skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And you also get directly rewarded for being there. ... Contrast that with being 'on call' for your megacorporation, who isn't giving you anything extra for your on call time because they 'already pay you enough'.

I'm really not seeing the distinction here. If a company offers a salary and includes on-call as part of the deal (and communicates that up front so it's not a bait and switch), how is that different than running your own business and getting compensated for your on-call time as part of a package that you sell to a client? In both cases you agree up front that you will be part of an on-call plan. In neither case are you getting a bonus for doing a good job at on-call, because either way you're just doing your job that you committed to ahead of time!

I'm totally sympathetic to people who don't want to be part of an on-call. Jobs that have on-call aren't for you, that's fine. But I don't get this idea that it's uncompensated labor, unless there are tons of people out there who somehow ended up in jobs that sprung on-call on them without warning.
Using LLMs to write SQL is a fascinating case because there are so many traps you could fall into that aren't really the fault of the LLM.

My favorite example: you ask the LLM for "most recent restaurant opened in California", give it a schema and it tries "select * from restaurants where state = 'California' order by open_date desc" - but that returns 0 results, because it turns out the state column uses two-letter state abbreviations like CA instead.

There are tricks that can help here - I've tried sending the LLM an example row from each table, or you can set up a proper loop where the LLM gets to see the results and iterate on them - but it reflects the fact that interacting with databases can easily go wrong no matter how "smart" the model you are using is.
Evacuating Boston was great, let’s see Mozilla do the same with SF.
Batteries are already replacing fossil fuels in a meaningful way. I got around today on an ebike and electric train and London where I am is switching the buses and taxis to 100% battery over the next few years. I have a petrol car but it's mostly parked.

As to battery vs hydrogen in the future I figure it's mostly down to costs - the most cost effective will win. So far it's battery in the lead. London tried hydrogen buses - it still has about 20 - but they weren't as good.

I've got a friend who was chairman of a hydrogen gizmo company Intelligent Energy Holding and I was puzzled why they were losing money and went broke as the gadgets like a hydrogen fueled phone charger seemed cool and worked eg this https://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/19/hydrogen-fuel-cell-upp-...

It turned out the problem is compared to battery it cost ten times as much and was a pain - refueling the hydrogen phone charger meant swapping it at a shop paying £5 whereas recharging a battery pack involves plugging it in and costs ~10p.
I've said this many times, snow leopard is still my favourite OS today. If you could add iMessages to it, although not necessary, it would be perfect.

Of course today it would be insecure, missing security patches etc. SSL...
Maybe the most recent "revolution", but like with reading or math the politics of school lunches has a long history, with periodic (decadal?) waves of concern and subsequent systematic changes going back to the 1930s, when national school lunch programs were first instituted.

The underlying point of contention has always been money, not desire. Who doesn't want healthier kids? For the first 50 years or so the hurdle was the price of food, but since the 1990s the hurdle has been labor. California public schools today offer free breakfast and lunch to everybody, independent of ability to pay. The push for that change started circa 2010. But to make it work fiscally that appears to have accelerated the shift to centralized kitchens distributing prepared--and increasingly highly processed--meals to schools.

Before it was closed, my oldest son went to a parochial school that prepared hot lunches out of a tiny kitchen jammed into a corner, pricing them at cost. But it was only possible because of one very dedicated cook (who possibly may not have even been paid staff) assisted by rotating parent volunteers. When that school closed he moved to a new parochial school with a large, well-equipped (albeit old) kitchen. But the kitchen is unused. There's no budget to fund a reliable, affordable cafeteria program even with paid meals, so like most of the parochial schools in the city they contract a private company to deliver prepared "hot" meals, which are no better than the horrible prepared meals the public school district gives kids even though they're sold at "market" price. (The city has their own central kitchens, but the economic pressures result in the same product.)
Because once you get good at using LLMs you can write it with 5 rounds with an LLM in way less time than it would have taken you to type out the whole thing yourself, even if you got it exactly right first time coding it by hand.
I agree, I saw the name and thought "this will be hard to get off the ground with that name". My guess is signly (pronounced sine-lee)
One time had a big pane hit by a golf ball. Just had the outer pane replaced at 10x cheaper.
Being infinitely rich might also be the cause of the problem.
I'm not arguing against using the models per se. It's just that this is a social problem, to which there's no good technical solution. The hard road of social change is the only real alternative.
Another example was High Sierra. They completely swapped out the file system on that release, focusing primarily on under-the-hood changes, and imo was also one of the most stable macOS releases to date.
This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it.

I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me. I can't really imagine a change that would happen in the next 2 years that would make this thing feel slow where an M3 would feel sufficient, so I'm curious to see if Apple really does just go hardcore on forced obsolescence going forward. I have a few M series devies now, from M1 to M3, and I honestly cannot tell the difference other than export times for video.

