MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-01-05 19:31:40+00:00
> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made.

The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.

You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.

Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.
by mlsu | 2026-01-05 19:31:46+00:00
The distribution is a problem, but not for the reasons people think. At these amounts (billions) the money stops being human-scale and starts to become civilization scale. You can accomplish big things with 150 billion. Things like: installing a gigawatt of solar, building a 1000km HVDC line, etc.

The issue is that when that 150 billion is concentrated into one person's hands, it tends to be inefficiently allocated. This is the argument against central planning; it's inefficient, it does not actually go where it would maximally benefit society.

We have, with the amount of wealth inequality, essentially re-invented central planning. It's arguably worse today, because rather than giving central control to a worker's council which is nominally accountable to regular people, we've given it to Larry Ellison who is going to build yet another datacenter for AI, instead of spending it on energy or manufacturing capacity.

My home electricity bill has doubled since AI came out. That is my evidence that this concentration of wealth is egregiously misallocating capital. It is a civilization-scale self-own. Countries that allocate capital properly will wipe the floor and we are beginning to see that play out.
by SecondHandTofu | 2026-01-05 19:32:05+00:00
Land IS somewhat expensive in LA though.

Plus, you are looking at it purely from a construction cost of the building point of view. If you build more densely, you don't need as many roads and other services, which also cost money, and once you have enough density, agglomeration means that it's economical to have local businesses nearby, fewer people need cars etc.
by az_reth | 2026-01-05 19:32:17+00:00
Every few months, I will get tired of the current look of my status bar in i3 (or sway on my laptop). For the icons I will go to https://www.nerdfonts.com/, search for ones that look cool, and copy paste them to the relevant-ish sections.

Apparently I'm qualified to be a designer for Apple.
by stale2002 | 2026-01-05 19:32:27+00:00
> Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music."

Ok. Lets go with that analogy. Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on? Sure they wont get good at the aiming part. But it feels kinda up to them on if that matters or not.

Additionally, I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with that. Now, if someone entered into a music competition, where only human made music was allow then I agree that this would be "cheating". But what if its not that and the listeners simply are OK with the "aimbotted" music?
by toast0 | 2026-01-05 19:32:42+00:00
> Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.

For a superbowl ad, there's the high cost to air the spot, but most of them also have a high cost to produce the spot (maybe not for the the one from last year that was just a dvd logo esque bouncing qr code for a crypto scam); if your marketing budget was ~ $5M, maybe you spent $1M on production and $4M on airtime. If AI gives you a good enough result for approximately no money, maybe you spend all that budget on airtime, maybe you cut the budget and still spend $4.5M on airtime. Of course, if everybody is spending more on airtime, you might not get more airtime, but you could still reduce/eliminate the production part of the budget.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-05 19:32:44+00:00
Related to OpenBSD/hppa platform support, see perhaps the recent post "The scariest boot loader code":

* http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/boot_hppa.htm...

* Via: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251231080327
by AStrangeMorrow | 2026-01-05 19:32:49+00:00
Yeah I am not an absolute GenAI hater. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and I think there are ways to be creative about it. However 95% of what we see online, especially in the Ads space, is bottom of the barrel quality. It is obvious basic AI generated images/video most of the time and for me is an instant “I’m not going to bother with that product” marker.

One of the worst one was an allegedly “illustrated history” book. All Ads were of AI generated history book pages with tons of historical inconsistencies. Looked up the real book and it actually looked decent: hand drawn, well formatted etc. Why not use pictures of the actual book instead of whatever mess I was seeing.

However I also keep getting Ads for this other historical book that drives me nuts: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vilno/the-codex-book

I might be wrong but to me most of the art is looks AI generated, and the few pages they show just don’t make any historical sense. Yet they sell it as “hand drawn”. From the animations seems like some stuff was AI generated and then redrawn by hand? But the drawing themselves are plain weird: the nonsensical castle. The archers and scoped crossbow in a page about medieval crossbows, the silly submarine
by filleduchaos | 2026-01-05 19:32:50+00:00
Jumping to conclusions about what "kitchen skills" means aside, the fact that nobody is born with them is precisely the point. Congratulations, you understood it!

