MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TomasBM | 2026-02-12 21:48:51+00:00
Although I'm speculating based on limited data here, for points 1-3:

AFAIU, it had the cadence of writing status updates only. It showed it's capable of replying in the PR. Why deviate from the cadence if it could already reply with the same info in the PR?

If the chain of reasoning is self-emergent, we should see proof that it: 1) read the reply, 2) identified it as adversarial, 3) decided for an adversarial response, 4) made multiple chained searches, 5) chose a special blog post over reply or journal update, and so on.

This is much less believably emergent to me because:

- almost all models are safety- and alignment- trained, so a deliberate malicious model choice or instruction or jailbreak is more believable.

- almost all models are trained to follow instructions closely, so a deliberate nudge towards adversarial responses and tool-use is more believable.

- newer models that qualify as agents are more robust and consistent, which strongly correlates with adversarial robustness; if this one was not adversarially robust enough, it's by default also not robust in capabilities, so why do we see consistent coherent answers without hallucinations, but inconsistent in its safety training? Unless it's deliberately trained or prompted to be adversarial, or this is faked, the two should still be strongly correlated.

But again, I'd be happy to see evidence to the contrary. Until then, I suggest we remain skeptical.

For point 4: I don't know enough about its patterns or configuration. But say it deviated - why is this the only deviation? Why was this the special exception, then back to the regularly scheduled program?

You can test this comment with many LLMs, and if you don't prompt them to make an adversarial response, I'd be very surprised if you receive anything more than mild disagreement. Even Bing Chat wasn't this vindictive.
by eduction | 2026-02-12 21:49:45+00:00
I’m sorry but in the context of a 50 year old technology like email, 2008 was yesterday. Gmail is in the wrong, you don’t get to just update the standard for email like it’s TikTok content or a Roblox update or whatever.

Email was here long before Gmail and will be here long after Google abandons it.

This is why I don’t use Gmail.

Also, get off my lawn.
by tocs3 | 2026-02-12 21:49:50+00:00
I feel like this is, in part, similar to strategies for software companies have always used. Offer free software tools to students (some CAD, GIS, Math, general office suites) and the students learns as much/more about which icons to click on than the underlying subject. All these things are valuable tools. I learned drafting in the days of pencil and paper but cannot imagine a world that without CAD. AI is on a different plane but it is interesting (I think also good) to see such public push back now.
by davnicwil | 2026-02-12 21:49:55+00:00
I mean I guess this is classic disruption theory.

It's not that a dominant position goes away overnight. In fact that would be precisely the impetus to spur the incumbent to pivot immediately and have a much better chance of winning in the new paradigm.

It's that it, with some probability, gets eaten away slowly and the incumbent therefore cannot let go of the old paradigm, eventually losing their dominance over some period of years.

So nobody really knows how LLMs will change the search paradigm and the ads business models downstream of that, we're seeing that worked out in real time right now, but it's definitely high enough probability that Google see it and (crucially) have the shareholder mandate to act on it.

That's the existential threat and they're navigating it pretty well so far. The strategy seems balanced, measured, and correct. As the situation evolves I think they have every chance of actually not being disrupted should it come to that.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-12 21:49:57+00:00
This appeal falls flat when you get to the parts about their homeserver requiring some form of age verification:

> From our perspective, the matrix.org homeserver instance has never been a service aimed at children, which our terms of use reflect by making it clear that users need to be at least 18 years old to use the server. However, the various age-verification laws require stricter forms of age verification measures than a self-declaration. Our Safety team and DPO are evaluating options that preserve your privacy while satisfying the age verification requirements in the jurisdictions where we have users.

Which is actually more strict than Discord's upcoming policy which allows accounts to operate for free without any verification, with some limitations around adult-oriented servers and content.

There has been a lot of FUD about the Discord age verification, so a refresher: The upcoming changes do not actually require you to verify anything to use Discord. It just leaves the account in teen mode by default. This means the account can't join age-restricted channels, can't unblur images marked as sensitive, and incoming message requests from unknown users will go to a second inbox with a warning by default.

You can, of course, run your own Matrix server. Having been there before I would suggest reading up on some typical experiences in running one of these servers. Unless you have someone willing to spend a lot of time running the server and playing IT person for people using it, it can be a real headache. They also note that running a server doesn't actually get around any age requirements:

> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-12 21:50:40+00:00
Additional citations:

No Republicans to appear on ballot in 2026 New Mexico Senate election - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/4455727/no... - February 12th, 2026

Four New Mexico candidates disqualified after failing to meet ballot requirements - https://www.abqjournal.com/news/four-new-mexico-candidates-d... - February 10th, 2026
by toraway | 2026-02-12 21:50:44+00:00
It's certainly ... convenient that any criticism of a wealthy tech oligarch can be dismissed as "anti-education" as a rhetorical cudgel. It's not like others may actually have problems with say, his actual beliefs, the specific methods Tan uses to "promote" education (attacking school teachers/etc), further concentration of power to SV billionaires, etc.

