MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grayhatter | 2025-12-26 20:44:51+00:00
He links to both HN and lobsters which already contained this information, from before he did any research, so "has been lost" is certainly a take...

But if that's value added, why frame it under the heading of popular drama/rage farming? To capture more attention? Do you believe the pop culture news sites would be interested if it discussed the idea and "experiment" without mentioning the rage bait?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-26 20:45:04+00:00
I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.
by themafia | 2025-12-26 20:45:26+00:00
> The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect.

Nvidia to cut gaming GPU production by 30 - 40% starting ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1poxtrj/nvidia_...

Micron ends Crucial consumer SSD and RAM line, shifts ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1pdj4mh/micron_ends_...

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites

https://openai.com/index/five-new-stargate-sites/

> Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.

I'm a software developer. I don't take planes for work.

> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career.

So your logic seems to be, it's bad, don't do anything, just floor it?

> I’m not an AI apologist.

Really? Have you just never heard the term "wake up call?"
by xboxnolifes | 2025-12-26 20:45:38+00:00
The drop from 2017 to 2023 is worrying, but my first reaction is to ask if that is only in the US or is it global? I couldn't find 2023 data for other countries, but the 2012-2017 PIAAC literacy data puts USA roughly in line with the rest of the world. I know people dunking on American literacy isn't new, it goes back easily to 2012 or earlier. If the US is illiterate, then so is much of the world.

screenshot for convenience: https://i.imgur.com/IMrCZch.png

data explorer: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac/report.aspx
by neomantra | 2025-12-26 20:47:01+00:00
Once upon a time (90s when this is what the web was), I made a website in the vein of “I can eat glass, it will not hurt me”, but with all the different translations of Smurfs.

There is so much diversity, and the feminization and paternization are interesting reflections of the language (eg Šmoulinka and Taťka Šmoula for Czech).

My brother and I were backpacking a bit and were in a hostel with some Czech girls. He admonished me: “these chicks are so DTF and you are blabbing about Smurfette?!”

I am curious of the connection between these fairy people and the DMT machine elves.
by eks391 | 2025-12-26 20:47:14+00:00
I could be misinterpreting parent myself, but I didn't bat an eye on the comment because I interpreted it similarly to "everything humans (or anything really) do increases net entropy, which is harmful to some degree for earth". I wasn't considering the moral good vs harm that you bring up, so I had been reading the the discussion from the priorities of minimizing unnecessary computing scope creep, where LLMs are being pointed to as a major aggressor. While I don't disagree with you and those who feel that statement is anti-human (another responder said this), this is what I think parent was conveying, not that all human action is immoral to some degree.
by Zenbit_UX | 2025-12-26 20:47:31+00:00
Sounds like Robs anger is directed a multiple know issues and “crimes” that the AI industry is responsible for, it would be hard to compile an exhaustive list outside of a lawsuit but if you genuinely aren’t aware there’s plenty in the news cycle right now to occupy you and or outrage the average person.

-Mass layoffs in tech
AI data centers causing extreme increases in monthly electricity -bills across the US
-Same as above but for water
-The RAM crisis is entirely caused by Sam Altman
- General fear and anxiety from many different professions about AI replacing them
- Rape of the copyright system to train these models
by dspillett | 2025-12-26 20:47:46+00:00
The written offer is part of the licence, as is the need to respond to that offer with the source code offered. It is all part of the same agreement.

A written offer on its own would not normally be directly enforceable in many (most?) jurisdictions, for the same sort of reason that retailers can't be held to incorrectly published prices (in the UK at least, a displayed price is an “invitation to tender”, not a contract or other promise) except where other laws/regulations (anti bait&switch rules for instance), or the desire to avoid fighting in the court of public opinion, come into effect.

But in this instance, the written offer and the response to that offer are part of the wider licence that has been agreed to.
by tasuki | 2025-12-26 20:48:12+00:00
Ok, fine: ceramics.

I used to go when I lived in Warsaw and there was a pay-monthly-and-stay-as-long-as-you-want. Now I've moved and all the ceramics places charge per hour, which, apart from being expensive, is much less fun.

I hear there's a group of grumpy old women doing ceramics nearby. I want to infiltrate said group and learn from them.
by RomanPushkin | 2025-12-26 20:48:18+00:00
The next step should be to send enthusiasts there, get samples of this mushroom from that market, and introduce it to the underground for personal research. That’s normally what happens when something interesting is discovered.

For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.

So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
by GrahamL | 2025-12-26 20:48:49+00:00
This is so funny. I've read both these books and absolutely loved Obviously Awesome and could not stand StoryBrand.