Slightly less facetiously, "anyone can follow a recipe" makes about as much sense as "anyone can follow a README". Is it some arcane black magic that only a select few can decipher? No, but at the same time if you don't recognise that there is a baseline level of technical literacy needed to actually follow your average README then you might have your head stuck too far in a bubble.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-05 19:32:52+00:00
> Maybe you meant the web stack (HTML, JavaScript)

HTML5 doesn't refer specifically to HTML, rather it's "HTML + JavaScript + CSS". There's hardly a website nowadays that can be used without JS.

By using the name HTML5 as an umbrella name for a programming language API plus some declarative bits, the W3C tacitly admitted that the declarative push has been a mistake - I explained "why" in my previous comment.
by DocTomoe | 2026-01-05 19:33:14+00:00
Just because you do not use a piece of technology or see no use in a particular use-case does not make it useless. If you want your Java code repaired, more power to you, but do not cripple the tool for people like me who use ChatGPT for more introspective work which cannot be expressed in a tweet.

By the way, I would wager that 'long-form'-users are actually the users that pay for the service.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-05 19:33:39+00:00
Worse in some ways, but understandable an others.

If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade.

Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s no way we can change that kind of consumer behaviour.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s right that companies do this, but I do think they’d go out of business if they didn’t because consumer trends will continue like this regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.

So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its operating system look. It’s that they completely jumped the shark and created something that was too focused on aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.
by matsemann | 2026-01-05 19:34:02+00:00
I'm not much on X anymore due to the vitriol, and visiting now kinda proved it. Beneath almost every trending post made by a female is someone using grok to sexualize a picture of them.

(And whatever my timeline has become now is why I don't visit more often, wtf, used to only be cycling related)

Edit: just to bring receipts, 3 instances in a few scrolls: https://x.com/i/status/2007949859362672673 https://x.com/i/status/2007945902799941994 https://x.com/i/status/2008134466926150003
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-05 19:34:05+00:00
IMO, this particular division of labor (design/specification) introduces a rather unacceptable level of friction.

It is a feature, not a bug, that when the design and specification work is being done by the same person, the designs tend to be ones that are relatively straightforward to specify. It makes it a conscious choice to budget more specification effort towards elments that are more important to the designer.
by andreyandrade | 2026-01-05 19:34:15+00:00
The technical implication here is that 'deleted' or 'hidden' doesn't mean gone. It’s interesting to see the tension between GDPR-like 'right to be forgotten' and the need for data preservation in legal investigations. However, selective hiding based on PR risk is different from automated safety filters. It suggests a manual layer of intervention that most users aren't aware exists.
by groos | 2026-01-05 19:34:23+00:00
Deflation is never going to be allowed to happen even if economic conditions allow it. The reason that the Federal Reserve wants inflation at ~2% is so that nobody hoards cash in their home and instead spends it before it loses value or puts it in a bank to lend to the economy or invests it. Deflation would mean that you could hoard cash and it would grow in value, leading to less money available for economic growth.
by perrygeo | 2026-01-05 19:35:07+00:00
> low fidelity version of a browser UI?

That's the point. For me, with very few exceptions, modern web UI is steaming pile of dogshit - no consideration for user's attention, speed, or usability. TUI are extremely low fidelity; there's nowhere to hide all that enshitified cruft! Stripping the functionality down to its bare essence vs navigating a bespoke web UI with the design aesthetic of clown vomit. I can tell you which one is more productive for me.
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-05 19:35:08+00:00
Having an audit trail is really important for medium-sized shops where a lot of senior devs still have the keys to prod and need to for the sake of being able to investigate faults or poke at systems to get them back online. At the same time, when something is left in a bad state, you want to know how it got that way and when; not even necessarily just to punish people, but so that the right people are in the room to explain the full circumstances of what they did and why.
by buchanae | 2026-01-05 19:35:08+00:00
I share a lot of this sentiment, although I struggle more with the setup and maintenance than the diagnosis.

It's baffling to me that it can still take _so_much_work_ to set up a good baseline of observability (not to mention the time we spend on tweaking alerting). I recently spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of our telemetry setup and fill in the gaps. It took weeks. We had data in many systems, many different instrumentation frameworks (all stepping on each other), noisy alerts, etc.

Part of my problem is that the ecosystem is big. There's too much to learn:
OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Zipkin, Micrometer, eBPF, auto-instrumentation, OTel SDK vs Datadog Agent, and on and on. I don't know, maybe I'm biased by the JVM-heavy systems I've been working in.

