MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Papazsazsa | 2025-12-28 18:04:22+00:00
"Tech" as a cohort is ideologically committed to one thing: minimum input with maximum quantifiable output (engagement, users, money). This works brilliantly in zero-sum competitions: markets, war, politics.

But here's the problem: societies aren't built on pure functionality.

They're built on intangibles.

Morals, aesthetics, the experience of meaning itself. These resist quantification to such a degree that homo sapiens has devoted centuries to exploring the intangibles: religion, philosophy, art (which have also been used as exploitation mechanisms, to be fair).

When you encounter Guernica [1] you're not processing a JPEG. You're standing before a distillation of one man's entire aesthetic and moral project. You're being overwhelmed by scale, by historical weight, by the presence of something that matters in a way that eludes specification. That mattering is what tech cannot compute.

The problem: tech culture has systematically reduced these intangibles to problems to be solved—UI patterns, conversion metrics, a marketing department tasked with fabricating the meaning the product itself cannot contain. Now companies are desperately hiring "storytellers" as patches. [2]

I believe this is one of the underlying reasons there is FUD about AI, and I'm not aware of any AI researcher who has bothered to address the intangibles (which is a very telling, but I might be wrong) but see Albert Borgmann's 'device paradigm' and Hubert Dreyfus on embodied meaning.

There's also "tech's" general attitude towards treating humans and their data like chattel for two decades. Try getting google tech support on the line some time.

There is a ton of repair work (and opportunity!) for 'tech' to engage in good faith with people if it wants to reshape society. But this requires extraordinary grace, a rejection of bottom-line thinking, and good-faith efforts to engage on reasonable terms.

When elites become so functionally detached from what actually sustains a civilization they stop being the ruling class and become illegitimate. History suggests what happens next [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-desperately-seeki...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
by phantasmish | 2025-12-28 18:04:52+00:00
There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.

I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?
by the_af | 2025-12-28 18:04:56+00:00
We don't know how much the imperfect translation would differ from the author’s intent, but we would sure try to meet him halfway. Nobody would criticize his broken English.

Contrast this with the faux polite, irritating tone of the AI, complete with fabrications and phrases the author didn't even intend to write.

Authenticity has value. AI speech is anything but authentic.
by mort96 | 2025-12-28 18:04:59+00:00
They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26.

EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
by hackyhacky | 2025-12-28 18:05:39+00:00
> Close to 2/3 Americans also believe in magic so I'm not sure what these studies are supposed to tell us.

I think you're missing the point, as are many other comments on this post saying effectively, "These people don't even understand how AI works, so they can't make good predictions!"

It's true that most people can't make accurate predictions about AI, but this study is interesting because it represents people's current opinion, not future fact.

Right now, people are already distrustful of AI. This means that if you want people to adapt it, you need to persuade them otherwise. So far, most people's interactions with AI are limited to cheesy fake internet videos, deceptive memes, and the risk of shrinking labor demand.

In its short tenure in the public sphere, large language models have contributed nothing positive, except for (a) senior coders who can offload part of their job to Claude, and (b) managers, who can cut their workforce.

Why would people hold AI in high esteem?
by not_a9 | 2025-12-28 18:05:47+00:00
> We all know they are inefficient and weaponized by hackers.

Name an exploit in EAC/BattlEye/Vanguard/FaceIT/whatever other big name anticheat middleware (though Vanguard and FaceIT don’t sell their services I think) that has actually been used for anything.

Genshin Impact’s driver got used as a vulnerable driver that one time, yeah.
EAC had an exploit to inject your own code into processes, but that quickly got patched (https://blog.back.engineering/10/08/2021/).
by tim-tday | 2025-12-28 18:05:48+00:00
Confluence still fucks your eye when all you want to do is type. Confluence still drops documents into the black hole of zero discovery (I’ve regularly written documents that I cannot later locate).

You still regularly fight confluence formatting to try to get your documents to look right.
God help you if you deliberately or accidentally end up with a bulleted list.

It is still the worst software I have encountered in my life. (Teams may be worse, I don’t have the energy to split hairs on first or second)

If I’m forced to use confluence I require a pre-arranged location that the whole team bookmarks, I write in a raw text editor and paste into confluence, and I time box formatting to 15min if it looks like ass after that that’s what you get.

However, I’ve met someone who swears by it. But he his use case sounded like a good time for Google Sheets which he was forbidden from using for political reasons so…
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-28 18:05:52+00:00
How does “the baby acts like a boomer” have negative connotations?
Sounds like you are personally offended that the word “boomer” exists and projecting here.

