skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
• Instead of forming hypotheses, users asked the AI for ideas.

• Instead of validating sources, they assumed the AI had already done so.

• Instead of assessing multiple perspectives, they integrated and edited the AI’s summary and moved on.

These are point against certain actions with a tool not against the tool.

AI is for the starting point not the final result.

AI must never be the last step but it often is because people trust computers especially if they answer in a confident language.

It's the ELIZA effect all over again.
The iphone has lacked innovation under Cook. Last 3 iterations (since 13) have been virtually identical. Also, the failure of Apple Intelligence (oversold promise) has seriously hurt the brand. I am an avid iphone user, and will likely continue to be for the next 3 years. But innovation is suffering. Anecdotally, the least talented ML engineers are currently at Apple (the best engineers I know in the field are at Google and OpenAI). I don't expect Apple to be innovating much in that regard, given a lack of talent (just look at Siri for instance).
I think what's going on is a helpful reminder that there's no such thing as "rights" in the way you describe. Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments. Constitutions and laws are only worth anything if the people in charge honor them. Might may not make right, but might does let you impose whatever you want on people who don't have your might.

You can try to design systems where one group of people don't have all the might, and so those who balance them are somewhat adversarial in their goals and desires. We always thought the US had such a system, but when you put law enforcement and the military under a single group, and give the other two groups no teeth, you really don't have that sort of system.
If tenure was designed to protect intellectual freedom, but academics are consistently the biggest cowards failing to stand up to anything - what does that say about academia?
as an artist, I totally agree with this approach. the whole idea of trying to pay artists for their contributions in training data is just impractical.

if the data’s pulled from the public domain, the model built from this human knowledge should be shared with all creators too, meaning everyone should get access to it
Yes we offer out of the box open AI subscription with signed data protection clause, but if you need extra privacy or zero trust you can use your own subscription.

Currently supported providers are:
- Open AI
- MS Azure
- Google Gemini
- Ollama (this is hosted by you so you can deploy any model)

In regards to the Ollama I recommend to use 7B+ models I tried QWEN 14b instruct and it was working nicely.
Haha, indisputable counterpoint! :D
man i just want a bot to buy groceries for me
It's also almost 50 years since "An Open Letter to Hobbyists"[1]. It's amazing that in the last 30+ years, the "hobbyists" managed to turn the entire software industry by 180°, and that Microsoft themselves are reliant on that work.

Bill even specifically mentions musicians. By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it. Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

[2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
Crazy to think how Microsoft went from a small startup to one of the biggest companies in the world. Wonder what the next 50 years will look like.
As a connoisseur of bad as well as old movies I'd like to add The Librarian movies to this list, and The Mummy, where the first from 1932 stars the inimitable Boris Karloff as the lovesick undead.
if you want to security, I think a generic boot loader isn't really a realistic target. A boot loader should be specific to the hardware. If you want a generic boot loader, you need to integrate perfected boot loaders for each hardware.
It feels almost more useful than BASIC on the Atari 2600, at least.
Why would this help Taiwan stave off China's advance? Arguably, this makes it more likely.
That's the real danger of AI.

The false promises of the AI companies and the false expectations of the management and users.

Had it just recently for a data migration where the users asked if they still need to enter meta data for documents they just could use AI to query data that was usually based on that meta data.

They trust AI before it's even there and don't even consider a transition period where they check if the result are correct.

Like with security convenience prevails.
Bank Suspensions, 1892 – 1935 (1936) [pdf]
What if one were to train a neural network of sorts based on your response times and mouse paths toward on screen stimuli?

I’ve thought that trying to make a bot for personal fishing use would be a delightfully fun project, and this is how I pondered evading such anti-cheat heuristics.
all the "low-skill" people would be able to move to the city and find a job

That this doesn't work is self-evident. Cities are currently filled with low skilled people. The vast majority of whom find no employment or employment in illegal activities.

Also:

We don't need more high-quality education

The idea that the world, and the US in particular, has no need for more and better education is laughable. Considering the fact that a lack of education is, arguably, what got the US into the current situation in the first place.
I got it to generate the Italian plumber with a red hat after demanding it do so three times in a row. It offered alternatives each time so my guess is it changed... something.
I'd like some repairs made to my car, but I'd object to someone making them with a hammer (without a stronger argument in favor than "trust me").
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example.

