MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rich_sasha | 2025-10-15 15:13:42+00:00
Universal income carries enormous moral hazard.

Let's say its fine now, and in 5-10 years also. But in a sense, it is a lifetime commitment to a payment that can sustain people's basic living needs with no output from them.

Because if suddenly you cannot afford this, what do you do? You tell people, after assuring them they can live their life free from fear of hunger death, that suddenly they have to fend for themselves.

We kind of have "universal income" for old people in Europe - it's called pensions. And it's a massive ticking time bomb in exactly this way. They are increasingly unaffordable in the aging society, and chances are sooner or later governments will start curtailing these benefits.

That's bad, but what makes it tragic is you first assured people they are safe and can rely on this.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-15 15:13:53+00:00
Exactly. I've always found that how people want to use lambda is the exact opposite of how to use it cost effectively.

I've seen a lot of people want to use lambdas as rest endpoints and effectively replace their entire API with a cluster of lambdas.

But that's about the most expensive way to use a lambda! 1 request, one lambda.

Where these things are useful is when you say "I have this daily data pull and ETL that I need to do." Then all the sudden the cost is pretty dang competitive.
by kllrnohj | 2025-10-15 15:14:11+00:00
PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all have 10s of millions of gamers each. Meanwhile MacOS makes up ~2% of steam users which is probably a pretty good proxy for the number of MacOS gamers.

Why would I do anything bespoke at all for such a tiny market? Much less an entirely unique GPU API?

Apple refusing to support OpenGL and Vulkan absolutely hurt their gaming market. It increased the porting costs for a market that was already tiny.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-10-15 15:14:46+00:00
I'm hoping the rumored revision of the Apple TV can slot in as a game console. Apple has been pushing AAA games on iOS/iPadOS over the past few years, but there's no good user story if I want to have that traditional experience beyond playing Apple Arcade games on the existing (and outdated) Apple TV pucks.

There's some irony in that the one thing they haven't figured out (the living room) is the one thing their competitors in the space (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) _have_ figured out.
by xp84 | 2025-10-15 15:14:55+00:00
> get LLMs to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control.

I reject this spin (which is the Apple PR explanation for their failure). LLMs already do far better than Apple’s 2025 standards of polish. Contrast things built outside Apple. The only thing holding Siri back is Apple’s refusal to build a simple implementation where they expose the APIs to “do phone things” or “do home things” as a tool call to a plain old LLM (or heck, build MCP so LLM can control your device). It would be straightforward for Apple to negotiate with a real AI company to guarantee no training on the data, etc. the same way that business accounts on OpenAI etc. offer. It might cost Apple a bunch of money, but fortunately they have like 1000 bunches of money.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-15 15:15:03+00:00
Removing the charger is a good move, in my opinion.

USB-C chargers are everywhere now. Monitors with USB-C or Thunderbolt inputs will charge your laptop, too. I bought a monitor that charges over the USB-C cable and I haven’t use the charger that came with the laptop in years because I have a smaller travel charger that I prefer for trips anyway.

You don’t have to buy the premium Apple charger and cable. There are many cheap options.

I already have a box of powerful USB-C chargers I don’t use. I don’t need yet another one to add to the pile.
by SXX | 2025-10-15 15:15:32+00:00
And to grow rice you need to somehow get rid of US bombs that majority of Cambodia soil is very well fertilized with.

Between 1965 and 1973 US dropped 2,756,941 tones of bombs on 113,717 sites in Cambidia. Thats more bombs than all allies together used in all of World War II.

Tens of people still getting killed by them every year.

https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabomb...
by dctoedt | 2025-10-15 15:15:37+00:00
>> Are you claiming a lack of gun / AI control is democratizing?

> This is obviously the case. It results in a greater distribution of power.

That's the theory. In practice, it doesn't work.

Most people don't spend a lot of time looking for ways to acquire and/or retain wealth and power. But absent regulation, we'll gradually lose out to those driven folks who do. Perhaps they do so because they want to serve humanity and they imagine that their gifts make them the logical choice to run things. Or perhaps they just want to dominate things.

