skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet. You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide.

I think the author ignores another reason that people (especially us techies) don't like to admit: The majority of people don't care about following a list of personal websites. Instead, websurfers just get whatever snippets of information they want (e.g. food recipe, medical trivia) from whatever website happens to have it and then move on.

The disinterest in personal websites comes from both the websurfers and many content authors themselves.

Some examples from the content creators...

Clay Shirky's essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" happens to be on the HN front page right now. But he doesn't maintain his personal website anymore. He gave reasons for it[1] and even said he regrets letting it rot. But even today, his personal website remains empty and previous links all return 404 errors. But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky

John Carmack's old personal website "altdevblogaday.com" is gone now.[2] But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack

Those 2 guys are obviously internet-savvy and need no lectures on personal websites -- and yet they chose to abandon them.

As to examples for websurfers, if you ask normal people if they sometimes search the internet for a cooking recipe, they'll say "yes". But if then followup with "Can you name a cooking website you got a recipe from?", most will say "no". The average websurfer cared more about the recipe and not the particular website. Sure, some will make a mental note of the domain url and maybe even bookmark it but many won't.

The lack of interest for following "little websites" continues to be reinforced with tools like ChatGPT. Most people would rather get some synthesized information instead of visiting a bunch of different websites they don't care about.

I think this past comment about RSS not being relevant to regular people is uncomfortable for some to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707

I bought this internet yellow pages book in 1995 when the consumer-accessible internet was new: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1s...

That book represents a different time when indie websites were a purposeful destination to visit. I notice that a lot of people don't bother doing that anymore. Me included.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194

[2] requires Wayback Machine: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...
My main issue with attestation is that it's platform controlled instead of user-controlled and that it doesn't just bind a credential to a device, it binds an authentication mechanism to a category/subset of devices.

If the attestation part was separated from the manufacturer and it couldn't be used to identify who made the device or what brand the device was or what OS it was running, and instead was just a completely randomized device key with no other information with only the restriction that it was hardware-bound, would that be enough to meet your use case or would the user being able to update the OS/firmware still be a problem for you?

My problems with attestation in order:

1. Locking down the ability of the user to change the software/firmware.

2. Allowing the website to identify the device/manufacturer (and allowing them to restrict accounts to a subset of devices).

3. Not allowing the user to replicate/change the device/move the key.

But 1 and 2 are the biggest issues I have, if they went away then 3 wouldn't be as big of a deal to me. Not that I would be super-happy about it, I still don't think it would be a good idea, but... it's comparatively less of a problem.

I could imagine a version of this where you get one private key set on firmware/OS load for your device but it's completely random, and if you update the firmware and the integrity check fails the only thing that happens is that key changes to a new one and the old key is erased. So updating the firmware would invalidate the old login keys that were relying on attestation, but it would not make it possible for a site to block an un-Googled Android from making an account or to even know that you were using an Android/iOS device in the first place.

Again, I don't think that would be a good idea, I think it would be introducing a lot of foot-guns that shouldn't be exposed to ordinary users, but I don't think it would be nearly as much of a problem as saying "we guarantee this is one of X devices in this hardware batch, and that the OS hasn't been customized."
Higher Yubikeys do, but other FIDO2 keys, including Yubico's ‘Security Key’ series, don't.

Apple's current policy on attestation is good (for consumers; I don't deny there are closed conditions where you'd legitimately use it), but their refusal to allow 3P integration is not.
> I assume they got marching orders because obviously, but from where?

Ads. They need clicks to get ad money. Reasonable, balanced commentary doesn't get attention, and no attention == no clicks.

This isn't a monstrous conspiracy, it's been a thing since well before Hearst make up phony headlines to sell newspapers.

Plus the team making the game hyped it up greatly and released a sub-standard product, all the more disappointing given that their previous games, like the Witcher 3, were excellent.
> totalitarian communist Allende who tried to take over the whole game.

I'll bite. What evidence do you have that Allende was a totalitarian and "tried to take over the whole game".

Given that we know that Pinochet ended 4 decades of democratic rule to establish a totalitarian regime that lasted two decades, seems like you would need to have pretty conclusive evidence to justify supporting the decision.
Synchronized passkeys by both Apple and Google don't use that mechanism (attestation).

There's also the AAGUID, but without attestation, every implementation is free to provide Apple's or Google's, should websites ever start requiring that.
>Honest question: why would you expect hate for using Yahoo mail?

Because every time I read about yahoo on HN it seems to be only negative opinions and in general people look funny at you when they see you with an yahoo email address instead of a Gmail one which has become the norm for average joe consumers.

