kortex

The solution was the one they arrived at way too late: have a "starter zone" for entry level stuff.

> Why do anti-flock activists insist that it doesn't help police apprehend criminals.

Seems like a strawman, i dont know anyone saying the cameras dont help police solve crimes at all. The issue is you have to balance crime benefits against civil rights, and the benefit right now seems pretty small, but the privacy implications are enormous.

Reducto ad absurdum: mandatory ankle monitors on everyone would help police apprehend criminals. Is that worth it? No? Ok, then where is the line in the sand? Flock's system is effectively tantamount to a gps tracker on every vehicle that uses surface roads.

It's entirely plausible to me that they could be training an NSFW 3D model detector, specifically because of their very minor userbase. TFA seems to presume it's all being used to train genAI, in exactly the same fashion.

We know NSFW data pollutes many otherwise non-adult datasets, so genAI is going to be trained on naughty stuff inadvertantly regardless - they might need a smut neuron specifically to turn off that sort of output.

Or they are just being irresponsible. point is, we dont know.

It's still a tad icky to scrape tons of data without asking, and downright rude to ignore robots.txt and ToS, but that's the world we live in.

meanwhile, as a fire-breathing, unicycling, sensation-seeking, self-care-neglecting, bad-choice-making, person with severe adhd on medication, I dont buy what you dont buy. This shit's rough.

I had conversations in Morse code with like gpt 3 or 4. I guarantee there were no snippets of what we were chatting about, in morse code, in its training set.

LLMs are clearly able to apply seemingly arbitrary transformations to symbol streams in ways that generalize well beyond the training set. It's getting into metaphysics whether that is "novel" but it's definitely not "copy paste from the training set"

This sounds like propagation of algae from unbleached to bleached coral, not colonization of skeletal structure.

> Nobody involved with any of this consulted a marine biologist with a rudimentary understanding of coral

Hmm.

> Stephen Palumbi: Jane and Marshall Steel Jr. Professor of Marine Sciences, Professor of Oceans and of Biology

https://profiles.stanford.edu/stephen-palumbi?releaseVersion...

You sure he doesnt have even a rudimentary understanding of coral? Did you read the paper? I'm going to assume the marine biologist publishing papers has at least some idea on corals, unless give a good reason to doubt it.

I got really excited for a carnivorous salmon-fishing tree there for a second. I could envision how roots might evolve to jut into the water, and develop some one-way geometry that fish get trapped in.

Absolutely delightful!

And i think i can tell the ones from HN (in a good way), they are often like "showed a client a really cool feature i made and they loved it."

Rhetorically, why can't folks add the feature of PRs to Git? Git is fundamentally just a graph manipulation engine and data structure. It would just be another object type, in a layer which sits above the normal commit graph. Obviously there is no "just make X" in software, but this feels reasonably achievable, and would have tremendous benefit for the cost.

> "Tortured phrases" are bizarre, nonsensical word combinations—such as "counterfeit consciousness" instead of "artificial intelligence"

Conterfeit Consciousness is gonna be the name of my new post-liquid analog modular synth IDM project.

I feel like these text spinners could actually be an untapped gold mine for creatively naming things.

One of the first ways I learned to meditate/access different states of mind was a technique described as "overload trance" (IIRC). The premise was, listen to a piece of music, focusing on one musical component, then while keeping that focus, add another element, and another, etc.

It works best with pieces with a lot of ostinato (repetition/vamp) and Bach's Little Fugue in G minor was and is one of my favorites. Really fun to play too, though i get tripped up as soon as the feet get involved. Also, Utopia by Astral Projection (that whole album Trust in Trance 3 is great for this).

Bonus points to mentally visualizing something in time with the music (I like orbs whirling around like atomic orbitals). You can really tie up much of your mental processing this way and I find it much easier than traditional zen meditation, trying to bring focus back to eg. breathing.

Little fugue: https://youtu.be/ddbxFi3-UO4

Trust in trance 3 playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mHhgZDphEanJgP6zSz...

Lmao not remotely. Their security is a joke. Axon's evidence system at least has concepts of security. Flock has had numerous high publicity security failures (see: Benn Jordan's work with 404 media).

> they respond by refusing to work. That's a ~~problem~~ solution that, at this time, has no ~~solution~~ problem.

If a police department reuses to accept accountability, and dig in their heels by refusing to work, "just" dissolve it. And while at it, half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.

