NFL playoffs give home field advantage to the teams with the better regular season records.
168,483 karma · joined June 14, 2011
Formerly: teaching at Stanford and programming+newsing at ProPublica.
Blog: http://www.danwin.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dancow
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But yes, I would say I was also "surprised" in the sense that you say because soon after the "MechaHitler" incident, there seemed to be revisions to Grok that clamped down on any prompt with a potential for displaying outright bigotry, so I did not expect my prompt to be successful on first try. Even now, I just asked it to render "a painting of the Seine, by a hypothetical Adolf Hitler who has won WW2 and has gone back to painting" — and halfway through producing a self-portrait of Hitler in Nazi regalia by the Seine, it suddenly shut down.
> One of the discoveries in the movie is Madsen, who has done a lot of acting over the years (he had a good role in “The Natural“) but here emerges with the kind of really menacing screen presence only a few actors achieve; he can hold his own with the fearsome Tierney, and reminds me a little of a very mean Robert De Niro.
RIP MM
> The Times’s investigation found that Mr. Musk became fixated on the program in early February after members of his team misread government spending data — a pivotal and previously unreported moment that DOGE believed had exposed massive fraud inside the agency.
This is an audio story about the invention of closed caption systems. A few parts that I found fascinating:
> MEREDITH PATTERSON: But by the beginning of 2003, it was becoming apparent that not enough steno writers were available to match the growing amount of content that needed to be captioned...: I was very junior, and maybe that's why I was tasked with experimenting with some software that we called the "black box."
> SIMON: Little things like the news broadcaster throwing to the weatherman would totally trip it up. It didn't include punctuation. And accents of any kind were an issue. However, what it could do pretty darn well was transcribe her voice, which led to a sort of crazy idea...What if she just echoed every word said on television into the computer? Maybe she could close caption that way.
I was also surprised that through 2020, the national captioning center was fully staffed by humans and growing. And only recently have they begun replacing humans through attrition with AI:
> SIMON: ... that technology they had started playing around with back in the early 2000s, just, like, the black box, AI running the feed directly into the computer, it works pretty damn well. It works well enough that you basically no longer need a human in the system at all. Meaning this dance? It's winding down, it's coming to an end. Today, Meredith says AI is doing around 50 percent of the closed captioning the National Captioning Institute is hired to do.
One issue with this is that FSD/Autopilot is designed to disable itself in non-optimal road conditions. I know Musk claims FSD/AP is the only system to not have "restrictions", but you can check any of the Tesla & self-driving subreddits and find people complaining how they weren't allowed to use the driving systems in rain or extreme sunshine, and even some night time conditions. So now you're comparing the accident rate of FSD/AP under safe conditions, against vehicles that are driving through dangerous conditions that FSD/AP aren't allowed to.
But accident rate is just one thing to be concerned about. If you picked 100 licensed human drivers and had them drive through the accident scene described in the article, I would happily bet $1000 that every driver, or at least, 99/100, would handle it without crashing.
If 100 Tesla vehicles using the same version of FSD and camera hardware were driving through the scene described in the article, what would the accident rate be? The concern is that it seems like the deadly Tesla was acting as expected. Even worse, this sounds like a baseline scenario for any driving-assisted vehicle to handle: if the cameras are receiving an extreme amount of light/glare, why is FSD/AP not designed to drive cautiously (and then disable itself)?
> Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
This will probably be flagged for being “political” but it feels relevant to HN to know that the world’s most famous engineer/technocrat is using the volume of drugs often associated with the Silicon Valley startup scene
Here's a summary:
• The charger was donated by a viewer and stopped working despite seemingly good construction. 0:02
• It has two USB-C ports (100W each) and one USB-A port (12V, 22.5W). 0:25
• When plugged in, none of the ports output voltage. 1:00
• The outer box is filled with resin, making it difficult to open. 1:10
• Open, the charger reveals several circuit boards in a sandwich-like design. 2:57
• A shorted rectifier bridge (3:49) and a shorted capacitor on the USB-C output control circuitry (7:20) were initially suspected. 3:49, 7:20
• Further investigation with a thermal camera pinpointed a specific communication/voltage conversion chip as the source of the short. 13:11
• This chip controls the gate of the MOSFETs used in the synchronous rectifiers and DC-DC converters. 14:00
• The main transformer is a hybrid flyback design with a unique AC input and half-bridge rectifier. 17:15
• The short was traced to the capacitor's pins on the same side of the board, suggesting a potential multi-layer board issue. 12:19, 12:41
• The video ends with a cross-section view of the transformer and measurements of some donated 18650 battery cells. 18:46, 20:35
Essentially, the video demonstrates a complex charging circuit and troubleshooting process, highlighting the potential for multiple failure points in high-power chargers.
https://translatingcuba.com/the-cuban-regime-celebrates-that...
https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-cuba-north-korea-escape...
In 50 years, when the U.S. has decided to call itself something else, then yes, this CNN breaking news headline will be ambiguous. But breaking news writes headlines for its current audience, it’s not meant to be a taxonomically accurate index.
> live demonstrations on how to handle cattle to reduce stress.(Every cow pie released by a stressed-out cow before it gets weighed by meat processers amounts to $6 in lost profit.)
I suppose more people would be more amenable to these wholesale cuts if the current administration weren't blowing through even more money than before [0]:
> The new Treasury Department data shows a deficit of $1.307 trillion for October through March, the first six months of the fiscal year 2025. And spending is $139 billion more in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year, with borrowing over that period $41 billion higher.
We're currently fighting no wars and yet Trump is proposing a record $1 trillion defense budget [1]:
> “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military,” he said. “$1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.
And that's before proposed cuts to tax revenue [2]:
> Extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would decrease federal tax revenue by $4.5 trillion from 2025 through 2034. Long-run GDP would be 1.1 percent higher, offsetting $710 billion, or 16 percent, of the revenue losses.
So this whole "we're just imposing much needed austerity" to justify penny-wise-pound-foolish policies is kind of laughable when the proposed increase to our peacetime defense budget alone wipes out Elon's most recent estimate of DOGE's total savings [3].
[0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-budget-deficit-spendi...
[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04...
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-cut...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/elon-musk-dog...
I thought the purported benefit of having skilled programmers/coders running DOGE would be that at least whatever they did would be done in a...programmatic way? But these sound like errors when doing manual data entry.
The freeform gameplay and incredible ending makes OW easily my pick for best game of all time, even though it’s also my least replayed favorite game.