skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mistake this article makes is it doesn't consider things outside of their perspective.
Before i go into more detail many of the things they think have degraded and gotten worse i never even touched, facebook, twitter, crypto currencies to me they weren't good ideas that degraded. They were defective, degenerate yet mostly inevitable ideas doomed to excite and provide glimpses of amazing utility but will overall degrade and manipulate society as a whole. They didnt get worse they just became fully utilized.

but when talking about what i consider legit products:
1. The difference may make something improved to one person but worse for someone else - i find most times the older os's faster with windows and android. part of that reason is the include graphical transitions and animations when doing things. turning them off makes them feel fast like the older versions. there are more features, hardware support, ect one person may dislike not need those new features or animations but most do like them
2. Adapting to changing circumstances - When google started out no body knew or maybe even had a strong reason to manipulate google results. Google itself might be significantly better but the internet and people using it has changed its not the Tech that degraded its the people using and manipulating it creating new challenges that were never faced before.
3. In the past it may have worked better for you but now it is more sustainable/better for everyone - in a extreme example during the dot com boom i could make money ($20-$30) just by having a ad bar at the bottom of my screen for a few hours a day(even when i wasnt on it). But the only way it worked was because a bunch of idiot investors were loosing a ton of money. Has advertising got worse? to me sure but in reality they just went to a reasonable business model as much as i would prefer to get paid good money for having ad's on my screen.

All that being said are there companies who make tech worse just for greed and profit absolutely, but its not a black and white situation and there is a lot more factors than people usually realize.

one of my "it got worse" but not really experiences is with phones when phones were analog for my normal use case of making local phone calls when there were just land lines calls, were always clear no latency issues and extremely rarely had issues. now with digital and voip there can be delay's and choppiness and audio cutting in and out and really low quality audio and i sometimes complain about how it used to just work. but really i can now call anywhere in the world for free, have cheap and easy to setup phones with amazing features not depend on one phone company and can easily switch between. so ya in the most common calling situation its worse but overall its so so much better.
I wish the wireless LoRa protocol would be open source...
Referenced in the article, Michael Pollen's 2018 "How to Change Your Mind" book is wonderfully written [1]. I read this right after reading Gabriel Maté's "Chasing the Scream" [tl;dr: addiction is a mental problem, not judicial]. Pollen's level-headed approach to the silly topic of entheogen exploration reminded me that I am just a simple chemical meatbag.

Reading the article, I am reminded of my humanness.

[1] Check out Pollen's "Botany of Desire" about plants (THC included) controlling humans. IMHO it's the author's best title.
Car alarms need to be retired. All they do is annoy people on ferry crossings etc.
Democracy by Mistake
you absolutely cannot be naming your company after a domain name you do not own. Terrible choice
Ask HN: Anyone know workarounds to MacBook Air M2 missing dual-monitor support?
I bought a second external monitor to pair with my existing one, only to find out my M2 MacBook Air won't support it.

I found workarounds[1] online such as "DisplayLink", which requires custom drivers and a $127 external adapter, and "SiliconMotion"[2] which I'm unclear on how to use. I've seen people on Reddit say the experience barely approximates the native feel, with features such as "Night Shift" not being supported and noticeable lag, even for office use, which is what I plan to use it for.

I made sure to purchase the adapter with the most advanced chipset available (the Startech device[3]) but I am worried the experience will be subpar. I chose an adapter to DisplayPort instead of HDMI thinking it might perform better but that's to be seen.

Short of buying an M3 Pro MacBook Pro, which is obviously off the table, do I have alternatives? Are there any homebrew solutions that work around this out there?

[1]: https://m1displays.com/

[2]: https://www.siliconmotion.com/downloads/index.html

[3]: https://www.startech.com/en-us/display-video-adapters/usb32dp24k60
I don't think you want to use the term "arbitrary" here, since that would imply a stronger claim: that no matter how one defines "understanding" it applies. "Yes, for some specific, narrow definition of 'understanding'" is better.

I understood what you meant, but my math reflexes had to say something.
The EU doesn't make innovation hard, it just puts rules in place to ensure that your "innovation" cannot be abusing users' data.

Nothing is stopping any of the thousands of EU companies innovating in all sorts of fields.
> because they thought its semantics are property-like,

Suppose you include a logging statement in your accessor, which hides a race condition. You're gonna tear your hair out.
The problem as I see it is that the costs of Three Mile are acute and fairly direct. Whereas fossil fuel power may have even an even bigger cost (from the environmental impact), but as they are slow, chronic, and indirect, they’re easily overlooked.

Humans just seem to be disproportionately responsive to rare, acute events.
Technically, under a compressive regime in the limit, LLMs necessarily need to encode an implicit world model, as the text input into is sampled from said world model.

