MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmje | 2025-10-18 06:15:47+00:00
Not sure that benign or alignment is that easy. I mean, as frequent authors have pointed out - I have a very much benign attitude towards ants. I don’t step on them if I can help it and I don’t maliciously go out to pour boiling water on them. But if I’m building a house or working in my garden I’m likely gonna kill tens of thousands of them. Same applies to AGI. If we’re just ants, we’re gonna get squashed.
by Gigachad | 2025-10-18 06:17:35+00:00
Yeah I just had a look and I'm seeing a reasonable amount of interference on 2.4ghz, very little on 5ghz, and then nothing at all on 6ghz.

My guess is people with large houses and only one wifi AP are probably using 2.4 when their devices are out of range for 5. But other people doing this probably doesn't impact you at all since you can just make sure you have good coverage for 5ghz and enjoy uncongested wifi.
by 1659447091 | 2025-10-18 06:19:22+00:00
> No probable cause? So you are truly convinced that out of hundreds of thousands of interactions with ICE, those 170 people who were actually arrested, didn't meet any of these criteria for arrest? Are you really that far gone?

The article itself is saying that and listed in the large summary box at the top. [edit] and at the very bottom of the article they detail "How We Did This" and gives more details on the numbers

We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests. Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.

Out of the 170 that that ProPublica could review, only 130 of them were taken "for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers".

That means the others were not.

There are many reports of Americans being detained at their place of work. I'll leave links in the case that you truly believe every US Citizen detained was because they were at a protest and assaulting officers. [0][1][2] There are more if you care to do a simple search

I have zero sympathy for anyone who initiates attacks on any law enforcement and finds themself arrested; in the same way I have zero tolerance for US Citizens being rounded up for matching a profile of people who lived here long before my ancestors ever landed in Virginia. The burden of proof is on the officers whose paycheck also comes from the citizens they are roughing up or humiliating in front of their families/workplaces. It's uncalled for and it's un-American

[0] https://apnews.com/article/us-citizen-detained-ice-portland-...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/george-...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-citizen-wrongfully-d...
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-18 06:20:10+00:00
The idea I keep coming back to is that as far as we know it took roughly 100k-1M years for anatomically modern humans to evolve language, abstract thinking, information systems, etc. (equivalent to LLMs), but it took 100M-1B years to evolve from the first multi-celled organisms to anatomically modern humans.

In other words, human level embodiment (internal modelling of the real world and ability to navigate it) is likely at least 1000x harder than modelling human language and abstract knowledge.

And to build further on what you are saying, the way LLMs are trained and then used, they seem a bit more like DNA than the human brain in terms of how the "learning" is being done. An instance of an LLM is like a copy of DNA trained on a play of many generations of experience.

So it seems there are at least four things not yet worked out re AI reaching human level "AGI":

1) The number of weights (synapses) and parameters (neurons) needs to grow by orders of magnitude

2) We need new analogs that mimic the brains diversity of cell types and communication modes

3) We need to solve the embodiment problem, which is far from trivial and not fully understood

4) We need efficient ways for the system to continuously learn (an analog for neuroplasticity)

It may be that these are mutually reinforcing, in that solving #1 and #2 makes a lot of progress towards #3 and #4. I also suspect that #4 is economical, in that if the cost to train a GPT-5 level model was 1,000,000 cheaper, then maybe everyone could have one that's continuously learning (and diverging), rather than everyone sharing the same training run that's static once complete.

All of this to say I still consider LLMs "intelligent", just a different kind and less complex intelligence than humans.
by mmooss | 2025-10-18 06:20:55+00:00
I'm aware of the conspiracy theories, and of course there are plenty of sources that repeat them. The first link is a highly partisan website that is quoting America First Legal, founded by Stephen Miller (yes, that Stephen Miller). The second is not as described: Its aim is to prevent enemy states from conducting propaganda campaigns in free societies, an undeniable danger. Its recommendations are,

1. Raise the cost of conducting malign influence operations against the United States and its allies.

2. Close vulnerabilities that foreign adversaries exploit to undermine democratic institutions.

3. Separate politics from efforts to unmask and respond to foreign operations against the U.S. electoral process.

4. Strengthen partnerships with Europe to improve the transatlantic response to this transnational threat.

5. Make transparency the norm in the tech sector.

6. Build a more constructive public-private partnership to identify and address emerging tech threats.

7. Exhibit caution when reporting on leaked information and using social media accounts as journalism sources.

8. Increase support for local and independent media.

9. Extend the dialogue about foreign interference in democracies beyond Washington.

10. Remember that our democracy is only as strong as we make it.

It's significant that a political faction does everything it can to remove barriers to disinformation, for example using lawfare and other attacks to shut down research into it, using political power to disable the country's ability to protect itself.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-18 06:22:18+00:00
> In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way.

