calibas

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Web browsers use sandboxing to keep you safe.

Web browsers can portscan your local network.

Google already successfully argued in court that creating an online search index of books constitutes fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

> Yes, the talking drums are attested in Africa from the 18th century

This highlights another important bias when viewing African history through the lens of Western culture. Talking drums are likely much much older, but oral history gets ignored, and the "official" history is really just the first time a European wrote it down.

They also encoded messages, so they had a high-speed communications network that used cryptography. In essence, it was an early version of the internet.

I've noticed a bit of resistance in Western cultures when I bring this up. People tend to think of Africa as "primitive", and there's some cognitive dissonance when you realize Africa had the world's most sophisticated communications system.

I'm not making this claim lightly either. They had a start/end signals, a "header" with an address, and a message payload, repeated for error-correction. There was also a whole routing and QoS system, albeit done manually.

Note that I didn't say they aren't conscious, I said they aren't conscious "in the same way as a human being". I left open the possibility they could be conscious "in a very alien way".

> Is/was the same true for ASCII/Smalltalk/binary? They are all another way to translate language into something the computer "understands".

That's converting characters into a digital representation. "A" is represented as 01000001. The tokenization process for an LLM is similar, but it's only the first step.

An LLM isn't just mapping a word to a number, you're taking the entire sentence, considering the position of the words and converting it into vectors within a 1,000+ dimensional space. Machine learning has encoded some "meaning" within these dimensions that goes far far beyond something like an ASCII string.

And the proof here is that the method actual works, that's why we have LLMs.

The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists. Taking a word (token) and abstracting it's "meaning" as a 1,000-dimension vector seems like something that should revolutionize the field of linguistics. A whole new tool for analyzing and understanding the underlying patterns of all language!

And there's a fact here that's very hard to dispute, this method works. I can give a computer instructions and it "understands" them in a way that wasn't possible before LLMs. The main debate now is over the semantics of words like "understanding" and whether or not an LLM is conscious in the same way as a human being (it isn't).

> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.

Yes, and that's always been the case. From Wikipedia:

"The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

There were so many buggy, unfun, barely-playable games released that it poisoned the market 40 years ago. The term is "shovelware", and it's always been a problem in the industry.

Go try the worst games of the Atari 2600, modern games the seem mediocre will become amazing in comparison.

Worst case scenario, it bricks your device: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36928638?pli=1

Even if the system boots properly, there's various critical systems that depend upon having the correct time. Say goodbye to things like HTTPS and SSL/TLS certificates.

I should have been more clear, I'm not responding to Alvy-Ray's article, I was simply adding to the idea that a pixel is not a little square.

If you don't treat a logical pixel like a discrete little square, you can take advantage of subpixel geometry to effectively increase the resolution. It's not the same as antialiasing, even though it can be used for antialiasing.

Arguably, instead of treating pixels as squares, you're treating them as three times as many rectangles, but that should still contradict the mental model of pixels as little squares.

We're going off on tangents here, I only brought this up to reinforce the idea that a pixel is not a little square.

And I guess I should have explicitly stated that I'm not talking about high-DPI displays, subpixel rendering obviously doesn't do much good there!

My point is simply this, if you don't treat pixel like discrete little boxes that display a single color, you can use subpixels to effectively increase the resolution on low-DPI monitors. Yes, you can use greyscale antialiasing instead, you will even get better performance, but the visual quality will suffer on your standard desktop PC monitor.

> even Windows does not do subpixel antialiasing in its new apps (UWP/WinUI) anymore

This is a little misleading, as the new versions of Edge and Windows Terminal do use subpixel antialiasing.

What Microsoft did was remove the feature on a system level, and leave implementation up to individual apps.

Maybe true for Mac users, but the average Win 10 desktop is still using a 1080p monitor.

If you want a good example of what happens when you treat pixels like they're just little squares, disable font smoothing. Anti-aliasing, fonts that look good, and smooth animation are all dependent upon subpixel rending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

Edit: For the record, I'm on Win 10 with a 1440p monitor and disabling font smoothing makes a very noticeable difference.

People are acting like this is some issue that no longer exists, and you don't have to be concerned with subpixel rendering anymore. That's not true, and highlights a bias that's very prevalent here on HN. Just because I have a fancy retina display doesn't mean the average user does. If you pretend like subpixel rendering is no longer a concern, you can run into situations where fonts look great on your end, but an ugly jagged mess for your average user.

And you can tell who the Apple users are because they believe all this went away years ago.

It's very simple, the reason people favor a more permissive license is generally the same reason they open source their code: You want other people to use your project.

Obviously, a more permissive license is going to let people do whatever they want with "your" code, as it doesn't really belong to you anymore. If you want tight control then it's a bad choice, but a more permissive license is almost always going to mean your project is more widely used, for better or worse.

From my experience playing guitar, the average punk or metal song is almost entirely power chords, while this data says power chords are only 5% of chords in both genres...

I thought maybe there's types of metal and punk that I don't know about, but Wikipedia, LLMs and guitar tab sites all agree with me. Punk and metal is overwhelmingly power chords, so I don't see how the data comparing chord types can be correct.

