Remind me again why I should buy an internet-connected refrigerator?
451 karma · joined November 29, 2025
Someone who's been paid a couple of quid to pretend to have a medical condition can easily miss things, and is unlikely to be anywhere near as invested in drilling down to the correct solution as someone who's really suffering.
Another outcome from the study was that the LLMs could do better with the right people driving them. That's not news.
Uhhhh, even in the US, we're not talking "thousands" here.
> So… a telephone psychic?
Look, at one level, you can think of LLMs as search with a sometimes useful probability engine sitting on top of it.
As someone who had multiple doctors do their damnedest to kill me on multiple occasions, I was very grateful to have google search back in the day, and you bet your bottom dollar I use LLMs to help me with health issues today. They are often better than most doctors.
Does that put me at risk of doing something stupid? Only if I don't do further due diligence.
Wouldn't it be simpler to simply protect a bitcoin private key with the encryption that you are challenging people to break?
Off the top of my head, the only downside I can see is that someone could drain the wallet without publishing the key, but people like to brag, so it seems unlikely to be a problem in practice.
I have no idea how or why you would think I think this, since what I wrote was exactly the opposite of this, e.g. "It's only intrinsically flawed if you expect absolute perfection" and "It has been accepted since before any of us were born that there is no such thing as perfect physical security."
In any case, if you think that every piece of information that ordinary humans want to protect is worth it for nation-states to waste their million-dollar attacks on, we inhabit totally different realities.
And yet, there are many pieces of information that ordinary humans want to protect that many nation states would easily throw thousands of dollars at.
In other words, the fundamentals behind security are the same as it ever was.
As is your comment.
> And it's the wrong lesson.
It's only the wrong lesson if you believe that making it more difficult for governments to seize and decrypt their own citizens' mobile phones with impunity is not a valid goal.
> the security model for trusted hardware is intrinsically flawed.
It's only intrinsically flawed if you expect absolute perfection.
The fact that some math-based protections may be theoretically better than physical protections does not obviate the utility of physical protections, whether we are discussing computers or phones, or houses or cars.
It has been accepted since before any of us were born that there is no such thing as perfect physical security. Even your putative perfect cryptographic security still relies on the physical security of the plant holding the keys.
I can well believe that I am an outlier here. Maybe not everybody else believes that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zephen#49748843
> without any subconscious idea those things are people.
Right, but there is a subset of anthropomorphism that relates to sentient beings, which is what I was trying to get at. Being angry at something is one thing; wanting to immediately destroy it in anger is possibly another.
I will admit I don't know the exact feelings involved, because I generally don't have them. The closest I come is the anger I feel at the designers of IVR systems that are too stupid to answer your questions and too obstinate to connect you to a human. I admit to yelling at those, but honestly part of that is that I have read that some of them are designed to sense frustration in users and connect you faster to an agent in some cases. But I have no idea how true that is, or whether it's just like pressing the completely impotent "close door" button on an elevator.
Smell whatever you want; it's a free country.
The "machines like me" is not a humble brag. It's an observed phenomenon, not just by me.
The "I'm different in how I react to them" probably doesn't put me at odds with the entire population, but certainly puts me at odds with a lot of individuals I have witnessed.
If you read my other comments, you'd see me contrasting myself with people who get angry with machines. I don't do that.
For whatever reason, I reserve anger for sentient beings who I believe are trying to fuck with me. That has its own set of problems, but I never have the problem of destroying inanimate objects in anger.
> So… you think yourself “different”
Yes.
> while acting like everyone else does
That's the point. I know for a fact that not everybody acts like me, never mind having the same facility with machines as I do.
Well, it may have been an overstatement, but not by much. Look, I have anger issues, but I never get angry at things because they are never trying to hurt me, and nothing good can come of it. I could probably fix most remote control issues (e.g. bad battery contact), but not after it's been smashed.
I also tend to feel the same way about, e.g., a rabid dog or vermin. Get rid of them, but not in anger.
