ufmace

You seem to be copy-pasting this around this thread a lot, what's the deal with that?

I would agree that electric is the future, but even if all that works as advertised and we keep making more progress, it's still going to take decades to manufacture the billions of them that will be needed to seriously displace oil. I believe oil will continue to be necessary and relevant for the lifetime of everybody old enough to write posts on this thread.

I believe that it's a physical plant thing. We have spent over a hundred years building hydrocarbon-based energy infrastructure. Much of that is still out there. Wind and solar have made a ton of progress in the last 15 years or so, but it's only really become substantially better financially in the last 5 or so years maybe. It's still going to take decades to actually replace most of that stuff, just as a matter of how fast we can build and install hardware.

Note also that it's a worldwide chart, so it includes developing countries that may not be so quick to jump on projects that are expensive right now even though they'll save a bunch of money in the long term. Though to be fair, some may have a leapfrog effect when it comes to building brand new infrastructure.

Importantly IMO is the extra phishing protection that the UX is really nice if and only if the url matches what's expected. If you end up on a fake url somehow, it's a nice speed bump that it doesn't let you auto-fill to make you think, hold on, something is wrong here.

If you're used to the clunkier workflow of copy-pasting from a separate app, then it's much easier to absent-mindedly repeat it for a not-quite-right url.

I don't think that means anything as the author of the article almost certainly has no clue about anything but what the Government there told him. They're just quoting general knowledge and speculation by other equally-uninformed third parties.

The interesting thing to me is, it seems likely that whichever individual or small group actually is Satoshi must have planted at least a few misdirection false flags like that at some point. But how in the world would you ever tell which ones are that sort of misdirection and which are real?

It did make me think - if he seems nervous under this questioning, it could be because he's actually Satoshi. Or it could also be because he's thinking something like, oh god, if this jerkoff convinces a bunch of people I'm actually Satoshi, all of the businesses I've worked so hard to found will collapse, I might be convicted of crimes around lying about it while founding these businesses, I might get targeted by any number of criminal gangs or even nation-states who will do all kinds of torture to me and my loved ones and will never believe that I'm not actually Satoshi and don't really have a secret stash of a bazillion Bitcoins.

Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.

I think they've been heading that way for a while, and it's only getting clearer.

I've been thinking, and said before, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows users as a captive audience they can exploit for whatever the corporate executives fancy at the moment. It seems more like a gradual transition.

In any case, it seems to be getting more clear that Linux is destined to be the best OS for power-users.

Why should they? It's not the right time for that yet. Letting the price stay high despite renewable prices being lower means it's tremendously profitable to build new renewable sources, so there's lots of incentive for it to be done.

It's worth keeping in mind that the only practical "saving" for the OP will result in not doing the job at all, since this client most likely doesn't actually have the money and never will.

It should be, oh, short-term rush job in a foreign country for a sketchy client? That is most definitely cash up front time. Oh, you can't afford that? Sucks to be you, not going to do it.

I would think if you're a developing country looking to build some domestic semiconductor manufacturing expertise, it'd probably be best to start with something on the easier side. Something with closer to well-known and standard tech that can still be sold on the open market.

> You can upgrade Windows from 1.0 through 11 without Microsoft saying "nah, this is impossible"

Have you tried that lately? It was probably true for Windows 10, but not 11. There is no supported path to install 11 if you don't have the Microsoft-approved hardware with TPM etc, which would certainly include Raspberry Pis. Installing Windows 11 on non-Microsoft-approved hardware seems to require levels of jank at least as bad as anything I've seen in Linux. Advice is all over the place, usually involving full reinstalls, setting random registry keys, running Powershell scripts downloaded from a random Github repo as Admin, or something along those lines. And no telling which if any work at any particular time, since Microsoft is constantly fighting them apparently.

Do you know how we are "pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction"? Genuine question. The only thing I know of is repealing the tax credits.

Personally, I think EVs are neat, but I also think the industry has grown enough already that they should be able to compete with ICE vehicles on as close to a level playing field as can be arranged. Let them beat the ICE industry by making vehicles that are actually better.

Well, if we were going to have government support anywhere, it should be through encouraging L2 charging availability in new homes and apartment buildings, ideally at a more local level.

Thanks, I actually didn't realize that my basically stock Linux install already did this

I can't help but think, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows as something they can leverage to get themselves in front of whatever the latest tech trend is, never mind what it does to their users' ability to get stuff done.

They may say they're backing off now, but it's hard to trust them. Will they just do the same thing with whatever the next tech trend is?

I used to argue in favor of Windows with basically the same argument. But honestly, using Windows nowadays seems to require even more hacking than Linux. Particularly if you don't have the newest hardware made to Microsoft's standards. Or don't want to deal with regular full-screen ads to update to Windows 11, or don't want Copilot jammed into every app.

I installed Linux instead, Fedora specifically, and everything just worked. It actually cleared up some weird hardware issues I had on Windows that I could never manage to track down. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to do any CLI or config file tinkering for anything that wasn't getting an actual CLI app I wanted to use running. Beats the dozens of different registry hacks and powershell scripts downloaded off random Github repos people kept telling me I needed to do to make Windows 11 work and not be too annoying.

I think this is a "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good thing". It's technically possible to get around, but adding more speed bumps in the way of scammers tends to drastically reduce the number of people who get scammed.

I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.

Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.