And the rest of us have every right to insist on guardrails, so those driven folks can't take us over the cliff. Certainly those folks can make huge contributions to society. But they can also fuck up spectacularly — because talent in one field isn't necessarily transferable to another. (Recall that Michael Jordan was one of the greatest basketball players of all time. But he wasn't even close to being the GOAT ... as a baseball player.)

Sure, maybe through some combination of genetics, rearing, and/or just plain hard work, you've managed to acquire "a very particular set of skills" (to coin a phrase ...) for making money, or for persuading people to do what you want. That doesn't mean you necessarily know WTF you're talking about when it comes to the myriad details of running the most-complex "organism" ever seen on the planet, namely human society.

And in any case, the rest of us are entitled to refuse to roll the dice on either the wisdom or the benevolence of the driven folks.
by FumblingBear | 2025-10-15 15:15:39+00:00
As far as I know, you can't have different virtual desktops for each room. The window to use the virtual desktop dynamically pops up over my laptop when I open and unlock it.

I do have a few widgets floating around in different rooms, but rarely use it from somewhere that isn't my chair or bed, so it's mostly a few clocks embedded into my walls to keep track of time, and those are persistent.
by amatecha | 2025-10-15 15:16:13+00:00
The evolution thing is kind of a red herring in that we probably don't have to artificially construct the process of evolution, though your reasoning isn't a good explanation for why the "evolution" reason is a red herring: Yeah, nature already established incomprehensibly complex organic systems in these life forms -- so we're benefiting from that. But the extent of our contribution is making some select animals mate with others. Hardly comparable to building our own replacement for some millennia of organic iteration/evolution. Luckily we probably don't actually need to do that to produce AGI.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-15 15:16:26+00:00
I mean, it shouldn't be morally objectionable to not support people who think that certain classes of people are sub-human, deserving of deportation, harassment, arrest and abuse, or outright murder.

It should be morally objectionable to support and promote such people regardless of their product. If think the "wrong" people don't deserve human rights, you don't get to play with the other kids.

Human rights overrides this asshole's privilege of being promoted. It overrides your right to participate in civilized society because you have chosen to be an uncivilized and antisocial person.
by Supernaut | 2025-10-15 15:16:34+00:00
No, crashing the property market would be economically and socially catastrophic. We know this for a fact, because it happened 16 years ago and we're still feeling the effects.

What is required is that the many legal and financial barriers that exist to the economically-viable building of apartments and houses need to be dismantled. If we could have tens of thousands of new dwelling places made available each year, the asking prices for housing stock would start to gently decline. Society as a whole would accept this as a social good.
by hopelite | 2025-10-15 15:16:56+00:00
You want immigrants that plunder the indigenous population while at the same time enriching the upper class at the expense of the lower classes, but you project your own nonsense on others, thereby proving you are full of it. Why do you support the ruling class using "immigrants" to plunder the non-ruling class? You do not even have the capacity to understand that, but you speak on it anyways.

I benefit immensely financially from "immigrants", but that does not mean it is just and I have the integrity to be honest about that. You clearly do not. Stealing by abstraction and supporting it makes you a bad person, not at all the good person you think you are by supporting "immigration", regardless of whether I get richer today than you make in one year or not because of immigrants.
by alexwebb2 | 2025-10-15 15:17:15+00:00
> correctly simulating the environment interactions, the sequence of progression, getting the all the details right, might take hundreds to thousands of years of compute

Who says we have to do that? Just because something was originally produced by natural process X, that doesn't mean that exhaustively retracing our way through process X is the only way to get there.

Lab grown diamonds are a thing.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-15 15:17:26+00:00
I have the 4th gen (2020) iPad Pro with the A12X Bionic, the same chip they put in the Apple Silicon transition dev kits. With iPadOS 26 it's become barely usable, despite still being performant as ever on iPadOS 18. I'm talking huge drop in performance, stutters and slow downs everywhere.

