Amorymeltzer

Well, that and the faux-/manufactured outrage from US Congress. Things like Coburn's waste book were designed to lampoon and degrade seemingly silly or wasteful basic-science research from just a cursory overview of the title or cherry-picked facts. That's part of a larger agenda alongside cutting basic research for cuts-sake, but it means that everyone in science is searching for a justification for even the most meager of funding. Human biomedical health is a good target—if you can come up with any plausible link, your odds of funding are better (maybe)—and I suppose robots aren't a bad one either.

The NSF has a list of responses to various such things: <https://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/wastebooks>

There's a moment in Cory Doctorow's The Reverse Centaur's Guide To Life After AI where he quotes Mark Fisher's definition of eeriness (from The Weird and the Eerie) as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is [sic] there is nothing present when there should be something." It's a great description of why so much AI art in particular just feels wrong, even if you can't put your finger on it.

>Not because any single task is harder. Because there are so many more of them, all at once.

There's a nuance here since the author says "Almost all of this is private work," but this is basically the entire premise of Cory Doctorow's excellent The Reverse Centaur's Guide To Life After AI, which everyone should read. If I may quote:

>>In automation theory (the academic study of automation), a centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine. Think of a clever human's head, arms, and hands atop a horse's strong body. Riding a bicycle or driving a car makes you a centaur; so does using the mute button on your TV remote when an ad comes on. Wearing a hearing aid makes you a centaur, and so does using a calculator to multiply large numbers. Being a centaur can be glorious.... Best of all, I get to choose exactly which of these features I use.... No one expects me to write more pages when I get a new tool.

[snip]

>>A reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine. There's a classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on an assembly line at a chocolate factory, taking bonbons off the belt and wrapping them in paper. As the belt goes taster and faster, Lucy and Ethel have to work at superhuman speed. They're reverse centaurs: the machine can move the chocolates from one place to another, but it needs a human to pack them into the box, and the humans who act as its assistant are made to work at a pace that exceeds all human capacity until calamity ensues.

"More tasks all at once" is exactly the premise of that I Love Lucy episode.

Hard isn’t inherently complicated and simple isn’t inherently easy. A commitment to those ideals is wildly complicated. To pick a child-rearing-relevant example, saying sorry and taking responsibility is simple and easy, but such a difficult thing to achieve, even for adults, and is rife with complicated and complicating emotions and relationships.

Who said don’t have any skills? There are different ways to make the world better, and certainly each takes a different set of skills. If your way of helping the world is advancing biomedical research, you will need those skills. It’s downstream of the top-level prerogative, if you wanna put it that way.

>become a good person

>become a good citizen

>make the world better

That's basically the whole game right there. Or as Hillel might say, the rest is commentary.

I'm reminded of a section of Cory Doctorow's latest non-fiction, The Reverse Centaur's Guide To Life After AI (it is of course an excellent read), where he discusses how the semantic web and having an internet set-up for agents and AI to use won't work:

>It also hasn't happened because there is a reward for cheating. Scammers will label their phone numbers as the customer service number for your cable operator or bank. Counterfeiters will label their batteries or phone cases as official accessories. It's hard enough to get people to correctly label their stuff—but fact-checking billions of labels created by millions of people, none of whom you know personally or whose identities you can verify? That's insurmountable.

There's more he says—the preceding paragraph is below—but that line "there is a reward for cheating" is something I keep thinking about. It's hard not to see in so many of the discussions of LLMs.

>For one thing, there are irreconcilable differences in the ways in which things should be described. A site run by transphobes isn't going to label every story about a trans woman as "a story about a woman," irrespective of what the standard says. Microsoft is never going to label Excel as equivalent to Apple's Numbers, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice's Calc. Hermès is never going to list a $40,000 handbag as being made of the same material and having the same capacity as a $30 leather handbag of the same size and shape.

A few notable previous discussions:

- 2023, 33 comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368505>

- 2021, 173 comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734242>

Indeed. And, weirdly, there are items that show up by that 03 standard alongside macOS 26 (e.g. "HP-UX 11i V3 Release B.11.31") that also show on the front page. Is it a latest version kind of thing?

Absolutely!

I've got a large, local library in Apple Music—the application, not the service, they need a naming czar—amassed over decades of purchases. The auto-lookup from iTunes/Music is fine, but I find a real joy in having correct metadata. All those mix CDs from high school!

I care less about high-quality album art than Apple execs do, I think, and I likewise don't bother too much with all the meta tags, but it's surprising how often the CDDB or Gracenotes or whatever Music.app uses are wrong, have typos, miss information, etc. I scrobble listens, so it's a natural progression for anything new or clearly wrong.

I think of it like tending a garden, and find it quite peaceful. It's clearly not for Regular People™ like so much else here. Every other person in my life is happy with "Unknown Artist - Unknown Album - Track 2" or just using a streaming service.

Automatic by HN? Don't think I've seen that one before

Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.

They briefly (hah) covered it in TFA:

>Researchers have used cotton strips and specialty tea bags for similar purposes before, but those methods require precise scales and careful handling. A pair of underwear, by contrast, offers something immediate: anyone can look at what came out of the ground and grasp what it means.