So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.

But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.

If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.

Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.

Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?

IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
>That's why Lennart recommends systemd-boot.

The creator of SystemD recommends systemd-boot? Seems legit and unbiased.
The pull is too strong, especially when you factor in the fact that (a) the competition is doing it and (b) the recipients of such outcomes (reports, etc) are not strict enough to care whether AI was used or not. In this situation, no matter how smart you are, not using the new tool of the trade would be basically career suicide.
Tea vs. Rootbeer, what will destory your laptop the best?
Made some tea and got ready to study, immediately dumped the entire cup (12-14oz) of tea on my laptop. I turned it around and waited for the tea to drip out.

Surprisingly, there is no damage.

About a month ago, i did the same thing but with rootbeer,and it immediately killed the keyboard and touch pad.
And… that is called overfitting. If you show the model values for y, but they are 2 in 99% of all cases, it’s likely going to yield 2 when asked about the value of y, even if the prompt didn’t specify or forbid 2 specifically.
Creating and sharing deceptive AI-generated media is now a crime in New Jersey
She explains better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDsjeKo3u3o
i thought they started by writing traffic control software, where's that source code? :)
I had a recent adventure attempting to replenish my Food Grade 35% Hydrogen Peroxide.

Amazon wouldn't even ship the stuff here. I'm coming to realize that any truly potent or powerful substance is strictly off-limits in consumer spaces. Plenty of good reasons for that. But such things as pure isopropyl and pure H2O2 are so versatile and tantalizing to have on-hand, rather than household cleaners with proprietary formulas, as much dilution as possible, unique MSDS, and obnoxious fake fragrance.

I can walk down an entire aisle in the hardware store, chockablock with bottles of household cleaners, and they all amount to 2 or 3 active ingredients, endlessly remixed for credulous homemakers.
Some context.

1. Some LLMs support function calling. That means they are given a list of tools with descriptions of those tools.

2. Rather than answering your question in one go, the LLM can say it wants to call a function.

3. Your client (developer tool etc) will call that function and pass the results to the LLM.

4. The LLM will continue and either complete the conversation or call more tools (functions)

5. MCP is gaining traction as a standard way of adding tools/functions to LLMs.

GitMCP

I haven't looked too deeply but I can guess.

1. Will have a bunch of API endpoints that the LLM can call to look at your code. probably stuff like, get_file, get_folder etc.

2. When you ask the LLM for example "Tell me how to add observability to the code", the LLM can make calls to get the code and start to look at it.

3. The LLM can keep on making calls to GitMCP until it has enough context to answer the question.

Hope this helps.
> The next piece that concerned me was GDPR which required EU citizens data to be processed in the EU.

That's wrong. It can be processed outside the EU, provided the country has laws providing adequate protections comparable (or better) than the GDPR.

Here more details: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i...
My personal pet-peeve is how a great majority of people--and too many developers--are being misled into believing a fictional character coincidentally named "Assistant" inside a story-document half-created by an LLM is the author-LLM.

If a human generates a story containing Count Dracula, that doesn't mean vampires are real, or that capabilities like "turning into a cloud of bats" are real, or that the algorithm "thirsts for the blood of the innocent."

The same holds when the story comes from an algorithm, and it continues to hold when story is about a differently-named character named "AI Assistant" who is "helpful".

Getting people to fall for this illusion is great news for the companies though, because they can get investor-dollars and make sales with the promise of "our system is intelligent", which is true in the same sense as "our system converts blood into immortality."
Yes, I do, you got me wrong, I actually meant it. It’s a beautiful man-made illustration! Thank you for pointing me to the artist.
Yes, that's the study that shows zero effect. The authors completely messed up in their write up of the study. That study is the definition of bad science.

Watch this if you want more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDsjeKo3u3o
> This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.

Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?

This idea is applicable to so much
This is awesome and I will take a closer look! One question:
We ran into issue with using Postgres as a message queue with messages that need to be toasted/have large payloads (50mb+).