I was considering just replacing the battery and keeping it for several more years but now I feel forced to upgrade which has me considering whether I still want/need an iPad since I'd also have to buy a new magic keyboard since they redesigned it, and they bumped the price ($1299 now vs. $999 when I got the 4th gen) so I'd be looking at $1700. Trying to hold out for an iPad Air with ProMotion.

I may be in the minority here, but I think 5 years is too short of a lifespan for these devices at this point. Early days when things were advancing like crazy, sure. But now? I have 8 year old computers that are still just fine, and with the M-series chips I'd expect at least 10 years of usable life at minimum (battery not withstanding)
by a022311 | 2025-10-15 15:17:28+00:00
I agree, it's very valuable in these situations, although it can only minimize damage. For Littlesnitch/OpenSnitch users: avoid allow rules that apply to all apps. Malware can and has used even trusted websites like Github Gists to expose secrets extracted.

In any case, even if your firewall protects you, you'll still have to treat the machine as compromised.
by whitehexagon | 2025-10-15 15:17:41+00:00
I dunno, didnt they already crack the 400GB/s memory bandwidth some years ago? This seems like just another small bump to handle latest OS effects sludge.

Now the M1 range, that really was an impressive 'outperform' moment of engineering for them, but otherwise this is just a clock-work MBA driven trickle of slightly better over-hyped future eWaste.

To outperform during this crisis, hardware engineers worth their salt need to designing long lived boxes with internals that can be easily repaired or upgraded. "yeah but the RAM connections are fiddly" Great, now that sounds like a challenge worth solving.

But you are right about the software. Installing Asahi makes me feel like I own my compter again.
by tyrellj | 2025-10-15 15:17:48+00:00
This seems to be pretty true in general. SBC companies are not competing with Raspberry Pi because their software is quite a bit behind (boot loaders, linux kernel support, etc). Particle released a really cool dev board recently, but the software is lacking. Qualcomm struggled with their new CPU launch with poor support as well. It sometimes takes a while for new Intel processor features to be supported in the toolchains, kernel, and then get used in software.

Aside from that, I think of Apple as a hardware company that must write software to sell their devices, maybe this isn't true anymore but that's how I used to view them. Maintaining and updating as much software as Apple owns is no small task either.
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-15 15:17:50+00:00
I would not assume this was a "rookie mistake". I've been here once or twice, and a common story is that engineers don't want to do it a certain way, but management overrules them for some vague hand-wavy reason like, "This way is more modern." Another common story is that you know you're not choosing the most [scalable|robust|performant|whatever] design, but ancillary constraints like time and money push you into a "worse is better" decision.

Or maybe the original implementation team really didn't know what they were doing. But I'd rather give them the benefit of the doubt. Either way, I appreciate them sharing these observations because sharing these kinds of stories is how we collectively get better as a professional community.
by euleriancon | 2025-10-15 15:17:58+00:00
Well, the US publishes numbers for a lot of its programs so we can see exactly how much is spent on the bureaucratic nightmare.

Medicaid

FY 2023 Budget: $900.3b ($620b federal, $280b state) [1]

FY 2023 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): 5% ($45b) [2]

SNAP

FY 2024 Budget: $100.3b [3]

FY 2024 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): $6.5b [3]

TANF

FY2024 Budget: $31.5b ($16.5b federal, $15b state) [4]

FY2023 Budget spent on program overhead: %10.1 ($3.2b) [5]

Total Admin Spending $54.7b -> $169 per person in the US

So not totally negligible but also not exactly a basic income

[1] (https://www.macpac.gov/topic/spending)

[2] (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42640) See figure 4

[3] (https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...)

