100721

Or very far eastern Canada :D

What does “lamence” mean?

all the same morally questionable practices existed under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden.

I’m gonna need a citation on this claim

This is actually fascinating, and simultaneously unsettling. Recommended reading for sure, especially in today’s social and political climate with LLM agents running rampant.

Maybe I’m just groggy with Friday Brain going on, but I’m having trouble understanding what you’re suggesting.

Do you think this was a scam attempt to extract money in the form of reparation donations?

I’m just a lowly dev and don’t have experience with seeing the bills from cloud providers for a whole org.

Can you (or someone) shed some light to help me understand how this would ramp up to millions? Both for curiosity’s sake, and to make sure my self-deployed projects (0 AI, all manually configured) don’t bankrupt me.

That said, my experience in an urban area on the west coast has given me many examples that support this notion that it's not just a housing problem.

You would know more about the situation in west coast cities better than myself, I’ll admit.

What I take issue with is how the anecdotes closely align with certain political talking points - it rings an alarm bell or two, and begs for more concrete sources. Personally, I couldn’t find any reliable sources saying one way or the other.

Anecdotes are highly susceptible to confirmation bias though, along with other biases. It’s one of the reasons propaganda is so effective: our preconceived notions influence how we see and interpret the world around us. This affects me too, I’m not immune to propaganda (2015 me thought the idea of a Trump presidency was “funny” because of the memes and I thought he had zero chance of winning, for example - don’t worry, I’m not American so no votes were cast!)

I appreciate you taking the time to respond with such detail, and you seem to be writing in good faith, but I think this issue is a lot more nuanced than (paraphrasing - not trying to directly attribute a quote to you) “the homeless in west coast cities are there because they cannot function normally in society”.

It’s a sensitive topic for me personally because my family was one of those “sheltered homeless” families for a few years when I was still single-digits of age, and growing up in severe poverty I also met many other homeless people. I can guarantee you, if wealth inequality were not so severe then many people wouldn’t have fallen into drugs and mental health crises to begin with.

Many folks see it as a “chicken or egg” problem, when really, we all know that struggling to make ends meet and being evicted is highly stressful and traumatic. Wealth inequality is the root of many of these tragic stories, and it’s unfair to label everyone in that position as if they’re fully to blame for their situation in life.

But, again, I’m not American and my culture is much more socialist and cooperative. So maybe the unhoused in America truly do fit your descriptions, and I simply have no idea what I’m talking about. :P

In any case, thank you for your thoughtful and insightful replies.

Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization

Sources? This just sounds like cope from a wealthy individual who wants to feel better about not helping the problem.

Filipinos will actively practice out any trace of their accent to sound as white as possible

Oh, so they have strong Swedish accents? Or South African?

On the topic of racism, skin colors don't have a particular sound.

Huh? I exclusively view r/all and its loading fine for me across all devices.

I have been putting my agents on their own, restricted OS-level user accounts for a while. It works really well for everything I do.

Admittedly, there’s a little more friction and agent confusion sometimes with this setup, but it’s worth the benefit of having zero worries about permissions and security.

Huh? The first paragraph literally says they are using LLMs

[ GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — March 28, 2026 ] — CERN is using extremely small, custom large language models physically burned into silicon chips to perform real-time filtering of the enormous data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Does anyone know why they are using language models instead of a more purpose-built statistical model? My intuition is that a language model would either be overfit, or its training data would have a lot of noise unrelated to the application and significantly drive up costs.

Huh? Their words are an accurate, if simplified, description of how they work.

Wasn’t that film explicitly about climate change denial?

It's still really early 2000's! We have over 900 years left :)

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On topic: discussions like these are as old as human discussion forums and communities. I think that the participants each grow and change on an individual level just as much as the community and platform does. I think humans have a hard time identifying how much of their feelings of nostalgia are based in reality.

Maybe the platform has not actually changed in the ways people fear, and instead, peoples' opinions on what is interesting, important, or valuable has changed?

Since this thread has been discussing politics-adjacent things, let's consider Senator John Fetterman from the United States. Mr. Fetterman is notably different today from when he first started his campaign, regarding what he believes is important and valuable. (Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke, which is suspected to have brought about personality changes and shifts in political ideology.)