Wrote reviews on both Obviously Awesome[0] and StoryBrand[1] for anyone interested.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5369411790
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5686301930
by jebarker | 2025-12-26 20:48:51+00:00
My top reads this year:

- How to Tame a Fox - great popsci history of a genetics experiment

- "The Sixth Extinction" and "Not the end of the world" - compelling but contrasting takes on climate change

- Through Two Doors at Once - posci history of the double slit experiment

- Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis Alvarez should get just as much attention as Feynman does IMO!

- A Matter of Death and Life - the last book I read this year that was touching and made me remember what’s really important in life
by epage | 2025-12-26 20:49:25+00:00
> uv is fast because of what it doesn’t do, not because of what language it’s written in. The standards work of PEP 518, 517, 621, and 658 made fast package management possible. Dropping eggs, pip.conf, and permissive parsing made it achievable. Rust makes it a bit faster still.

Isn't assigning out what all made things fast presumptive without benchmarks? Yes, I imagine a lot is gained by the work of those PEPs. I'm more questioning how much weight is put on dropping of compatibility compared to the other items. There is also no coverage for decisions influenced by language choice which likely influences "Optimizations that don’t need Rust".

This also doesn't cover subtle things. Unsure if rkyv is being used to reduce the number of times that TOML is parsed but TOML parse times do show up in benchmarks in Cargo and Cargo/uv's TOML parser is much faster than Python's (note: Cargo team member, `toml` maintainer). I wish the TOML comparison page was still up and showed actual numbers to be able to point to.
by praptak | 2025-12-26 20:50:21+00:00
I'm disappointed by HN snickering at his work for Google. Seriously, it's a "Mr Gotcha"[0] argument.

Yes, everyone supports capitalism this way or the other (unless they are dead or in jail). This doesn't mean they can't criticise (aspects of) capitalism.

[0] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
by caminante | 2025-12-26 20:50:37+00:00
Please read again and calm down.

I expressly said "ex gold."

>Bolsheviks ?

Lmao. Where are you getting these falses premises?

1. Who rose to power after Russia collapsed in 2017?

2. There was no Bolshevik fighting or presence in Bessarabia?

3. Romania didn't intervene to fight Bolsheviks in Bessarabia?

You must be hallucinating to think otherwise.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_military_intervention...
by rvnx | 2025-12-26 20:51:22+00:00
https://libera.catirclogs.org/ffmpeg-devel/2024-02-23 - The FFmpeg devs saw the violation, even laughed about how funny it was, then they tweeted, so the initial drama is not that big.

They pointed it out to Rockship; immediately the developers from Rockship answered (which is quite rare for big companies!):
Herman Chen: "I apologize... lack of understanding on conflict between Apache and LGPL. We will replace these code in future update. And do more homework on open source license."

FFmpeg: "Thank you for your message"

If you need something from someone, and they have not done it, you don't send a bomb after 1.5 years of silence. You can send a reminder.

If after these reminders, they don't know how to do, and you want them to do something, then you can educate them:

> - A) Click fork on the FFmpeg repo
> - B) Move your file to that repo
> - C) Create a Makefile that will build a .so with that file only.
> - D) Link that .so with to your project

Takes 10 minutes.

If they do not want, this is a different case, justifying DMCA, but nothing indicates that here in the public communications.

About the 1.5 years; silence != patience.

"We gave them time" is not the same as "we gave them a deadline and reminders." or "we communicated and they refused".

==

Imagine this: you buy me lunch, and I did not pay you back.

You text me: "Hey, you owe me 10 USD for lunch."
I reply: "Oh sorry, I misunderstood! I'll pay you back."

You say: "Thanks for your message."

Then... nothing. No Venmo request. No reminder. No "hey, can you get me that 10 USD ?"

Two years later, you take me to small claims court for 500 USD. That's not patience or waiting for 2 years. That's setting someone up to fail.

==

Now, still:

- Rockchip's code is gone
- FFmpeg gets nothing back
- Community loses whatever improvements existed
- Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
by ineedasername | 2025-12-26 20:51:52+00:00
You don't even need to do that- pay a subscription, I mean. A gemma 3 4b model will run on near potato hardware at usable speeds and achieves performance for many purposes on part with ChatGPT 3.5 turbo or better in many tasks much more beneficial than ad tech and min/max'ing media engagement. Or the free versions of many SOTA web LLMs, all free, to the world, if you have a web browser.
by webdevver | 2025-12-26 20:52:43+00:00
the article is... whatever.

