skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm sure before long you would be required to input your government ID to use it.

The government does not need to maintain a browser to enforce this rule. It would simply tell people that logging into the internet requires government ID now, and the ISPs would make it so or be shut down.

The government could however, if it maintained a browser, guarantee that the internet would be accessible without a government ID, just by not putting that feature in their browser. A government browser would be subject to the constitution, debate, public comment, and legislation; rather than having to sue companies to get anything done.

Google, Apple, and Mozilla are not protecting you from the government. They're intimately financially interconnected with each other, and can decide what the entire world is going to have to tolerate on the web on a group chat. Without government intervention (even if just to collect bribes), they'd all just probably merge and enslave the planet.
The main thing with his YA books is that the themes are darker and they're scarier than the regular stuff, imo.
You're ignoring the antitrust cases against Apple which may seek similar remedies.
At the moment when I got upset about this, they were trying to do an awful lot, and it felt like the money was burning a hole in their pockets.

I know they cut back a little but maybe they’ve sobered up since? Haven’t had the heart to look again.
One point to observe here is that there’s a difference between a “related content” section when viewing specific content and the more general algorithmic feed that is designed to be the primary mode of discovery and interaction.
There's interesting data on the accuracy of US presidential markets if you're interested in this kind of thing. It's especially remarkable how accurate they were (both at predicting the outcome and how close the results were) many decades before modern political polling came on the scene.

>As a basic if unsophisticated measure of the accuracy of the betting markets, the favorite almost always won, the only exception being in 1916 when betting initially favored the eventual loser (Hughes) but swung to even odds by the time the polls closed. In the 15 elections between 1884 and 1940, the mid-October betting favorite won 11 times (73 percent) and the underdog won only once (when in 1916 Wilson upset Hughes on the West Coast). In the remaining three contests (1884-92), the odds were essentially even throughout and the races very close.

https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/BettingPaper_final(JEP...

https://www.sportsoddshistory.com/other/potus-odds/
Who do you think is going to buy chrome? And don't you think they are going to want to recoup their investment?

I suspect chrome will get far less consumer friendly than chrome currently is if it is sold.
Yeah, pro/anti "algorithms" is too reductive, especially since the old status-quo was also an algorithm of people and processes.

I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer:

1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying?

2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them?

3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?
Yes and no. One of Bluesky's goals was enabling custom feeds, and they're definitely working on the app. I really enjoy the Quiet Posters feed.

On the other hand, making a custom feed involves hosting your own server, not writing config in Bluesky itself: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
The iOS app store monopoly is unreal. Epic's case should have been a slam dunk, they got removed from the app store by offering a discount if people went through their processor instead of Apple's, proving harm to the consumer by simply expecting less than 30% for simply processing a payment.

People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]

[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
My mistake, so they were agreeing that body doubling is for people with ADHD then. Otherwise a less-charitable interpretation would be that GP is saying that using a website to schedule a stranger to watch you do mundane tasks over Zoom —in 2025– is the same thing as human companionship in general, but that would be a kind of strange thing to volunteer online unprompted
Epic lost their's, while ironically winning the Google one... Where you were always able to install a third party app store, they just didn't let you do it through the official store.
> It doesn't scale to massive collaborative systems where you need rigid interfaces between components. But I suspect many of us are solving problems that don't actually need that complexity.

Here's the issue. Starting out you almost certainly don't need that rigid interface. However, the longer the app grows the more that interface starts to matter and the more costly retrofitting it becomes.

The company I currently worked at started out with a "just get it done" approach which lead to things like any app reaching into any database directly just to get what it needs. That has created a large maintenance issue that to this day we are still trying to deal with. Modifying the legacy database schema in any way takes multiple months of effort due to how it might break the 20 systems that reach into it.
If a guy sees an attractive woman out in real life somewhere, is there any action he can take that would be appropriate? What specifically should a guy do?
This was actually just last week. I guess GitHub made that, but I could not yet reproduce it.
The only thing being specific is chrome the product launches. Selling of the pixel phone business wouldn't require also selling android for instance, so arguably its the same.
You’ve misread then:

> Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

The exploit happens over bluetooth. They used a USBC driver to explore the potential attack surface.