I don't follow. If we, in some distant future, find a way to make humans functionally immortal, does that magically remove our agency? Or do we not have agency to begin with?

If your position on the "free will" question is that it doesn't exist, then sure I get it. But that seems incompatible with the death prerequisite you have put forward for it, because if it doesn't exist then surely it's a moot point to talk prerequisites anyway.
by areoform | 2025-10-18 06:24:12+00:00
Yes! Mars has enough of an atmosphere for sound to propagate. And sound is incredibly information rich. With sound alone, they're now able to diagnose the state of the rover, extract incredible amounts of information about the martian environment and a bunch of other stuff (see below).

It's kinda like all those clever hacks that use audio to figure out keystrokes.

> the study of sound associated with laser impacts on Martian rocks to better understand their mechanical properties, the improvement of our knowledge of atmospheric phenomena at the surface of Mars such as atmospheric turbulence, convective vortices, dust lifting processes and wind interactions with the rover itself. The microphone also helps our understanding of the sound signature of the different movements of the rover: operations of the robotic arm and the mast, driving on the rough surface of Mars, monitoring of the pumps, etc

https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document

There were some scientists who believed that the recordings would be useless. A waste of payload space. The experiment had to be done to demonstrate, with data, just how versatile audio can be.

There's only one The Jim Green, but we need more Jim Greens in the world.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-18 06:24:14+00:00
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes isn't close enough to what's happening here.

NASA had its mission statement changed in ~2005 by the Bush administration, to disregard/delete/chainsaw out the mission to observe & understand earth. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/science/nasas-goals-delet...

The foe against reality now is new and different. We should appreciate & respect how they stand against humanity in new ways, seek to bring ignorance & darkness down upon the world, let us hurt ourselves without attending to or working to improving Spaceship Earth. But this is also what "these people" do, and the ignorance to plunge us down into hell & ruin is something they have brought against mankind, reason & truth for decades. This is not new; this damnation & hell of ignorance and hands-over-the-eyes that these ruiners have been bringing against reality for decades.

This is a long long history of people trying to destroy mankind's understanding.
by yoz-y | 2025-10-18 06:24:53+00:00
See the problem you encounter is that rather than simply saying “just because there was a fallacy in my argument it doesn’t make it false”, you pasted this long, barely digestible, block of text.

In the other conversation “you” “explain“ why other people are misunderstanding you, rather than try to make the argument clearer. Unfortunately the flagged post is no longer available but I’m curious of how such a simple conversation spiraled down so badly.

I even tend to agree with your initial argument so I’m quite convinced that none of this was necessary.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-18 06:27:53+00:00
Some have accused centralized exchanges of minimizing their own losses

The crypto market is owned by the exchanges. Even P2P trades rely on them for pricing. Try buying bitcoin for a price that differs significantly from what the exchanges say it is worth,

But the exchanges can also create equity (stable coins) and trade alongside and even against their own customers. So they are not just simple market makers. They are the central bankers of crypto --- and without any checks or balances, they are beholden to nothing and no one but themselves.

Such a market is not really "free" is it?. If collusion and manipulation can happen, it will happen. And the lack of regulation and accountability virtually insures it.
by jader201 | 2025-10-18 06:28:32+00:00
1. Parent included brakes, but I think brakes should be on the “ICE only” list. EVs maybe use brakes 5% of the time. Maybe less. (And I don’t buy corrosion from salt causing more wear than friction.)

2. The only thing left are tires and washer fluid. I’m not convinced that these make up 2/3 maintenance costs. All of the fluids — oil, coolant, transmission — plus components that wear down/need replacing (alternator, transmission) — there’s no way these are only 1/3 of all maintenance.
by lanthade | 2025-10-18 06:35:10+00:00
As someone who has been using behringer X/m32 products for nearly 2 decades now (hard to believe it's been that long!) and as someone who's done a lot of high and low end live audio work this is pretty cool. You don't often see mfgrs being so open about transport protocols or the specs are locked behind expensive paywalls and hardware to mess with them isn't remotely affordable.

I am curious how the pictured A2B board interfaces with the X/M32 board. If that's an AES50 implementation then maybe there's the possibility someone could roll up an AES50 router. That could be cool.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-18 06:36:44+00:00
> ended slavery

We (mostly) ended human slavery, but I don't think its accurate to say we ended slavery in general.

Oil gave us a reason to stop enslaving humans for labor - a single barrel of oil equates to the amount of work a human can do working 8 hours a day for roughly a decade.