BUT... on the subject of apple:

i wouldnt be surprised if apple is going to bring back server offerings. the industry is swinging towards datacenter again and apple already has historic precedent there (Xserve)

plus consumers are getting made super poor now (it is what it is), and smartphone features are getting rapidly commodified while simultaneously failing to innovate: VR, foldables, etc, these are all attempts to try and get away from getting eaten from below, and all have failed. you can be the shiniest smoothest small black square on the market, but its becoming imperceptible (another example, retina displays: every display is a retina display now.)

well, i suppose this links back to the subject - perhaps the guys at the top can see that the tech road is no longer heading in a consumer-adjacent kind of place. the serious investment will be into infrastructure and large scale stuff, not so much for the customer directly.
by konfekt | 2025-12-26 20:53:04+00:00
How about buying (and installing) two cheap laptops, say used Thinkpads (or Framework!?), and then backing up $HOME (and maybe list of installed packages) at one's convenience? These are nowadays light enough to carry around when traveling with luggage. If deemed too heavy, at least a Thinkpad likely is on sale closeby and `dd`ing an ISO image, installing the missing packages and copying $HOME should not take too long.
by skywhopper | 2025-12-26 20:53:40+00:00
Honestly I think the article is a bit ahistorical on this one. ‘go get’ pulls the source code into a local cache so it can build it, not just to fetch the go.mod file. If they were having slow CI builds because they didn’t or couldn’t maintain a filesystem cache, that’s annoying, but not really a fault in the design. Anyway, Go improved the design and added an easy way to do faster, local proxies. Not sure what the critique is here. The Go community hit a pain point and the Go team created an elegant solution for it.
by ec109685 | 2025-12-26 20:53:51+00:00
The article info is great, but why do people put up with LLM ticks and slop in their writing? These sentences add no value and treats the reader as stupid.

> This is concurrency, not language magic.

> This is filesystem ops, not language-dependent.

Duh, you literally told me that the previous sentence and 50 million other times.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-12-26 20:53:58+00:00
Sounds like GP is just in need for a G-Code to DXF converter when they mention "fringe stuff, cnc machine files from the 80's/90's" as answer to a sibling comment, though.

There are great FOSS CAD tools available nowadays (LibreCAD, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD etc.), especially for people who only need 2% of a feature set. But then again, I doubt that GP is really in need of a CAD software, or even writing one with the help of Gemini.
by root_axis | 2025-12-26 20:54:14+00:00
For all of you on this thread who are so confused as to why the reaction has been so strong: dressing up AI-slop spam as somehow altruistic just rubs people the wrong way. AI-slop and e-mail spam, two things people revile converging to produce something even worse... what did you expect? The Jurassic Park quote regarding could vs should comes to mind.

Nobody wants appreciation or any type of meaningful human sentiment outsourced to a computer, doing-so is insulting. It's like discovering your spouse was using ChatGPT to write you love notes, it has no authenticity and reflects a lack of effort and care.
by pedalpete | 2025-12-26 20:54:33+00:00
This makes me wonder what methods of transferring information we may have lost historically that we don't even recognize?

Will there be analog clocks in 30 years? It seems somewhat doubtful, particularly if this generation can't read them.

What benefit is there to keep this antiquated method around, aside from just as an historical reference?

I'm in my 50s, so I can read an analog clock, and I have analog watches. But I don't feel the need to force this method of time on future generations.

Digital clocks are not subject to the drift that analog clocks are, they don't require the user to learn to read them, and if they are broken, it is fairly obvious at first glance.

What benefit does an analog clock have, aside from that it can work without power? And even then, it's only those that are purely mechanical, which I think is also dying out.
by code-blooded | 2025-12-26 20:55:44+00:00
My favorite reads of the year:

- Futu.re by Dmitry Glukhovsky (author of Metro 2033 series). Interesting take of how life would look like if humans became immortal.

- Blackout by Marc Elsberg. A semi-realistic depiction of a 2-week long blackout in Europe caused by a terrorist attack.

- Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larson. Murder mystery in Sweden. Really enjoyed the setting.
by nemothekid | 2025-12-26 20:55:48+00:00
Geohot isn't working by himself - it's part of his B2B company, tinygrad, that sells AMD systems and is VC funded.

https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox

You can see in his table he calls out his AMD system as having "Good" GPU support, vs. "Great" for nvidia. So, yes, I would argue he is doing the work to platform and organize people, on a professional level to sell AMD systems in a sustainable manner - everything you claim that needs to be done and he is still bottlenecked by AMD.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-12-26 20:56:00+00:00
Okay. So Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky sent a thoughtless, form-letter thank you email to Rob Pike. Let's take it even further. They sent thoughtless, form-letter thank you emails to 157 people. That makes me less sympathetic to the vitriol these guys are getting not more. There's no call to action here, no invitation to respond. It's blank, emotionless thank you emails. Wasteful? Sure. But worthy of naming and shaming? I don't think so.

