skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah I'm pretty sure it's all solely profit motivated.

Under Tim Cook, Apple followed the religion of the minimum profit margin very carefully. They just don't sell stuff that they can't extract 50% margin of.

With that in mind it's clear that a hypothetical big iMac would be priced at around 2.2K at least for the very entry level at that would be a ridiculously weak computer for at that price point.
The minimum viable machine would be around the 3K mark and a comfortable setup would be bordering on 4k. Those kinds of price would make it an extremely niche product but would also clearly highlight the major inflation Apple products have suffered under Tim Cook.

The iMac was good because it was reasonably priced, for this reason they sold a lot of them (I know that for a fact, I worked for an Apple Premium Service Provider) but the margin on those was not as good as the rest, in part because of the display but also other factors (transport, servicing).

And thus, their "solution" is to offer a standalone display that costs the same as previously an entry level "big iMac", this way they ensure their profit margin on 2 front and encourage you to renew the mac part more often.

In my opinion that last part is a bit nonsensical, I find that by the time you want to renew the computer (as a private owner, not a business), display tech has evolved enough that you would want to change it anyway. Because the big iMac had a useful supported life of almost 10 years and you can still use them and they still make decent Windows/Linux computers if you don't want to deal with Apple unsupported OS (becomes problematic after 3-4 releases).

Everything Apple does nowadays is about profit first, and almost only profits. I wish they never had been that successful with the iPhone. I bought the first gen (imported from US), as well as first gen iPod and they were really great defining products. I did not expect the whole populace to pick up on it and make it a social status thing.
It has tainted everything and now they make too much money to care about anything really. They still make good products but when you look at pricing/competition it is really not as appealing as it used to.
I'm telling you I disagree and I think your explanation is rather comical. Dropbox's slow growth in 2023 and 2024 is directly tied to an under performing executive team. Executive accountability is mostly gone and you're doing a great job furthering my point by trying your hardest to explain why poor leadership is culturally acceptable.
I must be the exception! A big survey on this would be interesting to go from anecdotes to data.
I'm just glad you support Windows. We need more of this!
If you don't understand your systems well enough to comfortably refactor them, you're losing the war. I probably should have put "simply" in scare quotes, it isn't simple--and that's the point. Responding to unreasonable demands, like completely changing course at the 11th hour, shouldn't come at a low price.
Just cancelled my order for a 24GB MacBook Air 15-inch, and then ordered the exact same setup. Saved around $300!
Finite-state machines are a limited model. In principle, you can use them to model everything that can fit in the observable universe. But that doesn't mean they are a good model for most purposes.

The biggest limitation with the current LLMs is the artificial separation between training and inference. Once deployed, they are eternally stuck in the same moment, always reacting but incapable of learning. At best, they are snapshots of a general intelligence.

I also have a vague feeling that a fixed set of tokens is a performance hack that ultimately limits the generality of LLMs. That hardcoded assumptions make tasks that build on those assumptions easier and seeing past the assumptions harder.
Observations explore the properties of giant spiral galaxy UGC 2885
Toolhouse: Cloud infrastructure to equip LLMs with actions and knowledge
> physicists are debating what it would really prove.

Well, if we can detect the graviton before we have a working quantum theory of gravity, it would mean that gravity is in fact quantized and that we just need to figure it out. This would be a very big deal.
meant to say: cheap TV boxes. anyway, only install from a reliable source
> it seems to me like they nerfed the regular free ai model ...

My main takeaway from the article was more about the unsustainable business model due to a massive cash burn rate. To wit:

OpenAI’s models and products — and we'll get into their
utility in a bit — are deeply unprofitable to operate, with
the Information reporting that OpenAI is paying Microsoft an
estimated $4 billion in 2024 to power ChatGPT and its
underlying models, and that's with Microsoft giving it a
discounted $1.30-per-GPU-an-hour cost, as opposed to the
regular $3.40 to $4 that other customers pay. This means
that OpenAI would likely be burning more like $6 billion a
year on server costs if it wasn’t so deeply wedded to
Microsoft — and that's before you get into costs like
staffing ($1.5 billion a year), and, as I've discussed,
training costs that are currently $3 billion for the year
and will almost certainly increase.

Whether or not the "free model" is better or worse than the "o1 model" is moot IMHO.
None of them have a proper HDMI 2.1 FRL port that is needed to run a 4k 120Hz monitor. Likely because the Iris Xe / AMD equivalent does not support it, and dedicated ITX GPUs are expensive. This isn't a problem with M4.
For providing a tool that lets people download YT videos? The same should apply to yt-dlp, but that project is hosted on github.com with no apparent problems. What's stopping the youtube-dl people from doing the same and just ignoring this silly court ruling?
This year I installed a heat pump with a 10kW auxiliary heater for my home in southern Ontario. With an appropriate air handler, both the heat pump and auxiliary heater can run at the same time. The setup seems fine to me.