[4] (https://www.gao.gov/assets/880/872093.pdf)

[5] (https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ofa/fy2023_tan...)
by Chance-Device | 2025-10-15 15:17:58+00:00
True, but I think this reasoning is a category error: we were and are capable of rationally designing cars. We are not today doing the same thing with AI, we’re forced to optimize them instead. Yes, the structure that you optimize around is vitally important, but we’re still doing brute force rather than intelligent design at the end of the day. It’s not comparing like with like.
by plmpsu | 2025-10-15 15:19:01+00:00
FAQ says:

"[...] a source port is just the executable code for the game, you still have to provide your own copy of the game's data. So for example, using Quake III: Arena again, the game consists of both an executable and a set of data files (pk3 files, in this case). The download for ioquake3 is an executable that is up to date and has been maintained to work on modern Macs, but you still need to acquire the pk3 files from a legal source, such as an existing installation of the game from disc or Steam or GOG."
by eitally | 2025-10-15 15:19:09+00:00
I've been primarily on a Macbook for the past three years, after almost 10 years using Chromebooks as my primary machines (yay work at Google). Until 2015, I had been a rabid defender of Thinkpads (T-series, mostly), and used Windows at work and Linux (mostly Kubuntu) at home, from around 2009-2015.

Long story short, I was very happy with the "it just works" of ChromeOS, and only let down by the lack of support for some installed apps I truly needed in my personal life. I tried a Mac back in 2015 but couldn't get used to how different it was, and it felt very bulky compared to ChromeOS and much slower than the Linux machine I'd had, so I switched to a Pixelbook as was pretty content.

Fast forward to 2023 when I needed to purchase a new personal laptop. I'd bought my daughter a Pixelbook Go in 2021 and my son a Lenovo x1 Carbon at the same time. Windows was such a dumpster fire I absolutely ruled it out, and since I could run all the apps I needed on ChromeOS it was between Linux & Mac. I decided to try a Mac again, for both work & personal, and I've been a very happy convert ever since.

My M2 Pro has been rock solid, and although I regret choosing to upgrade to Sequoia recently, it still makes me feel better than using Windows. M4 Pro for work is amazingly performant and I still can't get over the battery efficiency. The nicest thing, imho, is that the platform has been around long enough for a mature & vibrant ecosystem of quality-of-life utilities to exist at this point, so even little niggles (like why do I need the Scroll Reverser app at all?) are easy to deal with, and all my media editing apps are natively available.
by jtbayly | 2025-10-15 15:19:17+00:00
Please do this. Here are some examples to add to your list, leaving out the 26.0 bugs that I've come to expect running a .0 release.

1. I won't focus on a bunch of Siri items, but one example that always bugs me: I cannot ask Siri to give me directions to my next meeting. The latest OS introduces an answer for the first time, though. It tells me to open the calendar app on my Apple watch, and tap on the meeting, and tap the address. (I don't have an Apple watch.)

2. Mail.app on iOS does not have a "share sheet." This makes it impossible to "do" anything with an email message, like send it to a todo app. (The same problem exists with messages in Messages.app)

3. It is impossible to share a contact card from Messages.app (both iOS and MacOS). You have to leave messages, go to contacts and select the contact to share. Contacts should be one of the apps that shows up in the "+" list like photos, camera, cash, and plenty third party apps.

4. You still have to set the default system mail app in MacOS as a setting in the Mail.app, instead of in system settings. Last I checked, I'm pretty sure you couldn't do this, without first setting up an account in the Mail.app. Infuriating.
by hwayne | 2025-10-15 15:19:24+00:00
Since writing this I've been informed of some gaps (mostly through email and a lobsters [1] thread). Some of the main ones:

- McCarthy's "Direct Union" is probably conflating "disjoint union" and "direct sum".

- ML probably got the sum/product names from Dana Scott's work. It's unclear if Scott knew of McCarthy's paper or was inspired by it.

- I called ALGOL-68 a "curious dead end" but that's not true: Dennis Ritchie said that he was inspired by 68 when developing C. Also, 68 had exhaustive pattern matching earlier than ML.

- Hoare cites McCarthy in an earlier version of his record paper [2].

Also I kinda mixed up the words for "tagged unions" and "labeled unions". Hope that didn't confuse anybody!

[1] https://lobste.rs/s/ppm44i/very_early_history_algebraic_data...