Shit like this is what happens when you don’t have good separation between functionality you give QA for production firmware & commands for factory firmware bringup. Almost certainly this is because the vendor used the same image for factory bringup & shipping to end users.
This is you "the success of the strategy. I revel in it." Own it.
Putin said again today he has no interest in a ceasefire. But 'Zelensky'. Sure.
It doesn't matter why you use any of this software. What matters is what it does to the ads market. This is not 1999 and this is not Microsoft. Google's product isn't software. It's the attention of its users.
I agree with the sentiment that algorithms do affect what we see in our feeds and often the things we see are chosen because they are deemed more engaging by said algorithm, but I also think we're overstating the effects of the algorithms and putting too much blame on them. I think we need to recognize that the technology we've built is inherently addictive and also making human connections more impersonal.

If you took away the algorithms, I don't think you'd necessarily have a relaxing social media feed. You'd still have people sharing so-called "engaging" material and you'd still have to deal with "context collapse" and disagreeable discussions. I think the anonymous nature of online connections inherently make them more impersonal compared with actual face to face ones. And being constantly connected to other human beings digitally (even strangers) is incredibly addictive.
I could be mistaken, but doesn't Indeed do this already?
Keep Google Chrome. Separate search. Sell it to private equity. (I bet DoJ didn’t think about that whammy.)

And start charging for everything else out there like maps, street view, and browser. And buy cloudflare while at it. Push themselves into everything related to connectivity and internet properties.

The search business is the cash flow that is being a thorn in the side of Google. And it doesn’t even make sense in its vision anymore.
He‘s basically jumping from hype to hype, riding the forefront wave of attention, funneling it into his wallet. I think he‘s extremely intelligent and quick also, both of which are necessary to do this. I wouldn’t be able to.
Don't you see how a random device with an Ethernet cord being able to change its MAC address and send arbitrary packets is a wormable threat actor?

...and then let it do the same but without the Ethernet cord requirement?

Drive around with a white van that says "Free Candy / BLE Persistent Threats"... pwn devices as you walk through the metal detectors on the way to China.

Wireless, wormable, arbitrary packets, spoofing arbitrary devices and you don't see the issue?
I was impressed with the El Salvador prisons. All of the prisoners are given incentive to shorten their sentences by working in various production operations, like sewing clothing, farming food, etc... they have classes to teach them various skills, but they also work a lot of hours to contribute back to society. For those who believe prison should be unattractive, it definitely still is. For those who believe inmates should be rehabilitated, they are learning to contribute to society while gaining valuable skills. Seems like a win win to me.
Agreed! That's the key problem: we are not going to blow up the world to save Ukraine.

But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.

Unfortunately, I think the rational thing to do is to apply increasing pressure to Putin until he either backs down or proves that he is willing to blow up the world over Ukraine. If the latter, then we back down. Of course, the risks of that strategy are all too obvious.
There is a split in discworld around 'Mort'. The first 2 books are at their core a critique on all the tolkien clone books repeating these same old boring cliches. The 3rd is a critique around the lack of gender equiety in fantasy.

The 4th book, Mort, is Terry dealing with the fact that he has a successfull series running, so he might as well start writing his own stories. He's not primarily reactionary at this point. This is for me the first 'real' discworld book.

In fact, I find the first 3 books a string of stand alone gags if you don't see them as critiques of the genre. Funny but shallow. Small Gods has real depth, but the author still stands at the sidelines. The Truth or Nightwatch are even deeper, and I suspect they are both autobiographic and cathartic on some level.
Absolutely. The known ease with which voting manipulation is possible and the lucrative incentives for motivated actors and organizations to do so, and the fundamentally flawed moderation structure are the two key issues that, unless they are radically changed, systemically compromise the integrity of the entire platform. This is the natural, inevitable state of a system such designed.

I wish Aaron Swartz were still here. Such an absolute injustice.
Discredited how? I recall a whole bunch of people in his administration getting arrested. (Though not the president himself.)
False. It's to protect citizens first and personal property second. Private property is invalid and a legal construction and assumes the personhood of corporations. It's this false equivalency that gives these orgs power over us. Our legal system should prioritize actual people. Anything else is morally bankrupt. A lot of people get mad because hearing the truth hurts.
How do you tell if he's talking to co-conspirators and doing more crimes or not unless you are monitoring who he is talking to?
Maybe something to stop it succeeding at requests like "hack into some power stations and blackout city X" ?
> But those “struggling users” who may be lacking in social skills, and begin to rely on AI assistants to craft conversations for them, may have difficulty once they arrive on real-life dates, without the use of their phone to help them converse. This could lead to anxiety and further retreat into the comfort of the digital space, a group of academics has claimed.

It may also not for some of them. For me, digital vs IRL is a different experience. My style of communicating is different.

