MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bill_joy_fanboy | 2026-01-05 19:39:13+00:00
I've noticed the same thing with regards to actually attending college. People still go; they just complain about it more.

The only change is that there is a much more cynical feeling about the experience. School spirit is out. People see it as "a ripoff I must endure to get a decent job and be taken seriously."

I graduated years ago. When my college (major state uni) called asking for a donation, I laughed the guy off the phone. The idea of "school spirit" seems like a joke to me, as it does for many students these days.

The new cope is to see if you can't do it as cheaply as possible, lop off a year, get scholarships, do a bunch of AP courses prior, etc.

Basically, a lot of students see the process as a box to check as if they were standing in line at the DMV to get their diploma.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2026-01-05 19:39:14+00:00
> It means wanting isn't a mechanism.

Well we still have demand in the equation. If demand for service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is there.

People with more disposable income (the high-productivity ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the compensation to where we want it to be.

What I don't know is how we will respond to service jobs being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation. Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage therapists?
by intalentive | 2026-01-05 19:39:31+00:00
This mirrors the military doctrine of "mission tactics" which entrusts subordinates with wide latitude in executing orders. But it requires a high degree of alignment and competence, which explains why YC focuses on founders over product or idea.

This makes sense in a dynamic environment with sensitive local conditions and "network lag" in the chain of command. But in more static or settled market environments it may be wiser (for investors) to focus elsewhere and restrict founder autonomy. We see this pretty commonly with successful founders who get "phased out" and replaced with more experienced managers.

I wonder how much this sort of "distributed decision-making" has been formalized and studied.
by quantified | 2026-01-05 19:40:07+00:00
The campus life for 18-22 year olds can be an amazing experience. It can be super stimulating socially, intellectually, culturally. Or it can be a 4-year drinking binge. Depends on the school, the person and the peer group the person can find.

There is a huge variation in quality of local colleges, and in opportunity that arises from them. As every reader here knows, Americans are super class-conscious and pretty competitive, so a good local school will seem like "settling". And, they're not free by any means.
by observationist | 2026-01-05 19:40:19+00:00
If you look at the conjunction of standards going down, and student loans effectively being government sanctioned predatory debt subsidized by taxpayer dollars, and "education" being a sacred cow in certain circles, then of course degree mills are going to be churning out more than ever before.

People aren't being educated, they're being credentialed, and you can no longer assume the quality of a credential. I will trust 100 of 100 people who can coherently explain a system or process over people purportedly credentialed for a thing.

It's far easier to make more money in trades, or to earn experience and work outside traditional career ladders with no degree. These days you can gain experience in technical domains and even without certifications or degrees you can get to the top 5% of paying jobs. Not all jobs, not everywhere, but it's very, very common to see experience exceptions. Prove you can do a thing, that you're good at a thing, and that matters far more than a degree.

The best you can assume from a degree is that a person has enough persistence to stick it out for 4 years on a singular goal. In rare instances, their capabilities are going to align well with the best of what their credentials imply, and they'll actually be exemplary.

Most of the time, in my experience, degrees are nothing more than attendance slips, these days. Congratulations, you're literate and showed up.
by dc396 | 2026-01-05 19:40:33+00:00
I had the same experience recently and felt similarly (more or less, I didn't really find it embarrassing, more irritating). If the restaurant I was calling had simply said "Hi, I'm an automated service" at the beginning, I'd have be less irritated. I guess I'll have to start calls by asking "are you human?" when I call for reservations (or other services I suppose).
by pcoz | 2026-01-05 19:40:55+00:00
Built a small experiment around conditional compute by reasoning type.

This repo (1) classifies prompts into 6 reasoning types (weighting/consensus/deduction/comparison/causal/lookup) via simple patterns, then (2) runs GPT-2 Small and compares neuron activation patterns by type (overlap + “type-specific” neurons). On a toy set (48 prompts) the classifier is ~92% accurate, and some type pairs show low overlap.

Has potential applications in query-aware routing / MoE-style gating, serving-cost reduction (skip irrelevant compute for “lookup-ish” prompts), prompt triage (send hard cases to stronger models/tools), and interpretability (what subnetworks light up for what reasoning demands).
by freeplay | 2026-01-05 19:41:11+00:00
Memorizing CLI commands and typing/editing them over and over can be very time consuming.

Use k9s for example. Let's say you want to determine where the value of an environment variable is coming from.