I mean I know they're not a sexy company anymore and they didn't have a competent CEO but their e-mail offering still slaps IMO.

I use it mostly for non-critical activates like signing up to websites and online shopping.
Or on my phone
What about disabling IMAP access and forcing users to use the Gmail webapp?
Have people tried/documented gmail to proton migrations? There is a forwarding functionality that could reduce the migration pain but you never know what kind of can of worms you might get into.
like his mentioning 'Lord of the Netherlands' vs 'de Nederlanden/Nederland

But Lord of the Netherlands was exactly the title used by Charles V in those days ("Landsheer van de Nederlanden"), and "de Nederlanden" was the customary name to refer to the region. What is it exactly that feels off to you?

And the description of the Dutch Republic as "loosely modern Holland" seems placed to contrast it with the Flanders and Luxembourg areas -- it doesn't feel tone-deaf to me, other than that "Holland" itself in an antiquated term, but I'd think it permissible given that it's used in the context of the Dutch Golden Age (which is where that name gained prominence).
it's still expensive and not easy to build reliable models. thus open-source is not a sustainable option for maintainers. you have to have talented people and high quality data. talented people have opportunity cost, they can go to big tech with high 6 or 7figure TCs. some former mozilla people did. i'm not criticizing them, we gotta accept the cost of living is crazy. i care about my compensation too and i do not have energy left to contribute to foss. i salut those who can. you cannot compare donations vs. big tech TC unless you have a trust fund i guess. I don't have old money, so not sure about that part.

snips.ai is acquired by sonos. google and sonos are still in patent wars. i'm not sure whether sonos will survive. it's not easy if big tech lawyers come after you, even you are kinda big. mycroft was a part of patent war too and the poor guy dedicated all of his energy instead of trying to build something. https://mycroft.ai/blog/huge-win-for-mycroft-at-the-patent-t...

spokestack.io is no longer active. stability ai will probably go bankruptcy or aws or nvidia will acquire them: https://futurism.com/the-byte/stable-diffusion-stability-ai-...

picovoice.ai tries to do things differently, combining on-device speech processing and subscription based model. it's the only company i know that has good hotword detection and speech-to-text. their free option is enough for my project https://picovoice.ai/pricing/

you may ask why nobody uses their tech to build an alternative voice assistant. again i dont think smart speakers are profitable enough. when you can buy an echo for $20 it's hard to find somebody to pay $20 per month. silicon shortage and logistics costs increased the boms. it's not easy to compete with amazon which can burn $10 billion.

openai api probably feeds their audio streams to microsoft. otherwise why would nuance move to the cloud when they can process on-device, right after microsoft acquires them. to find options not feeding big tech, we gotta start paying for non-big tech.
You're making some pretty big assumptions about a stranger on the internet there.
True - but I can't think of a single game which actually makes use of multiple monitors even on PC where plenty of people have the hardware to support that sort of thing. A second monitor with Discord on it, or for streaming? Sure. But nothing that video games themselves make use of.

Even if games supported it, who has multiple TVs in their lounge room close enough to connect both of them to your xbox? That sounds super niche.
Stopped reading at chat server. Some FAANGs use IRC when all fails.

There is no reason a startup should be building a chat server in 2023. Best reason given in the article was 'integrations'. Use an IRC bot to post messages to the channel, don't waste time writing yet another insecure chat client and server.
Have you read Ann Leckie?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Justice
Or poor ARM support
Actual title:

>Twitter tells advertisers that user growth is at ‘all-time highs’ under Elon Musk

SimilarWeb says:

>Twitter is Shrinking: Web Visits Down 7.3%, App Usage Dropping

>Elon Musk claims Twitter is enjoying all-time high usage. We’re not seeing it.

https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/t... (Updated April 18, 2023)
So glad to see this cited.
very much agreed re: dust settling.

it makes no sense deploying any of these libraries to prod. as-is. best to understand a configuration / workflow / tuning / etc. that fits your data best and write it from scratch in golang/rust/whatever.
Did you mean to say customer-friendly or user-friendly?
> A site having the technical ability to determine not just its authentication mechanism but how that authentication mechanism is stored is not its choice and should not be its choice and is not its business.

If that site is legally held liable for fraud happening due to credential compromise, as (hopefully!) would be the case for e.g. consumer bank accounts, I'd say there is at least some legitimate interest.
I guess they could just create bogus entries that show as emails for IMAP/POP users.
During COVID, because of costs, we drastically cut down on our beef consumption.