> you yourself recognized this when you asked "Which demographic was casually insulted here

I asked this because boomer was the only possible demographic in GPs post, not because I think the term boomer is pejorative in itself. Chilling and ambition are obviously not demographics but qualities.

> This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.

If you want to go there, this argument is bad faith as well… of course I can say anything, but you seem to be personally offended that the term boomer exists and I simply don’t understand why.

> all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative

Is that true for every other age group, so for example is every statement that refers to “millennials” or “zoomers” automatically pejorative and ageist?
by missedthecue | 2025-12-28 18:05:55+00:00
AI solved a medical issue bothering my sister for over 20 years. Did what $20k in accumulated doctors bills couldn't.

I'm not even a utilitarian, but if there are many many people with stories like her, at some point you have to consider it. Some people use cars to kill themselves, but cars help and enrich the lives of 99.99% of people who use them.
by vintagedave | 2025-12-28 18:05:58+00:00
Yeah, I have solid mental images of both those books too, and I'd be really hesitant to watch any version of them for fear they'd be too... generic? Not that it's someone else's vision (for me), just that it would be Netflix/Hollywood Cyber Slash Noir. I can't imagine anything worse than them looking like every other set-in-the-future adaptation.

I've never seen "A Christmas Story" (Wikipedia shows it as very American-cultural-icon) but reading the synopsis, I'm surprised how many parts of it are semi-familiar, perhaps culturally reflected in other ways. It'll go on the to-watch list. And looking forward to the narration!
by itishappy | 2025-12-28 18:06:18+00:00
Edit: Whoops, looks like this is only for the contiguous US, which is somewhat higher than the global average. See later comment!

1ft at 2075 assumes we curb emissions somewhat:

https://www.climate.gov/media/14136

Article:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Datasource:

https://earth.gov/sealevel/us/internal_resources/756/noaa-no...
by ChadNauseam | 2025-12-28 18:06:39+00:00
One thing that annoys me about LLMs is how they say stuff that's dumb but sounds smart. For example:

> Have you considered adding historical tracking/graphing? Being able to see throttling patterns over time would be super valuable for understanding workload impacts and diagnosing thermal issues

Would it actually though? Is anyone going to ever check if their laptop was throttling at 6pm yesterday evening and then remember what they were found at that time and try to "understand workload impacts"? It's the type of thing that might come in kinda useful once in a while, not "super valuable". Idk, I notice this trend with LLMs a lot. Often what they say just doesn't really make sense when you think about it.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-28 18:06:49+00:00
Isn't it obvious? If ChatGPT convinced more teenagers to not commit suicide, than it has convinced teenagers to commit suicide, then the net contribution is positive, isn't it?

Then the question becomes more if we're fine with some people dying because some other people aren't.

But AFAIK, we don't know (and probably can never know) the exact ratio of people AI has helped still be alive today VS helped contribute to that these people aren't alive today, which makes the whole thing a bit moot.
by pinko | 2025-12-28 18:06:52+00:00
I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.

And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.

I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-28 18:07:13+00:00
> Frankly, if we give black boxes the ability to manipulate atoms with no oversight, we _deserve_ to go extinct.

Well we are giving them ability to manipulate all aspects of a computer (aka giving them computer access) and we all know how that went (Spoiler or maybe not so much spoiler for those who know but NOT GOOD)

For the unitiated, Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115

and Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867
by shimman | 2025-12-28 18:08:05+00:00
We absolutely should, some companies cannot ever be trusted with certain information. There is no reason why companies like Meta or Google should be entrusted with so much user data. The government should force a divestment from it and allow the public to own it (which should include public job guarantees that allow the public to maintain said data) or allow for smaller companies to be the handlers of such data.

Google, Meta, and the rest of big tech have proven they should never be trusted.
by UomoNeroNero | 2025-12-28 18:08:15+00:00
I’ve been diabetic for 30 years, and for more than twenty of those I did multiple daily measurements by pricking my fingertips and multiple insulin injections per day. Now I wear a sensor that I replace every two weeks and a catheter (which I change about once a week).

I really don’t understand this phobia of needles at all. After two days with one system or the other, you get used to it—there’s no pain, it’s just a mental issue of “having to make the gesture.”