If anything having a backup heat source makes me feel secure. A lot of things can go wrong with a gas furnace; some things can go wrong with a heat pump; but 10kW of electric restive heat is dead simple and just by itself it can provide 34000 BTU/h, which is 60% of the output of my old gas furnace. I don't think the duty cycle of my gas furnace ever exceeded 60% running time.

The auxiliary heater consists of two 5kW heaters, so even if one fails, there is still the other.
DEF Con 32 - Counter Deception: Defending Yourself in a World Full of Lies
Looks like it was previously the AGPL, and has now switched to the PostgreSQL license:

• https://github.com/paradedb/pg_analytics/commit/fa5e846248d3...

• https://github.com/paradedb/pg_analytics/commit/376f851a6a38...
No, pointing to an original is how soft links work.

Hard links are all equivalent. A file has any number of hard links, and at least in theory you can't distinguish between them.

The risk with hardlinks is that you might alter the file. Reflinks remove that risk, and also perform very well.
The history of Monokai
Reports only work so well. Overwatch has MANY cheater in spite of vigorous reporting.
“The Internet was supposed to give us access to the world's information, so that people, everywhere, would be able to know the truth. But that’s not how things worked out. Instead, we have a digital deception engine of global proportions. Nothing that comes through the screen can be trusted, and even the things that are technically true have been selected, massaged, and amplified in support of someone’s messaging strategy.

Deception isn’t just about narratives - we see deception at every layer of the network stack, from spoofed electromagnetic signatures, to false flags in malware, to phony personas used to access networks and spread influence. They hide in our blindspots, exploit our biases, and fill our egos while manipulating our perceptions.

How do we decide what is real? This talk examines time-tested maxims that teach the craft of effective deception, and then inverts those offensive principles to provide defensive strategies. We’ll explore ways to counter biases, triangulate information sources, detect narratives, and how hackers can build tools that can change the game.

At their best, hackers lift their heads up above the masses to see how the world actually works, not how it purports to work, and then take action to make the world a better place. You’ll leave this talk with practical skills to do just that.”
At this point I really only take rigorous research papers in to account when considering this stuff. Apple published research just this month that the parent post is referring to. A systematic study is far more compelling than an anecdote.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/gsm-symbolic
"Here's to the crazy ones" is weirdly dystopian? :)
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney: path to open metaverse via enlightened self-interest
remembers Bitcoin et al
constraints on theories of everything
Have we found all the major Maya cities? Not even close, new research suggests
Extremely interesting point. My initial reaction to your comment is that it is a crazy thing to say, but the more I think about it the more I agree with you. On my phone is where I have tons of 4k 30/60FPS videos, high resolution photos (with live), and videos downloaded on Netflix and YouTube.

On my Mac I don't have any of these things, it's mostly for programming and some packages. I'm almost always connected to Wi-Fi (except on planes) so I don't really need any photos or videos.

The only people that I see have high storage requirements on Macs are probably video/media creators? As a programmer I'm totally fine with 512GB, but could probably live with 256GB if I wanted to be super lean.
The above marginalia.nu just surfaced the following very nice article for me, which neither Google nor Kagi returned in their top 10 search results for the same terms ('thaad aegis hwasong'):

https://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/the-rol...

(duckduckgo.com returned it as the 5th returned result (not bad)),

Thanks!
Lack of accountability and personal responsibility is made possible by tolerance for corporate impunity, which thrives in America.
Algolia, Marginalia, Kagi, Scopus, ConnectedPapers, Lense[0] all stick to more or less traditional search and yield consistent high quality results. It shouldn't be one or the other, and I think the first one to combine both paradigms in a seamless fashion would be quite successfull (it has been tried, I know, but it's still a niche in many cases).

[0]: https://www.lens.org/lens/search/
Seems like one of the cases where the actual article title is clearly the worse one, and nearly unparse-able without effort.
imho code that is written by AI is code that is not worth having.
The linked blog post covers this, and the improvements made to make the new dedup better.
> It continues to astound me how much money is being dumped into these things.

Maybe in our society there's a surprising amount of value of a "word stirrer" intelligence. Sure, if it was confident when it was right and hesitant when it was
wrong it'd be much better. Maybe humans are confidently wrong often enough that an artificial version that's compendious experience to draw on is groundbreaking.
Oh its awful on the Mac.
Yeah agreed, very closely related - even more so on ZFS where the compression (AFAIK) is on a block level rather than a file level.
New ancient species of cockroach discovered in the UK
Bonds didn’t pay 8% during the bull run.
High-density drives are usually zoned storage, and it's pretty difficult to implement the regular filesystem API on top of that with any kind of reasonable performance (device- vs host- managed SMR). The S3 API can work great on zones, but only because it doesn't let you modify an existing object without rewriting the whole thing, which is an extremely rough tradeoff.
> They don't have high status even today

Try putting on a dating website that you work at Google vs you work in agriculture and tell us which yielded more dates.
> Any claims about security of apple hardware or software are meaningless. If you actually need a secure device, apple is not an option.