Historically, we have bought 1/2 cows but haven't in some time. I hadn't even looked into it because I assumed the costs would be very high.

Local to me, it's actually the same exact price to buy a 1/2 cow as it was ~5 years ago, including butchering/packing fees.
As I understand it, the claim that there was to be a coming ice age was based on our increased rate of particulate matter into the atmosphere, not greenhouse gases. The claim was that in addition to greenhouse gases, we were also exponentially increasing soot, aerosols, and other light dampening particulate matter. They argued that the C02 emissions would increase the temperature, but that cooling particulate matter pollution would outpace the warming greenhouse-gas pollution.

We've very much curbed out aerosol, but increased our greenhouse-gas pollution. I very much doubt that their analysis was correct to begin with, and I doubt had we not curbed the aerosol pollution, we'd be facing an ice age today - but I'm just some jerk on the internet - I could easily be wrong! Right or wrong, the first paragraph above is how I understand the argument to have been made at the time.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
The mere existence of these plans and weapons have successfully deterred a nuclear war — so, while the execution of the plan would have been horrific indeed, the plan itself was something completely opposite.

It's sad that people often evaluate strategic military matters without applying even the minimal level of game theory.
> Why is that a requirement?

Some sort of self-awareness is required for an AI system interacting with the real world physically - i.e. via controlling a robot or a vehicle - safely and to react appropriately for situations it has not been taught for.

> But the model fails to apply even basic logical rules as entropy increases, indicating that GPT models have a fundamental limit of applying logic to high entropy problems.

IIRC, the problem with current GPT AI models is tokenization. Basically, words are long and somewhat visually distinct with clear separation, whereas numbers are far harder to "convert" into tokens the model can use.

In the end I believe that this problem will eventually be solved by applying enough compute power, as will the problem with "self awareness" - run a GPT model in a continuous loop that allows self training.

The real and actually very hard problem IMO is adversarial training and inputs. In humans, the limits of a human brain in the speed of interaction and the number of other actors one brain can interact with act as a natural hard performance ceiling as well as a quantity barrier for too much adversarial input (you can only get fed bullshit 24 person-hours a day), and yet we're seeing adversarial inputs (aka propaganda) be very effective to the tune that 40% of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen or manipulated [1].

An AI system that can interact with hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously? Microsoft proved how fast that can go sideways with Tay 2016, when 4chan and other trolls managed to turn the bot into a raging Nazi in not even a day worth of effort [2]. Now imagine you have an AI running airspace travel control and someone convinces it that a plane got hijacked by terrorists or to lead planes onto a collision course...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/40-americans-think-2020-election-st...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Henry George recognized that there were benefits to private control, security of tenure, productivity, etc. These ideas were well recognized by classical economists/liberals, Locke, etc.

There is ultimately no -perfect- solution to the land problem because 2 objects cannot exist in the same place at the same time so -any- solution will be somewhat arbitrary.

However, the advantage one plot of land has over another manifests in its rental value. Therefore, you pay everyone else according to the natural advantage your location has. If only marginal land is left for me, then that reflects in the fact that I pay nothing and receive a share of the differential advantage in return.

Nothing in society will ever be perfect, but compared to alternatives and also recognizing that other forms of land control are also problematic, the solution in the article makes quite perfect sense.

If the full rental value of land were collected then its selling price would be $0. That is a far cry from the tax system we have today. Urban locations are the most relevant for society, but all the same there would be benefits to farmland use as well. The selling price of land is recognized as the primary barrier to entry for new farmers.
Customer-friendly? Maybe if you've never required support or human engagement for any issue. If you have, Google is by far the worst among the big tech companies.
Freeman Dyson's contribution to DL: Circular ensembles mimics trained DNN
The tool Facebook built has a worldwide effect, and we knew it because just 2 years ago the Vietnamese government banned a common hashtag (saltbae or something related), and it had a FB-wide effect on all countries. I find it hard to believe that Vietnam is the only one with access to it.
Tesla changes course with Full Self-Driving to introduce end-to-end AI in v12
Organization of American States
Honest question: What, if anything, does a country gain from nationalizing mining over just taxing it - besides scoring political points that is?