Heck Rob Pike did this himself back in the day on Usenet with Mark V. Shaney (and wasted far more people's time on Usenet with this)!

This whole anger seems weirdly misplaced. As far as I can tell, Rob Pike was infuriated at the AI companies and that makes sense to me. And yes this is annoying to get this kind of email no matter who it's from (I get a ridiculous amount of AI slop in my inbox, but most of that is tied with some call to action!) and a warning suffices to make sure Sage doesn't do it again. But Sage is getting put on absolute blast here in an unusual way.

Is it actually crossing a bright moral line to name and shame them? Not sure about bright. But it definitely feels weirdly disproportionate and makes me uncomfortable. I mean, when's the last time you named and shamed all the members of an org on HN? Heck when's the last time that happened on HN at all (excluding celebrities or well-known public figures)? I'm struggling to think of any startup or nonprofit, where every team member's name was written out and specifically held accountable, on HN in the last few years. (That's not to say it hasn't happened: but I'd be surprised if e.g. someone could find more than 5 examples out of all the HN comments in the past year).

The state of affairs around AI slop sucks (and was unfortunately easily predicted by the time GPT-3 came around even before ChatGPT came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830301). If you want to see change, talk to policymakers.
by DetectDefect | 2025-12-26 20:56:14+00:00
> I'm not sure what makes you assume that about me.

I'm not sure why you're not sure; the parent comment explained it already: your vision of an idealized pasture is incongruent with reality, namely because the number of animals and resources it would take to materialize and actually sustain such a system defies reason.

This was never a discussion about animal welfare, but about challenging industry-seeded assumptions which were not even being questioned. It is unfortunate this makes you feel threatened and requires a retreat from the conversation, but it is also typical.
by dkdcio | 2025-12-26 20:56:20+00:00
I do see the point a bit? and like a reasonable comment to that effect sure, I probably don’t respond

but accusing me of being deficient in English or some AI system is…odd…

especially while doing (the opposite of) the exact thing they’re complaining about. upvote/downvote and move on. I do tend to regret commenting on here myself FWIW because of interactions like this
by jppope | 2025-12-26 20:56:43+00:00
Ted Chang, Bunch Books on Roman Architecture, "You, me, and Ulysses S. Grant", Raving Fans (for work), 3 body Problem, Not the end of the world, Anti-fragile (3rd time), Transformed (for work, it was trash), Harry Potter (in Spanish), and some other things I can't think of off the top of my head.
by aapoalas | 2025-12-26 20:56:47+00:00
Preface: I am not a compiler engineer at all, so I'm just spitballing silliness here.

Avoidance of type feedback counters and such. Get LBBV to clean out the redundant type checks (Higgs proved this well, avoiding something like >90% of them) and produce a format, perhaps a high-level bytecode or just an HIR, that can be used as an input to start a method-level JIT compilation.

So, LBBV gives the quick and easy basic block compilation and cleans up the very easy stuff but leaves enough information so that a follow-up compiler can still use it as input.
by bart__ | 2025-12-26 20:56:47+00:00
The best solution I could think of on the spot was this:
First write down every license place until it fills up. Then for each time a car drives by, give it a 1/2 chance to write it down. Moving down the list regardless of the outcome. Then once the bottom is reached, do it again but with 1/3 a chance. Over and over again, decreasing the chance each time.

I checked for which situations it is valid, and it surprisingly was when there are many more cars than the list size. But it is not valid when there are just a few more cars than the list size.
by xdavidliu | 2025-12-26 20:57:10+00:00
I should have clarified what I meant. The training data includes roughly speaking the entire internet. Open source code is probably a large fraction of the code in the data, but it is a tiny fraction of the total data, which is mostly non-code.

My point was that the hypothetical of "not contributing to any open source code" to the extent that LLMs had no code to train on, would not have made as big of an impact as that person thought, since a very large majority of the internet is text, not code.
by NohatCoder | 2025-12-26 20:57:18+00:00
So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].

As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-from-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant
[3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-us-ai-n...
by CerryuDu | 2025-12-26 20:58:14+00:00
For those of us who consider programming a way to self-realize, the potential vanishing of programming as a lucrative job definitely seems threatening. However, I don't think it could disappear entirely. Professions replaced by machinery, at a global scale, continue to thrive locally, at small scales; they can be profitable and fulfilling for the providers, and they are sought after by a small (niche?) target group.

In other words, I don't need programming to remain mainstream, for it to continue fulfilling me and sustaining me.