I remember watching my brother get frustrated with a dysfunctional remote control. He threw it forcefully enough at a stone fireplace to shatter it.
From my perspective, that, in and of itself, is a mild form of anthropomorphism — trying to inflict pain on the object.
But are you happy handing over your notes documents to mass aggregators of information?
But frankly, I mostly use (greenfield, non-remembering) LLMs directly to counteract the enshittification of search brought on by attempts to use AI to remember things about me (and especially to sell me things).
This works well for me because (a) I'm usually using my desktop, and (b) I'm a touch-typist. I want to say that my search results have gotten back to where they were a decade or more ago by doing this, even though I often have to give a couple of prompts in order to get the LLM to provide me a useful link.
I find it interesting. For most of my life, I have gotten on well with (well-designed) machines. I'm the sort of guy who, when they bring me in to show me what's broken, it works in front of me.
Maybe I get on with well-designed machines better than people. Because people are never well-designed. So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy. But I never confuse any of my machines for people.
Case in point: Gemini just asked me "Where should we start?". When I asked it if that turn of phrase was used by the creators to invite the users to anthropomorphize the model, it's first paragraph was:
Yes, to a significant extent. While system designers rarely state their goal as "making users believe the AI is a living being," tech companies deliberately design conversational agents to evoke social and relational instincts.
You don't really think they added all that circuitry and a cell connection just to collect odometer information, do you?
> how is that causing the owner an issue?
Welp, it was a huge issue for a lot of owners when GM OnStar started sharing real-time driving data with insurance companies.
Supposedly they're stopping that, but a lot of the damage is done.
I read this as:
"Removing the fuse that provides power to the telematics module can stop data collection from a vehicle, but the real issue is that the putative owner is the only one who isn't instantly privy to all of the collected data."
In any case, the complaint above was obviously about AI usage, and there are a lot of good reasons to use AI for editing your words, starting with (for example) if you're not a native speaker.
> BTW, if you've been reading my responses you'll see that I've landed in the same "get rid of tab characters" camp, because while they're nice in theory, they cause pain in practice.
I had to go back and look. You obviously have more patience than I do for this sort of debate. :-)
I don't think people who fall down on the tab side of the debate have thought things through. Tabs are about alignment, of course, but why did we transport the typewriter alignment to printers? (Many printers had escape sequences that let you set the tab spacing.) Arguably, it was to save computation time, storage space, data transmission time, and even (for faster printers) to make your print job come out faster. People forget how precious all those were.
Today, a tab key on a keyboard is a perfectly cromulent method to get to your next alignment boundary, but there's a reason that every single usable code editor lets you program the tab key to emit a certain number of spaces.
He had to also mark the memory as inaccessible for code loads.
Which, honestly is kinda stupid. Because nobody asked the processor to start executing there. It just took it upon itself to try to start executing there, later decided that was a bad thing, and then borked itself.
People talk about how terrible x86 is, but honestly, one of the reasons that x86 won for decades was because of making things that programmers did that might be suboptimal still work, even if a bit slowly (misaligned data accesses, for example). ARM does that now for that specific case, but didn't before 2002.
So there's an implementation tradeoff for whether you decide to spend transistors to reduce the number of sharp edges on the tool. Obviously ARM just doesn't give a shit about this particular sharp edge.
No, I vehemently disagree with most of what you wrote. We certainly agree on basic things that tabs do not have a fixed width, and that a "compiler never has any control over (source code) display." (What a bizarre idea; whoever said it did?)
> I'd dispute that the compiler needs to care about where your editor places the left margin.
This isn't just about editors. I well remember green-bar.
> As long as the prefix remains consistent across a given level of indentation then there's no cause for concern.
No, if someone uses 8 character tabs, and then wants to space over half a tab for visual reasons, things completely break. We probably agree that's wrong, and that the answer is some variant of the answer to "Doc, it hurts when I do this" and I maintain the answer is to dispense with tabs completely.