> nothing actually passes the Turing test

Says who? I had already found this study, published almost a year ago, saying that they do: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

There doesn't seem to be a super-rigorous definition of the Turing Test, but I don't think it's reasonable to require it to fool an expert whose life depends on the correct choice. It already seems to be decently able to fool a person of average intelligence who has a basic knowledge of LLMs.

I agree that we don't really have AGI yet, but I'd hope we can come up with a better definition of what it is than "we'll know it when we see it". I think it is a legitimate point that we've moved the goalposts some.

That seems a bit contrived to me. Okay, that particular place is pretty deeply nested, but it's clearly a regular menu tucked away in there, with a option to show the menu bar. If you turn that on, then those options are half as deep. Or if you don't need to adjust those options, you don't go that deep.

The sibling comment, meanwhile, is complaining about extra space devoted to explicit controls for all of the extra options. Well, you can't have it both ways. If you want to have a lot of features and options, you have to either devote some space in the main UI to them, or have a lot of deeply nested menus like that.

Or I guess you could do a config file somewhere, but IMO that's even worse. If we're going to complain about bad UIs, isn't it even worse than some deeply nested menus to need to open a separate file somewhere else with a separate program and learn whatever config file syntax they happen to use.

Fedora works well with it for me, no complaints. Though I haven't yet used it through a major version update.

The part that always struck me as weird about this stuff is that all of these "agents" with their "personas" are the same baseline LLMs with the same training ultimately, just told to basically pretend they're different. How far can that really get you?

I'm not actually a database engineer with 30 years of experience. If somebody demanded that I pretend to be one, I guess I'd give it a shot, but I would expect any actual employer would be able to tell that I don't have the level of knowledge and experience that you'd expect from somebody like that.

If the base LLM actually has the knowledge of all of these specialties, why can't it just apply them all at once, instead of needing to be told to I guess pretend to be only one of them.

Perhaps anti-oil activists would have been a better term. That seems more plainly true to me.

They might or might not have had more valid cases in their respective pasts. But it doesn't seem right to me to term themselves "trial monitors" when they seem pretty plainly biased for one side of the trial. It would be more okay if they had some pro-oil attorneys on their board too, or called themselves "Greenpeace Defenders" or something.

I know, it's hardly the first or the most egregious case of deceptive naming out there. But it's still worth calling out in my opinion, especially when it it still, at the time of this writing, on the top of the HN thread about this, described as if they were unbiased legal experts.

I don't think it's a money thing really. IIRC the regular XZ creator/maintainer had a regular job and enough money already, and it was more of a burnout thing from dealing with the usual hassles of OSS. Which means what it really needs is to be taken over by an actual business organization, with a team of developers and professional project managers and customer support people etc so no one person gets too burnt out and if anyone does, they have plenty of backup.

If you wrote a science fiction novel around the idea that we make computing devices by blasting fine drops of tin in a vacuum with a laser exactly 3 times at exactly 100,000 drops per second, nobody would believe it. Truth is crazier than fiction.

Why not lean into it instead of becoming a wet blanket? Just look at the trench every few hours or so, and if it gets too deep, tell them about and help them with setting up some shoring.

This gets near something I was thinking about. Most of the numbers seem to assume that injuries, injury severity, and deaths are all some fixed proportion of each other. But is that really true in the context of self-driving cars of all types?

It seems reasonable that the deaths and major injuries come highly disproportionally from excessively high speed, slow reaction times at such speeds, going much too fast for conditions even at lower absolute speeds. What if even the not very good self-driving cars are much better at avoiding the base conditions that result in accidents leading to deaths, even if they aren't so good at avoiding lower-speed fender-benders?

If that were true, what would that mean to our adoption of them? Maybe even the less-great ones are better overall. Especially if the cars are owned by the company, so the costs of any such minor fender-benders are all on them.

If that's the case, maybe Tesla's camera-only system is fairly good actually, especially if it saves enough money to make them more widespread. Or maybe Waymo will get the costs of their more advanced sensors down faster and they'll end up more economical overall first. They certainly seem to be doing better at getting bigger faster in any case.

The best way to understand why it isn't widespread is to spend 10 minutes attempting to use it to actually chat with some people you know. I don't know which issues you'll run into, but it's virtually guaranteed you'll run into a variety of incredibly dumb and inexplicable ones.

Have you checked whether the work laptop's bad battery life is due to the OS, or due to the mountain of crapware security and monitoring stuff that many corporations put on all their computers?

I currently have a M3 Pro for a work laptop. The performance is fine, but the battery life is not particularly impressive. It often hits low battery after just 2-3 hours without me doing anything particularly CPU-intensive, and sometimes drains the battery from full to flat while sitting closed in a backpack overnight. I'm pretty sure this is due to the corporate crapware, not any issues with Apple's OS, though it's difficult to prove.

I've tended to think lately that all of the OSes are basically fine when set up reasonably well, but can be brought to their knees by a sufficient amount of low-quality corporate crapware.

I think a VPN likely hurts more than it helps. Maybe they can't tell your IP address anymore, but they have a ton of ways of tracking through it anyways. It probably hurts more by marking you as someone willing to shell out too much money for snake-oil security products.

It's only discussed in a similarly ambiguous way - like that they know noise is a potential problem that they're working on. Though to be fair, the designers probably have no idea themselves, since apparently nobody has built a prototype engine that could be run at the rated thrust level in a way they could check the real-world noise and vibration on.