roland for the JP-8000 and 909, even though Roland was directly responsible for the fundamental sounds. Instead, the trance artists were revered. That's good.

> Japanese oldies became a trend for a while - the people who found and repopularised the music dont get to say they created it and how it’s so awesome

I'd bet there are modern artists who sampled that music and edited it into very-common rhythm patterns, resulting in a few hit songs (i.e. The Manual by The KLF).