1. 'kubectl get deploy -n example' (find the name of the deployment in question)
2. 'kubectl describe deploy example-app -n example' (determine where the value for the env var is coming from)
3. 'kubectl get cm example-app-config -n example -o yaml' (check the value of the referenced key in the config map)

This is a very basic example but you can see where it lead to slow debugging that is made even slower by its propensity to typos and the need to look up command syntax. Once you get comfy in a well designed TUI, you can fly through this process in 10 seconds.
by darksaints | 2026-01-05 19:41:15+00:00
I understand where you're coming from, and I'll play devil's advocate to the devil's advocate: If generative AI is generating convincingly photorealistic CSAM, what the fuck are they training the models on? And if those algorithms are modifying images of actual children, wouldn't you consider those victims?

I strongly sympathize with the idea that crimes should by definition have identifiable victims. But sometimes the devil doesn't really need an advocate.
by _fzslm | 2026-01-05 19:41:27+00:00
> That’s like blaming a pen for writing something bad,” DogeDesigner opined.

Genuinely terrifying how Elon has a cadre of unpaid yes-men ready to justify his every action. DogeDesigner regularly sub tweets Elon agreeing to his latest dumb take of the day, and even seems to have based his entire identity on Elon's doge obsession.

I can't imagine how terrible that self imposed delusion feels deep down for either of them.
by pelorat | 2026-01-05 19:41:42+00:00
Jokes on xAI. Europe doesn't have a Section 230 and the responsibility fall squarely on the platform and its owners. In Europe, AI generated or photoshopped CSAM is treated the same as actual abuse-backed CSAM if the depiction is realistic. Possession and distribution are both serious crimes.

The person(s) ultimately in charge of removing (or preventing the implementation of) Grok guardrails might find themselves being criminally indicted in multiple European countries once investigations have concluded.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-05 19:42:19+00:00
I'm mostly bald... I got tired of paying as much as I did for haircuts and now mostly just use a pair of clippers on myself, since my goal is to take off all of it. I've paid for more beard trims the past few years than haircuts, though I mostly do that myself too.

Note, I usually use clippers on myself about once a week. Sometimes I'll use a shaver to get a closer shave, but generally doesn't matter as I don't care if there's a little growth, which is noticeable unless I literally shave daily anyway... which I'm too lazy to do, and definitely not able to pay someone else to do.
by seanwilson | 2026-01-05 19:42:57+00:00
Sounds like we agree! There's no perfect solution and I'm not saying SSGs are always the best fit. It really depends on the project and what the people involved value.

For my own solo projects, the ease of hosting for static sites is often such a big win for me that I'm willing to forego some interactivity even though more interactive features would be nice. Knowing that I can upload several static sites and they'll run themselves without any maintenance for years and without potential security problems keeps my life nice and calm. It depends what you want to prioritize.
by krick | 2026-01-05 19:43:35+00:00
First off, this is not the top we are talking about, since there is one that AA provided[0]. I am not sure what it matters which names exactly I've heard of, but if you are that curious: I don't know what is Ed Sheeran and Wham (but cannot vouch I've never heard their music in a supermarket), but I definitely remember "Coldplay" being mentioned in a joke onstage by a NIN member[1], but I didn't bother to check out what they are. I can imagine the faces of Taylor Swift & Justin Bieber, but cannot name any song, and I'm sure I've heard Mariah Carey somewhere, since that name is around longer than Rihanna. I have a song or two of Ariana Grande in my playlist though.

Edit: Ok, I've finally googled "Coldplay". Yeah, definitely heard "Clocks" somewhere.

[0] https://annas-archive.li/blog/spotify/spotify-top-10k-songs-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qboe5CebixA
by 9x39 | 2026-01-05 19:43:43+00:00
I use AI, but I don't get such content.

I understand everyone pouncing when X won't own Grok's output, but output is directly connected to its input and blame can be proportionally shared.

Isn't this a problem for any public tool? Adversarial use is possible on any platform, and consistent law is far behind tech in this space today.
by MurkyLabs | 2026-01-05 19:43:45+00:00
I'm not sure if there's been talk about it but it does make you wonder, would this AI generated CSAM 'saite' the abuser's needs and/or would it spread the idea that it isn't bad and possibly create more abusers who then go on to abuse physical children. Would those individuals have done it without the AI. I believe there's still debate over whether abuse is a result of nature or nurture but that starts to get into theoretical and philosophy. To answer your question about who the victim is I would say the children who those images are based off of. As well as any future children that are harmed due to exposure of these images or due to the abusers possibly seeking real content. I think for the most part AI generated porn hurts everyone involved.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-05 19:44:41+00:00
One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have walked back some design decisions that were total flops in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK, good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)

I like this article because it points out how undeniably awful some of these decisions were in a "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens a does a major course correction.
by wincy | 2026-01-05 19:44:52+00:00
That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation.

My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story.

Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.
by lynndotpy | 2026-01-05 19:44:55+00:00
Speaking in the abstract: There are arguments that fictional / drawn CSAM (such as lolicon) lowers the rates of child sex abuse by giving pedophiles an outlet. There are also arguments that consuming fictional / drawn CSAM is the start of an escalating pattern that leads to real sex abuse, as well as contributing to a culture that is more permissive of pedophilia.

Anecdotally speaking, especially as someone who was groomed online as a child, I am more inclined toward the latter argument. I believe fictional CSAM harms people and generated CSAM will too.

With generated images being more realistic, and with AI 'girlfriends' advertised as a woman who "can't say no" or as "her body, your choice", I am inclined to believe that the harms from this will be novel and possibly greater than existing drawn CSAM.

Speaking concretely: Grok is being used to generate revenge porn by editing real images of real children. These children are direct, unambiguous victims. There is no grey area where this can be interpreted as a victimless crime. Further, these models are universally trained with real CSAM in the training data.
by praptak | 2026-01-05 19:45:03+00:00
I don't buy the "I only provide the tool" cop out. Musk does control what Grok spews out and just chooses not to act in this case.

When Grok stated that Israel was committing genocide, it was temporarily suspended and fixed[0]. If you censor some things but not others, enabling the others becomes your choice. There is no eating the cookie and having it too - you either take a "common carrier" stance or censor, but also take responsibility for what you don't censor.

[0] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250813-chatbot-grok-...
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-05 19:45:13+00:00
There's a fundamental hand wave going on in this article.

First, we're led to believe that LLM "AI" is entirely a new, revolutionary thing

Then, it waves off objections by saying that people made objections when compilers were introduced.

I think you can't claim "completely revolutionary" and then not deal with all observations, or at least you can't reject observations and objections based on some historical introduction of technology. If "AI" is that great, then you can deal with all objections.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-01-05 19:45:17+00:00
For me the first-approximation litmus test of "is it a real programming language" is "does it have conditionals"? HTML itself does not have conditionals (at least in common use, if you don't count the contents of <canvas> and <noscript>, which I don't). So I don't see how HTML is a programming language, let alone a messy one. LaTeX is a programming language because it's built on TeX, which is a programming language, but HTML purely marks up text.

Granted, when you add CSS to the mix, HTML+CSS is programming if you get fancy about it.
by jsheard | 2026-01-05 19:45:35+00:00
> If generative AI is generating convincingly photorealistic CSAM, what the fuck are they training the models on?

CSAM of course: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009418/generative-ai-i...

When you indiscriminately scrape literally billions of images, far too many to manually review, some horrible and illegal stuff is bound to end up in there.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-05 19:45:37+00:00
Yeah but “without being asked” here means the user has to confirm they are 18+, choose to enable NSFW video, select “spicy” in Grok’s video generation settings and then prompt “Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys”. The prompt seems fine but the rest of it is clearly “enable adult content generation”.

I know they said “without being prompted” here but if you click through you’ll see what the person actually selected (“spicy” is not default and is age-gated and opt-in via the nsfw wall).
by metalman | 2026-01-05 19:45:58+00:00
Having never had a google account or used the "play" store, but having only used android phones(so far) I would try this from fdroid, etc.
I have a workarounds that dissables all notifications except for pm's, the trickiest ones bieng for the varios google (dis)services.
The other main workaround is to use webpage sign ins rather than apps through an oddball browser that breaks anything........hmmmm, too agressive, which luckily comes in another flavor that I have set up for banking, and certain other sign ins.
But what I would realy realy like a cache cleaner that would wipe EVERYTHING , or better yet a detailed list of all running services and cached data AND bieng able to see the network. could be called WTFIGO, or FIGO for short
by waisbrot | 2026-01-05 19:46:04+00:00
IME, taking on extra responsibility doesn't get you promoted. However, you can take it on and then find a new job with a better salary where the responsibility you added is part of the expectation.

The blog is not terrible advice, but "getting promoted" just seems like a waste of time and effort nowadays. To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.

To get hired away from Google to an L6-equivalent role at Meta (or whereever) you need to get halfway through one L6 project and do a few hours of interviewing. There's no comparison in the level of effort. (And I'm not picking on Google here. I think it's the same or worse nearly everywhere.)
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-05 19:46:12+00:00
I'd be interested to see someone try to untangle the sycophancy/flattery from the modern psych / non-violent communication piece.

In theory (so much as I understand it around NVC) the first is outright manipulative and the second is supposed to be about avoiding misunderstandings, but I do wonder how much the two are actually linked. A lot of NVC writing seems to fall into the grey area of like, here's how to communicate in way that will be least likely to trigger or upset the listener, even when the meat of what is being said is in fact unpleasant or embarrassing or confronting to them. How far do you have to go before the indirection associated with empathy-first communication and the OFNR framework start to just look like LLM ego strokes? Where is the line?
by cyberax | 2026-01-05 19:46:19+00:00
> One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.

