Ariarule

Is a painting not art because individual pigments aren't art?

Not criticizing this in particular, but I'm genuinely curious: why is everyone talking about how obvious or not the details of the poster are as AI, when they didn't take the 30 seconds in most good image editing software to remove the sepia/yellow/brown tint all over? You could put a 100px blur on the smallest thumbnail on that page of it, and I'd still recognize it as AI generated.

> Without CC, we wouldn't have Wikipedia

This was interesting overall, but since Wikipedia existed for years under GFDL, this sentence is extremely dubious. Wikipedia would probably exist in some form if it hadn't switched licencing. It's not like the Creative Commons people, as much credit as they do deserve, were the _only_ people thinking and trying to address the issues posed.

More generally, Freddie deBoer has been writing in publicly available works and published for so long that he's obviously more credible for how any previous work was put together than what appears _itself_ to be a hallucination-prone AI system. Granted only one person knows for sure, but the idea that Pangram may have actually been correct all along doesn't pass a laugh test for me.

Do people not recognize names nor search for them before making insinuations? It's not like OP is a brand-new pseudonymous essay on a default-template blog with one or two other posts in the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_deBoer

While human biology hasn't changed in any meaningful sense, technology and US culture have changed dramatically.

1974 was over a half-century ago; it is extremely weak evidence with everything that's changed since then, at best.

The WSJ charts at the end should be taken with a huge grain of salt: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/544508/measu...

Yes, people do that. Karpathy made a utility to monitor it better years ago: https://github.com/karpathy/arxiv-sanity-preserver

No? It's almost certainly not AI overall despite the Webflow badge; it's pretty similar now to how the site looked in 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806131653/https://www.beyon...

What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?

That might be a valid motivation for keeping the rule, but as far I can tell it can't be the original reason for this rule as it predates passive indices in retirement accounts being that popular.

> There used to be a professional layer between most people and raw information. Librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers: people whose entire job was to understand how information was organized, who produced it, what motivated them, and where the gaps were in any given source. You didn’t need to think much about any of that, because someone else already had.

> That layer has largely dissolved. Search engines replaced the card catalog, algorithms replaced the reference interview, and AI summaries are now stepping in where a librarian’s judgment about source quality used to sit. What’s been left in place of all that professional mediation is a search bar and the assumption that you’ll figure it out. - https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/i/188856309/the-skil...

An unfortunate conclusion that smuggles in unwarranted good-old-days nostalgia to an otherwise excellent overview. The previous system that they're describing had serious problems, limited access to raw data compared to now, and could not have scaled up to the level of access to information that the internet provides.

The information environment prior to the early 2000s was quite terrible. We shouldn't pretend this was a golden age of truth-oriented gatekeeping, although there were certainly gatekeepers. There were a lot of misconceptions, errors, and unchecked biases on dead trees and in late 90s databases. The idea that those librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers were aligned with anything you might care about is also unsupported and dubious.

Not a single one of those explain the endorsement in OP of the completely-new "highly bizarre raccoon army conspiracy theory"

As someone that's been working on a game with Claude Code in a more human-in-the-loop, iterative fashion, I have to say that OP's claim that "LLMs barely know GDScript" does not match my current experience at all even though it seems to have matched yours. Maybe it was true a while ago in both cases; how long ago was your "vibecode" attempt? I've gotten completely fine GDScript and even decent perfectly functional if placeholder-quality TSCN files from Opus 4.5, 4.6, and Sonnet 4.6 with very little issue and no special tricks; just a CLAUDE.md file, the project itself, and going through plan mode before each change. I did start from a playable project with a fair amount of hand-written scaffolding already in place, and I have no idea if that would make a difference. Every once in a while there will be some confusion that I get something appropriate for Godot 3 instead of Godot 4, but never Python despite the similarities of the language.