And as you say, somewhat comical to lob that accusation given the current crop of tech oligarchs are firmly aligned with a overtly intellectual/anti-education movement on the right and are systematically working to dismantle higher education at this very moment.

As an aside, there has been a crazy amount of (brigaded?) flagging/downvoting of comments critical of Tan in this thread. Each time I check back I see fairly anodyne comments go back and forth from grey, with a few eventually nuked by flagging). Can't think of a similar recent example of an HN thread with the same patterns even with highly charged/controversial topics.
by salawat | 2026-02-12 21:51:04+00:00
>What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?

Ding ding ding. Endemic to fascism, among other things, are heavy State involvement in the curation of, shall we say, "the corpus culturále". Even in the United States, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, there were certain lines you could not cross and still end up on broadcast television. Renditions of the Government, Police/Authorities, or the Courts in an unflattering light was an express lane to non-syndication. Go ahead, look for syndicated media that that highlighted the People's struggle against a corrupt Government where another part of the Government isn't also complicit in "cracking down on the bad apples" (thereby distancing itself from being party to the dysfunction, and reinforcing it's own Supreme legitimacy). No points if it's not in the United States. We're great at syndicating everyone else's problems. Not so much our own. Point is, those network decency standards were, in essence, formulations of what the governing authority considers invalid art. Art, on the other hand, is all encompassing. Ironically, mrob, you're pulling from the fascist art critic's handbook to dismiss the possibility of the work of satire being a fascistly produced piece of media consumption into and unto itself, by doing exactly what a fascist state does. Referencing guidelines and norms that lay out the boundaries of acceptable artistic practice.

In reality, art is as much the characteristics and execution of the workpiece itself, the cinema Starship Troopers, as it is the collective viewer's response to it. In essence, both you and the other poster have equal claims to artistic merit. Though I tend to side with the "this is fascist af" side of the argument given that despite the limitations of the medium, it is very clearly illustrated that what the military junta says goes, period. States are not containers or facilitators of the monopoly on violence. They are incubators for collective action. By trimming down the collective, and setting price of admission to "do our bidding or no representation"; you undeniably tread what in mid-20th century historical experience outlines as "the road to fascism". Disenfranchise the undesirable. Rule according to sensibilities of the desirables. Funnily enough, in it's own way, the U.S. of today is fascistic in that regard, given we absolutely adore the disenfranchisement of the felon, which seems more peppered through legal system than your Grandma's favorite spice.

Ain't Art grand?
by progval | 2026-02-12 21:51:35+00:00
> which has lead to the flagship instance being far bigger than its moderation team can handle, leading to a situation where it's a major source of abuse

Is that still true? As the admin of a small instance, I find the abuse coming from mastodon.social has been really low for a few years. There is the occasional spammer, but they often deal with it as quickly as I do.
by aftbit | 2026-02-12 21:51:54+00:00
DHS -> Department of Homeland Security, parent agency of both others created after 9/11

CBP -> Customs and Border Protection, descended from U.S. Customs Service, which traces back to the end of the 18th century, but added to DHS at the beginning of the 21st

ICE -> Immigration and Customs Enforcement, created in 2003 from the criminal investigation arm of CBP and related agencies

They are related but not the same. Under the current US regime, all the stops are being pulled out and all the lines blurred. As a result, you're seeing ICE doing crowd control, BORTAC (basically CBP's tactical / SWAT unit) doing run-of-the-mill immigration enforcement, and all kinds of other wackiness. The DHS does much much more than just CBP/ICE stuff too.
by sdoering | 2026-02-12 21:52:11+00:00
Sorry to rain on your parade. I wanted the original verbose mode for those moments I needed a truly verbose output. And I wanted to know, at a minimal glance, what files are being read and put into context in nearly any other situation.

I exactly do not need a "verbose" mode, that lost all value to me as a replacement for something it still is no good at replacing.

You actually argue, that I do not loose anything, when in fact your product just got made worse in two significant areas. And you keep arguing, that shooting the product into one foot is solved by shooting the other foot. Sorry. Not working for me.

Will be evaluating your competition. Was on the cusp of upgrading max to the higher tier. Now? No chance of that happening.
by mac3n | 2026-02-12 21:52:35+00:00
folklore was that IBM used it as an example of a bad variable name,
based on Zarathustra Q Xerxes III

Here it is, in fact! Page 19:

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/os/...