It does not "forget", the permissions are limited to 30 days. So you have to re-grant them periodically.

Oh, and if you miss the popup (because sometimes it pops _under_ other windows) then you just start getting silent failures. With absolutely NO indication in the UI that something is wrong. There is literally no way to find that out without looking directly into the TCC database.
by imp0cat | 2026-01-05 19:46:25+00:00
Probably yes, but time will tell.

Right now, their chinese OEM bought them and seems to be committed to keeping their robovacs alive.

It is my understanding that US availability of the top models (such as 705 combo) may be limited, so here is a german youtube channel that has a lot of reviews of their newer units and compares them to the old ones (usually the S9 or 980, as those are the best units when it comes to vacuuming): https://www.youtube.com/@frickhelm/videos
by louthy | 2026-01-05 19:46:48+00:00
It’s not about danger it’s about being declarative. That’s kinda the point of using these ‘result’ types: you’re fully declaring the codomain of the function — barring exceptions — and so if your codomain is augmented with Exception then it’s pretty hard to know whether all exceptions will be returned in value form, or just exceptional exceptions! It’s fails the declarative test.
by platevoltage | 2026-01-05 19:46:49+00:00
I mean, a lot of "creatives" fund their art by doing work like making icons, thumbnails, jingles, website designs, corporate logos, etc. Things that can, and are being done by AI. This will have downstream effect on creativity since we aren't using the efficiency that AI provides for the greater good of society. Koenigsegg might sell one or two more cars though, so there's that.
by showerst | 2026-01-05 19:47:07+00:00
Lexis especially makes even scraping public state laws and admin codes difficult, which is extra frustrating because they are the legal publisher of record in a number of states.

I've been considering trying to launch an OpenStates style scraper project for US laws and admin codes, but haven't had the time to attack 100 more scrapers. Even with AI help, the volume is significant.
by MoltenMan | 2026-01-05 19:47:11+00:00
I think 'mirage' is the wrong word; college very much has gone out of vogue as a place of learning. But if you want to get a good job, you still do need to go to get the piece of paper, regardless of whether you think you'll be learning anything. The other factor you have to keep in mind is that college is where every 'smart' 20ish yo goes. If you want to meet people your age similar to you they are most likely all in college! It's difficult as a 20ish yo to have a social life outside of college.

I personally took a gap year working at a startup mid college, and as much as I enjoyed working I still ended up coming back to college purely for those two reasons.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-01-05 19:47:35+00:00
You post a picture of your four-year-old daughter at the playground.

Some random anonymous reply guy creep says "@grok put her in a g-string, make it really sexy". Grok happily obliges and puts it on your timeline.

Photorealistic softcore porn of your toddler: it's all happening on X, the everything app.™
by simontheHWguy | 2026-01-05 19:47:51+00:00
To be honest, the two biggest drivers for this project were Cost and Signal Integrity.
1. Cost: This was my main frustration. The Cyton is currently priced at
1,249.I managed to get the Cerelog ESP−EEG down to
299 (assembled). I really wanted to lower the barrier to entry for individual researchers and hackers who can't drop a grand on a hobby board.

2. The Bias/Noise Implementation: While we both use the same high-end ADC (TI ADS1299), I implemented the Bias (Drive Right Leg) differently. I designed a true closed-loop feedback system. By actively driving the inverted common-mode signal back into the body, the board follows the TI spec aggressively for helping cancel out 60Hz mains hum

Regarding the analog front-end: The current version keeps the inputs flexible (firmware configurable) for different montages. However, I’ve found that most researchers just stick to a single standard montage configuration. Because the Cyton tries to be a "jack of all trades" for every possible montage, it compromises on physical filtering. For future revisions, I plan to trade some of that flexibility for dedicated common-mode and differential hardware filtering to lower the noise floor even further. I already had this on a previous revision prototype but decided to take not out for simplified testing. I'd like to add it back in to a future revision after some more prototype testing.

3. Connectivity: I’m using the ESP32 to stream over WiFi rather than a proprietary USB dongle. Ive been trying to get BLE SW working as well but noticed MAC drivers aren't the most friendly to my implementation.
by 9x39 | 2026-01-05 19:47:51+00:00
The CSAM enforcement complex suffers if people shrug instead of get alarmed - plenty of jobs and budget in this space.

Anyone who sees it might decide to be a victim if they sense there's relief they can secure for damages they can describe.

Society, like others have said, for normalizing weird stuff.

Children, indirectly and hypothetically, if MAPs and their related content are normalized.