Variety, amount of training samples, capacity of the model, etc come into play, but a lot of tie ins to info theory for this, as well as things like the MDL (achieved in the limit by an L2 decay over the weights, for example).

Like, in a lossy compression environment, conceptual "understanding" is all but required.

These are the very basics of information theory for large nonlinear algorithms, I'm not sure why it's not considered the basics! There are a lot more interesting things beyond this to talk about w.r.t. neural network capacity, certain information theoretic guarantees about the process and (within some rough perspective/metric) capacity of neural network training, as well as some of those dynamics as well!

Some days it feels like in a world where calculus is available to us, we spend all our spare time debating exclusively whether Riemannian sums are real or not, and ignoring everything else beyond that.

It to me is a very bizzare form of bike-shedding! Come on, y'all, we got much more interesting (and important, I might add! ;P) things to talk about!
When writing systems software like a kernel, clarity is far more important than ergonomics. The basic operators aren't functions, they're translated directly into opcodes based on the types of the operands. Operator overloading allows them to be either opcodes or functions, and if you think about the amount of work that goes into a function - saving registers, creating a stack frame, pushing addresses, multiple branches - versus a single opcode, as a kernel developer you really don't want this to be hidden behavior based on whether something has been overloaded or not. In the best case the compiler will optimistically inline multiple instructions, in the worse case it will call a function before you've even set up a stack.
The smelly part would be useful when the car is towed against the owner's consent though. It should be law to at least attempt to contact the owner and give them 15 minutes before even touching a car that isn't yours. Since the law hasn't enacted this, fart spray (and maybe some sticky goo) would help delay towing companies while simultaneously contacting the owner via some kind of app.
What is your suggestion as an alternative program?
Also a Veritasium video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
I wonder when the english (at least American english) pronunciation of robot changed? I sometimes listen to old radio dramas as I fall asleep and the older the show the more likely they are to say "row butt" instead of "row bot."
> an independent appliance repair guy told me changing brands won't help much

Take this with a grain of salt. Repairmen only see the failures and are very skewed by survivorship fallacy.
I've heard this same remark from now 3 appliance installation/repair folk. The advise I was given was do NOT upgrade i.e. our refrigerator because it will keep working while the new models are made to die.

This really shouldn't shock anyone, it's a bit of the status quo for appliances, printers, toys, you name it. Planned obsolescence is real and going strong.
A guy I worked with spent a long time trying to source parts for his Bosch dishwasher that was leaking from underneath.

He got a couple years out of it.

He did end up finding one. Allegedly the part was redesigned, but what they meant by that was thicker foam tape.
It's not a huge can of worms, it's just a logical extension of existing laws for warranties on consumer products: No-one is saying things must last forever, but that things must be supported (i.e. updates, security, etc) for at-least the statutory minimum on warranties (which is two years in the EU+UK+etc) - and that the length of the supported lifespan should be clearly displayed when purchasing.

It's nothing controversial at all.
Why not regulate the DNT header into expressing the user's cookie banner preferences?
> Cloud-Native Git Alternative

Not sure if this is a good summary of the product. For one, cloud-native is an implementation detail, unless the company plans to sell the new VCS as packaged software instead of service. For two, I'm not sure how being cloud-native addresses any issue with my daily interaction with Git.

> The biggest drawback of Git is its limited scalability

I wonder how many people really has this problem. Millions of people have been using github and gitlab. I'm curious about the percentage of users who feel that there is a scalability issue with their own repositories. Personally, I don't have any beef with git's scalability at all, even though the companies I worked for had anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of engineers. Maybe having a monorepo will lead to scalability problem? But monorepo is a debatable topic, to say the least.

> Diversion is built on top of distributed storage and databases, accessible via REST API, and runs on serverless cloud infrastructure. Every repository operation is an API call (commit, branch, merge etc.). The desktop client synchronizes all work in progress to the cloud in real time

Again, how does this have to do with me, a user? Why would I care about the underlying protocols when I simply use a CLI or a UI?
What do you mean by "terrible"?

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo quite a while ago now, at least a decade I think, and it meets my needs well enough that I have never bothered to try anything else.
No, it isn't. It's always bound by the operationalization of "understanding." Do you take it to mean something like: "number of correct answers on a multiple choice test given a news paper article"?
I don’t run Linux anymore, and I am waiting for Apple to officially drop Intel support before swapping my laptop over, but one of my many software “bucket list” projects is to use a high level language to build a window manager. I was thinking about starting by porting DWM to some form of Lisp.

I love seeing these kinds of projects because it further validates that such an idea is feasible.
There have at least been attempts via creative restrictions on already-mandatory arbitration, notably 23andMe after their breach[1] updated their TOS to require a mandatory conference with the company before filing arbitration[2], seemingly as a way to prevent mass arbitration (since they could claim to only have enough staff to handle a trickle of such conferences).

