MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-11-14 15:36:33+00:00
I use Whisper running locally for automated transcription of many hours of audio on a daily basis.

For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced with others.

When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio syntactically with the mistaken word.

Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise was but the rest of the transcription would be unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic similarity that created the initial error. The following words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.
by andrewmutz | 2025-11-14 15:37:18+00:00
The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another

I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
by ColonelPhantom | 2025-11-14 15:37:26+00:00
That's fair! I believe that window positioning also works on XWayland, though, so running your file manager that way should still work with the rest of the system being Wayland (and Gnome has no plans to drop XWayland afaik).

I believe the main holdup is a desire for Wayland to be usable with e.g. VR interfaces where there is no simple 2d grid.

Out of curiosity, how do you want the file manager to behave? And did you write your own or are you using an existing one that works that way?
by kalkin | 2025-11-14 15:37:34+00:00
Right. Nobody makes a Pascal's wager-style argument in _favor_ of investing in AGI. People have sometimes made one against building AGI, on existential risk grounds. The OP author is about as confused on this as the water usage point... But the appetite for arguments against AI (which has legitimate motivations!) is so high that people are willing to drop any critical thinking.
by DeusExMachina | 2025-11-14 15:37:58+00:00
I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.

My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.

Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-14 15:38:20+00:00
I don't know what you mean by "managed by".

But I'd be perfectly happy to use a phone made by any of them that let me upload my driver's license to a wallet they managed.

I mean, why wouldn't I? What do I care whether China knows who I am...? I mean, I've already given them my passport when I visited anyways.
by leoedin | 2025-11-14 15:38:23+00:00
If water is just used for cooling, and the output is hotter water, then it's not really "used" at all. Maybe it needs to be cooled to ambient and filtered before someone can use it, but it's still there.

If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not least because most data centres don't have massive evaporative cooling towers.

Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends on the location. If the data centre was located in an area with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.
by rollcat | 2025-11-14 15:38:46+00:00
Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.

Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.

Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
by zerosizedweasle | 2025-11-14 15:39:03+00:00
It's interesting to se the market try to do anything to rally. The problem is you guys are rallying on the thought that you've scared the Fed into cutting rates, but actually by rallying you short circuit it. You ensure they won't cut. And that's how the market's lillypad hopping thinking is actually just stupidity. You rallied, so now there are no rate cuts so the crash will be even more brutal.
by cubefox | 2025-11-14 15:39:09+00:00
> LandSpace raised 900 million yuan ($120 million) in December from a state-owned fund focussed on advanced manufacturing, while in 2020 it raised 1.2 billion yuan ($170 million), Chinese corporate databases showed.

https://www.reuters.com/science/chinas-landspace-launches-im...

They need to raise a lot more if they want to build a Starship-class rocket. Small government injections like the $120 million last year won't move the needle much. I somewhat doubt the "billions" of dollars WSJ is reporting, unless they include state-owned rocket companies like CASC, or non-rocket companies, like military companies.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-14 15:39:36+00:00
I guess I never come across that situation because I just don’t engage with sources that fluff. That is a good example, but presumably, there should be no errors there because it’s just stripping away unnecessary stuff? Although, you would have to trust the LLM doesn’t get rid of or change a key step in the process, which I still don’t feel comfortable trusting.

I was thinking more along the lines of asking an LLM for a recipe or review, rather than asking for it to restrict its result to a single web page.
by simonw | 2025-11-14 15:39:49+00:00
"Presented by the USGA" (the United States Golf Association) gave me a wry chuckle there.

That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012 article in full:

> Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds, lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source for irrigation.

> Specific water sources for 18-hole courses as indicated by participants are noted below:

> 52 percent use water from ponds or lakes.

> 46 percent use water from on-site wells.

> 17 percent use water from rivers, streams and creeks.

> 14 percent use water from municipal water systems.

> 12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.
by flenserboy | 2025-11-14 15:39:53+00:00
Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it.

It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.
by naasking | 2025-11-14 15:39:59+00:00
> To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs

This is simply a scaling problem, eg. thousands of single I/O functions can reproduce the behaviour of a function that takes thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs.

Edit: As for the rest of your argument, it's not so clear cut. An LLM can produce a complete essay in a fraction of the time it would take a human. So yes, a human brain only consumes about 20W but it might take a week to produce the same essay that the LLM can produce in a few seconds.

Also, LLMs can process multiple prompts in parallel and share resources across those prompts, so again, the energy use is not directly comparable in the way you've portrayed.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-14 15:40:00+00:00
> Thanks for testing! The whole card IS clickable actually, it has two click targets: Click anywhere on the card and it goes to the summary article page on europedigital.cloud (with translations, context, etc.) Click the "source" link and it goes directly to the original article

The problem is that you're handling that with JavaScript, instead of adding a <a> with a href, and also missing href for the <img> element.

When you do this, you break the expectations of a typical web user. For example, I cannot ctrl+click or middle-mouse+click on anything of what you've done, because you personally didn't think about how people browse websites. That's not a problem, and not really your fault, lots of courses and tutorials get this wrong, teaching people to use divs then use JS for actually handling the navigation.