They did not, you get the same date range and the same graph shape going to FRED and pressing the "1Y" option, and the series includes the first two months of 2026 so it's 12 months: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1SGzm

However, the chart settings were actually modified to hide/deemphasize the earlier decline: the the index date was changed. 2025-02-20=100 in their graph, default of 2020-02-01=100 would have the chart start at 64 and rise to 71.44.

Per Scott Alexander, they're working on a bet targeting 2036 instead of 2029: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-421/comment/215...

Previously polled in 2023 in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37036804

In light of recent developments, I thought it would be interesting to ask again.

It unfortunately didn't get very much attention here at the time (2021), but "Sigmoids behaving badly: why they usually cannot predict the future as well as they seem to promise" at https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08065 is related.

I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

This could be "bad, actually" if it gives an incorrect impression that power tools are unequivocally safe, rather than somewhat risky but usually safe when used correctly.

What exactly is so terrible as long as you're willing to take a small to moderate risk of getting a PVC pipe stuck in the ground and keep in mind the presented cautions -- consider the water irrigation-only/non-potable until tested (possibly even if tested, although that's not what the site says)?

"Occasionally, there will be a thin black bar at the top of the top bar, in memoriam of a significant figure in the tech/science community dying." -- https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#thin-b...

While the abstract does say there's "rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States", the actual title is "Case Report of Leprosy in Central Florida, USA, 2022" and that's a more honest description of what this is.

The second reference -- https://www.hrsa.gov/hansens-disease -- shows cases in the entire US bouncing from around 160 to 220 since _2011_ up through 2020: "Most (95%) of the human population is not susceptible to infection... Treatment with standard antibiotic drugs is very effective." The Florida dashboard which is the third reference shows 14 cases in that state total in 2021.

"No nitrates or nitrites added" bacon still has nitrites as they are generated by the production method: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

The Frankenstein veto; Wisconsin is infamous for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_veto

Huh? The 14th amendment has already been part of the US constitution for 155 years.

Also, what is this about judges starting the amendment process?

That also reminded me of _Connections_, which notably made the same point in _the late 1970s_! It isn't like technology's gotten any easier to understand -- in total, "top to bottom" -- since then.

Why speculate? _Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults_, Table 20 "Waist circumference in centimeters for adult males aged 20 and over and number of examined persons, mean, standard error of the mean, and selected percentiles, by race and Hispanic origin and age: United States, 2015–2018" is right at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_03/sr03-046-508.pdf

The mean in the very first row is 102.9 cm (the 40.5 inches in the OP), while the 50th percentile is actually lower at 101.8 (39.7 inches).

Besides that, as of now, https://poweroutage.us shows slightly less than 6 thousand customers out in Texas. Meanwhile:

"States and territories by customers out Maine 110,693 New York 38,041 Virginia 19,038 New Hampshire 18,056 Pennsylvania 13,040"

While groundbreaking for its time (started 1988!), the IEM is a very poor substitute for PredictIt. While I could offer a half-dozen reasons why, some of which were noted in CFTC Letter 14-130 for PredictIT in the first place, it'd probably do to point out that their "current" markets consist entirely of:

* 2022 French Presidential Election Markets (I haven't looked at these too closely that maybe there's a reason they're still listed as "current" on the IEM site, but wasn't this election back in April?)

* 2022 U.S. Congressional Control Markets (3 Markets: Senate, House, and Overall)

If you're trying to use prediction market prices as a gauge of the state of the world, IEM is missing dozens of countries, does not give visibility into US state-level elections, and does not include the result of primaries or political events besides elections that nonetheless impact elections. The 2024 US Presidential election is not even on the radar yet there.

Credit where credit is due for the trailblazing, they're worth a look when they do have a market on an event going, and it's notable for being sort-of a proof of concept for prediction markets. But while IEM may now be the best fit within a particular niche in light of what's happened to PredictIt, it's not in the same league.

It's all but forgotten now, but the early statements that Minecraft was going to be released as open-source really hint towards what might have been, and the magnitude of what was lost:

"Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain."

https://web.archive.org/web/20120614004339/http://www.minecr...