The linked manuscript basically says the same:

>Cotton strips have previously been applied (Harrison et al., 1988; Nachimuthu et al., 2007), while the Tea Bag Index (TBI) makes use of commercially available teabags with standardized composition for the same purpose (Keuskamp et al., 2013). Due to the wide availability of the material, the TBI has been employed in a citizen science approach to gather global decomposition data (Sarneel et al., 2024). However, despite being relatively easy to apply and interpret, the method requires careful handling and specific tools, such as a fine scale balance. Moreover, it lacks visual appeal and may struggle to attract broader public attention for soil-related topics. A more playful approach that has occasionally been used to illustrate soil decomposition, though without scientific rigor, is the burial of cotton underpants (Figure 1).

It looks like establishing cotton underwear as a viable method was exactly the point of this study. As they say, "This work demonstrates that underwear decomposition varied widely across land-use types and that buried underwear is a simple and easily interpretable tool to gain a first impression of soil health."

YMMV. I ran Snow Leopard on a couple of machines for years—bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square—and it was far and away the best OSX experience I had, and, at least in my experience, the best/smoothest/most stable until El Capitan, 10.11. And yes, maybe I'm thinking of 10.6.8, but I don't see why that's a problem.

The myth part, is of course, a myth, and good marketing. Snow Leopard was super important for the OS, changing a ton: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...>. Marketing gonna market.

Regardless, I can agree with this:

>People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification.

Not the creator, but I suspect your first block is was in the third row, with a sun on either extreme end: the spots just inside (2nd and 5th) must then be moons, as were one a sun, there would then be three moons in a row. The rest follows from there.

iOS-only, but Callsheet (<https://callsheetapp.com>) is basically "What if the IMDB app didn't suck?" It uses TMDB as the data source. I love the interface, and it has JustWatch info built-in; I use it as my quick access link, so I now only use it to find where things are.

Excellent! That's been on my TBR list for a while. There's a bit about PIE in Lost Worlds, mostly as supporting evidence for movements and connections between ancient (pardon the pun) lost worlds.

Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on:

>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....

>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.

It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."

>Slartibartfast: I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

>Arthur: And are you?

>Slartibartfast: No. That's where it all falls down of course.

>Arthur: Pity. It sounded like rather a good lifestyle otherwise.

Adulthood, career, marriage, parenthood, nearly everything since I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a (pre?)teen has been slowly, stubbornly learning that this exchange is basically the key to everything.

That's specifically the secondary, more-powerful model. It was only mentioned in passing in the keynote, but on this page anyway, it seems to be just the improved dictation in Siri and ability to customize pacing, etc.

Without engaging in your point, small nitpick: These are images of Western blots[1], not PCR.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot

I also love the longer clip with the bed of feathers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_FEaFgJyfA

It gives a good visual as to how much air is being moved/disturbed during the flight/glide of each.

While in graduate school, the graduate student government had results from a student survey about their advisors. When presented with the results, nearly every administrator would give some response of "Well, it's really just a few bad apples," and we had to remind them every time of the actual meaning of the phrase!

He really is such a committed and dedicated developer. This here is of course a perfect example—"So… I commissioned a custom map" aka hiring a cartographer—but it was really cool how he blew up with Widgetsmith because he put in the effort with Watchsmith before, and was basically the world's expert on widgets? Couldn't happen to a better guy.

I hugely recommend reading Peter Brannen's The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything. I picked it up thinking it'd be a good book about climate change—it is—but it's so much more. It's an excellent journey through our planet's (bio)geochemistry, and really gives you a sense for the power and scope of CO2 over millions and billions of years. Snowball earth features prominently, and there are some really fascinating history and consequences of them.

Don't have it in front of me so I can't comment on the actual language, but wasn't ENIAC designed for the purpose of firing tables, but the time it was "completed" got used for e.g. H-bomb?

It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.

The book[1]—Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald—is a fun enough read. Definitely written as a fan and for fans, it picks a few specific items/series and uses them to tell a narrative. It's not, you know, hard-hitting journalism, but there's good stuff in there I'd never read or heard before. Pretty quick read, and a delight if you're fan of anything Nintendo.

Basically, came for Zelda fandom and got fun things like Navi and Z-targeting coming about from seeing a ninja show to avoid a hot day.

1: https://bookshop.org/p/books/super-nintendo-the-game-changin...

I basically agree, but I think at this point it's an accepted use; see e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_knowledge> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_technology>. Indeed, wiktionary (<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democratization>) uses your sense as the first, strict definition, but gives "The broadening of access to something, especially for the sake of egalitarianism." as the loose definition.

The (excellent) Megan Greenwell wrote Bad Company, all about private equity; I'd recommend it. It does a good job of telling the story through a few specific and illustrative examples of people/industries[1], while still explaining everything in detail. Greenwell has a perspective, to be sure, but she's not wrong.

1: IIRC, it's a Toys 'R Us employee, a nurse at a rural hospital, a journalist at local newspaper, and a resident in a PE-owned apartment.