I can imagine some kind of architecture change that might come with an M6 or something that would force an upgrade path, but I can't see any reason other than just forcing upgrades to drop support between M1-M5. Maybe if there is a really hard push next year into 8K video? Never even tried to edit 8K, so I don't know. I'm guessing an M1 might feel sluggish?
Point 10:

https://www.ettf.land/p/30-reflections
So much about this seems inauthentic. The post itself. The experience. The content produced. I wouldn’t like to be on the other end of the production of this content.
Not just their software, the hardware is beginning to be get pretty unwieldily complicated.

From an OS / software perspective:

Have a "core" macOS that has none of the apps / integrations are baked in at an OS level.

You install the things you want, how you want - eg iMessage, Mail, and then iCloud if you want to sync it, and Photos etc.

Have a slim, fast, stable OS that I can just turn on and get going with.

From the hardware perspective, I made this comment a little while ago but what I want to be able to choose is:

- Device: Watch, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac

- Size: Mini, "Normal / Default" (Air), Max

- Processing Power: "Normal / Default", Pro, Ultra

- And maybe storage.

That way I can go and buy a MacBook Pro (13"?), or a MacBook Max Pro (15"), or a MacBook Mini (11"), or a normal iPad Mini Ultra, or an iMac Mini (21"?), or a Watch Pro, or a Mac Max Ultra etc.

Device + Size + Power.

It's kinda there, but not quite.
> It seems like quite a paradox to build something but to not know how it actually works and yet it works.

That's because of the "magic" of gradient descent. You fill your neural network with completely random weights. But because of the way you've defined the math, you can tell how each individual weight will affect the value output at the other end; and specifically, you an take the derivative. So when the output is "wrong", you say, "would increasing this weight or decreasing have gotten me closer to the correct answer"? If increasing the node would have gotten you closer, you increase it a bit; if decreasing it would have gotten you closer you decrease it a bit.

The result is that although we program the gradient descent algorithm, we don't directly program the actual circuits that the weights contain. Rather, the nodes "converge" into weights which end up implementing complex circuitry that was not explicitly programmed.
That is neither standard nor normal.
My line of work (ML for medical imaging) is pretty dense with leetcodelikes, especially the classic “what’s the best time complexity? Great now whats the best space conplexity”
It seems very dangerous because it is very dangerous.

Other drivers around you are going to expect you to be able to accelerate past the speed limit during dynamic driving conditions like heavy traffic, especially on the interstate. This will make some people unable to drive in a predictable way in some circumstances.

One thing that people underestimate is the danger of deviating from proper right-of-way. Letting someone go that is supposed to yield to you is an example of this. All of the drivers around you are going to expect the other car to yield, and for you to go. If you do the opposite to "be nice" and stop when you have right-of-way the other drivers around you are not going to expect you to stop the flow of traffic. It can cause confusion and that leads to accidents.
Thanks, as I said, easy to fool yourself into thinking you're wrong when esolangs are involved.

The CLI tool is fantastic. I never thought that I'd see an esolang where "ergonomics of using it" was something the author would work on. I'll play around with that some more later, thanks again!
It's all one big game of make-believe in order to justify one group's (the ruler's) use of force and to invalidate the other's (the ruled's).
Don't they use machinery to carry the windows? Even double pane gets heavy. The windows of the sliding doors I've recently got replaced were like 200kg each.
Oh!

The ancient 2017 WiFi article - I see now; I thought you were referring to the OP's NSO group exploit.
I'm very impressed that Innerscene provides LM-63 data for your artificial skylights. Is there any chance you'd be open to providing Spectral Similarity Index scores for your skylight? I think it would really differentiate your product and show how much your company cares about quality.
> I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey through three or four different interface designs, artifacts of half-implemented changes dating back to the last century. Whenever I find myself stuck outside of Appleland, I am eager to return “home,” flaws and all.

Hard agree with this. I sometimes have to boot up a windows laptop to play Minecraft with the kiddo, and it never stops reminding me how little I know about Windows now, how counter-intuitive everything is, how everything feels designed for a user whose mind I cannot comprehend.
Spotlight straight up broke on both of my Macs after Sequoia. It can't even find exact matches in many directories marked for indexing and re-indexing did nothing. Just searching for apps under Applications doesn't seem to find all apps.
Here in Portland, the standard is 5 mph UNDER the limit in the left lane. -_-

If I had a dollar for every time I've passed people on their right while going the speed limit, I could make a living off of it.
Shift work sucks more than on call for me. I like having a flexible schedule that I can work whenever I want, and I'll happily take the remote risk that I'll get paged during my one week per quarter on call rotation in order to guarantee that no one expects me to be on during set hours the rest of the year.