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1061032.1061041
by siglesias | 2025-10-15 15:19:33+00:00
Your vocabulary presupposes the categories you’re asserting are equivalent. The process of evolution and AI training are vastly different. One confers a survival advantage and is suffused with values that are essential to humans, such as morality, the primacy of vision, taste and smell, etc. AI training is an attempt to transfer functions that allow for human survival and flourishing to objects that are not human. AI training, and especially the Turing Test featured in the Chinese room is about mimicking humans and human evolution is about survival and forms the basis of our aesthetic and moral judgments. One is simply a simulation of the other. Consciousness might not matter to what you concern yourself with as somebody amazed with AI (I am as well), but surely you believe that there is a moral difference between harming a human and harming an LLM, even verbally. What do you think accounts for that, if not consciousness?
by bee_rider | 2025-10-15 15:19:34+00:00
Even if there is a creator, it seems to have intentionally created a universe in which the evolution of humans is basically possible and it went to great lengths to hide the fact that it made us as a special unique thing.

Let’s assume there’s a creator: It is clearly willing to let bad things happen to people, and it set things up to make it impossible to prove that a human level intelligence should be impossible, so who’s to say it won’t allow a superintelligence to be a made by us?
by timeon | 2025-10-15 15:19:47+00:00
Not sure why would one think that article is something other than distraction attempt. Because emissions are adding up.

I'm from country (in Europe) where CO2 emissions per capita [0] are 5.57 while number for USA is 14.3, so reading this sentence in that article: "The average American uses ~50,000 times as much water every day..." surly does not imply that one should use ChatGPT because it is nothing. If "average American" wants to decrease emissions then not using LLMs is just start.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
by foxyv | 2025-10-15 15:19:52+00:00
I think the best argument against us ever finding AGI is that the search space is too big and the dead ends are too many. It's like wandering through a monstrously huge maze with hundreds of very convincingly fake exits that lead to pit traps. The first "AGI" may just be a very convincing Chinese room that kills all of humanity before we can ever discover an actual AGI.

The necessary conditions for "Kill all Humanity" may be the much more common result than "Create a novel thinking being." To the point where it is statistically improbable for the human race to reach AGI. Especially since a lot of AI research is specifically for autonomous weapons research.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-15 15:20:29+00:00
Yeah, and it's the Hexagon mDSP that's the issue. It's basically THE modem. It has its own RTOS and runs the entire RF stack and whispers to all the other RF parts. The cores that run the Linux distro are just... there. For you to run Android on, normally.

PostmarketOS can run on some devices with almost no blobs - but there's no escaping the modem curse.
by oritron | 2025-10-15 15:20:34+00:00
I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.

To compare Apples to apples, you'd have to look at a Framework computer and agree that wifi is going to work out of the box... but here I'm meeting you on a much weaker argument: "Apple's software basics are /not/ rock solid, but other platforms have issues too"
by woodruffw | 2025-10-15 15:21:12+00:00
Yeah, I think that documentation is irresponsibly misleading: it implies that (1) attacker code execution requires the attacker to be able to run code directly (it doesn't, per this post), and (2) that checking out at the base branch somehow stymies the attacker, when all it does is incentivizes people to check out the attacker-controlled branch explicitly.

GitHub has written a series of blog posts[1] over the years about "pwn requests," which do a great job of explaining the problem. But the misleading documentation persists, and has led to a lot of user confusion where maintainers mistakenly believe that any use of `pull_request_target` is somehow more secure than `pull_request`, when the exact opposite is true.

[1]: https://securitylab.github.com/resources/github-actions-prev...
by myrmidon | 2025-10-15 15:21:16+00:00
I'm not saying that language necessarily is the biggest stumbling block on (our) road towards AI, but it is a very prominent feature that we have used to distinguish our capabilities from other animals long before AI was even conceived of. So the current successes with LLMs are highly encouraging.

I'm not buying the "current AI is just a dumb parrot relying on human training" argument, because the same thing applies to humans themselves-- if you raise a child without any cultural input/training data, all you get is a dumb cavemen with very limited reasoning capabilities.