1. https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/23andme-confirms-hackers-s...

2. https://www.23andme.com/legal/terms-of-service/#dispute-reso...
LLMs might just be the first actual product. Hardware, data, algorithms are all getting better and I would imagine we’ll get competing production-ready architectures to LLMs next
We can't say for sure. I've been guilty of thinking everything I read anymore is AI generated, but then I read my own posts and think they look AI generated too, even though I know they're not, because I wrote them.

Although some posts are clearly AI generated.
> I think if I was to do a Waylabd compositor, a first step would be to put things like window management beyond an IPC boundary, just like with X.

Afaik river does something in that direction https://github.com/riverwm/river

> Dynamic layouts generated by external, user-written executables. A default rivertile layout generator is provided.

> Scriptable configuration and control through a custom Wayland protocol and separate riverctl binary implementing it.
As expected, you do not know anything about its API limits. Maximum token is 4096 with any gpt4 model. I am getting tired of HN users bs'ing at any given opportunity.
Exactly, it's not about the marginal increase in risk today, it's about fighting the culture of enshittification the only way you can, with your wallet.
Our 20 year old fridge gave up the ghost. First thing I did was get a month of Consumer Reports and read through their Fridge section. Something I noticed, same with Vacuums ... there is no clear winner. They gave top scores to LG fridges people vehemently disliked in the comments. Almost everything got low scores in owner satisfaction. Their #2 pick had an owner satisfaction of 1/5!

We decided to get a $700 Whirlpool, but that started making weird noises almost immediately (like a bad fan bearing).

I have tried recording the sounds from my phone but its too difficult. Does anyone recommend a consumer-level vibration-analysis product? Something you could stick to your fridge, etc, for days, weeks, and it detects and records outlier noises, etc?
You'd be surprised. I've seen AWS bills well in the 9 figures. It's just that fixing expensive designs is, in itself, quite expensive, and many of those very large corps have hiring practices that don't allow them to complete for the top of the market. Sometimes there's tens, if not hundreds of millions in savings a year, but corporate sclerosis makes it very difficult for broad cost-saving initiatives to be identified and approved.

It's the same issue in any large organization: Large levels of success somewhere allow for large levels of waste somewhere else, but often the waste is not required for the success to exist: The success just makes the organization complacent.
So people can have their cars ruined by punks and/or glitches. Great idea!
> Doing it right requires a heat gun, or solvents, or a removal wheel, etc.

Or a can of spray paint to over names, logos, and contact information. :)
I've spent some time doing this. There's always old systems people don't really understand, ownership is poorly defined, and no one knows what happens if you turn it off. It's archeology. Understand what the system is doing and how it interacts with other systems and the business. If it looks unneeded back it up, stop the VM, wait and watch for fallout, and eventually terminate it.
Good questions. The future is unpredictable. No one will be half right on how a future with an AGI will look like.
Building games that you can only multi-play on official servers is short sighted. I started playing early-access ARK with my 5 year old who was super into dinosaurs. He's now 13 and still loves playing ARK with his friends. He was really worried to hear they were shutting down the official servers, but I reassured him that he'd still be able to host the game himself as he had been doing. We have a lot of memories playing that game, and I suspect he'll be playing the sequels for years to come.

When my current 3 year old wants to learn to play a game with his dad and brother, there are many choices - and I'm sure not going to get us into one that we can't play in a few years.
how the hell do you steal a 2020 vehicle without the key? I thought thats the whole point of the sophisticated FOBs (that cost $500 for a replacement). I thought the only way you could steal a late model car was with a tow truck.
How can there be a lot of scalpers when they're an appointment only to fit at the Apple store?
Interfaces/traits is syntactic sugar for a function dictionary/vtable. It could probably be done via Zig's compile time subset.
Can an AI Compose Music?
That's just the secret program to get Europeans to stop making fun of us.
I've been in the same mindset as you, but I've changed my mind a bit.

Personally and at work, I've started to think about two-ish security classes.

The first are the top security things, e.g. my password manager or my github account. For these, I want my password and my second factor far away from each other and I won't add this second factor to my password manager to make it hard to compromise both of them at once.

But then there are less important accounts and at work, shared accounts even. Here you get a small benefit: Unless you compromise the secret behind the TOTP (which is the one kind you'd generally store in a password manager), if you can see my password + token for some reason, you only have access for a minute or so. Like I can finally type my password into slack without the account being immediately compromised.

And I can get this small edge of security for these less important accounts for almost no effort from the PW manager.