I think the problem isn't on call itself, it's that a lot of companies suck at on call. If your rotation is every 3 weeks and you get woken up in the night at least once per rotation, then yeah, that's awful. But the problem you have in that case is that stuff is always on fire and you don't have enough people on the rotation, not with on-call as a concept.
> Using spaces is not wrong.

Its not wrong for en-dashes (and en-dash set open—with space on either side—is generally an alternative to an em-dash set closed.) And its not wrong on the trailing side of an em-dash used in dialogue to show an abrupt stop mid-sentence if the stop is followed by a new sentence. And there's a few other particular uses, but, generally, setting an em-dash open is wrong.

> but newspapers often space them.

I've never seen a newspaper set em-dashes open, but I have seen them use en-dashes set open instead of using em-dashes at all. Given the space premium in print newspapers, em-dashes set open, which would consume enormous horizontal space, would, other concerns aside, be an odd choice.
>Humans anthropocize all sorts of things but there are way bigger consequences for treating current AI like a human than someone anthropocizing their dog.

AI is less human-like than a dog, in the sense that an AI (hopefully!) is not capable of experiencing suffering.

AI is also more human-like than a dog; in the sense that, unlike a dog, an AI can apply political power.

I agree that there are considerable consequences for misconstruing the nature of things, especially when there's power involved.

>I know plenty of people that believe LLMs think and reason the same way as humans do and it leads them to make bad choices.

They're not completely wrong in their belief. It's just that you are able, thanks to your specialized training, to automatically make a particular distinction, for which most people simply have no basis for comparison. I agree that it's a very important distinction; I could also guess that even when you do your best to explain it to people, often they prove unable to grasp its nature, or its importance. Right?

See, everyone's trying to make sense of what's going on in their lives on the basis of whatever knowledge and conditioning they might have. Everyone gets it right some of the time and wrong most of the time. For example, humans also make bad choices as a result of misinterpreting other humans. Or by correctly interpreting and trusting other humans who happen to be wrong. There's nothing new about that. Nor is there a particular difference between suffering the consequences of AI-driven bad choice vs those of human-driven bad choice. In both cases, you're a human experiencing negative consequences.

AI stupidity is simply human stupidity distilled. If humans were to only ever speak logically correct statements in an unambiguous language, that's what an LLM's training data would contain, and in turn the acceptance criterion ("Turing test") for LLMs would be outputting other unambiguously correct statements.

However, it's 2025 and most humans don't actually reason, they vibe with the pulsations of the information medium. Give us something that looks remotely plausible and authoritative, and we'll readily consider it more valid than our own immediate thoughts and perceptions - or those of another human being.

That's what media did to us, not AI. It's been working its magic for at least a century, because humans aren't anywhere near rational creatures; we're sloppy. We don't have to be; we are able to teach ourselves a tiny bit of pure thought. Thankfully, we have a tool for when we want to constrain ourselves to only thinking in logically correct statements, and only expressing those things which unambiguously make sense: it's called programming.

Up to this point, learning how to reason was economically necessary, in order to be able to command computers. With LLMs becoming better, I fear thinking might be relegated to an entirely academic pursuit.
There's a popular 'wisdom' to dismiss things like honesty, but they actually do work, and they are used widely by most successful professionals, in my experience.

Yes, they aren't usually sufficient by themselves - you need other things too. And sometimes the payoff is later, as I suggest it will be for Lidden. And people point to failures but nothing succeeds all the time; it's the distribution of outcomes you should look at: Lying fails more and worse and it damages and sometimes destroys the most valuable things in the world: your self-respect, your reputation with others, your relationships, and trust.

Trust is one of the most powerful techniques in business and life. With it, people can make any arrangement with a few words, and not expend resources ensuring and verifying the other people do it. People trust me and I trust them (the ones I have relationships with), and that allows us to move quickly and accomplish much more.

Integrity does one more great thing, it sets an example for others. People are social creatures that follow the herd much more than they realize. If you behave with integrity, you establish a norm that people follow. If you do the wrong thing, you have the same effect. I think Trump, the Republicans, and the far right are having that effect. We are each responsible for our communities - we are the doers and makers, not consumers of morality (except children and maybe others unsophisticated in these things).

It's our free will, you can choose either - an understanding going back to the Genesis and further. And the consequences are very real.
Settings is not that bad. It's _awful_, yes, since it broke the panel design we had since the NeXT days, but for me the real annoyance is the way Apple progressively, inexorably broke desktop automation to a point where they now effectively painted themselves into a corner regarding having enough of a foundation to make Apple Intelligence useful (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/03/14/1830).