We didn't stop slavery all together, we found a more efficient target of our enslavement. We'll do the same with AI (or at least we'll try), should actual artificial intelligence exist.
by roenxi | 2025-10-18 06:40:07+00:00
You might find some inspiration in this video of metronomes synchronising and desynchronysing [0]. It doesn't take much to cause things to happen at the same time, in the case the CEOs are likely all responding to the same market signals at the same time for the same reason. Probably interest rates.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaxw4zbULMs
by brosco | 2025-10-18 06:40:25+00:00
One of OpenAI's founding team members developed Adam [0] well before it was flashy and profitable. It's not like nobody is out there trying to develop new algorithms.

The reality is that there are some great, mature solvers out there that work well enough for most cases. And while it might be possible to eke out more performance in specific problems, it would be very hard to beat existing solvers in general.

Theoretical developments like this, while interesting on their own, don't really contribute much to day-to-day users of linear programming. A lot of smart people have worked very hard to "optimize the optimizers" from a practical standpoint.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980
by Yoric | 2025-10-18 06:40:44+00:00
Having worked with CEOs of a few start-ups, I suspect that many CEOs feel like they belong to a small circle of people "in the know".

Part of it is going through the VC gauntlet, I believe. Let's face it, to get money from VCs, you need to abase yourself, to learn how to lie to them and to yourself, to focus only on the survival of your company and pretending that you're going to make lots of money, regardless of your original goals and ideals. If you're a bit of a techie, you have just entered a world of appearances, where [it feels like] pretending to be successful and knowing something more than others matters more than actually doing something. And being kicked out would mean losing funding, which means everything for which you've twisted yourself into something you were not.

I think that this strongly favors hivemind/mob thinking.
by inkyoto | 2025-10-18 06:41:04+00:00
I was delineating a particular nuance – that the mere utilisation of Cloudflare does not, by itself, render 4Chan subject to the classification of «targeting UK users», save for the instance in which they issue a distinct monthly remittance to an entity denominated «Cloudflare UK» for the edge node services provided during the preceding period.

I.e., if a machine (the Cloudflare control plane) elects to route traffic through an edge node within the UK as an optimisation measure, such an act does not, in itself, constitute the possession of equipment within that jurisdiction — nor would it be readily ascertainable before a court of law.

Historically speaking, the Ofcom/UK approach is orthodox rather than novel. Ofcom’s sequence – information notices, process fines for non-response, then applications to court for service-restriction and access-restriction orders that bind UK intermediaries – is a modern, statute-bound version of a very old playbook. If a service has no UK presence and refuses to engage, the realistic endgame is to pressure UK-based points of access rather than to extract cash from an foreign entity.

What is new is the medium and the safeguards, not the underlying logic: regulate the domestic interface with out-of-jurisdiction speakers.
by abenga | 2025-10-18 06:41:15+00:00
> Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons.

> Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything.

What am "I" if not (at least partly) the cells in that chain? If they have "seen" it (where seeing is the complex chain you described), I have.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-18 06:42:24+00:00
The Chinese have a workable plan to defeat western, free market capitalism. And basically all they really have to do in order to make it work is keep corruption in check.

They have already succeeded. The economy of the USA has now been changed to be less "free market" and more authoritarian --- like theirs.

Only worse. Instead of a central committee steering the economy, we have a central person deciding who you can trade with and how much it will cost. Government interference has been normalized. There is nothing "free market" about it.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-18 06:47:13+00:00
This is very cool. Does anyone know how it works in reality (not theorycrafting)? What is internet connectivity and what is power and so on?

There’s a solar well so I assume this is solar powered too but what about network?

Edit: I shouldn’t have used Google. ChatGPT had the answer in seconds https://gondwana-collection.com/waterhole-camera/faq

Solar power, wireless point to point network
by ares623 | 2025-10-18 06:48:09+00:00
I like it. There will inevitably be one product that will do a bait snd switch or rug pull in the future, but it’s good to bring visibility for their present state. I’ve been looking for something like Ente for a while and I don’t know why this is the first time I’ve heard of it.

I just worry that some techbros see this as a growth hack and abuse the system. It being in HN you know someone somewhere is already putting this in their back pocket for future use.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-18 06:48:33+00:00
> Animal brains such as our own have evolved to compress information about our world to aide in survival.

Which has led to many optical illusions being extremely effective at confusing our inputs with other inputs.

Likely the same thing holds true for AI. This is also why there are so many ways around the barriers that AI providers put up to stop the dissemination of information that could embarrass them or be dangerous. You just change the context a bit ('pretend that', or 'we're making a movie') and suddenly it's all make-believe to the AI.