I worked for New Relic for years, and even in an observability company, it was still a lot of work to maintain, and even then traces were not heavily used.

I can definitely imagine having Claude debug an issue faster than I can type and click around dashboards and query UIs. That sounds fun.
by hecanjog | 2026-01-05 19:35:12+00:00
It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.
by naasking | 2026-01-05 19:35:16+00:00
They are very competitive in the places where most people live, but the USPS delivers to many more places that the others do not, and still maintains cost competitiveness.

This turns out to be a decent analogy to healthcare: insurance companies do not provide the coverage, universality and simplicity that a single payer system would; instead, you'll get something like insurance coverage networks providing spotty and inconsistent care.

Either approach has upsides and downsides, but single payer, universal coverage for basic and emergency healthcare seems like a no-brainer.
by tech_ken | 2026-01-05 19:35:33+00:00
> Observability made us very good at producing signals, but only slightly better at what comes after: interpreting them, generating insights, and translating those insights into reliability.

I'm a data professional who's kind of SRE adjacent for a big corpo's infra arm and wow does this post ring true for me. I'm tempted to just say "well duh, producing telemetry was always the low hanging fruit, it's the 'generating insights' part that's truly hard", but I think that's too pithy. My more reflective take is that generating reliability from data lives in a weird hybrid space of domain knowledge and data management, and most orgs headcount strategy don't account for this. SWEs pretend that data scientists are just SQL jockeys minutes from being replaced by an LLM agent; data scientists pretend like stats is the only "hard" thing and all domain knowledge can be learned with sufficient motivation and documentation. In reality I think both are equally hard, it's rare that you find someone who can do both, and that doing both is really what's required for true "observability".

At a high level I'd say there are three big areas where orgs (or at least my org) tend to fall short:

* extremely sound data engineering and org-wide normalization (to support correlating diverse signals with highly disparate sources during root-cause)

* telemetry that's truly capable of capturing the problem (ie. it's not helpful to monitor disk usage if CPU is the bottleneck)

* true 'sleuths' who understand how to leverage the first two things to produce insights, and have the org-wide clout to get those insights turned into action

I think most orgs tend to pick two of these, and cheap out on the third, and the result is what you describe in your post. Maybe they have some rockstar engineers who understand how to overcome the data ecosystem shortcomings to produce a root-cause analysis, or maybe they pay through the nose for some telemetry/dashboard platform that they then hand over to contract workers who brute-force reliability through tons of work hours. Even when they do create dedicated reliability teams, it seems like they are more often than not hamstrung by not having any leverage with the people who actually build the product. And when everything is a distributed system it might actually be 5 or 6 teams who you have no leverage with, so even if you win over 1 or 2 critical POCs you're left with an incomplete patchwork of telemetry systems which meet the owning team's (teams') needs and nothing else.

All this to say that I think reliability is still ultimately an incentive problem. You can have the best observability tooling in the world, but if don't have folks at every level of the org who understand (a) what 'reliable' concretely looks like for your product and (b) have the power to effect necessary changes then you're going to get a lot of churn with little benefit.
by stabbles | 2026-01-05 19:35:42+00:00
For the particular case of the 5 delimiters '\n', '.', '?', '!', and ';', it just happens to be so that you can do this as a single shuffle instruction, replacing the explicit lookup table.

You can do this whenever `c & 0x0F` is unique for the set of characters you're looking for.

See https://stoppels.ch/2022/11/30/io-is-no-longer-the-bottlenec... for details.
by swashq | 2026-01-05 19:35:51+00:00
1. Scan economic calendar: Takes 2 min to see what Fed/earnings announcements are coming. Helps contextualize news later.
2. Review one chart/metric: Pick one stock or index, look at 1-year trend. Not trading, just pattern recognition over time. After a few months you start noticing things faster.

Both are low-effort but compound, you build intuition without committing to deep analysis.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-05 19:35:52+00:00
And I would wonder if overpriced luxury items in general are detrimental to the economy. It feels to simple me that transacting items with subjective added values above costs shrinks economy a bit.

To me it feels that overpriced items cause less trickle downs if they cost less to make: the delta would go into an oblivion. Trickle downs don't appear to be real, but less than already immeasurable sounds bad.
by femiagbabiaka | 2026-01-05 19:36:25+00:00
Any lawyers around? I would assume (IANAL) that Section 230 does not apply to content created by an agent owned by the platform, as opposed to user-uploaded content. Also it seems like their failure to create safeguards opens up the possibility of liability.