That said, I expect things to get worse as they manage to converge their multiple platforms in exactly the wrong way (by dumbing them down across the board even as people keep hoping they'll make iPad OS more useful, etc.).

But at least we still have Safari, Apple Silicon is pretty amazing and I can survive inside Terminal and vim. For now.
See my blog post "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard": https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html

TL;DR What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0, which was in fact very buggy, and buggier than 10.5.8, but rather later versions of Snow Leopard after almost 2 full years of bug fixes.

See also "Snow Leopard bug deletes all user data": https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...

The yearly release cycle is the problem. Apple needs "another Snow Leopard" only in the sense that I mentioned above, "almost 2 full years of bug fixes", although at this point, Apple has more than 2 years of technical debt.
You seem to be glorifying humanity’s failure to make good products and instead making products that just work well enough to pass through the gate.

We have always been making products that were too difficult to understand by pencil and paper. So we invented debug tools. And then we made systems that were too big to understand so we made trace routes. And now we have products that are too statistically large to understand, so we are inventing … whatever this is.
From a features perspective, they should acqui-hire either Alfred or Raycast and build that functionality into spotlight.
Projects like this are a great demonstration of just how far hobby projects can go today by exploiting some fairly recent innovations. In particular, designing a custom lens geometry and having JLC manufacture small runs cheaply is especially impressive; and of course, what you can get out of a modern LED is just absurd.
Clearing Brain Waste Dramatically Improves Memory in Aging Mice
I think they’re painted into a corner with WWDC. Everything has to be a crowd pleasing brain busting wow drop each year. I’m certain there are teams that design their entire workflow around the yearly wwdc. It honestly feels like an executive leadership problem to solve.
I'm sorry you ran into problems repeatedly, and couldn't agree more. As much as we've aimed to innovate on customization, it does not have to be an either/or. We recognized this, heard a lot from the community, and the goal of our 1.0 was to focus ourselves very seriously on stability. Going forward we are going to continue to treat Continue as the foundational tool that we hope it can be. This has meant investment in testing, clearer contributing guidelines, and a general mindset shift to understand that AI code assistants have become fundamental to developer workflows and have to be rock solid (when something is doing work on every keystroke, it better not break!)

If you get the chance to try the 1.0, I'd love to hear whether you find it better, or if you think we can do even better—we think it's in a solid place and it'll always be improving from here.
My comment was about spaces specifically. The Guardian and the BBC use en-dashes instead of em-dashes, but both do so with spaces.
Well, actually, there was. I was doing OpenGL stuff at the time on a Bondi iMac that barely ran early OS X and distinctly remember that.
> Math postulates a bunch of axioms and then studies what follows from them.

That's how math is communicated eventually but not necessarily how it's made (which is about exploration and discovery as well).
It's basically the same thing as the premise behind "The Twitter Files", isn't it? Someone in government sees rule-breaking content, reports it through back channels.
I got extra thick glasses (12mm thick each instead of 6mm standard) for my argon filled double pane windows in the bedroom. The noise isolation is incredbly improved. It did cost only 15% more. This is Europe again.
I didn't claim it was harmful, I said it met the definition of "ultra processed".

There's more to the ingredients than most people realize.

> Canola oil is made at a processing facility by slightly heating and then crushing the seed. Almost all commercial canola oil is then extracted using hexane solvent, which is recovered at the end of processing. Finally, the canola oil is refined using water precipitation and organic acid to remove gums and free fatty acids, filtering to remove color, and deodorizing using steam distillation. [Wikipedia]

Other processes are hydrogenation, flour bleaching and modification of starch (starches treated with chemicals and/or enzymes), and whatever makes "lemon juice solids" and "yeast extract".

I certainly don't have those leavening agents or dextrose in my kitchen, or all the oils, or the modified starches.
Spotlight seemed to go from great to unusable in 5 years
I'm a bit surprised the article didn't get into what kind of mic too. It's not just about the quality, there are specific favourites of broadcasters that have a particularly nice proximity effect, the phenomenon by which some mics make one sound bassier when speaking very closely to them. This sound has come to be associated with trustworthiness and so on.

So yeah, more expensive is not necessarily better - a wide diaphragm condensor in an untreated lively room is going to sound less authoritative than a cheaper but decent dynamic mic dead close.

An affordable mic that sounds really good for this is the Seinheisser e935. It's not as heinously directional and tight as an SM57 so doesn't ding you when you move, but still has a nice close, warm proximity effect. I use it for zooming and I have much more expensive mics on hand.

A more expensive broadcast favourite with a milder proximity effect is the Electro-Voice RE20. Killer live mic too.

Also - pop shields are good.
Review of Never Pay the First Bill