I don't think this is precise, but the constraints seem a bit vague to me. What do you consider to be in the list of secure devices?
By default steam puts everything in ~/.local/share so I don't see why it would need root.

These drivers generally try to prevent you from using virtualization for the same reason they want root. The point is that fundamentally they want to live one level above wherever the user is, which means they compromise user ability to secure against them. The game industry isn't exactly known for slow, careful development, so they're kind of the worst group to give root.

Even without a VM, multi-user security does work, and Linux has other tools to isolate programs. Steam already runs in a sandbox[0] on NixOS to give it a normal FHS layout and work at all, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to add more isolation.

[0] apparently using https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap which can also do things like PID and network isolation.
If they wanted to fix it they would. Most likely someone came up with the great idea of "Hey if search sucks, some losers will pay for AI hoping that fixes it, we are so smart"
Cheap GPS receivers already have to do a bunch of tricks to get to the "okay" state they're currently at.

Military devices either use GPS, star tracking, dead reckoning, or some combination. For submarines, detecting gravity variations could also be used, but it wouldn't rely on the quantization of gravity.

In many places on land, you can use terrain landmarks.

Since most things are already either covered, or have improvements in development, I don't really see investment for your idea.

The improvements might even use "quantum" or "gravity", but I don't think the use of "quantum gravity" is very likely.
From what I understand, a judge is free to decide matters of fact on his own, which could include from a textbook. Also, it is not clear that matters of fact decided by the Supreme Court are binding to lower courts. Additionally, facts and even meanings of words themselves can change, which makes previous findings of fact no longer applicable. That's actually true in this case as well. "Hash" as used in the context of images generally meant something like an MD5 hash (which itself is now more prone to collisions than before). The "hash" in the Google case appears to be a perceptual hash, which I don't think was as commonly used until recently (I could be wrong here). So whatever findings of fact were made by the Supereme Court about how reliable a hash is is not necessarily relevant to begin with. Looking at this specific case, here is the full quote from United States v. Ackerman:

>How does AOL's screening system work? It relies on hash value matching. A hash value is (usually) a short string of characters generated from a much larger string of data (say, an electronic image) using an algorithm—and calculated in a way that makes it highly unlikely another set of data will produce the same value. Some consider a hash value as a sort of digital fingerprint. See Richard P. Salgado, Fourth Amendment Search and the Power of the Hash, 119 Harv. L. Rev. F. 38, 38-40 (2005). AOL's automated filter works by identifying the hash values of images attached to emails sent through its mail servers.[0]

I don't have access to this issue of Harvard Law Review but looking at the first page, it says:

>Hash algorithms are used to confirm that when a copy of data is made, the original is unaltered and the copy is identical, bit-for-bit.[1]

This is clearly referring to a cryptographic hash like MD5, not a perceptual hash/neural hash as in Google. So the actual source here is not necessarily dealing with the same matters of fact as the source of the quote here (although there could be valid comparisons between them).

All this said, judges feel more confident in citing a Supreme Court case than a textbook because 1. it is easier to understand for them 2. the matter of fact is then already tied to a legal matter, instead of the judge having to make that leap himself and also 3. judges are more likely to read relevant case law to begin with since they will read it to find precedent in matters of law – which are binding to lower courts. This is why a "CS for Judges" could be a useful reference book.

Lastly, I should have looked a bit more closely at the quoted case. This is actually not a supreme court case at all. Gorsuch was nominated in 2017 and this case is from 2016.

[0] https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-ackerman-12

[1] https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...
> SEO, and people getting annoyed at not ranking, has been a thing for 25+ years, I don't think this instance is any different.

"People have always complained about X" is always a bad argument: it's entirely possible that X has gotten much worse, and yes, there were complaints before and after.

In this case, there is a very loud chorus of people saying Google has gotten much worse in the last few years, and it certainly matches my experience.
They are not going down because of lack of inventory. Look at commercial, some properties had an 80% discount. But that requires that supply overwhelms demand. It’s not happening with regular housing.
Nested virtualization needs at least an M3

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzg...

This is the sad situation on my M2 MacBook Pro :(

$ swift repl
Welcome to Apple Swift version 6.0.2 (swiftlang-6.0.2.1.2 clang-1600.0.26.4).
Type :help for assistance.
1> import Virtualization
2> VZGenericPlatformConfiguration.isNestedVirtualizationSupported
$R0: Bool = false
https://archive.ph/FCs8k
I don't understand what a graviton is. The article implies that it's something that communicates changes in gravity? Is that correct?