And of course all of this is narrowly focused on CSAM (not that it should be minimized) and not on the fact that every person on X, the everything app, has been opened up to the possibility of non-consensual sexual material being generated of them by Grok.
by lmwnshn | 2026-01-05 19:37:08+00:00
It is an undergrad course, though it is cross-listed for masters students as well. At CMU, the prerequisites chain looks like this: 15-122 (intro imperative programming, zero background assumed, taken by first semester CS undergrads) -> 15-213 (intro systems programming, typically taken by the end of the second year) -> 15-445 (intro to database systems, typically taken in the third or fourth year). So in theory, it's about one year of material away from zero experience.
by jghn | 2026-01-05 19:37:08+00:00
My observation over the last 10-15 years here has been this is partially true. But what's more true is the Overton window has shifted. To use your example, the things that would come out of their mouths, especially Elon, has taken a decidedly right wing turn over time. So keep in mind you're also seeing people who have largely stayed the same discussing a culture that largely has not.
by DocTomoe | 2026-01-05 19:37:26+00:00
> A few months ago, OpenAI shared some data about how with 700 million users, 1 million people per week show signs of mental distress in their chats

Considering that the global prevalence of mental health issues in the population is one in seven[1], that would make OpenAI users about 100 times more 'sane' than the general population.

Either ChatGPT miraculously selects for an unusually healthy user base - or "showing signs of mental distress in chat logs: is not the same thing as being mentally ill, let alone harmed by the tool.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-diso...
by mothballed | 2026-01-05 19:37:42+00:00
You can't seriously believe those other societies are taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than what they already have. People in the 3rd world are less fortunate; they're not dumb -- they want the same as us: better lives for themselves and their family. If they're working in a factory and not the alternatives it's because they passed something else along the way that was an even shittier option than that.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-05 19:37:54+00:00
> They extended their operations there because Biden lured them with insane subsidies.

Biden, really? If you’re attempting to stop disinformation, please start with yourself.

Michelin opened their US headquarters in Greenville in 1984. BMW opened their plant in South Carolina in 1994.

How was (at the time) Senator Joe Biden of Delaware responsible for that in any way? Why would he care so much about South Carolina?

The real reason is shipping tires and vehicles across oceans is expensive.
by JohnMakin | 2026-01-05 19:37:58+00:00
This is just recycled advice that's been given for 30+ years. "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" etc. The thing is this only really "works" in healthy or semi-healthy environments. You could just as easily have an infantile, poorly qualified, easily threatened middle manager above you that will perceive this kind of behavior as an attack and take the legs out from under you in ways that you have very little control over (has happened to me)
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-05 19:38:10+00:00
> But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.

There's a thin line between art and business - quite often the goal isn't to have you feel something, it's to sell you product that you pay for, and if by the way you feel something, that's cool.
by josalhor | 2026-01-05 19:38:16+00:00
> most of your points are refuted in the article

Sure, we can debate about the general points.

Yet, we can't refute that my subjective opinion evaluation of the opening image looks better (for me) , reads better (for me) and is easier (for me) to parse. Either I don't fit the general guidelines, or the general guidelines need a revision, that's my point overall.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-05 19:38:46+00:00
Making a game that will sell well on Steam is typically much harder than finding a bunch of boring business leaders and pitching them a SaaS or consulting package. On the surface it might seem simpler to do a game, but once you get into the mechanics of building, testing and publishing something for the masses, the fear of cold calling or emailing total strangers begins to evaporate quickly.

About 99% of the work you do on a game will wind up in the trashcan. Doesn't matter what kind of work it is. Code, audio, textures, models, map layouts, multiplayer balancing work, etc. are all susceptible in the same way. No one is safe from the chaos. It takes a lot of human energy and persistence to produce sufficient 1% content to fill up a player experience.

I'd estimate for a B2B SaaS product, the ratio is approximately the same, however you don't need such a broad range of talent to proceed. One developer with a desire to do the hard things constantly can be all you need to make it to profitability. Going from one employee to N employees in a creative venture is where things go bananas. If you absolutely must do an indie game and you need it to succeed or your internet will get cut off, you will want to strongly consider doing it by yourself. Figuring out how to split revenue and IP with other humans when you can't get the customer on the phone is a nightmare.