Only fix we could find was using unlogged tables and a full vacuum on a schedule. We aren’t big Postgres experts but since you are I was wondering if you have fixed this issue/this framework works well for large payloads.
I did, I love illustrations and I mourn the day GenAI destroyed it.
Countries in general have a strong dislike for regions trying to become independent. There's just no way California will be able to become independent. Not sure about the US laws though, but in Europe there isn't even a legal framework for achieving something like this.
The bloviation on manufacturing is cargo-culting. It's a promise of a better time for an electorate that's being squeezed by ever increasing precarity. It's a rose-coloured version of 1950, when people with a high-school diploma could walk into a giant General Motors factory and get a job that paid enough to raise a family, own a house, and retire at 60 with a pension. Obviously, this was based on the US being a dominant manufacturing power.

(They neglect that what made it the dominant manufacturing power was a war that killed tens of millions and sidelined most other industrial nations, but perhaps that's plan B when this doesn't work)

As for using tarriffs to deliver the factories, they assume the US market is so vast and desirable, that it's worth building plants and full supply chains specifically for it. I'd expect that any firm that believed that had onshored their factories years ago due to plain economics, without a comical tarriff regime to spur it. (I'm thinking of how "foreign" automakers sprinkled plants all over the South making models that largely fit US preferences)

Conversely, I suspect you'll see a lot of firms say "we'll just skip the US entirely" -- the factory you built in Viet Nam or Germany can still sell cheaply to a hundred and fifty countries, and together that adds up to more than even the US can offer.
For some cathedrals that visible mismatch in the materials might be a feature, not a bug.

At least that's the case for the co-cathedral in Zamora, Michoacán which had its construction interrupted for almost a century due to the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War and its subsequent expropriation by the government. In this context, the mismatching facade remains as a testament of the building's history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocesan_Sanctuary_of_Our_Lady...
I suppose it would depend a lot on the specifics of the situation, but there's less obligation to help others than I would have thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue
When the level of random variation is greater than the change attributed to an event it's not possible to claim an event caused something. The random changes overwhelm and possible change.

If you want to claim a change anyway, the burden is on you to do the modeling and math to prove it.
It's true, so often chatgpt has to apologize because it was wrong. lol
No, I did not misinterpret it. That study does not show what you think it does. i.e. the actual data does not lead to the conclusion presented. The actual data shows zero effect, the written conclusion is a work of fiction.
Show HN: We made an open-source alternative to Drata and Vanta (Comp AI)
Hey HN!

I'm Lewis. I've spent the last 4 months building Comp AI - an open source alternative to Drata & Vanta.

Those platforms can cost $10,000+ per year. We've seen how over the last 18 months AI has changed software development...

We want to change how quick it is to get compliant with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR. Our goal is to help 100,000 companies get compliant by 2030.

You can check out our GH at https://github.com/trycompai/comp/
Meanwhile these same people are tripping over each other to buy ARM MacBooks, which are by design extremely hostile to their cause.
I'd actually agree that, at any level of living standard, the more equal society is probably happier. I'd question whether that'd be an effective _intervention_ though. Actively reducing the median standard of a relatively well-to-do society to compress the overall distribution does not seem like it would lead to a net increase in happiness.
Thank you! Very insightful, especially the forum link and the observation around UUIDs bloating indexes.
Unless you’re referring to strange toddlers wielding crayons, you probably mean “carcinogenic”?
CSScape Room
I was noodling with Gemini 2.5 Pro a couple days ago and it was convinced Donald Trump didn’t win the 2024 election and that he conceded to Kamala Harris so I’m not entirely sure how much weight I’d put behind it.
I don't think you're necessarily drawing the right conclusion from what the GP said. It seems more likely to me that non-degree-holders aren't resentful about not having a degree, but are resentful that white collar work more or less requires a degree these days. It wasn't always that way; degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.

Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class? If so, that's an understandable reason to be anti-university.
I generally agree with your framing, I'll just comment on a minor detail about what "literate" means. Typically, people are classed in three categories of literacy, not two: illiterate means you essentially can't read at all, literate means you can read and understand text to some level, but then there are people who are functionally illiterate - people who can read the letters and sound out text, but can't actively comprehend what they're reading to a level that allows them to function normally in society - say, being able to read and comprehend an email they receive at work or a news article. This difference between literate and functionally illiterate may have been what the poster above was referring to.

