thomassmith65

My original comment was to add context to the article's first line:

  Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely, without having to press the power button.

To you and me, that sentence needs the word "again" appended to it.

Any implication that OS X Server could only run on Xserve was inadvertent. I mentioned the special OS to preempt discussion of whether Xserve was, strictly speaking, part of the Mac product line.

Xserve had LOM hardware 20 years ago.

  LOM enables power management even if the Xserve is off, and even if it lacks an installed operating system.

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

Edit: Xserve was an Apple rack mounted server that ran a special version of Mac OS X

If the government added an 'abolish all future elections?' item to every ballot, it would be more democratic, and also a risk to democracy.

Everyone has a voice now, but the hysterical, shouting voices drown out the calm ones.

The 90s weren't so different, nor earlier decades, centuries. In fact, the positioning here irritates me:

  The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives.

It makes it sound as though the anomaly were not the past two decades, but all of recorded history which preceded them.

I'm no supporter of Trump, but the Iranian regime plotting to assassinate an American president - if true - poses a problem for America: https://justice.gov/opa/pr/iranian-intelligence-agent-convic...

  The principal U.S. demand being placed on Iraq is to reduce Iranian influence in the country, which especially takes the form of pro-Iranian militias.

https://iranintl.com/en/202601167778

'Iranian influence' sounds relatively benign, but while the US has been fighting Iran, Iraqi militias reportedly have been entering Iran to help the IRGC man checkpoints, etc.

From the point of view of the American government, Cuba did do harm to America. Eg:

https://thisdayofhistory.com/2025/08/05/august-6-1960-cuba-s...

To many people, America accusing Cuba of theft is hypocrisy. I don't have a strong opinion either way; I think a party can be guilty of 'theft' only to the extent that there's consensus on who owns what.

Hooray! No more camera bump :)

Anybody who remembers the last century knows that any Democrat left of Clinton would have resulted in a President Bob Dole. And at least the Clinton administration tried to give Americans Hillarycare.

  In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true.

Today is different, but people are worse informed. Every online place that an average person visits is a hotbed of fantasy.

That is exactly why I deleted my reddit account years ago. For every factual post there, there were two inaccurate or false posts. I didn't like my head becoming a receptacle for other people's falsehoods.

For some reason, I always assumed the British narration was Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), but now that you quote it, I realize it can't be Calloway. Interesting! The narrator must be someone we never meet.

Cheers. I don't bicker with random internet people.

It's laughable to accuse Europeans of having an 'imperialist mindset' in relation to Ukraine. It's not they who now are gambling with a third World War, it was the Russians who gambled on it when they began seizing territory.

The American cut of the movie has an intro narrated by Joseph Cotton, who played Holly Martins. The wording might differ (since the movie is clearly Holly's first time in Vienna)

Polack jokes, too. Very classy /s

I posted this link partly because there is no better background music to code to than Steve Reich... though how many years remain before humans stop programming, I don't know.

Anthropic's recent post https://anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem seems at odds with this blog post. Am I misinterpreting it, or does it indeed say they configured Claude to do less 'thinking' in order to address a performance issue?

Fair enough. If the comments in question were still editable, I would be happy to replace 'gaslighting' with 'being a bit slippery' or something less controversial.

No worries about 'sounding preachy'; it's a good thing people want to uphold the sobriety that makes HN special.

I'd rather not speak too poorly of Anthropic, because - to the extent I can bring myself to like a tech company - I like Anthropic.

That said, the copy uses "we never intentionally degrade our models" to mean something like "we never degrade one facet of our models unless it improves some other facet of our models". This is a cop out, because it is what users suspected and complained about. What users want - regardless of whether it is realistic to expect - is for Anthropic to buy even more compute than Anthropic already does, so that the models remain equally smart even if the service demand increases.

And still are gaslighting:

  We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium

Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.

It pains me to criticize the UN, since they're the best the world has, but if the UN were more judicious on the conflict, it would help. Eg:

https://independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ban-kimoon-...

  today. I’m aware that Jews and Muslims live in Iran today

That is true, in the sense that there are more than two jews left in Iran.

5x as many Iranian jews live in the USA now. 20x in Israel.

Iran has a population of almost 100 million, and the Hollywood Bowl could seat its jewish population twice over.

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

Happy for Hungary, the EU, the planet. The sooner the world falls out of love with populism and illiberalism, the better.

Bad propaganda contains falsehoods. Good propaganda lies by omission. Great propaganda tells the truth, compellingly.

Edit: on the other hand, great propaganda is probably wasted on time periods like ours. Great propaganda isn't always effective propaganda.

I was curious about the claim so I did a web search for "Roman depiction of birth" and this is the first result:

https://www.worldhistory.org/img/c/p/1200x627/18720.jpg

The mother appears to be sedentary, rather than supine. I doubt I would have noticed that detail had I not read the article.

That is worse.

"The product is disgusting, but there's nothing I can do; I'm only the CEO"

50 years ago, progressive Iranians, predominantly young and educated, made the mistake of collaborating with violent, theocratic rednecks.

After they overthrew the Shah together, the rednecks took over.

It's difficult to bring nuance into the Iranian situation, because the hicks controlling Iran see the world in black and white: they believe they are infallible, and everyone but them - within and outside Iran - is evil.

As a result, they take actions that are difficult for even open-minded people to defend.

Incidentally, only a few days ago, when I heard the IRGC was using child soldiers again, my hunch was that it was only a rumor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47548780 I mention that as evidence that I'm not consumed by irrational hatred here.

Even if "it's just their culture" were a compelling excuse for using children as soldiers, it's not the culture of the majority of Iranians, only a minority of religious extremists who oppress them.

This comment in dripping with elitism. We trusted the rocket scientists and what did that get us? The Challenger disaster. /s