In other words, would an economist be able to point out any benefits?
Huh? But blocking someone on a distributed protocol seems impossible? to block someone, or censor them, you would have to get every node in the network to cooperate. Sure you can “mute” someone and not see their posts personally pretty easily. But if you want to make it so that others can’t see someone’s posts, like Alex Jones or Trump, and generally block the public from seeing them, this action seems much harder.
Nothing you say is in any way incorrect and I agree with it. However, for me, the experience of writing Lisp is very different from that of writing Ruby, or Perl, despite the latter languages having a great many Lispy features. In fact I jokingly call Perl a Lisp-6ish, because of how typeglobs let you mess with the symbol table directly and it has separate namespaces for SCALAR, ARRAY, HASH, CODE (I think that's the subroutine namespace), and a few others if I recall correctly. It's been a bit since I wrote any XS which is pretty much the best way to grok Perl internals. And that difference comes down to interactivity. I totally agree that REPLs are great and can bring a measure of interactivity to other languages. Except I barely ever use the REPL when I'm writing Lisp. I just evaluate the current form directly. Haven't you ever wondered why DEFPARAMETER and DEFVAR both exist? Having both makes no sense in a world where the Common Lisp REPL as equivalent to, say, irb. I'd say that notebooks are where non Lisp languages are coming closest to a kind of Lispy/Smalltalky interactive programming environment. And yes you can do some very very clever things with the JS console in a browser that are in tune with the Lisp way. And that's no surprise since JavaScript was originally a Lisp DSL and that very much shaped its philosophy.

Interestingly enough the Lispiest non Lisp dev experience I've professionally had is writing java 8 using Eclipse on the JVM treating the unit test runner as a kind of C-x C-e. It's no wonder Clojure was such a good fit for the JVM.
An external chat service can be a pain in the ass just like a microservice.
Depending if you want a lot of business rules integrated in that chat, you will have to keep data synced between your server and the chat's server. This can become a nightmare if you dont get it right.
Anduril Unveils Lattice for Mission Autonomy
> Many benchmarks today actually do measure these things

Except, of course, for chips that are not available yet, such as those discussed here.
> trust in democracy

My favorite part is where the millionaire-billionaire politicians (that do this exact thing themselves) use this opportunity to vilify their opponents and then push for something else they want as the solution.

X does something wrong, Y calls it out and raises support and then sneaks in something wrong.

So the citizens get fleeced and then become pawns. It seems like this is visible in every. single. bill. that gets passed by either party in the US.
Doesn't Canada have to ratify international treaties/agreements in an assembly? I assume joining NAFTA was debated, right?

Edit: Ah, it looks like it's fully up to the executive branch.
https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...
Theocracy ended with the acceptance that most people will end up eternally damned as there can't be two competing religions holding the complete truth and European population was quickly fractured into "us vs heretics" depending on the side one was on, whereas before everybody was part of the same church. That weakened religion and allowed rationalist thought to emerge.
What "you consider good" can be bad, especially if you are going by conscience and your source is faulty. Otherwise we would never learn from our mistakes or feel sorry for wrongdoings. A faulty conscience leads one to feel good for their wrongdoings, and to live by their mistakes.

If you do not go by conscience, but use your own observation and feeling, you must will thyself not to fall for the wrong moral nor to value the wrong ethic. One learns and grows more without conscience.

Conscience depends on the source of which you trust and believe. If you are the source, that is not conscience but regular sciens, also called sentience. If your sentience is true to nature you have no need of conscience, also called sapiens.
No those were never official goal posts. The one goal post was official and famous was the Turing test that measured if a human could tell the difference between a text chat generated by an AI or one generated by a human. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Literally the inventor of the Turing machine came up with this test so this was always the north star goal post since computing began. It's a way higher bar then any of the nameless goal posts you mentioned.

Unfortunately this goal post was also just moved recently with LLMs.
I guess you never been in a data center in the last 10 years. All modern DCs run on DC power because stepping down voltage is easy and 95%+ efficient. Why do we backhaul electricity across the country by DC and convert into AC to our house and then back into DC for our stuff? Add renewable energy generation like solar cells and battery storage and AC makes no sense.

Theres a reason why china is spinning up DC power grids while posts like mine get bashed on.
Theres also Birda, the gamified version of eBird...data ends up with the scientists all the same
Yes, Google/Apple/Microsoft are likely to tie it to device biometrics, but:

- 1Password is rolling out Passkey support next month

- Apple is on the record stating that passkey import/export is on the roadmap

You can already use the 1Password demo and export the passkey it generates and see the raw data.
What sanctions does the US have on Argentina?? Please don't tell me you don't know the difference between Argentina and Venezuela.
> You'd be surprised what a conversation with someone who knows someone can yield.

This is definitely true. But it's also true that key decision-making processes at large corporations -- particularly those that are publicly traded and/or concerned about regulatory oversight -- tend to be more controlled and process-guarded than your run of the mill farmer.