Note that functional illiteracy is not some niche phenomenon, it's a huge problem in many school systems. In my own country (Romania), while the rate of illiteracy is something like <1% of the populace, the rate of functional illiteracy is estimated to be as high as 45% of those finishing school.
The point is that this isn't some fundamental property of our society that we all agreed to. It's de facto capitalist, not de jure. Just because a bunch of people pushed it one way doesn't mean we have to throw up our arms and just go with it.
Interesting use of formaction on a button. One suggestion: put role="link" on it so it appears as a link to screen readers as well.

Unfortunately, by using a button you can't right click to copy the URL or open in a new tab/window. Middle clicking doesn't work either, although that could be fixed with JS. The URL also doesn't show up in the bottom left when hovering.

Edit: One thing you could do if you don't mind making your site JS-only is intercept link clicks and trigger a form POST instead, so the links are all normal links that respect default browser behavior, but the requests are all made as POSTs. Though honestly it's a losing battle, trying to stop bots; I've largely given up. You also have to consider what happens when someone shares the URL or bookmarks it, or tried to reload the page.
I tried the "generate a photo image of a female adventurer protagonist who raids tombs" on ChatGPT

And got an eerily similar picture as in the article: https://imgur.com/Dv7hkoC
I think you'll never find a case where someone got in trouble for not being a hero.
I've recently found myself in a somewhat related situation where a guy turned violent in a pub... first I tried to calm him down and almost got hit... he then turned to other guys who were nearby, and one of them got punched in the face and fell unconscious. My family was with me and told me to stay the hell out of it, but I thought that would be extremely cowardly so I jumped at the guy to try to keep him down, but he was strong and I got a punch in the eye which cost me a week with a black eye, but could've easily turned out much worse for me. If I had just stayed quiet, would I be "negligent"?? The police told me what I did was good as I was trying to help someone, but I didn't have any obligation to do it.

In the case of a child in a pool, the difference is a matter of degree. What if I am terrified of water myself? Does that justify my inaction? What if I just "froze", which is common in stressful situations. Does anything justify not doing something?
Now I'm waiting for the MCP version of this.. :)
Actual Code https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
> It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :)

Wasn't Alpha also a fairly pure RISC architecture, with larger machine code being an inherent property of that?
no bad programmers
Humans becoming domesticated by benevolent superintelligences are some of the better futures with superintelligences, in my mind. Iain M Banks' Culture series is the best depiction of this I've come across; they're kind of the utopian rendition of the phrase "all watched over by machines of loving grace". Though it's a little hard to see how we get from here to there.
> What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world?

You may find this to be insightful:
https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/

In short, "meaning" is a contextual perception, not a discrete quality, though the author suggests it can be quantified based on the number of contextual connections to other things with meaning. The more densely connected something is, the more meaningful it is; my wedding is meaningful to me because my family and my partners family are all celebrating it with me, but it was an entirely meaningless event to you.

Thus, the meaningfulness of our contributions remains unchanged, as the meaning behind them is not dependent upon the perspective of an external observer.
It's charitable of you to think that they might be qualified to talk about inference and model weights and such. They are AI safety researchers, not AI researchers. Basically, a bunch of doom bloggers, jerking each other in a circle, a few of whom were tolerated at one of the major labs for a few years, to do their jerking on company time.
is this a way to democratize mining? then, one day, rich people will just buy other people to mine for them, instead of asics
Long before systemd took over the init world, Debian led a huge effort to switch their entire infrastructure to dash[1], specifically making heavy use of checkbashisms[2]. The main reason behind it was performance: POSIX sh implementations were much simpler, and easier to optimise.

[1]: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/

[2]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/checkbashisms

My rule of thumb is that if a shell script calls for a Bash-only feature, exceeds 100 lines, defines more than three functions, includes a nested loop, or a pipeline that exceeds 80 characters, it's probably time to reach for Python.

There are reasonable cases for exceptions - my backup script has about 200 lines and 6 functions, but it's 100% portable between Linux & macOS.
Sometimes it just randomly prompts about the content guidelines and the next day it will do it perfectly right away. Maybe you just had a wrong moment in time, or maybe it depends on the random server you're assigned.
It's just a joke about the ridiculousness that large economy dominating companies can't possibly be replaced and will last forever. Thus, instead of modern companies they give the example of two titans of vintage corporate might (one from several centuries ago and one more recent, just a century ago) are used instead. Ah, Hubris.