In practice that obviously would not go over well, people are too attached to the status quo. We just lack the political will to rethink and retool the system (despite most Americans favoring police reform).

This RFC (the concept behind it) has been in the works in one form or another since 2008

> The HTTP SEARCH method was first formally proposed in November 2008 within RFC 5323.

> Before it became a full RFC, the proposal progressed through the IETF under the working group draft name draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-method-w-body. Its formal journey began in March 2021 as an adaptation of the older SEARCH method (from WebDAV's RFC 5323), before being renamed explicitly to QUERY in later draft revisions.

There's no "pretending" this is a good idea, a ton of very smart people have spent a tremendous amount of effort refining this solution. It's incredibly well thought out.

I find it really fascinating that you use the metaphor to GA of a senior dev sweeping all the cruft away into a single clean abstraction, is that my read/smell of TFA (as a layperson for this depth of math) is that GA runs the exact same risk of leaky abstraction. It's really general and elegant and covers all these cases with a single abstraction, but in doing so it sometimes conflates very similar things (precisely because they are so similar) when they really ought to be separate things. Like a complex number and the rotation operator it performs. My seat-of-pants take is GA is just a bit too DRY.

My understanding is too shallow to get why we don't just go straight for EA/Clifford Algebra when the "lower" systems like cross product are insufficient.

I share the author's intuition that there ought to exist some mathematical object that begets Clifford Algebras and multivectors and GA and all the like that we have yet to discover.

> They're spending their precious time on this Earth learning a dead language instead of learning about the law or bugs

I know this is hyperbole, but it's my opinion Latin/Greek emerged so dominantly in law/bio/medical fields is that it allows at the same time semantic bleaching and composition. "Jargon is a DSL" if you will. Sure, you could say "heart muscle no worky cause insufficient oxygen" but "myocardial infarction" is a) more concise b) comprises reusable composable pieces of meaning (myo + card + -ial, in + farcire + -ion) c) most importantly, is extremely precise. It's like the trouble of using English + LLM to define a program, vs just writing damn code. Sure you can do the former, but it's lossy, and that lossiness causes issues.

Did you mean hyperthermia? This whole thread sent me down a rabbit hole (I have several close folks afflicted by Lyme) and while at first glance hyperthermia might seem woo-ish, there is real research being done, particularly on hyperthermia + antibiotics. The chief drawbacks are cost (I'm seeing $30k and up and not usually covered) and strain on the body. Friedrich Douwes pioneered much of this.

Douwes F. Komplextherapie der chronischen Borreliose (Lyme disease) - Ein neuer Therapieansatz: die Antibiotika augmentierte Thermoeradikation (AAT). OM & Ernährung. 2018;164:F10.

Douwes F. The successful antibiotic augmented thermal eradication of chronic lyme disease. Paper presented at the 32nd ESHO Meeting, Berlin, 16–19 May 2018.

Robot arms can have reproducible movement with error bars measured in double-digit microns. Where they lack is in the force feedback, and even then they have had huge strides.

I'd rather have a pristine repo (no .ds_store/.idea/etc) than a pristine .gitignore file.

I think you misunderstand the functionality. It doesn't ingnore the diff completely. it just replaces the full contents with "`Binary files differ"

> Use -diff to completely hide the internal file content during a diff. Git will only report `Binary files differ` if the file changes.

Same like you would binary files. It's still good advice to actually review the lockfile changes at some point.

You can also apparently write transformers to make it more human readable.

It also directs Github to automatically collapse those files to the "Show Diff" interface by default. I'd still call the contents of things like lockfiles, protobuf output, big JSON blobs, etc, "noise" when reviewing PRs for code changes, but that doesnt mean I dont look at them.

Super fun, got 70,250. Friends have always lightly ribbed me for having to go home and look up words i've used. Those remaining 100k words must be really obscure.

One suggestion would be more convincing decoy choices, some were pretty silly. But I have no idea how they come up with them.

That sure is an interesting take from someone with "anarchist" in their username. IMHO corruption is any time you use power/influence/station in order to skew the normal well-behaved channels of governance (cybernetics) for personal gain. Any system with hierarchy can have corruption. Bernie Madoff was an example of illegal, private industry corruption.

