MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it time for an AI workers union?
by JimmyBuckets | 2026-02-28 10:39:19+00:00
This last week 671 verified current employees of Google and OpenAI publicly coordinated across competing companies to jointly refuse specific Pentagon demands around autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance: https://notdivided.org

This kind of cross-company researcher solidarity is historically rare. The issue is that it's ephemeral and once the immediate pressure is gone, there's no structure left behind.

Given the issues facinf the field and our species, I would feel a lot safer if I knew that regular scientists and engineers, people I went to college with, were legally positioned to have a hand in governing how this is built. I dont trust Altman, Amodei or any of the rest of them, including the US government.

I'm a tech worker in Europe with connections to Tech Workers Coalition, and although not an AI researcher myself I've been feeling compelled to get off my aas and participate in seeding something more durable.

I was thinking of something like a transnational body that provides researchers with the ability to coordinate across companies, refuse specific applications without career destruction, and set professional ethics standards - even perhaps setting up unions in each country and fostering coordination between them.

Am I reading the zeitgeist wrong?
by fennecbutt | 2026-02-28 10:39:30+00:00
I mean they literally shot a child and watched him bleed to death while creating a wall to prevent an ambulance getting to him soooo.

But for some reason the Western world only sees the evil things Hamas does and handwaves IDF.

They're both evil.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o

Though I suppose you could say he's lying, it's staged etc. In the same way that the religious attribute every good thing to their god and every bad thing to their devil.
by maxbond | 2026-02-28 10:40:00+00:00
Is it toxic to reject a PR for use of unsafe? Does that reflect toxicity of Rust's community? The first image that popped into my head was a classic Torvalds email ripping into a change for being irresponsible with memory (for better and for worse). Obviously you can do anything with a toxic or personal tone, but PRs should be rejected (or changes requested) if they aren't safe/correct. There's correct unsafe code out there but most projects don't need to touch it.
by tenpa0000 | 2026-02-28 10:40:07+00:00
I run Llama 3.2 3B locally for latency-sensitive classification (sub-50ms, so no room for bigger models). At that scale Q2_K vs Q4_K_M isn't just smaller — Q2 starts flipping yes/no answers that Q4 gets right. Not often, but enough to notice in production.

So the KL divergence numbers here are more useful to me than the MMLU tables honestly. I've had MMLU hold steady while the output distribution drifted enough to break things downstream.

Does the calibration dataset make much difference at 3B though? There's so little redundancy that I'd expect it to hit a floor pretty fast regardless of how good the calibration data is.
by adithyan_win | 2026-02-28 10:40:23+00:00
I built a small Swift bridge app that maps gamepad buttons/chords to coding-agent actions in my terminal workflow.

Current actions:

- split panes
- tab workflow
- model/context switching
- quick send
- dictation/transcription trigger

It started as a one-night experiment to learn Swift and test hardware repurposing, but it has been surprisingly usable in daily coding.

Video demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFiQFPgrHPA

Code:
https://github.com/wisdom-in-a-nutshell/stadia-macos-control...

Disclaimer: the repo is not plug-and-play yet. It is mainly shared as inspiration/reference.
by latexr | 2026-02-28 10:40:54+00:00
> That message was sent in error.

That really needs a longer explanation. Reading the previous message, which even has a date, I don’t see how they can claim it was an error.

> we’re sorry for any confusion and concern our mistake may have caused.

Can’t even apologise properly. Just say “has caused”, “may have caused” is trying to weasel out.
by jamiecode | 2026-02-28 10:40:56+00:00
The 98% reduction is the real story here, but the systemic problem you're solving is even bigger than individual tool calls blowing up context. When you're orchestrating multi-step workflows, each tool output becomes part of the conversation state that carries forward to the next step. A Playwright snapshot at step 1 is 56 KB. It still counts at step 3 when you've moved on to something completely different.

The subprocess isolation is smart - stdout-only is the right constraint. I've been running multi-agent workflows where the cost of tool output accumulation forces you to make bad decisions: either summarise outputs manually (defeating the purpose of tool calls), truncate logs (information loss), or cap the workflow depth. None of them good.

