emptybits

I like everything you said, but do you think AI assisted math may primarily give us a more productive age for individuals, with less need for human-human collaboration?

Maybe it doesn’t matter and maybe that’s just the new flavour of golden.

One of the first slides clarifies that recreational programming is INTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED. I agree with this definition.

So if an external factor like LLM prowess “killed it all” for you, I would suggest you may not have been intrinsically motivated in the first place.

Long live recreational programming. It’s fun and, personally, it’s satisfying building things close to the metal.

I hear you, and you're right that rigidity and the extra work of clear specs and strong tests don't bother an LLM. When they're used. And they should be used. But experienced software developers also use those procedures and understand their value. i.e. working on a codebase that doesn't make you want to quit!

Anyways, you've obviously got good policy in place for generating code. This wisdom isn't universal.

We would have. IF a typical C codebase in its early years sucked as much as some AI generated codebases do today.

But instead, humans preferred the productivity AND the readability AND maintainability that elevated us above assembly. Maybe AI-generated code will get there also.

1. I love this question and not just on HN, but the answers are very high quality here. At a house party, at a baseball game, on a hike, whatever ... if anyone asks out loud to a group, "what are you reading?" I get ready to scribble down a new list!

2. Obvious (?) observation: Today's list consists of human-authored books. Will that trend hold? Can you imagine this question being asked in X years with predominantly AI-authored books as the answers? Novels or nonfiction. I get a thrill out of a good book, partly, because it lets me into the head of a lucid or genius or maniacal fellow human.

I favoured the untabled option: year round standard time instead of daylight saving time. But so be it, here we are, at least we're not changing twice yearly.

AFAICT, this code is equivalent to PDT and UTC-7. (And, thus, redundant?) Maybe someone can explain if this PCT code is truly going to be adopted.

If or when WA, OR, and CA choose to stop changing their clocks, are we looking at yet more redundant time zone codes? (It's hard to imagine America in its current stance adopting the "Pacific Canadian Time" code.)

IANAB but lobsters are worth a look. They apparently do not get slower or weaker or even lose fertility as they age. And apparently Greenland Sharks might live for 300-500 years, are immune to cancers, and their DNA can repair itself. Maybe leaving the ocean was our ancestors' mistake.

Yes, “Go” plan users pay and also receive ads. They pay less.

Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be part of this business model, unlike typical free-riding Google and Facebook users.

It's a trend in Canada also. Libraries are being seen as a social safety net.

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/public-libra...

The word concentric reminded me of sort of an inverse idea in vinyl. Equally cool IMO: concentric grooves. Rush did it. Kate Bush did it. Probably more recent examples. It works like this: drop the needle at a different starting point and the whole record plays through a different groove. Cool, eh?

Agree completely. The most common barriers to trade are tariffs and I'm glad we don't have those within Canada. The next most common barriers are regulatory and legislative and we've got those but the good news is (unlike the US-Canada trend lately) those barriers are diminishing (at a government pace) in a consistent trend over time.

I'm not aware of steps backwards (as in US-Canada relations) where barriers between provinces increased. Am I wrong to be optimistic?

No. You claimed Canada doesn't have free trade internally. The most common barriers to free trade are tariffs. IME tariffs and duties are what most people think of as non-free trade. Witness the current US-Canada trade war. I can order lots of things from all around the world and the main resistance to me doing that are tariffs and duties, wouldn't you agree?

I'm clarifying that the trade barriers on things like liquor and food between Canadian provinces are regulations, not tariffs.

Food and especially liquor continue to have stupid barriers between provinces. But intra-provincial trade increases every year and the CMRA legislation from last year should improve that.

There are no tariffs between Canadian provinces and never have been.

Cool idea. The author's AI failed to encode flags for approximately 35% of the world's population. Approximately 3 billion people. At least that's why my AI tells me. India obviously contributes a lot to this. I'm probably salty because my own country's simple (?) flag is also in the "unencodable" group. Lol.

I applaud the author holding aspect ratio as a priority to encode. It's jarring to see an otherwise correct and familiar flag stretched into an incorrect shape when flown or shown.

Four ostensibly competing billionaires agree with each other and want worldwide government regulations around their moneymaking? o_O

Chilling and suspicious. Of course, this will lead to a modicum of safety in some provable way to justify (in uncritical minds) the rest of the implications: fewer freedoms and more surveillance for everyone else.

“Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.”

Yes! Well said. If I already know someone, reading their own words, technical or businesss or personal, is meaningful to me. Warts and all. And if I don’t yet know the author then I definitely want to read their own words so I can get to know them.

Either way, taking the time to think and then write is a gift and I respect that.

Absolutely agree. And yet, complicity and acceptance of uncivilized behaviour is dangerous.

If people normalize to lies, outrageous demands, lawbreaking, threats against allies and their sovereignty, etc ... if these behaviours are accepted as the new normal for a powerful world leader, without any outrage and with no pushback ... we show approval and we invite progressively worse behaviour.

It's all gradual, very incremental treachery. We accept it and encourage more.

Glad it was clear to you.

I felt it useful to provide a reliable source for such an outrageous national position. Lest some think it exaggeration or twisting of facts for humour or effect. It's not. Yikes. :-)

No need for your </sarcasm> tag. The United States makes repeated claims linking childhood vaccines to autism.

https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/trump-and-rfk-jr-repeat-fa...

“NOW Foods, which makes and sells supplements itself, bought 25 vitamin C gummy brands off Amazon and paid an accredited lab to test them. They published the results last week. Twelve had almost no detectable vitamin C. Five claimed 1,000mg or more per gummy and contained under 2mg.”

Yikes. And Vitamin C has to be one of the cheapest active ingredients going, so imagine the incentive to skip “real” ingredients. o_O

“Many parents say that, thanks to the hoax, their children now feel confused about historical facts, the Nanjing Daily reported”

Great, lets make this useful … this specific nonsense will settle down and be proven to be a hoax and/or misinformation. An important component of parenting today is to raise kids who take claims presented on the internet with a large grain of salt. Rather than contrived examples in critical thinking exercises they might get in class or a textbook, parents now have a perfect, real example here to show their kids that online nonsense can look authoritative and be very widely believed, and yet still be false. Shields up. Less time online for kids. And don’t outsource your critical thinking to the online majority or to AI!

His trebuchet launched a 4 gram projectile at 776 miles per hour.

That's obviously extremely lightweight for trebuchet payload, but for comparison, his projectile is approximately 62 grains so approximately twice as heavy as 30 grain high speed 22LR rounds. And approximately 1.5 times as heavy as 40 grain subsonic rounds.

Yes, and I'd include Cory Doctorow in the list of Canadians paying attention and writing about it.

Back to 2024: "Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare"

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-07-23...

I'm not being flippant but I think part of your answer is in the first two words of the title.

IME while LLMs may help delivery utility in a finished work, humans often value the absorption, mastery, style, or constraint of performing a mundane activity hands-on and brains-on.

Fast forward... all the computer I need is now in my bag or pocket or least within the room.

So what I'd enjoy on my wrist is an entry-level Seiko (or other) quartz with nothing but: 1) analog hands, and 2) a vibrating Bluetooth notification of incoming phone calls or maybe messages.

I know know, the second one is a swamp that Seiko doesn't want to wade into.

Buying a used book sight unseen from Amazon or from a reseller who doesn’t have a reputation for reporting used condition reliably … that’s a buyer’s choice. It’s not left to (mis)fortune.

Anyways, my point was to counter the parent post’s claim that notes in margins are shallow or unsocratic. Some are, some aren’t IME.

Aside from shallow, uncritical notes, consider that annotating in a margin is evidence that a reader is actively engaging with a text.

Very often when I write in margins it's to question or argue against what's written (e.g. "really? what about ...", or "no, contradicts ...") which, to me, seems in line with the dialectic process Socrates promoted. Multiple sides, truth-seeking.

Sure, having a spacious notebook on the side is even better. But it's the same goal, isn't it? Engage more deeply with a text and encourage questioning as you read it, while it's still fresh.

Happy Birthday Z80! My first job out of university was in Z80 assembly. (Sega Game Gear.)

As a kid, it was all about 6502 micros, but my early professional love was Z80 and it still warms my heart to think about. Sure, the “other” 8 bit CPUs had zero page, but block instructions and 16 bit extensions FTW. <3

Perhaps: "If you find yourself re-arranging your life into a [car|AI|...]-dependent life, stop before it's too late?"