Psychededics are unpredictable. We know the government looked into their use as thought- and behavior-manipulating tools (MKUltra) but the results proved too chaotic. You might get a manchurian candidate...or the unabomber. But most likely just a renewed outlook on life.

Psyches basically raise the "temperature" (in machine learning parlance) of the brain, increasing crosstalk. This can jostle folks out of a mental rut. But it can also create positive feedback loops of upheaval.

Soma would only work as it did in BNW if society controlled essentially all sources of information - which is essentially the whole premise.

Drifting? I think it's there. basedpyright is awesome and super fast. Our latest services are all CI gated by type checking. Early in my career you'd hit so many dumb errors running your code - NoneType, attribute, value, and type errors. I'd say that's been cut over 95%.

According to Pew, almost 70% of teens report to have used LLMs/chatbots, and 30% use it daily. This is also over 6 months out of date, which feels like an eternity at the current rate things change.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/12/09/teens-social...

> > As a group, teenagers and young adults hate AI

Anecdotally, I've observed a robust correlation between the cost/quality of the model, and attitude towards it.

Most of the general public, young folks, and old folks (ie outside gen z, millennials, and some X) are using free models, usually what's immediately available (cough copilot cough), have really unreliable results, hear all the hype, experience dissonance, and chalk it up to just hype, and walk away thinking AI is a crock of junk.

The Z/Y/G cohort - the ones that grew up alongside the growth of the internet - seem to be the best adopters. They recognize a system which is powerful, albeit flaky, and know how to extract utility from it without over-reliance. Especially ones with paid flat-rate subscriptions.

The power users - the ones using API/paid (by usage) models, tricking out their claude with plugins, seem to have the least amount of hate, but rather a healthy respect for a powerful disruptor.

I also don't buy the whole "the young'ns have never dealt with barriers of entry to the internet and thus lack the tech skills the millennials developed." I think the internet cohort that adopted tech was always split between the powerusers/curious learners, and the "just get my goal accomplished and get out" folks. I think that's roughly the same percentage of folks in Z/alpha, and these kids are just as savvy and aware of limitations of the tech.

I think the analysis-space really needs to be divided into three groups: software, media (audio/video/image) generation/alteration, and everything else.

Software - this tech is ludicrously powerful and productive. But it's a force multiplier, not a "push button, receive software" system. Great devs that know how to wield it will become überdevs, becoming more productive and with lower defect rate (we have objective internal numbers backing this). But bad devs and non-devs will become high output slop factories. You basically need a dedicated platform team to keep things on the rails. I think this is very akin to the internet bubble. The process, institutional knowledge, and feedback systems developed at this time will grant the "survivors" massive edges after the pop.

I think media generation is or will be a solved problem. Animators, 3dfx, background/filler music composers, those jobs are in sorry shape based on current trends. But a cost explosion could easily level the playing field.

Everything else, where middle managers are aggressively pushing AI usage? Yeah maybe. At this time, other than for document retrieval (basically suped-up search), the "productivity" gains don't really map to value gains. Oh wow you can crank out powerpoint slide decks 50% faster. Write 50% more corporate emails employees barely read anyways. There's definitely a trust issue there with hallucinations. If the reliability gap can be solved (the bots don't even have to be correct, they just need to be less confidently incorrect, and I already see this somewhat with my own agents with tuning), then that could prove the turning point between "begrudging usage at the behest of higher ups" and "actual productivity enhancer."

Does no one remember in the dot com boom all the internet skepticism? "I don't trust it with high value orders, what if it crashes or loses data? Call me old-fashioned but I'd rather write it down." That attitude was quite prevalent for years, even into the 2000s.

Are the datacenters that are being built not directly analogous? Even if the hardware in them is cooked after 5 years, the buildings, power, cooling, and fiber interconnects are still all valuable.

The models may go out of date but the process and software are continuously improving.

> What if the primary goal of the first AGI is to keep itself at the top? What if it's goal is to prevent any other AGI? Scary thought...

is basically the premise of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

The younger devs have largely been the ones showing us old farts (eg millennials) how do to the really sophisticated stuff with claude - custom skills, plugins, tooling like openspec, things that have had massive benefits over stock claude.

We are nowhere near the ceiling in terms of process either.

Re: flat rate going to by-usage, I believe this is largely a long tail problem. You have a small number of power users that capitalize on the flat rate to use the service orders of magnitude more than the average user.