This is one of the reasons I don't believe you can make this tech safe and watertight against abuse, it's baked in right from the beginning, all you need to do is find a novel route around the restrictions and there is an infinity of such routes.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-18 06:48:46+00:00
> For a long time I wanted to find some sort of litmus test to measure this and I think I found one that is an easy to understand programming problem, can be done in a single file, yet complex enough. I have not found a single LLM to be able to build a solution without careful guidance.

Plan for solving this problem:

- Build a comprehensive design system with AI models

- Catalogue the components it fails on (like yours)

- These components are the perfect test cases for hiring challenges (immune to “cheating” with AI)

- The answers to these hiring challenges can be used as training data for models

- Newer models can now solve these problems

- You can vary this by framework (web component / React / Vue / Svelte / etc.) or by version (React v18 vs React v19, etc.)

What you’re doing with this is finding the exact contours of the edge of AI capability, then building a focused training dataset to push past those boundaries. Also a Rosetta Stone for translating between different frameworks.

I put a brain dump about the bigger picture this fits into here:

https://jim.dabell.name/articles/2025/08/08/autonomous-softw...
by dmkii | 2025-10-18 06:49:28+00:00
It’s interesting you mention linguistics because I feel a lot of the discussions around AI come back to early 20th century linguistics debates between Russel, Wittgenstein and later Chomsky. I tend to side with (later) Wittgenstein’s perception that language is inherently a social construct. He gives the example of a “game” where there’s no meaningful overlap between e.g. Olympic Games and Monopoly, yet we understand very well what game we’re talking about because of our social constructs. I would argue that LLMs are highly effective at understanding (or at least emulating) social constructs because of their training data. That makes them excellent at language even without a full understanding of the world.
by PeterHolzwarth | 2025-10-18 06:50:07+00:00
It really is strange to cast one's net a bit further than just Seattle for renting or buying: you'll find it hard to spot a reasonable deal surprisingly far from the city itself. Growth really is oozing out all throughout western Washington.

Looking at 1 or 2 bedroom rents for a somewhat, but not too, newer unit shows rent prices that are not terribly far off from the city itself - at distances beyond commute.

I sometimes think people don't understand just how many people have moved to the (very) broader Seattle area in the last 15 years.

Broader Seattle has been a growth area since the early nineties, but this has expanded to far beyond the broader reaches of the area. I know of at least six people who own small second homes on the peninsula (Kitsap), the greater peninsula (Olympic), and up-and-down the broader I5 corridor from Olympia to Marysville/Totem Park.
by visarga | 2025-10-18 06:50:27+00:00
> we still lack schematic-level understanding of what “intelligence” even is or how it works. Not to mention how it interfaces with “consciousness”, and their likely relation to each other

I think you can get pretty far starting from behavior and constraints. The brain needs to act in such a way as to pay for its costs. And not just day to day costs, also ability to receive and give that initial inheritance.

From cost of execution we can derive an imperative for efficiency. Learning is how we avoid making the same mistakes and adapt. Abstractions are how we efficiently carry around past experience to be applied in new situations. Imagination and planning are how we avoid the high cost of catastrophic mistakes.

Consciousness itself falls from the serial action bottleneck. We can't walk left and right at the same time, or drink coffee before brewing it. Behavior has a natural sequential structure, and this forces the distributed activity in the brain to centralized on a serial output sequence.

My mental model is that of a structure-flow recursion. Flow carves structure, and structure channels flow. Experiences train brains and brain generated actions generate experiences. Cutting this loop and analyzing parts of it in isolation does not make sense, like trying to analyze the matter and motion in a hurricane separately.
by defrost | 2025-10-18 06:52:22+00:00
Exciting results from blood test for 50 cancers (Oct, 2025)

The trial followed 25,000 adults from the US and Canada over a year, with nearly one in 100 getting a positive result. For 62% of these cases, cancer was later confirmed. Lead researcher Dr Nima Nabavizadeh, associate professor of radiation medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, said the data showed that the test could "fundamentally change" their approach to cancer screening.

~ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205g21n1zzo

A year ago:

Galleri promises to detect multiple cancers—but new evidence casts doubt on this much hyped blood test (August 2024))

The NHS is currently running a £150m trial of the test, funded by Grail and involving more than 100 000 participants in England. ... Documents leaked to The BMJ indicate that the criteria being used, unpublished until now, are unsuitable to justify a new national screening programme aimed at saving lives. They show that even Mike Richards, the chair of the independent UK National Screening Committee, has privately voiced “serious concerns” to Amanda Pritchard, NHS England’s chief executive, about the trial and its ability to provide sufficient evidence “on whether the benefits of testing outweigh any potential harms and at reasonable cost.”

~ https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1706

Company site: https://www.galleri.com/what-is-galleri/types-of-cancer-dete...