TMWNN

Charlie Stross dismissing AI as "just spicy autocomplete on steroids" three months ago <https://np.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1vbtdga/what_is_...>, for example

I think the score for Colossus: The Forbin Project is too low. There is nothing in the film that contradicts the notion of Colossus being a very, very large LLM. Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.

>The two machines begin with arithmetic and soon communicate through mathematics their engineers can’t follow. That’s the most relevant prediction here: machine intellectual activity racing ahead of the people supervising it.

This misses the specificity of the scene's prediction. Colossus and Guardian are basically speaking in the style of the super-dense, almost incomprehensible-to-human chain of thought that LLMs indulge in nowadays. One might also point to the just-released news of LLMs easily seeing patterns, incomprehensible to humans, in model weights.

Here is what Muse came up with. https://imgur.com/a/5FmK0Ch

Yes, one thing I noticed immediately with the MIT test is that Freeway is much more obscure than Breakout, Pong, and Pac-Man. A person is much more likely to recognize the abstract visual depictions of those games than Freeway; I know video game history quite well and could not have recognized the last, even with a full-quality screenshot.

Does this mean that there is a "visual" element at work here?

As StilesCrisis said, adversarial attacks do work on us. (naniwaduni makes a very good point, as well.)

Highly relevant: "BLIT" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)>

Also, <https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...>

SCP calls such things cognitohazards <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cognitohazard>.

There is no shortage whatsoever of funding for public schools in urban areas. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US. <https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...> Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.

> Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes.

From the article:

>Total tax revenues (federal, state, and local) as a percentage of GDP for OECD countries.

>If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried.

I agree that US debt is a real issue. But:

* The data indicates that, if necessary, the US has a (lot) more room to raise taxes.

* US GDP grew by 3.4% <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/business/economy/us-econo...> in 3Q2026, beating estimates. French GDP shrank by 0.1% <https://www.france24.com/en/business/20261030-french-economy...> in 3Q2026, worse than estimates.

* Put another way, it is possible to grow out of debt. The US is the only member of the $40 trillion debt club, but is also the only member of the $32 trillion GDP club. Scott Bessent has been talking since before being named Treasury Secretary about 3/3/3. <https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/treasury-secretary-nomi...>

* Put yet another way, if you are so worried about the US, you should be sounding a five-alarm bell for France and Italy, and three alarms for most of the rest of the developed world.

>Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?

Yes. French taxes are 43.5% of GDP in 2024, the second highest among OECD countries. <https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/oecd-taxes-share-gdp> US is 25.6%; Germany is 38%; Britain is 34.4%; Canada is 34.9%.

Context: French taxes are 43.5% of GDP in 2024, the second highest among OECD countries. <https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/oecd-taxes-share-gdp> US is 25.6%; Germany is 38%; Britain is 34.4%.

During a discussion of the recent shutdown by EA of Bioware, the famous studio behind game franchises like Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age (and, more relevant, three huge bombs over the past decade in the latter two), Jason Schreier of Bloomberg states that

* Gears of War: E-Day, the newest entry in Xbox's also famous franchise, cost Microsoft $500 million dollars to develop

* "that is a real number, it's real". There had been a lot of talk, mostly by fans of the franchise (of which I would include myself), that the rumored $400 million+ figure for the game was greatly exaggerated. Apparently not.

E-Day has had laughably low player count figures on Steam. <https://steamdb.info/app/3010850/charts/> While it is true that most players are going to play via Xbox Game Pass on console or PC, for such an expensive game to develop, the player count still implies catastrophically disappointing customer reception.

>From their current position, it would be genuinely difficult to find ways to piss off more of their customers.

Tesla Model Y was the world's best-selling car in 2024 <https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market-2024/> and 2025 <https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market-2025/>, and has gained share in 2026 YTD. <https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/>

>When GPT-3 became available, and I did not have to learn Elisp (another f%^&*n computer language - with no other use)

DHH recently said that despite hating Rust, he recently wrote a program he needed in Rust by handing the task to AI, and that the alternative was him having to spend nine months to learn the language.

>Lots of recent Linux and neovim users due to how easy it is to debug an issue or edit a config now.

DHH made the interesting point that the Unix standard of plaintext dotfiles and such are as if designed for AI.

> It says Tesla registrations increase

You and I both know that registrations are a proxy for car purchases. (The article even says so.)

>and I believe this may be a trend accross all EV brands with the influence of the Iran/US conflict on the price of gas.

Again from the article:

>According to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association, Tesla registrations across the European Union, Britain and the European Free Trade Association leaped 43.3% between January and August, outpacing the broader battery-electric vehicle market's 38.8% growth over the same period.

So tell me, again, what about my statement "Tesla is gaining share in Europe despite Chinese EVs" do you disagree with?

>That only says they are improving relative to last year, not their heyday.

Yes, but the Chinese EVs are a very recent thing in Europe, so Tesla is (re)gaining share versus both existing domestic and new foreign competition.

Tesla still does quite well in China.

>Where I am it is Kia that has taken Tesla’s place as the go-to EV brand.

Tesla Model Y was the world's best-selling car in 2025, <https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market-2025/> and has gained share in 2026 YTD. <https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/>

"Hey, why are activity rates up 2000%?" —Tumblr executive

... while Europe did not allow the Ukraine War to interrupt its longstanding massive purchase contracts for gas from Russia.

The United States is, contrary to what many subreddits' denizens seem to believe, not actually at war with Russia. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Anything the US does, or does not, regarding sanctions on Russia is up to the US to decide.

Tesla is gaining share in Europe despite Chinese EVs, <https://www.kansas.com/news/business/article317450876.html> and benefited from Canada cutting import duty on Chinese EVs. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-19/tesla-vol...>

>The Internet also told me Europeans were boycotting Tesla and Elon, but I didn’t see that either.

And indeed, Tesla is gaining share in Europe. <https://www.kansas.com/news/business/article317450876.html>

Only if revenue grew quickly enough.

When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.

Put another way, it is a peculiar naming regime when M(n-[2-4]) Pro/Max/Ultra is superior to M(n). This is very visible right now because of the demand for running local AI on Macs.

>to required grades being higher for local students, which is a problem in subjects where there is a limited intake

I saw many courses in Clearing listed as being only for foreign students.

Title edited by me from "NewsTwo pallets of ZOTAC RTX 5090 graphics cards worth $470,000 disappear at Brazilian airport"

>For older "abandonware" games, this is a huge positive. Especially for all the Flash ones.

I look forward to AI decompiling and making available on modern MacOS all the Intel 32-bit games that aren't compatible with Intel 64-bit, let alone Apple Silicon.

Heck, extend that to PowerPC and even 68K games. Yes, emulators have been available for such for a long time. But that's not the same thing as recompiling natively onto Apple Silicon (or whatever comes along in the future) and adding support for modern resolutions along the way.

Title edited by me from "Yum! Brands executive pushes back against AI hate: Taco Bell drive-thru bot has helped increase employee retention by making jobs easier".

HN removed the Fortune-provided referral tag that bypasses the paywall. If necessary, use https://fortune.com/2026/10/14/yum-brands-executive-data-cen...

Thank you. I found the dictionary file elsewhere, but the above indeed has superior formatting, as per its description.

DictUnifier crashes on current MacOS. Is there an alternative?