Look the tabs-vs-spaces war is as old as the big-endian/little-endian war, and I am probably older than you. We'll probably never convince each other of any of this. Have a good day.
Sure, but (a) the speculation is supposed to be transparent; and (b) ARM's response to a failure in speculative execution is arguably broken.
> The Armv8/9-A architecture reference manual
Sure, but before then marking memory as not readable would make it non-executable, and also mostly before then there was no or minimal speculation.
> then your code is not "perfectly good and correct".
Certainly it won't work on that machine. It might have worked perfectly well on prior machines, and we could argue all day about how reasonable ARM's implementation decisions were, but I will merely say that a documented flaw is, in fact, still a flaw.
When it's done incompetently as on this ARM implementation, then you can't even run perfectly good and correct code, because the CPU will attempt speculative execution on a location that you never asked it to execute code at, and then bork itself when it realizes that can't possibly work.
Naturally, this is the sort of problem that requires tedious dissection of what exactly happened, and copious amounts of alcohol.
> What business does a compiler have worrying about display width?
The business of the compiler is to insure that code that it deems acceptable is not ambiguous to different users. Since people can set their own tab spacing, display of tabs is, in an indentation-sensitive language, inherently ambiguous.
> What if I choose to program in a variable width font?
As long as the spacing of any prepended whitespace doesn't arbitrarily change depending on the phase of the moon, the compiler shouldn't (and Python doesn't) give a rat's ass about your display preferences.
The only important thing here is that the location of the left margin on every line is meaningful, both to the compiler, and to any viewers of your code.
Uhhh, no. Sure, it's posited by people who feel they are are forced to use it, but it's basically unlearning other syntax.
Here's a study about people with no experience. They do better with python:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262256894_An_Empiri...
When the scala language made whitespace optional, it was very divisive, but now it's extremely well accepted.
For a start, that's effectively the premise it's sold on. And for another thing, if it's not contributing to the kind of thinking that would help with that job, what is it other than another esoteric game?
Seldom, if ever, is anybody restrained from "engaging in creative activity." As opposed to making public the results of their purported creativity.
> I don't consider that to be fine, either. There is a time and place for sales pitches; my front porch ain't it.
I don't consider it fine, personally, but I have been writing from a strictly legal standpoint. That line, as some idiots have found to their chagrin, does not allow you to shoot strangers who show up at your door.
Just as you can say whatever you want, but facebook/twitter/reddit/whoever is not required to give you a soapbox, you can download this software and make whatever changes you want, but nobody is required to give a shit about your proposed changes.
This statement is mendacious, at best. I have explained that HTML has fuck-all to do with layout. I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
Here, check out what the W3C has to say about it:
> Because HTML conveys meaning, rather than presentation, the same page can also be used by a small browser on a mobile phone, without any change to the page. ... But it goes further than just differences in screen size: the same page could equally be used by a blind user using a browser based around speech synthesis, which instead of displaying the page on a screen, reads the page to the user, e.g. using headphones. Instead of large text for the headings, the speech browser might use a different volume or a slower voice.
(Emphasis in the original.)
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#semantics-2
Also, check out the ACID series of specifications which require and always use CSS, because otherwise, there is no mandate on how a browser should display stuff.
And, just for completeness, here are a couple of quotes from Tim Berners-Lee:
> HTML should convey the structure of a hypertext document, but not details of its presentation. This was the only way to get it to display reasonably on any of a very wide variety of different screens and sizes of paper.
> The separation of presentation from structure is a fundamental principle of the Web. HTML documents represent the logical structure of the document; style sheets provide formatting instructions.
Now, I will grant you during the browser wars of the 90s when everybody was trying to get ahead, some layout elements were stupidly added to HTML, and copied by other browsers. But these came nowhere near close to being definitive layout descriptions, and since at least 1997, the W3C has advocated for separating content into HTML, and presentation into CSS.