My friends used to laugh at how normal it was for me to inject insulin outside a restaurant, while walking, chatting, and smoking at the same time.
by justinhj | 2025-12-28 18:08:17+00:00
Oh, I see. Also broken on desktop but you can still read the article without accepting the cookies, which makes the thing kinda pointless?

Their post endpoint for cookie handling is broken. Giving 403.

Request URL
https://notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/wp-admin/admin-ajax....
Request Method
POST
Status Code
403 Forbidden
Remote Address
xxxxxxxxxx
Referrer Policy
strict-origin-when-cross-origin

payload

set_user_consent
val
positive
security
xxxxxxxx
by oersted | 2025-12-28 18:09:13+00:00
I understand that, but if "/", and other common operators, don't mean what they means on paper, you can prove things that would be untrue if copied onto paper (kinda). You can indeed prove "1/0 = 0", which is not that far off from redefining "=" and proving "1=0".

More importantly, the other way around, it seems too easy to copy a proposition from paper onto Lean and falsely prove it without realising they don't express the same thing. A human probably wouldn't but there's increased usage of AI and other automatic methods with Lean.

I do understand I'm being purist and that it doesn't matter that much in practice. I've used Lean seriously for a while and I've never encountered any of this.
by blensor | 2025-12-28 18:09:17+00:00
I recently saw a video discussing fasting effects on cancer.

In the past it seems the consensus was that since cancer cells need more fuel than regular cells, starving them is beneficial in combating it.

But recently it has been discovered that some cancers can grow better with ketones.

So it seems that some cancers benefit from fasting while others are starved from fasting.
by some_furry | 2025-12-28 18:09:21+00:00
> The Alice / Bob comparison is asymmetric in a misleading way. You state Bob Ltd retains all private keys indefinitely. A Heartbleed-style attack on their key storage infrastructure still compromises 30 years of backups, not 90 days.

No. Having 30 years of secret keys at all is not the same of having 30 years of secret keys in memory.
by a-dub | 2025-12-28 18:09:45+00:00
never played with windows 2 but looks pretty awesome.

i think in this era the home market was largely saturated by home machines (atari st, amiga, apple 2+, a little macintosh). i don't remember a lot of pc juniors or other machines running windows 2, maybe some tandy machines but i think they were still more expensive than the home stuff.
by convolvatron | 2025-12-28 18:09:51+00:00
I know it seems reductive, but in the early 90s there was a serious discussion about NAT. NAT bifurcates the internet into producers and consumers. naturally everyone looking to monetize the internet thought this was just fine, even desirable. and almost all the people who actually built the internet were aghast. ubiquitous reachability was the goal, not making a new form a television.

the details wrt social media etc were unknown, but the path we were taking was quite clear.
by hackyhacky | 2025-12-28 18:10:00+00:00
> most survey respondents don't even _understand_ what AI is doing, so I am a bit skeptical to trust their opinions on whether it will cause harm

Why do they need to know how AI works, in order to know that it is already having a negative effect on their lives and is likely to do so in the future?

I don't understand how PFAS [1] work, but I know I don't want them in my drinking water.

[1] https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc
by eoskx | 2025-12-28 18:10:18+00:00
My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.
by shimman | 2025-12-28 18:10:28+00:00
It also neglects that car companies purposely made cars extremely unsafe while chasing profits.

The only reason we have any regulations and safety standards for cars is because of one person leading the charge: Ralph Nader. You know what companies like Ford, GM, Chrysler tried to do after he released "Unsafe at any speed?" Smear his name in a public campaign that backfired.

Car companies had to be dragged kicking and screaming to include basic features like seatbelts, airbags, and crumple zones.
by hxugufjfjf | 2025-12-28 18:10:45+00:00
As a twitch reaction I’m inclined to agree, but I’ve found the quality of AI generated readmes typically far exceed those created by humans. Yes, some emojis and fluff are to be expected, but also great structure, fully documented CLI arguments, loads of examples and easy to get started guidelines.

It does however indicate that likely the code is also fully or at best partially written by the same LLM.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-28 18:11:33+00:00
How about now?

To be fair, I think that the biggest dangers of AI are just a continuation of the dangers of the Internet at large, namely the disintegration of a shared reality among society broadly. Echo chambers and personalization bubbles mean that everyone now is free to believe whatever they want to believe, and everyone else is crazy and wrong. AI just supercharges that, and especially makes it possible for the powers that be (i.e. owners of social media and communication channels) to subtly shift opinions in their favor.