> But if the programmer decided to use ZQX-3 in pl.ace of MINIMUM-BALANCE because it is shorter, or because he once met a cab driver named Zarathustra Q. Xerxes III, then it is a bad name.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-12 21:52:42+00:00
No corporate body ever admits wrongdoing and that's part of the problem. Even when a company loses its appeals, it's virtually unheard of for them to apologize, usually you just get a mealy mouthed 'we respect the court's decision although it did not go the way we hoped.' Accordingly, I don't give denials of wrongdoing any weight at all. I don't assume random accusations are true, but even when they are corporations and their officers/spokespersons are incentivized to lie.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-12 21:52:42+00:00
> Stores have whole grain bread. Germany isn’t unique and there are plenty of bakeries in the US that make fresh bread. If you can’t be bothered to make or buy good bread then that’s on you not the government.

American bread brands tend to have a lot of sugar in them. I've had a few foreign friends that have commented on just how sweet all the bread here is.

It isn't that you can't find low sugar breads in the US, but rather it can be something that hard to even know you should be looking for. Just because a bread is whole grain won't make it healthy.

Germans also tend to really like whole grain and dark breads. Rye bread in particular is something a lot of germans like.
by realo | 2026-02-12 21:52:43+00:00
I have a friend who needs a medication that costs more than 30,000$ a year. Here in Canada it is 100% covered by our government health insurance regime. In the USA he would be bankrupt (or dead).

Here in Canada if I have an accident i do not have to worry about being bankrupt if the ambulance brings me to the wrong hospital.

I am really not enthusiastic about the so-called superior quality of life some US-ians like to boast about.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-02-12 21:52:51+00:00
> The blog author isn't really angry about the comment. He's angry because someone accidentally miscategorized him tribally.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm in a similar boat to the author and, I can tell you, it would be really insulting for me to have someone accuse me of using AI to write something. It's not because of any in-group / culture war nonsense, it's purely because:

a) I wouldn't—currently—resort to that behaviour, and I'd like to think people who know me recognise that

b) To have my work mistaken for the product of AI would be like being accused of not really being human—that's pretty insulting
by patrakov | 2026-02-12 21:52:53+00:00
There is another correct way. Denote the general topic, ask it to ask you questions that would be needed to write it. Discard the final output, write something yourself based on what it asked.

Example (minus the final review): https://chatgpt.com/share/698e417a-4448-8011-9c29-12c9b91318...

I still think that the final review written by ChatGPT is a bit off. But at least, it asked mostly the right questions.
by girvo | 2026-02-12 21:53:17+00:00
> Same reason vegans get mad when you assume they eat meat, or whatever

This so isn't important, but I don't know any vegan who would get mad if you assumed in passing that they ate meat. They'd only get annoyed if you then argued with them about it after they said something, like basically all humans do if you deliberately ignore what they've said to you.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-12 21:53:39+00:00
> I know for a fact the prices are lower non-emission vs emission. I own a tractor that is detuned 0.1 HP under the emission limit and with zero emissions controls. They sell the exact same tractor with the exact same engine with a fuel screw turned up over the limit to increase hp, plus emissions controls, and it's about $4,000 more. Manufacturers absolutely will charge more for emissions models than non-emissions models.

This is flawed logic.

BMW tried charging a subscription fee for heated seats (https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-e...). All the cars had the seat heaters; "exact same [car] with the exact same [seats]". (I'd also note that you yourself acknowledge that people are paying for the extra horsepower, not the emissions controls.)

You're describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination, not necessarily an actual difference in the BOM.
by lacker | 2026-02-12 21:53:43+00:00
It seems tough culturally.

If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.

So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.

It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
by VBprogrammer | 2026-02-12 21:53:55+00:00
I live in the UK. Most of our farmland is divided into relatively small parcels owing to geography and history (they were divided long before mechanisation).

However, when you come across a field of wheat, rape or corn it's notable how little diversity there remains. A complete absence of birds or insects for example. The agricultural deserts, I believe, are as damaging as their drought based cousins.
by muppetman | 2026-02-12 21:54:49+00:00
It's this sort of thing that makes me run a home DNS server with a blocklist. It even works when I leave the house thanks to Android's PrivateDNS function, I don't need to turn on a VPN, all DNS requests even on mobile hit my AdGuardHome. I use quite a conservative DNS blocklist (oisd.nl) but it means I don't have the family complain various sites are broken.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-12 21:55:09+00:00
The list of locations with those laws is growing very large. From the post:

> Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA). Since then Australia, New Zealand and the EU have introduced similar legislation, with movement in the US and Canada too.
by bnchrch | 2026-02-12 21:55:34+00:00
Reacts added some poor abstractions over the last decade. Looking at you hooks and effects.