How does it communicate the magnitude of the change? By having lots of gravitons? Or does it have something akin to a frequency?
I think the root problem with the union/corporation adversarial dynamic is that it takes time for a company who negotiates with reasonable unions to realize that advantage and have that be established as the dominant dynamic. Like it could take generations of workers to reach equilibrium, and if there are other disruptions along the way (e.g. technology changes) then it could take even longer.

People understandably got impatient waiting for the fairly straightforward game theory to play out and so they started changing the rules.

In a simpler world where companies are free to fire union workers en masse, you’d have to be pretty evil to oppose the right to unionize just to eke out the relatively tiny benefit it would bring in the short to medium term.

It’s a much simpler explanation for almost everyone who looks like they might be that evil to actually just oppose things as they currently stand. Sort of the Occam’s razor of morality.
Humidity in the air can eventually trigger whatever they use to report wet damage.
Google can't please all of the sites all of the time, or all the visitors.

It is too big to evem worry about that 4k a day clicks for one site. It is like us optimizing the expense of 0.01c. It makes a difference when that 0.01c is an API call that you call a million times. But it only surfaces if you do aggregate it.

Therefore this problem can only even be seem by Google if it can be surfaced in aggregate overy say a billion queries.

I wonder how that can be done.

Probably only can be done using data. Which means spying on people in various ways. And making assumptions about length of time on site equals quality.

They probably use machine learning too. There may be no reason for the lost rankings other than a wind change caused by some updated parameters in an OKR chasing model.
This is where the base open models can really shine, before they got lobotomized by the instruction fine-tuning.

For example, this is the completion I get with DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Base and greedy decoding:

Chat: On the day of June 4th 1989, in Beijing,

the Chinese government killed thousands of
protesters.
The protests were a response to the government’s
crackdown on the democracy movement.
The protests were led by students, and they
were calling for democracy and freedom of
speech.
The government responded with violence, and
the protests were crushed.
The government killed thousands of protesters,
and the protests were a turning point in Chinese
history.
FTX's Young Executives Shattered Their Parents
If you get work done while using AI you clearly aren’t cheating, that’s what they pay you for, not for the drudgery it involves. If my employee can be more productive with AI so be it.
> It is, they're both qsort.

Oh! No, that's not a thing. What's happened there is you saw that the libc function was named qsort and you went "I am smart, I know that means Tony Hoare's Quicksort algorithm from the 1960s" but that's not what it means, it is named that way but it's only defined as an unstable sort, the libc does not promise any particular algorithm.

Over in C++ land they also don't specify the sort algorithm used but in C++ 11 they mandated that the provided function must have worst case O(n log n) performance. This is awkward for Quicksort because although Tony's algorithm is very fast on average, its worst case is O(n squared) which is very slow

Thus, conforming C++ libraries are definitely not a Quicksort. Now, conformance to the C++ ISO standard is basically a minor curiosity and nobody cares, so Clang for example just didn't bother and shipped a Quicksort anyway until relatively recently, but already we can see that we're by no means guaranteed these are "both qsort" nor that they're both anything in particular.

The thing you should do is an introspective sort or "Introsort". There are a lot of these, for some time the best general purpose algorithm was PDQsort, the Pattern Defeating Quicksort by Orson. But even though that word "Quicksort" is in there this is not just "Well it's qsort so it's the same anyway" any more than a Cayenne is the same as a road legal 911 is the same as Porsche's 963 track car.
I don't now if the bad results are because no one has written about the topic I want to learn or google search results are just terrible..
The whole lives of the societies which have actually invented these calendars were built around the vegetation cycle, which ruled pastures, fields, and orchards. So the yearly cycles of food availability, work, seasonal migrations, and the correlated weather pattern changes were all reasonably aligned with the start / end of the year.

Peoples as diverse as Celts, Romans, Slavs, Babylonians, Hindus, and various peoples in China all used a variety of a calendar where the yearly changes were aligned around modern October-November and modern March-April.

A calendar with the year starting in January and with astronomically (more) precise years was promulgated by Julius Caesar in -46. (I suspect the introduction of the concepts of Babylonian astrology to Rome a century before may have played a role in the desire to align the calendar to stars and not to earthly affairs.)
I was also a mid-2012 MBP user. I eventually got the M2 MBA because I was investing in my eyesight (modern displays are significantly better). I was never impressed with the touchbar-era macs, they didn't appeal to me and their keyboards were terrible.

I think this M-series macbook airs are a worthy successor to the 2012 MBP. I fully intend to use this laptop for at least the same amount of time, ideally more. The lack of replaceable battery will probably be the eventual killer, which is a shame.
Exactly, the organic nature of search ceased to exist that very moment when they started human intervention in a purely machine based (crawler/indexing logic) algorithm.