Is it not obvious? The number of protons is the atomic number. If "c" was the answer, ions couldn't exist.

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I'm not arguing that animal isn't a useful term, but if you're dividing eukaryotes into the major groups, it's not one of them.

> More personally speaking: what am I missing out by using the four kingdoms? Like, how could that possibly ever backfire in a way that slightly impacts my life negatively, or impedes the scientists studying genetic lineages?

Sure, where does kelp fit in? How about slime molds?

Also, I'm not suggesting we teach children all the nuance of phylogeny. I'm suggesting we don't teach a version that we've proven to be objectively wrong.

Eventually, the four-kingdoms system will go away, and it will sit next to the "animal, vegetable, mineral" system in the annals of scientific history.

Children can memorize all 50 US state capitals, they can memorize a handful of scientific names. If we really wanted to, we could teach them a much more accurate view of the tree of life. Also, I don't think the four-kingdom system has been taught in schools for a while? I went to high school in the late 90s and it wasn't taught then.

It's strange to see people promoting it online in 2025. If adults want to remain ignorant, so be it, but at least teach children the truth. Let them know that life is incredibly complicated, it's a mystery we're still solving, and they could be the ones to help figure it out. Don't overly simplify things for small minds, it creates a false picture and it kills the imagination.

> with eukarya containing all multicellular organisms within the four kingdoms of fungi, animals, plants and protists.

This bugs me so much. The four-kingdom system should have died out decades ago, it's absurdly wrong. For one thing, fungi and animals should be together (opisthokonts) if you're dividing eukaryotes into the major groups. If you consider genetics, there's no such thing as "protists", they're just a whole bunch of small things that were grouped together because we didn't know otherwise.

It's more like, Archaeplastida, Excavata, SAR supergroup, Amoebozoa, and Opisthokonta at the moment. The exact list is up for debate, and currently undergoing change. There's plenty of weird things like Hemimastigophora and we're not really sure where they fit yet.

I see people bringing up arrays, and an array index is represented by a number, you can do math on it, but it's not a regular number for counting a sequence of items. It's a unique reference to a location in the memory, and it's dangerous to treat an array index like it's just any old number.

Behold, the really stupid things you can do in Javascript:

  let myArr = [];
  let index = 0;
  myArr[--index] = 5;

  console.log(myArr.length); // 0
  console.log(myArr[index]); // 5

> We should reduce the use of fossil fuels but that will take decades.

I remember people saying that decades ago, and fossil fuel consumption has only risen since then...

Here in the US, we've been expanding production and breaking records! The opposite of what we should be doing, and I have no faith that the government, especially the current administration, is going change things either.

This all works out great for the oil industry, the plans to solve climate change are perpetually decades away, and in the mean time oil consumption stays the same or even increases!

Suppose for a moment that human-driven global warming is real, and a direct threat to human survival. Suppose that burning fossil fuels is one of the biggest drivers of global warming.

Now who are the "bad guys" and who are the "good guys"? The people defending the fossil fuel industry, or the people attacking it?

Now I have my personal doubts about some of Greenpeace's methods, but maybe we should be doing much more to curtail the power of the oil industry?

So anything authored by an AI is effectively public domain? And does that go for code as well as art?

I did a little reading on the subject, and it looks like these questions are still in the process of being answered.

They only made less than 400 available for purchase by the general public, which all sold out, and there was a waiting list for more.

You keep criticizing the sales, yet it was the supply that was the limiting factor. You can't sell more than you make, so of course tiny production runs are going to be "worse than pathetic" for sales!

Almost like they didn't really want it to succeed...

> The RAV4 nickel-metal hydride plug-in hybrid from 97-03 sold a grand total of 1400 units.

FYI, it wasn't a hybrid.

And your statement is a bit misleading. 1400 sales sounds pathetic, until you realize that means they completely sold out. 1400 was all they ever made.

What about electric cars wasn't "viable" in 2003? That was the year Toyota released their all electric RAV4 in California...

Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.

Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!

Back in 2003, President George W. Bush announced the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. At the time, people criticized the effort as an attempt by the oil industry to shift attention away from electric cars. The oil industry knew that hydrogen power wasn't going to be viable anytime soon, while electric cars were already a direct threat to their profits, so they pushed the US government towards hydrogen power.

Not to disparage the talented scientists and engineers working on hydrogen power, but now that 20 years have passed I believe it was designed to fail.

> While mathematicians traditionally pursue understanding for its own sake, industry researchers must ultimately deliver products, features, or capabilities that create value for their organizations.

This really isn't about mathematics or AI, this is about the gap between academia and business. The academic wants to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, while a business wants to make money.

Compare to computer science or engineering, where business has near completely pervaded the fields. I've never heard anybody lamenting their inability to "pursue understanding for its own sake" and when someone does advance the theory, there's also a conversation about how to make it profitable. The academic aspect isn't gone, but it's found a way to coexist with the business aspect, for better or worse.

Honestly it sounds like mathematicians have had things pretty good if this is one of their biggest complaints.