But its far from the worst.

It was the first framework to put together JSX, a functional way of defining components and simplifying state. This was a monumental improvement. As a result they earned mass adoption.

As a result its the framework that now has a community moat that is not going to crumble until someone else can break ground in the way they did.

Sure, some of these could be considered "better" but they're all better due to incremental improvements for Frontend Engineering.

None of which are substantial enough to unseat the king
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-12 21:56:22+00:00
Yes; that's why the Obama administration changed it in 2011.

https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/letsmove...

https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/what-is-myplate

(To much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Right at the time; https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/michelle-obama...)
by mothballed | 2026-02-12 21:56:49+00:00
No they're paying for the emissions controls. The people that buy the tractor I have, usually illegally turn the screw and get all the horsepower back. Nothing is stopping them from doing it, it is all over youtube, can be done in a few minutes.

If it was actually about "price discrimination" they would do something to stop you from tuning them back to the full horsepower other than "please definitely don't do this thing we made it super easy for you to do, hint at in your repair manual, and is plastered all over youtube probably indirectly by advice of our own mechanics."

To use your BMW analogy, it would be "we put a screw to turn on the heated seats, but please don't do that". That would not indicate someone actually seeking price discriminations, but rather providing people a way to save money getting around an expensive rule, but also they will charge you $4000 if you really want to comply with the law and add a big "save the environment" doohickey on to the seat heater.
by muwtyhg | 2026-02-12 21:57:19+00:00
The study mentions a total number of immigrants may be up to twice as many as thought (10 mil vs 20 mil) but it doesn't say anything about when they arrived, how long they have been in the country, etc. You entirely blaming the last admin with no actual evidence, and muddying the facts between the total undocumented vs the amount that entered under Biden.

Also... what years was Biden president...? Your study from 2018 would be under a Trump admin, before the Biden admin was even able to "stop enforcing" this portion of immigration law and cause the (supposed) flood of undocumented immigrants. So how is it at all relevant except to confuse the issue?
by pickleRick243 | 2026-02-12 21:57:22+00:00
Yes but unironically. It may seem obvious now that the LLM is just a word salad generator with no sentience, but look at the astounding evolution of ChatGPT 2 to ChatGPT 5 in a mere 3 years. I don't think it's at all improbable that ChatGPT 8 could be prompted to blend seamlessly in almost any online forum and be essentially undetectable. Is the argument essentially that life must be carbon based? Anything produced from neural network weights inside silicon simply cannot achieve sentience? If that's true, why?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-12 21:57:43+00:00
My point is that it’s silly to say that Apple doesn’t have enough money left over after spending money on marketing to pay off people who find security vulnerabilities if they have $110 billion in profit after spending money on marketing.

If you had to spend 0.5% of your income for something in a year, would that adversely affect how you chose to spend the other 99.5%?
by ibejoeb | 2026-02-12 21:57:45+00:00
>OSS will be sufficient for most businesses

Only for well defined tasks. There's not really a practical upper bound. We will keep throwing more complex tasks at it to the extent that it can handle them. Like if you just need fancy OCR, then a specific model will probably suffice, but there will be an appetite for human- or superhuman-level intelligence that never gets tired and has no rights.
by ffjffsfr | 2026-02-12 21:57:46+00:00
I don't see any clear evidence in this article that blogpost and PR was opened by openclaw agent and not simply by human puppeteer. How can the author know that PR was opened by agent and not by human? It is certainly possible someone set up this agent, and it's probably not that complex to set it up to simply create PR, react to merge/reject on blogposts, but how does author know this is what happened?
by linkregister | 2026-02-12 21:58:01+00:00
I appreciate and agree with your comment. The reasonable answer to "did you use AI" would be just "no". In the context of the story, the other person's intent is comparable to "did you run spell check?"

My personal nit/pet peeve: it is far more likely to meet a meat-eater who gets offended by the insinuation they're a vegan. I have met exactly one "militant vegan" in real life, compared to dozens who go out of their way to avoid inconveniencing others. I'm talking about people who bring their own food to a party rather than asking for a vegan option.

In the 21st century, the militant vegan more common as a hack comedian trope than a real phenomenon.
by axi0m | 2026-02-12 21:58:04+00:00
I have always been deeply grateful for all the amazing content that brilliant engineers have posted online for the past 20 years. I've learn so much from it, avoided so many mistakes and discovered such incredible technologies. As a humble contribution to the industry, I'm glad to launch our new engineering blog, on which we will post stories about what we built, how we did and the challenges we faced. Starting with a deep dive into our observability stack!