I believe that what we're witnessing is a fundamental breakdown in the human psyche's ability, as it evolved historically, to handle the modern world. There are 2 other areas that I think are good analogies: food abundance and birth control. Humans evolved to love sex, which, historically, also guaranteed lots of children. But with birth control, humans can now have sex without the consequence of children, and this is actually putting a huge new evolutionary pressure on humanity - lots of people aren't procreating, so those that do will markedly shift human evolution. Similarly, humans evolved in an environment where food scarcity was common, and our current overabundance of food causes all sorts of havoc in first world societies.

Similarly, humans evolved socially to understand small groups, and then I would argue even larger and larger hierarchical groups. But the Internet, and AI, destroys those hierarchies, and is wreaking havoc on a society not prepared to deal with so many representations of "truth" where it is trivial to find an endless sea of people (or bots) who exactly agree with you.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-28 18:12:38+00:00
It's hard to know what to make of a question like this. How did the respondents understand it, and what did the surveyors mean by it?

It seems obvious to me that, if we take the question literally, this will definitely happen. Already has, really. It's a powerful tool. Powerful tools are used to do many things, including harmful things. Good, useful technology like fertilizers and computers have caused major harm to humans, this will be no different.

As written, the question does not say anything about the harm outweighing the benefits. But I bet a lot of the people answering the question took that as implied.
by Obscurity4340 | 2025-12-28 18:12:41+00:00
> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment (ending with someones couch being neutralized) makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.

Thats a bit much, isnt it? This was in the early days of their nuclear progress, of course at the time it wasnt going to be a linear, completely efficient and sanitized. Kind of a weird comment, nothing develops perfectly while its development chugs along
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-12-28 18:12:44+00:00
This is by far the absolute best "how things go from a high-level (AI/LLM/Inference/Python/JAX/etc.) to low-level (TPU equivalent of assembly language instructions)" article that I've read to date!

Upvoted and favorited!

A keeper -- for present and future study...

Well done!
by foldr | 2025-12-28 18:12:48+00:00
>How does a statically typed language rejecting a correct program affect reliability?

Because in some cases it will reject code that is simple and obviously correct, which will then need to be replaced by code that is less simple and less obviously correct (but which satisfies the type checker). I don't think this happens most of the time, but it does mean that static typing isn't a strict upgrade in terms of reliability. You are paying for the extra guarantees on the code you can write by giving up lots of correct programs that you could otherwise have written.
by shimman | 2025-12-28 18:13:20+00:00
I have these insane bugs where my apple tv will connect to my mbp even tho my mbp has blutooth disabled. I'll be listening to a podcast on my mbp with airpods while my wife is watching some show on the apple tv. It will still randomly connect to my airpods when my wife never tries to connect them.

Apple is quickly becoming a trash company and we're seeing the effects of an industry writ large when you only hire leetcode monkeys.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-28 18:14:09+00:00
You are forgetting about how with the multiple high quality open weights models, we are gonna quickly/(already have?) reached the point where using completely local models will make sense.

If the writer of the (grandparent comment?)/ (the person who wrote about the philipines secretary is reading this), I would love it if you can do me a simple task and instead of having them use the SOTA models for the stuff for which they are using AI right now, they use an open source model (even an tiny to mid model) and see what happens.

> "My assistant in the phillipines has used it to substantially improve her communications, for instance."

So if they are using it for communications, Honestly even a small-mid model would be good for them.

Please let me know how this experiment goes. I might write about it and its just plain curiosity to me but I would honestly be 99% certain that the differences would be so negligible that using SOTA or even remotely hosted AI datacenter models wont make much sense but of course we can say nothing without empirical evidence which is why I also asked you to conduct my hypothesis.
by westurner | 2025-12-28 18:14:17+00:00
> intersection of LLMs and formal verification

/? TLA LLM
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... : 1 submission, ~20 comments

"AI will make formal verification go mainstream" (2025-12)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46294574
by FergusArgyll | 2025-12-28 18:14:54+00:00
Acquired (Long episodes about companies, recents include:
coca-cola, trader joe's & alphabet)
Dwarkesh Podcast (Inquisitive curious host, mostly "AGI"
related)
Conversations with Tyler (Wide ranging, polymath host,
distinctive, hard to describe style)
The Marginal Revolution Podcast (Tyler cowen & Alex Tabbarok
discussing economics)
Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson (you sort of mentioned)
The Morning Meeting (US Politics mostly. Neutral tone,
informative, forward looking i.e. what will happen next not
who is bad etc)