Put differently - if you manage to break into my password manager, you'd get access to my less secure accounts either way, no matter if I store the TOTP or not. But having the TOTP active might make some attack scenarios harder, like if you MITM a login request.
Just tell them you are at an advanced stage with another companies, your timeline is pretty aggressive and if there's a way to skip some steps it would help make it work for both of you.
The person who invents a refrigerator compressor that isn't a sealed unit that requires special training and equipment to replace when the motor starts sticking is going to get a horse's head in their bed.
Or just vxdev or vx-dev or VxDev or something that doesn't look like a domain name.
If you take incentivation to the extreme, look no further than the publishing criteria for academic positions in China.
https://www.nature.com/articles/463142a
I disagree, but ignoring this somewhat, I offer this:

One remarkable thing is how the hippie stuff often induced by chemical manipulation of serotonin receptors mirrors a lot of religious messages. You can take slogans like "peace on earth, love your neighbor, love is all you need" and say, is that hippie stuff? Or is it, say... The message attributed to Jesus? In that sense, you don't really need the drugs or counterculture to come up with that. It's been an authentic part of history before. Nor can it totally be dismissed as only coming from drug culture, or a brief source for a small moment in time. We've had similar movements and ideas become popular before. I'd go one step further and call it objectively a good thing.
Greer's thesis is interesting, but I don't see what this article adds to it.

Western Culture is firmly in the "one story" paradigm, and reaching the terminal state.

"Too many stories = schizo" seems like a defense/cope from someone in the popular "one story" camp. I say this because the author doesn't really substantiate it with examples, or explain how/when the culture transitioned from "many" to "too many".

IME people described as "schizo" often have a "one story" worldview of the world, i.e. believing strongly that their views are Truth, but struggle to form a cohesive "one story" and go crazy. In contrast, a "many stories" person is detached from owning the Truth and can better cope with contradictions and differing worldviews.
I remember playing around with GPT-2. I was absolutely amazed to see that it knew some characters from Dota 2 or Supreme Commander. I thought damn this thing has a whole world model inside, because it can clearly memorize concepts and talk about then in a flexible/ approximate way. This requires remembering not just the things but also the dynamics of and relations between those things. Since it can talk about them freely, it must have done that to at least some degree. Getting to an accurate world model is then just a quantitative step. I am surprised some people still think LLMs don't have any kind of world model.
This is such an absurd overgeneralization of the cultural lives of millions of people
I'm thinking that would decrease the sale or trade-in value :) It also doesn't help all that much with the raised nature of vinyl letters.
Generative AI's end-run around copyright won't be resolved by the courts
We're currently living through a race to the bottom in everything: technology (degradation of platforms like Google and FaceBook — Google has become practically unusable; proliferation of bots, SEO junk, AI junk; also the degradation and over-complication of hardware, e.g. these fridges: overly-complicated smart appliances that don't last long; "they don't build things like they used to"), society (social media, polarization, siloing, echo chambers), politics (Trump, fake news, the death of a well-educated electorate), media (the death of editorial and journalistic responsibility, the death of the institution of the brick-and-mortar press), products and markets (all of the utterly cheap and crappy products on Amazon), the environment (pollution, climate change, mass extinction)... I could probably go on and on. We're about to lose our ability to know what is true and what is real as AI becomes more powerful. The race to the bottom is happening everywhere, all at once. Which means there's a set of root causes behind all of these seemingly-disparate effects: globalization + erosion of barriers to entry in all industries + externalization of costs + technological amplification of capabilities + Moloch + tragedy of the commons + Lord of the Flies (i.e. no adults in the room, no one to step in and stop us from destroying ourselves) + who knows how many other factors.
> C++, D, and Go have throw/catch exceptions

I believe Go does not.
Literally nobody pays attention to car alarms because they are 99.9% false positives. They're a nuisance that do more net harm than good.
I think that the "Mondo" films played a part.

For those not in the know, Mondo films (that's usually the start of the title, like Mondo Freudo) gathered together very disparate samples of different slices of life, with a heavy emphasis on the titillating, the criminal, the bizarre, not to mention almost anything that might be numbered among the counterculture, and presented them in a vaguely documentary-like format. How much was staged, how much wasn't? Still, aside from the almost obligatory nudity, you got a very strong feeling of "look at the strange stuff these people get up to!"

My guess is that they had kind of an outsized impact for what seemed like half "nudie cuties" of the 50s married to a casual National Geographic feel of different cities in Europe, the United States, and associated territories.
Wasn't this proven to be faked?
> It would add new states to the already complicated TCP set of states.

Huh? Half-closed connections already exist. The complexity in the state machine is there, and more TCP users should be aware of it (the source of soo.... many... bugs)
We have a Whirlpool and it seems to have started having issues within 3 years.
What is a "suiting tool"? It's not a term I have heard before, and a quick web search did not turn anything up.