If instead you use a.href and img.href, you get all of these expected behavior for free, without doing anything! And as a extra bonus, people who are blind or otherwise need assistance tooling for browsing the web, will now also be able to use your website with their tooling! :)
by TheCraiggers | 2025-11-14 15:40:03+00:00
> I don't know why

It's the new age of propaganda. It's not just on HN; it's just slightly easier to spot here because we can easily look at history. Bots are everywhere, trying to drive the narrative in the direction their owners desire. They're playing a really long game here and we don't even know who the players are.
by garciansmith | 2025-11-14 15:40:08+00:00
You can make a better decision if you have the context of the actual thing you are reading, both in terms of how it's presented (the non-textual aspects of a webpage for instance) and the language used. You can get a sense of who the intended audience might be, what their biases might be, how accurate this might be, etc. By using a summarizing tool all that is lost, you give up using your own faculties to understand and judge, and instead you put your trust in a third party which uses its own language, has its own biases, etc.

Of course, as more and more pieces of writing out there become slop, does any of this matter?
by CjHuber | 2025-11-14 15:40:10+00:00
I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.
by travisgriggs | 2025-11-14 15:40:30+00:00
> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment).

Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable.

Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Suddenly with a new trixie build and who knows what else has changed, I just could not get my little client to open the HCI socket. In about 10 minutes prompt dueling between GPT and Claude, I was able to learn all about rfkill and get to the bottom of things. I’ve worked with Linux for 20+ years, and somehow had missed learning about rfkill in the mix.

I was happy and saddened. I would not have k own where to turn. SO doesn’t get near the traffic it used to and is so bifurcated and policed I don’t even try anymore. I never know whether to look for a mailing list, a forum, a discord, a channel, the newsgroups have all long died away. There is no solidly written chapter in a canonically accepted manual written by tech writers on all things Bluetooth for the Linux Kernel packaged with raspbian. And to pile on, my attention span driven by a constant diet of engagement, makes it harder to have the patience.

It’s as if we’ve made technology so complex, that the only way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the associated AGI fantasy.
by zackmorris | 2025-11-14 15:40:42+00:00
This is maybe the first dataset I've seen that clearly illustrates how margin (profit) is inversely correlated with value to humanity.

Other than Ports, the top 7 highest-margin industries (stock/crypto exchanges, stock exchanges, banks, toll road operators, financial services and asset management) are in financialization and rent-seeking, basically acting as middlemen that use other people's money to extract wealth.

Meanwhile the bottom 7 lowest-margin industries other than LiDAR and aircraft leasing (CRISPR, gene therapy, hydrogen fuel cell, genomics and mRNA therapeutics) arguably have some of the greatest potential to improve quality of life and help the planet.

Sometimes it feels like everything that I care about most has been marginalized and commodified to the point of financial inviability. Meanwhile people who simply came out on the winning side of the multiverse and pulled up the ladder behind them are doing so well that they mock the rest of us for working by actively making our lives harder at every opportunity.
by 4ggr0 | 2025-11-14 15:40:47+00:00
very cool idea, but the AI-generated images really irk me. firstly because they're AI-generated images, secondly because they're just flat-out wrong for the example i clicked on.

Take this[0],

DATENSCUNTZ-EINSTELLUNES should be DATENSCHUTZ-EINSTELLUNGEN

ALLE AKZIETTREN should be ALLE AKZEPTIEREN

you get the point, basically almost all the text is wrong...i think AI-generated images are annoying and vapid enough, but if they don't even show actual text then what's the point? the english ones seem to be fine, can't judge the spanish ones. images feel like a lazy business-powerpoint.

anyways, cool site in general :)

[0]https://europedigital.cloud/_next/image?url=%2Fapi%2Fnews-im...
by lkey | 2025-11-14 15:41:47+00:00
| Drop the politics

Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.

Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation of energy costs is about as political as a topic can get.

Economic uncertainty (firings, wage depression) brought on by the promises of AI is about as political as it gets. There's no 'pure world' of 'engineering only' concerns when the primary goals of many of these billionaires is leverage this hype, real and imagined, into reshaping the global economy in their preferred form.

The only people that get to be 'apolitical' are those that have already benefitted the most from the status quo. It's a privilege.
by 999900000999 | 2025-11-14 15:42:19+00:00
It's magic when it's optional.

I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun.

But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots.

From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed round appears.

As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.
by hbn | 2025-11-14 15:42:23+00:00
> Sony is not doing much better considering almost all of their former exclusives are on steam these days.

I still can't wrap my head around why they decided to do this considering they were in a pretty killer position coming out of the PS4 generation. I mean, it's probably a positive for consumers to have more options for platforms, so I won't exactly complain. But I do want PlayStation to stick around as a strong competitor because fierce competition is best for consumers in the long-term.