The search ranking piece is worth noting. Most people just grep logs or dump chunks and let the LLM sort it out. BM25 + FTS5 means you're pre-filtering at index time, not letting the model do relevance ranking on the full noise. That's the difference between usable and unusable context at scale.

Only question: how does credential passthrough work with MCP's protocol boundaries? If gh/aws/gcloud run in the subprocess, how does the auth state persist between tool calls, or does each call reinit?
by sillyboi | 2026-02-28 10:41:32+00:00
The real win here isn’t just performance,it’s convergence.

When ReadableStream behaves the same in the browser, Workers, and other runtimes, stream-based code becomes portable and predictable. That reduces subtle backpressure bugs and eliminates “works here but not there” edge cases.

Standardization at the streams layer is a big deal for building reliable streaming systems across environments.
by Phelinofist | 2026-02-28 10:41:54+00:00
> Protect _Americans_ from mass surveillance
> Protect _American_ forces

What the actual fuck. How can anyone side with Anthropic. They are not the good guys by any means whatsoever. Mass surveillance against anyone is wrong and having killbots "when AI is ready" is totally fucked and dystopian. Imagine killbots rampaging while the good American people are at home living a nice peaceful life. Fuck any of that, fuck Anthropic, fuck ClosedAI, fuck Google, fuck Trump, fuck the DoD and fuck every American who is patriotic to the monster their country became. Fuck every country that also tries to do stuff like this. Fuck all companies taking part in such insanity.
by dangus | 2026-02-28 10:41:57+00:00
I disagree with this idea on some level.

I don’t think AI is very good at “plan” compared to someone who is actually experienced with a toolset.

I think the more pertinent “falling behind” aspect for most people is the assumption that the models can’t do complex work. I.e., many people using the AI tools limit what they ask for because they are afraid of getting back bad code they have to fix.

It’s also important to be incredibly specific on what you want wherever possible.

I’ve also tried multiple agent workflows and have found them to generally be tiring and cluttered more than helpful.

Here’s a real life pro tip for you: don’t rush to become amazingly more efficient when a new tool comes along. The only benefactor of that attitude is your employer. I’d rather my employer think that AI is giving them a ~10% boost at best while my workload stays the same. I have a family, I don’t live to work, I work because I have to. Crazy brain-melting shit like multi-agent workflows is antithetical to that.

My last bit of feedback is that this reads too much like a LinkedIn post.

I see now that you’re a director of engineering, and so I now understand the LinkedIn influencer style going on here. Since you’re in a position of leadership, take my advice: don’t expect your ICs to pick up these insane thought leadership workflows that sound amazing on paper but end up causing pain, burnout, and low product quality for the engineers on your team who are actually in the trenches doing the work.

No, you won’t magically get 10x engineers and get to make your CTO happy. Don’t treat AI like a magic pill.

When the Covid-era tech overhiring correction ends, your best employees who have spent 2023-2026 getting squeezed and burned out but haven’t quit due to the job market will be the first to leave when the job market inevitably rebounds. These are the engineers whose dumbass bosses think shove AI down their throats and tell them that they aren’t agentmaxxing sloperator code enough.
by pjjpo | 2026-02-28 10:42:14+00:00
Don't need to use China even, Microsoft, or Palantir, etc will continue to support the US military, likely using Google technology in the process (Guava, gRPC maybe?, k8s assuredly? etc).

Sorry but if you truly believe in technology not using in bad context, the only way to avoid it is to change careers. The issue with news like this is it's hard to actually trust the protesters, they probably are happy to clear their conscience personally while continuing to reap the benefits of living in the tech industry. Have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes people do quit - they're probably the ones you want to hire if you care about ethics. Most don't though.
by cheonn638 | 2026-02-28 10:43:09+00:00
> theyre food delivery robots, thats not a gun that a drink dispenser!"

You underestimate how many top AI scientists are perfectly okay with building autonomous weapons systems and are not ashamed of it.

Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

Now note that many L7+ at OpenAI are making $10 million+ per year.
by hamuf | 2026-02-28 10:43:21+00:00
The endless loop grew tiresome. Downloading models, scripting tests, watching them falter on setups while big tech smirks from afar. Trial-and-error felt like a slow grind, so Speechos came about: a web UI to drop audio, switch models on the fly, and watch the comparisons unfold.

All local, data stays put. Mic input or file upload. It auto-senses GPU/CPU/RAM for smart defaults, but tweaks are possible.

Built-in (no Docker): faster-whisper (tiny to large-v3), Vosk, Wav2Vec2, Piper, Kokoro, Bark, eSpeak, Chatterbox, emotion2vec+, HuBERT, Resemblyzer, Silero VAD.

Docker extras: XTTS, ChatTTS, Orpheus, Fish-Speech, Qwen3-TTS, Parler, MeloTTS, Speaches, NeMo, PyAnnote, and more.

Python/FastAPI + Next.js, uv/pnpm. ./dev.sh starts it. MIT, scales from 2GB CPU basics to 24GB GPU full load.

Grab it if it speaks to you.
by mksglu | 2026-02-28 10:43:48+00:00
No magic — standard Unix process inheritance. Each execute() spawns a child process via Node's child_process.spawn() with a curated env built by #buildSafeEnv (https://github.com/mksglu/claude-context-mode/blob/main/cont...). It passes through an explicit allowlist of auth vars (GH_TOKEN, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS, KUBECONFIG, etc.) plus HOME and XDG paths so CLI tools find their config files on disk. No state persists between calls — each subprocess inherits credentials from the MCP server's environment, runs, and exits. This works because tools like gh and aws resolve auth on every invocation anyway (env vars or ~/.config files). The tradeoff is intentional: allowlist over full process.env so the sandbox doesn't leak unrelated vars.
by JasonADrury | 2026-02-28 10:45:19+00:00
>Oh Drop down from your high horse, let’s ask you what have you done for example for the environment have you quit your job to join a cause to for the environment? Have you stopped buying things from china? Have you completely stopped consuming fast fashion?

I hope this particularly weak whataboutism helps you feel better about your indefensible moral position.

> fight for the values of this country from here

Apartheid being one of the core values worth fighting for, apparently.
by dminik | 2026-02-28 10:46:17+00:00
It's not really that interesting. For instance, we've seemingly decided that various blue collar workers are incapable of not falling to their deaths and so have come up with OSHA and various other national equivalents. Drivers are incapable of not crashing and so we started including air bags. Woodworkers seemingly can't stop cutting their fingers off using a table saw and so we came up with SawStop.
by adamors | 2026-02-28 10:47:44+00:00
Not true, prior to 2022 February Russia controlled small parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, now they control them almost entirely, as well as good chunks of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/24/mapping-russian-att...

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...
by pydry | 2026-02-28 10:47:59+00:00
>Normal people are starting to call themselves goyim and aren’t afraid to call themselves antisemites anymore.

Normal people distinguish between Israel and Jews. It's Zionists who blur the distinction.

There are several countries throughout history where the citizens have been absolutely obsessed with their own race and considered the crusader state to be the sole representative of it. It never ended well.
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-02-28 10:48:14+00:00
> I'm not sure what's the logic behind that PR-wise

Part of it is the stated idea that Israel still has public support. That such an exchange, even if Israel launches the first strike, would get more support. This is probably misjudging the actual public support for Israel, which is much lower amongst the general public than amongst (esp. Republican) political circles.

The other part of it is that Trump has surrounded himself with card-carrying nazis, who have not at all been subtle about their desires to harm jews.

> but regardless, it didn't happen.

That Israel didn't launch the first strike and instead insisting on a joint strike (despite otherwise being constantly warmongering), suggests to me that it's the latter 'part' of the reason that had a lot of weight here.
by sensanaty | 2026-02-28 10:49:00+00:00
The funniest or perhaps saddest (depending on your view) is that the "principles" we're talking about and apparently celebrating here are that they don't want to do DOMESTIC surveillance, and they don't want FULLY autonomous kill bots... Yet, because according to the CEO the models aren't there yet.