> It could also erode the trust users have in the authenticity of others on the app. Who is using AI and who is a genuine, flesh-and-blood human tapping away behind the screen?

This is already a general issue for the whole internet, not just online dating.

If certain people struggle with social skills, they should get social skills training. Dating coaches exist. They're not cheap but exist.

> Many single people say that it has never been more difficult to find a loving relationship.

I agree, my last dating period was 3 years ago. It required a lot more skill than 15 years ago.

> homogenising profiles

This is already happening based on my experience. But they do forget though that during the dates the homogeneity goes out of the window by quite a bit. It's only the online part that has this.

> But proponents of dating app AI say that assistants and “dating wingmen”, as they’re known, could help reduce dating app fatigue

Not really as the recipient will now be wondering whether an AI is talking to her/him. So the fatigue is transferred.

> Last year, product manager Aleksandr Zhadan programmed ChatGPT to swipe through and chat to more than 5,000 women on his behalf on Tinder. Eventually, he met the woman who is now his fiancée.

That worked because it's still a growth hack. Not many people are doing it. The moment that many people are doing it, this probably won't work anymore. I made a simple autoswiper too, swiped through 200K profiles and found my wife that way. I did the chatting on my own because ChatGPT 3.5 couldn't keep up with my playfulness. Also, the chatting for me served as an anchor to start the date off with a blast. I specifically remember when I met my wife on our first date that I was groggy and cranky due to a severe lack of sleep. But when we met, one of us used callback humor from our Tinder conversation and our time with each other has been hype ever since. If I'd had used ChatGPT there, that date may have started off less well since I wouldn't know any of the playful things I'd have mentioned.
Do note that this will take years to play out. Nothing is certain yet.
Great write up, especially agree on pgvector with small (ideally fine tuned) embeddings. There’s so much complexity that comes with keeping your vector db in sync with you main db (especially once you start filtering with metadata). 90% of gen AI apps don’t need it.
Oddly enough, Russell's political transformation came long before the world's least surprising revelations, probably because he'd got to the point of his "revolution" where the left considered him tiresome and the pandemic was a reboot opportunity.

Elon is the starkest example of "journalist contacts him about historic allegations that were never going to amount to anything other than embarrassment and within a couple of hours he's come out as a Republican and therefore rendered himself immune to shame over personal indiscretions of the sort only Teh Wokes care about". Again, trending that way because he was genuinely annoyed at pandemic regulations and not a fan of Teh Wokes but interesting to see how far he's taken it...
Well, I guess...? Tonally they feel completely different and Good Omens draws a lot of its DNA from The Omen (and, wonderfully, Richmal Crompton) whereas I don't see any of that in Sourcery.

I find it hard to see Good Omens as a do-over of Sourcery, but I guess they do have something in common.
Yes. And other than Firefox, Mozilla was spending money in two ways. First creating new paid products in an attempt to have revenue in case the Google money ever went away. None of them were successful enough to meet this goal, but it was a good goal. Secondly, they spent their charity donations on activism work. The way they are structured they legally could not spend that money on Firefox. They would need to restructure as a non-profit corporation (not tax deductible charity) to accept donations to spend on Firefox, like their Thunderbird subsidiary. I hope they do so now, and at least attempt to support Firefox on donations.

The truth is that browsers are a very complicated, very quickly moving, and very security sensitive piece of software. They spent all that money on Firefox rather than saving it because if they didn't Firefox would have fallen behind Chrome and Safari and it wouldn't be worth using today.
MS and Apple have the same thing, they're just less successful. Just a browser and an OS was previously seen as antitrust (and it looks like MS is being anti-competitive in this space still). Just a browser and a search engine can allow anti-competitive behavior. Or just a search engine and an ads platform...

The problem is the anti-competitive behavior. Businesses are generally rational actors, so clearly our system isn't working. It's unclear what the boundaries are until years in court, and even then it only applies to a single company.
> his company is pure evil

Would you mind elaborating on why you'd call Palantir 'evil' in particular? I wouldn't exactly hold the company up a a role model of good corporate citizenship, but I also wouldn't put them down as particularly more 'evil' than your average multinational. Say, on a level with -- to pull an example not-quite-entirely out of thin air -- Airbus.
Cloudflare workers are not amazing in terms of communicating problems. The errors you get can also be out of sync with the docs and the support doesn't have access to poke at your issues directly. Together with the custom runtime and outdated TS types... it can be a very frustrating DX.
They spent trillions of dollars to create a lame spell check.
But we are not discussing Chromium. Google’s browser is Chrome, and that product has search exclusivity deals that have been deemed monopolistic.