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I think we, as individuals, should always be focusing our first line of questioning on how _we're_ changing, rather than trying to figure out how the world, or the zeitgeist, or Hacker News, etc. is changing.

Sometimes we outgrow things that we hold dear, and instead of accepting that it's not really the place for us anymore and moving on to a different environment, we try to shape our current environment around our new personality by instituting new rules or adding new features.

Genuinely curious: would you mind please explaining to me how your contributions are more productive than the person you are responding to (read: attacking)?

It reads like you are upset at the poster using "DEI" and projecting your own behaviors onto them ("tedious and unproductive political discourse", "immune from critique or any burden of evidence").

I think it'd be good to keep in mind that Hacker News is mostly populated by a demographic commonly referred to as "Tech Bros" who, for the most part, are here as part of their journey in creating profitable businesses.

For a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.

Web search-based RAG is very different from having something embedded in a model's training data, though.

Let’s define the bot as one that asks LLMs to visualize concepts, then.

Now I’ve argued that the bot would very likely have thought of the same question you did, and my original assertion stands.

Acting as a pass-through for LLMs is logically equivalent to wiring up a bot account.

Would you mind elaborating…?

Unrelated to the topic, it seems awfully unintuitive to name a function ‘poll’ if the result is ‘not polling.’ I’m guessing there’s some history and maybe backwards-compatible rewrites?

One thing worth taking into account is the practice of finding people who actually like the product, and then paying them to write an honest review. I find this to be much closer to ethical than paying exclusively for positive reviews to people who may not have ever used the product, but it has a similar net effect of distorting the sentiment by amplifying a subset of opinions, so still not ideal but at least it’s rooted in honesty.

If you haven’t been vocal about your support of products in general, you wouldn’t show up on the radar for these “opportunities.”

Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them.

What does this mean? What do you mean unique shit? What do you mean when you say you’re trying to draft on the sentiment? What is “them” referring to?

Genuinely. I’m not being (deliberately) obtuse, just trying to follow. Thanks

The ability to harness electricity had not been invented yet, by a few thousand years.

This seems unlikely.

Wow, thank you for this detailed reply! I’ll be checking out some of those resources at lunch today :)

I didn’t take your comment as a dig at all. I’m honestly a little surprised myself that I’ve made it this far with such a flawed understanding.

Did you think they could do it anyway so trying to pass a law to force backdoors to be made is a cover for existing capabilities, or what?

I had to do some quick reading on the ChatControl proposal in the EU.

I see it along the lines of, if they really needed to target someone in particular (let’s not get into who “deserves” to be targeted), then encryption would only be an obstacle for them to have to overcome. But, for the great majority of traffic - like our posts being submitted to HN - the effort of trying to break the encryption (eg, dedicating a few months of brute force effort across multiple entire datacenters) simply isn’t worth it. In many other scenarios, bypassing the encryption is a lot more practical, like that one operation where I believe it was the FBI waited for their target to unlock his laptop - decrypting the drive - in a public space, and then they literally grabbed the laptop and ran away with it.

The ChatControl proposal sounds like it aims to bypass everyone’s encryption, making it possible to read and process all user data that goes across the wire. I would never be in support of something like that, because it sounds like it sets up a type of backdoor that is always present, and always watching. Like having a bug planted in your apartment where everything you say is monitored by some automated flagging system, just like in 1984.

If a nation state wants to spend the money to dedicate multiple entire datacentres to brute forcing my encrypted communications, achieving billions of years of compute time in the span of a few months or whatever, I’m not a fan but at least it would cost them an arm and a leg to get those results. The impracticality of such an approach makes it so that they don’t frivolously pursue such efforts.

The ability to view everyone’s communications in plaintext is unsettling and seems like it’s just waiting to be abused, much in the same way that the United States’ PRISM was (and probably is still being) abused.

Perhaps that is why I was asking for better information.

As someone who’s fairly tech-literate but has a big blind spot in cryptography, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for articles, blog posts, or smaller books on the topic!

My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable. You sound both very knowledgeable on the topic, and very confident in the safety of modern encryption. I’m thinking maybe my understanding is obsolete!