Meaning, they're a-okay with:

- Mass surveillance of non-US peoples (and let's be completely real here, they're in bed with Palantir already, so they're obviously okay with mass surveillance of everyone as long as they're not the ones that will be held culpable)

- Autonomous murder bots. For now they want a human in the loop to rubberstamp things, but eventually "when the models improve" enough, they're just fine and dandy with their AIs being used as autonomous weapons.

What the fuck are the principles we're talking about here? Why are they being celebrated for this psychotic viewpoint, exactly?
by nivertech | 2026-02-28 10:49:25+00:00
> Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation

no, he got it for no visible reason whatsoever

the most plausible explanation is an advance payment by foreign entities in exchange for future favors

Between his inauguration (January 20, 2009) and the Nobel announcement (October 9, 2009), Obama had been president for less than nine months. The Nobel Committee emphasized his intentions, tone, and early diplomatic actions, rather than long-term achievements.
by ryanjshaw | 2026-02-28 10:49:55+00:00
Yup. I’m not expert so maybe I’m completely off base, but if I were OpenAI or Anthropic I’d likely just hire 1000 highly skilled engineers across multiple disciplines, tell them to build something in their domain of expertise, then critique the model’s output, iteratively work on guardrails for a month or two until the model one-shots the problem, and package that into the new release.
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-28 10:50:36+00:00
That same concept utilizing a cow filesystem would be neat I think, you'd be able to skip your hashing and replace the sqlite with hardlinks, effectively versioning passively whenever something was written to

But now that I think about it, its too obvious not to exist already. Probably just dont know about it yet •́ ‿ , •̀
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-28 10:50:37+00:00
This is exactly what was claimed in Iraq, and while I'm sure you can find some few idiots or optimists, it is completely false at the relevant level. There is no such thing, and has never been such a thing, as a country welcoming an invasion by another country, at least not in the last few hundred years since nation states developed, and since explosives became the major means of war.

This is especially false in Iran in relation to USA intervention, since both the democrats and the fundamentalists still remember how the USA & UK deposed their last democratic leaders and (re) installed the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, who both parts of Iranian society hate and remeber being oppressed by today.
by anonnon | 2026-02-28 10:50:41+00:00
Last I checked, no one dared to attack them before they had nukes because of China's promise (made good in 1950) to use their military to defend the regime in Pyongyang, and the massive array of conventional artillery pointing at Seoul just across the DMZ, where 25% of South Korea's population resides. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192139
by catlikesshrimp | 2026-02-28 10:50:56+00:00
Israel only has outposts in Lebanese territory.

In Syria, Israel had a buffer zone since 1974. Last year they said the agreement had "collapsed" and went on to occupy even more territoru: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/israel-carries-out-...

Palestine is occupied.
by Matl | 2026-02-28 10:52:07+00:00
Iraq was attacking its neighbors every couple of years, Iran is not.

Iran has shown that it is remarkably sane actually, given the aggression towards shown towards it by Israel and the US and has made a lot of efforts to reach a deal.

Remember, it was the US that exited the JCPOA and now it wants Iran to give up all its misses so that they would be defenseless.

I have no love for theocracies, but I do think the Iranian system is a lot better than the likes of Saudi Arabia, which we're buddy buddy with.

Oh and I guess the founder of Syrian branch of AQ and deputy head of ISIS running Syria is better that what was before too, in your book?
by seydor | 2026-02-28 10:52:12+00:00
The plan is a show of power. Trump will leave in 2 years, leaving much of the world in disarray because he had no plan whatsoever, and his staff is literally out of the movie Idiocracy. Nothing of lasting value will come out of the horrors that happened in the past 3 years, and in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
by ozgung | 2026-02-28 10:52:14+00:00
Am I the only one who is really freaking out?

They deploy BOTS to KILL PEOPLE!

This is the only big news here.

This is the only time in this timeline where we must say "you shall not pass". The ultimate red line. And there is no going back. It's just escalation in an arms race from now on. Nothing good can come out of this.

And you are talking about details, if some guys mentioned the word "domestic" in their tweet etc.