At first it seemed like they were just porting the previous game in a series when the sequel came out exclusively on PS5, as a way to get people into the series and then making them buy their console to play the next game. But now it seems like there's barely any wait between when one of Sony's exclusives comes to PS5 and the PC launch afterwards. If Sony is confused as to why the PS5 isn't selling up to expectations, the answer to that seems pretty obvious to me.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-14 15:42:39+00:00
Do they let children sit and program for 3 days (without breaks?) at these events without a single person checking in on them?! That's absolutely bananas if true, how could something like that even happen, is it a sweatshop of programmers or what's going on?

Truly, if they're forcing children to sit and code for 3 days straight someone should call the police this moment.
by glenneroo | 2025-11-14 15:43:36+00:00
I am currently adding passthrough mode to my game (DodgeALL) to spawn portals on your walls letting you dodge things coming out of the walls. Planned release within the next month (in time to enter in the Meta VR competition). A friend of mine made a game (Loop One: Done) that is Factorio-lite which lets you build infinite factories in your flat, which is loads of fun.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-14 15:44:17+00:00
Honda probably spends $100-$10,000 on a warranty claim in terms of technician time and parts. [1] Even at the low end they can afford to spend 10 cents on an LLM to analyze a claim.

[1] specifically https://www.warrantyweek.com/archive/ww20230817.html claims the expectation value of warranty claims for a car is around $650.
by wholinator2 | 2025-11-14 15:44:29+00:00
Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or doesn't let me type into it.

I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
by rekrsiv | 2025-11-14 15:44:33+00:00
On the other hand, a large part of the complexity of human hardware randomly evolved for survival and only recently started playing around in the higher-order intellect game. It could be that we don't need so many neurons just for playing intellectual games in an environment with no natural selection pressure.

Evolution is winning because it's operating at a much lower scale than we are and needs less energy to achieve anything. Coincidentally, our own progress has also been tied to the rate of shrinking of our toys.
by JCM9 | 2025-11-14 15:44:36+00:00
I’m bullish on AI as tech but folks are starting to sniff out that the financials of everything going on at the moment aren’t sustainable for much longer.

I hope we have more of a “reality correction” than full blown bubble bursting, but the data is increasingly looking like we’re about to have a massive implosion that wipes out a generation of startups and sets the VC ecosystem back a decade.
by coldpie | 2025-11-14 15:44:37+00:00
> I've polled about this (informally) as well.

This is kinda like how if you ask everyone how often they eat McDonald's, everyone will say never or rarely. But they still sell a billion burgers each year :) Assuming you're not polling your Bsky buddies, I suspect these people are using AI tools a lot more than they admit or possibly even know. Auto-generated summaries, text generation, image editing, and conversation prompts all get a ton of use.
by mtillman | 2025-11-14 15:44:48+00:00
Many years ago now, Mozilla hired an adtech exec to run the show and I arrived at the conclusion that Firefox would be staffed by for-profit thinkers in direct conflict with their non-profit foundation. That’s the moment I stopped donating. I daily drive Orion as even though Kagi is for profit, they have managed to keep trash out of their free version.
by mnky9800n | 2025-11-14 15:44:56+00:00
> Used as a prototyping tool to quickly test an idea seems to be a good use case but there should be better tooling around taking that prototype, splitting it into manageable parts, sharing the reasoning behind it so I can then rework it so I have the necessary understanding to move it forward.

This would be amazing. I think claude code is a great prototyping tool, but I agree, you don't really learn your code base. But I think, that is okay for a prototype if you just want to see if the idea works at all. Then you can restart as you say with some scaffolding to implement it better.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-14 15:45:16+00:00
Mozilla spending their limited resources on something so absurd and irrelevant seems extremely strange.

People use Firefox because they want privacy respecting software with good customizability. What Mozilla should be focusing is making their "vanilla" experience as good as possible and keep working on tools which further help user privacy.

Firefox should be performant, compatible, well polished and have the best privacy tools available. Focusing on anything else will make it just a worse version of another browser.

To be honest this makes me really question the leadership of Mozilla. Who is deciding this? And what are these decisions based on. I doubt that it is actual user research.
by rollcat | 2025-11-14 15:45:48+00:00
OS/Xamp perhaps.

Joking aside, there's Audacious[1], which is an excellent and cross-platform player, with support for Winamp skins. Also check out WebAmp[2] and the skin museum[3].

[1] <https://audacious-media-player.org> [2] <https://webamp.org> [3] <https://skins.webamp.org>
by RiverCrochet | 2025-11-14 15:46:06+00:00
I want the LLM outside of the apps, telling the apps what to do on my behalf and gathering information from them privately towards doing what I ask it or answering questions I have for it.

If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so the app isn't really needed.
by cs702 | 2025-11-14 15:46:52+00:00
Buffett routinely mentions it in his annual letters:

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

A good place to start is by reading his thoughts on See's Candy as of 2007 (~four decades after he bought it):

https://berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf (search for "See's Candy")
by phkahler | 2025-11-14 15:47:35+00:00
>> They didn’t “establish” abstract expressionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture.

I've heard it claimed that they generally don't try to start movements because it's too difficult, but instead just promote and amplify things that are already leaning the direction they want them to go or is beneficial to their agenda somehow. Makes sense to me!