Google could divest the Chrome product and keep contributing to Chromium, but the value proposition is really unclear when that OSS investment doesn’t buy you billions of dollars of browser lock-in value.
and we wonder why there's a "loneliness epidemic". Give me a break
10% is the norm here.
It's not his lifestyle I'm worried about. There was a healthy youtuber who made videos about wilderness survival who was killed when he was rear ended by a drunk driver while stopped at a red light (the drunk driver, of course, survived). It's all the morons around Knuth I'm worried about.
Nothing you quoted implies that there's an exploit that happens over Bluetooth. It actually implies otherwise, so you'll have to find a better quote if that's actually true (I couldn't, FWIW).
And I still don't understand why. I expected it when I started my career, and here nearing the end it's still really rare. And it should have gotten easier in that time, what with the Internet.

Time zones and culture and language and all that, I suppose. But the world is full of very smart people who have a decent grasp of American and European culture, and would work for a tenth the price.
I never use them to generate code for languages that I know well. Google has started trying to answer my programming related searches with LLM results. Half the time it points me a useful direction, the other half it's just dead wrong.

I have found them pretty helpful writing sql. But I don't really know sql very well and I'd imagine that somebody who does could write what I need in far less time that it takes me with the LLM. While the LLM helps finish my sql task faster, the downside is that I'm not really learning it in the same way I would if I had to actually bang my head against the wall and understand the docs. In the long run, I'd be better off without it.
wasn’t vo1d something which could potentially deliver in this?
Same way it worked in the past with monopolies like Ma Bell?

Those teams can keep working on Chrome, they'll just have to fall under some new kind of separate Chrome Inc. structure instead of under Google Inc., and Google will have to sell most of its shares of Chrome Inc. to third parties.

Splitting off Chrome really isn't the problem. Making the new Chrome Inc. profitable without accepting bribes from big tech, on the other hand...
I mean, some people prefer covering it up to flaunting it :)
I can't take Discworld seriously. It doesn't even take itself seriously. I read the first book, which was full of random deus doing ex machina all over the place, and tapped out.
At this point, tech's major competitors are overseas. Never thought I'd be making this argument, but does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?
I've actually been working on something tackling exactly this for a little while now. It's a social network where you post to your own curated tags, and people can follow any subset of those. So you can post both your "local small town history" and also "important cs papers", and those interested in either or both can follow as they choose. It's alts by default. And to start, it's focused on links.

Reverse chronological is sacrosanct and it will always remain ad free to keep incentives aligned with it being a place I like to spend time. Every tag also has its own RSS feed.

It's still invite-only, but anyone reading this page is obviously a great fit so here's an invite link:
https://lynkmi.com/accounts/signup/?invite_code=333ee833-e3d...
I don't disagree that porn shapes our sexual behaviour. But I don't think it's a bad thing. Sex is a behaviour that's sensitive to fashion and tradition just like food, dance and social norms are.

If people do more extreme things and they enjoy it then why not? As long as it's fully consensual and of adult age it's only great when people get to explore their sexuality.
Am I misunderstanding what is meant by semantic code search? I thought the idea was that you run something like a parser on the repo to extract function/class/variable names and then allow searching on a more rich set of data, rather than tokenizing it like English.

I know github kind of added this but their version falls apart still even in common languages like C++. It's not unusual for it to just completely miss cross references, even in smaller repos. A proper compiler's eye view of symbolic data would be super useful, and Github's halfway attempt can be frustratingly daft about it.
So which figure is more accurate in your opinion?
Suppose that, since next March 20th, the government adopts a standard time and school schedule that are perfectly synchronized with the local astronomical time, i.e. kids wake up at dawn, go to bed when it's dark, etc. On March 21st the sun will rise a little earlier and set a little later, so the once-perfect synchronization will be a bit off, and more the following day, an so on until the summer solstice. Then the trend will be inverted and the skew between the two times will slowly decrease until reaching zero on September 22nd. But the very next day the synchronization will go off again, this time in the opposite sense, until March 2026,
and so on forever.

Just like a broken clock that shows the right time twice per day, the ideal ruling suggested in the article will result in two perfect days every year.

At least the current scheme theoretically allows for 4 perfecy days per year! Note that I'm not saying that it is what really happens, though. It depends on school schedule and the dates of the switch. About the latter, I do think that the switch should happen as close as possible to the equinox, so towards the end of March, like in Europe.