BOTS will autonomously KILL PEOPLE!
by quotemstr | 2026-02-28 10:52:35+00:00
The thing about talking to computers is less the formality and more the specificity. People don't know what they want. To use an LLM effectively, you need to think about what you want with enough clarity to ask for it and check that you're getting it. That LLMs accept your wishes in the form of natural language instead of something with a LALR(1) grammar doesn't magically obviate the need for specificity and clarity in communication.
by karthink | 2026-02-28 10:53:07+00:00
There's some miscommunication here.

> How does eat detect a visual command in eshell?

eat-eshell-mode doesn't detect visual commands and launch a separate eat buffer, like eshell-visual-commands do. It filters all process output in eshell and handles term codes. It turns the eshell buffer itself into a terminal, so that vim or whatever runs in eshell.

> It sounds from your description like vterm is faster than eat.

vterm is faster than eat, but a dedicated eat buffer is fast enough for most common TUIs. An eshell buffer with eat-eshell-mode is slower.
by ajam1507 | 2026-02-28 10:53:15+00:00
> Are you sure you know how they'll judge this case?

I'm not even sure it will get that far. There's a million different ways that this could go that mean it won't ever come before the supreme court. The designation isn't even in effect yet.

I do think if it goes into effect it will be eventually overturned (Supreme Court or otherwise) There just isn't a serious argument to make that they qualify as a supply chain risk and there is no precedent for it.
by mainframed | 2026-02-28 10:53:47+00:00
I think there is some value in asking these questions. Maybe a better question would be how much effort and time was put into a project.

1. Maintenance: Projects that (seem to) have the same quality and complexity but were built over months or years by hand versus built with an AI tool in a weekend will probably experience different amounts of maintenance in the future. This is, of course, not a black-and-white rule. But simply knowing that people think a project is worth spending months or years on gives me an indication that they probably want to keep it alive in the future.

2. Testing: Projects developed by hand probably underwent a lot more hidden manual testing—maybe on different hardware, maybe by more than one person. Since my personal projects have gotten significantly more complex with the availability of AI coding assistance, I spend much more time writing prompts and thinking about integration testing. But this is not the case for all projects.
by sensanaty | 2026-02-28 10:54:42+00:00
I'm going to copy a comment I made in a related thread:

I might be being a bit conspiratorial, but is anyone else not buying this whole song and dance, from either side? Anthropic keeps talking about their safeguards or whatever, but seeing their marketing tactics historically it just reads more like trying to posture and get good PR for "fighting the system" or whatever.

"Our AI is so advanced and dangerous Trump has to beg us to remove our safeguards, and we valiantly said no! Oh but we were already spying on people and letting them use our AIs in weapons as long as a human was there to tick a checkbox. Also, once our models improve enough then we'll be sending in The Borg to autonomously target our Enemies™"

I just don't buy anything spewing out of the mouths of these sociopathic billionaires, and I trust the current ponzi schemers in the US gov't even less.

Especially given how much astroturfing Anthropic loves doing, and the countless comments in this thread saying things like "Way to go Amodei, I'm subbing to your 200 dollar a month plan now forever!!11".

One thing I know for sure is that these AI degenerates have made me a lot more paranoid of anything I read online.
by nerdyadventurer | 2026-02-28 10:54:44+00:00
> While I have no love for the Iranian regime

Who say US is not regime? It is the world largest regime in the world, with bidders in every country to do their bidding, mass surveillance including their own country men. People blame only Russia, China, Iran etc when US have been doing the same for years.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/w6_2Ul3Ght8
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-28 10:56:23+00:00
My shower is on the hot water system, not electric.

But for fixed stuff like the light, yes, it meets IP standards. If you meet the right standards you can of course have electrics in splash domes. A standard socket is not going to meet those ingress protection ratings.

A socket 1m away from a shower is likely to have wet hands plugging things in.
by tome | 2026-02-28 10:57:03+00:00
> The wall extends across the so-called Blue Line and has made “more than 4,000 square metres [43,055sq feet] of Lebanese territory inaccessible to the Lebanese people”

So you're saying Israel's occupation of Lebanon amounts to 4,000 square metres? About the area of an athletics track, I guess? (Not counting the bit inside the athletics track.)