kunai

The easy workaround for this (which Flock has used to massive success and why it's drawn so much ire) is to set up or subcontract a private corporation to do this which will inherently be subject to much less stringent oversight. It also allows government and law enforcement to evade accountability.

There has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning.

And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live.

On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.

ILS, yes (the G/S vector and angle is calibrated to account for terrain), LOC on the other hand (i.e. non-precision with no G/S information) would have probably ended up in the same situation as it requires pilots to manually manage rate of descent. Not all runways have ILS equipment on both sides of the runway, let alone on all runways available or one that is active. At some airports it's possible you only run a 30% chance or lower that you can actually use the ILS to land, because the one with the equipment may not be the active one (and which runway is active changes depending upon wind and weather)

This should tell you how unserious these "companies" are when they consider themselves the grand harbinger of the one and true "AGI" because their frontier models were able to solve (with great assistance) some sort of conjecture that was never taken seriously in the mathematical world but somehow is significant now because ???

There's a very extreme, asocial monoculture on this particular website regarding AI whereby dissent is tolerated though the true believers and devout acolytes quietly seethe at any skepticism towards their beloved frontier models, are quick to dismiss concerns about generative AI profitability, the enormously negative externalities resulting from the manner in which it's being scaled, marketed, and used, and its more profound ethical and philosophical effects on our collective future.

Because, you know, they know best, so the hoi polloi ought to just shut up and watch as the poorly socialized quiet children exact their revenge upon those not as enlightened as them. Cue Dario adjusting his glasses and baring his teeth, or Sam Altman bulging his eyes at a camera. They can't wait for the rest of the world to be just as deeply mediocre and spiritually empty as they are.

So funny how a site called "Hacker News," once vibrant with the ethos of lighthearted disobedience and an inquisitive spirit, finds itself almost religiously in opposition to those who decry a (horrendously incompetent) dystopia and panopticon forced upon the population by the very forces this website's (former, I'm assuming) users claimed to hate so much.

I thought bronyism sort of died out and that the furry community sort of subsumed it.

I'd also add that I think the increased self-ID of young people in the LGBTQ community is in and of itself sort of a means to access a sort of alternative lifestyle. Many of these people live somewhat hedonistic, bohemian, artsy lifestyles that disregard traditional notions of success or traditional standards and mores in relationships and love.

Uber used the classic triple-E philosophy of Microsoft and entered a market that was ripe for disruption -- many cities lacked reliable taxi service entirely, others were cartels that fixed prices. They undercut prices to an extreme degree, subsidized fares, and when it either drove local taxi companies out of business and spurred widespread adoption as the default, it had a captive market and duopoly with Lyft which allowed them to raise fares without losing any market share whatsoever.

It's a pretty classic business strategy, and not directly comparable to any of the AI companies. There's a reason people compare the current situation to the dotcom era and not Uber. Also, don't take Uber as an example of a slam-dunk VC success story and leave it at that -- plenty of dumb ideas get pitched and funded and go bankrupt for every Uber.

Yeah no worries, apart from the facetiousness I'm a pretty YIMBY person un-ironically. But it is infuriating that people adopt YIMBY rhetoric to try and defend data centers and other harmful industrial uses in areas with high land value. It's not only completely counter to the ideals of YIMBYism but also insulting as YIMBY has always been about lowering housing and commercial use costs through heavily relaxed zoning, NOT pushing through anything that anyone wants to develop in some sort of libertarian wet dream.

Academics aren't infallible at all. The studies showing tobacco as non-harmful had the collaboration of a great many cooperative scientists. Generally speaking, many academics are amoral and will do very unscrupulous things for grant funding and exposure. It is a business.

> AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".

Again, this is a misapprehension of the technology itself and its most ideal use cases. Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation. If you do this, you will expend valuable resources verifying the output that would be better spent just verifying the inputs in the first place. I'm no Luddite and I do think AI is cool and incredible technology. If you reframed that sentence as "AI could get better at taking the busywork and tedium out of fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> leveraging human strengths with AI's super-human strengths at assorting and analyzing information will lead to major scientific breakthroughs" then I would have absolutely no issue with it. But the marketing copy never says that and instead frames it as "AI can do anything a human can do and better," which is a) patently untrue, and b) suggests a very troubling agenda that the big corporations will have to answer for at some point or another.

Probably. Although I feel more inclined to forgive Ed in this case because it's sort of fighting fire with fire, the insanely hyperbolic and obscenely misleading drivel that's coming out of the most ardent AI boosters is continually unchallenged in the public eye. In a world where we had a more realistic view of AI/ML/LLMs, the limits to its capabilities, and the negative externalities of its widespread adoption in places where it quite frankly does not belong, then I'd be more critical of the Chicken Little sort of writing style

This has been my issue this whole time. Why isn't it just framed as a useful software tool that helps you automate tasks and write code? Use cases beyond this have exceedingly high social cost and negative externalities, and it's arguable that besides highly specialized local models with very specific training data, AI is not reliable enough nor deterministic enough to truly "replace" humans in the vast majority of roles outside of tech.

Obviously the answer is $$$ and the fact that this admin's economic policy has further encouraged the market to go all-in on AI as it's the only thing that's trending in the black for the economy right now. I don't think you'll find many people on HN who won't readily admit that even if they're anti-AI, LLMs are genuinely amazing pieces of software that can be transformative and useful in many different environments, and it's mindblowing how they work. The issue comes from the very harmful way it's currently being commercialized and marketed.

Thanks for taking feedback into account but $20 per license is still a bit absurd. StartAllBack for Windows does almost everything your product does and costs $5 for a lifetime license.

There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.

The reason why no one cares is because most well-adjusted adults have never interacted with the web or its many tendrils as much as the patrons of this website (and others like it) have.

I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?

Only the T and X series benefit from the Japanese design studios though and have the build quality to match. The E and L series are indistinguishable from a myriad of bargain bin business laptops, including Lenovo's own ideapads.

Perhaps developing an actual personality would help with this.

No one is confusing Cleetus McFarland with an AI bot.

It's not just AI-generated articles -- it's the other things that we delve into as a result. Listicles. Comments. Posts. It's what it means to be human, and honestly? That's rare.

> ... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.

This seems to be a recent phenomenon. A lot of electronic music production uses the Macintosh and Logic/Ableton workflow, to say nothing about how many of the best DSPs were Apple-exclusive until about a decade ago. I don't really think music production, at least in the EDM and hip-hop world, got popular on the PC until the rise of Fruity Loops and FL Studio, but that's available on the Mac now too.

It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.

I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.

Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)

Yeah there is no way they do that with THREE LOCVs in their history. The fire, Challenger, and Columbia.

It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.

Might as well get some ROI out of it though.

IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.

> So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees with that, it's policy after all.

Because autocomplete still requires heavy user input and a SWE at the top of the decision making tree. You could argue that using Claude or Codex enables you to do the same thing, but there's no guarantee someone isn't vibecoding and then not testing adequately to ensure, firstly, that everything can be debugged, and secondly, that it fits in with the broader codebase before they try to merge or PR.

Plenty of people use Claude like an autocomplete or to bounce ideas off of, which I think is a great use case. But besides that, using a tool like that in more extreme ways is becoming increasingly normalized and probably not something you want in your codebase if you care about code quality and avoiding pointless bugs.

Every time I see a post on HN about some miracle work Claude did it's always been very underwhelming. Wow, it coded a kernel driver for out of date hardware! That doesn't do anything except turn a display on... great. Claude could probably help you write a driver in less time, but it'll only really work well, again, if you're at the top of the hierarchy of decision making and are manually reviewing code. No guarantees of that in the FOSS world because we don't have keyloggers installed on everybody's machine.

I don't really believe that the strongman theory and hierarchy is inherent to human social structure, or at least not the way in which we do it. Some level of hierarchy is inevitable, but the longest-lasting and most stable hierarchies were somewhat bureaucratic and highly meritocratic (think China and their civil service exams) and our system is extremely bureaucratic and not meritocratic whatsoever.

If you only knew how the enterprise space does stuff you'd realize how little a priority maintainability is.

I'm grateful we had Java when this stuff was taking off; if any enterprise applications were written in anything else available at the time (like C/C++) we'd all suffer even more memory leaks, security vulnerabilities, and data breaches than we do now.

Except this is not the age of the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, who, despite being far more philanthropic than modern-day billionaires, drew ire from every corner of society for their wealth accumulation. It wasn't until the New Deal that the balance shifted.

Unconstrained accumulation of capital into the hands of the few without appropriate investment into labor is illiberal and incompatible with democracy and true freedom. Those of us who are capitalists see surplus value as a compromise to ensure good economic growth. The hidden subtext of that is that all the wealth accumulated needs to be re-allocated to serve not only capital enterprise, but the needs of society as a whole. It's hard to see the current system as appropriate for that given how blindly and wildly investments are made with no DD or going long, or no effort paid to the social or environmental opportunity costs of certain practices.

A lot of this comes down to the crippling of the SEC and FTC, but even then, investors cry and whine every time you suggest reworking the regs to inhibit some of the predatory practices common in this post-80s era of hypernormalization. Our current system does not resemble a healthy capitalist economy at all. It's rife with monopsony and monopolistic competition, inequality of opportunity, and a strained underclass that's responsible for our inverted population pyramid -- how can you have kids when we're so atomized and there is no village to help you? You can raise kids in a nuclear family if and only if you have enough money to do so. Otherwise, historically, people relied on their communities when raising children in less-than-ideal circumstances. Those communities are drying up.

> executives having a pretty short horizon for risk if the potential bonus is large enough.

This single line explains succinctly what is probably responsible for most of the economic dysfunction of the past 20 years

But then what about the fact that it's exposing so many firms to immense risk and essentially straight-up lying to investors as well as product adopters? No one thought of that reality, when the chickens finally come home to roost?