Delphiza

Somewhere along the way, consoles lost where they fit into the 'living room space'. The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well. Gears of War, Halo and others used to be a good way to to spend time with your children. The Wii had all ages playing together. Now, all that you can do is play Minecraft together. I was watching my (adult0 daughter play the new Subnautica, and would like to have joined in without having to go to a different room.

Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.

If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.

I had to do an age check in the UK recently. There were various options (credit card, face scan, etc). The one that I chose was email address. My email address has been around long enough to vote, so I am that old. It seems like a good heuristic. If your email address is, say, 10 years old, you are likely to be old enough to create an account.

I will get downvoted by people suspicious of handing over a lot of personal data, but we do have GDPR laws, and they're not getting me to install a proctopod (tm). Giving someone my email address to verify my age is not a big deal. They're getting my email address to create an account anyway.

The practicalities of implementing 'good enough' age verification, where the website can prove that they conformed to an acceptable approach, do not require giving up all or significant freedoms. Maybe we get to something similar to DNS verification where you need to create a dummy TXT record in an already verified account.

Social media platforms are offloading detection of harmful content and algorithms to UK parents.

What kind of class teaches 'tech-illiterate' parents to help their children not succumb to a multi-trillion dollar industry pushing out addictive and damaging content? It should be easy to develop such classes right? Maybe dust off the classes for 'health-illiterate' parents that were needed to stand up to the tobacco and alcohol industries? </s>

If the only benefit of space-based datacentres is a hedge against infrastructure attacks in a world war then we are in an awful place.

I'm not disagreeing with you but peace is far more prosperous for humanity than blowing the worlds' retirement funds on datacentres-in-space as a military endeavour.

An curious example where an academic at full-time at Harvard is obviously less qualified than millions of people that live in 15-minute cities all around the world. Maybe he should spend less time researching urban planning, and more time doing field work.

It was only really the US that was left with the legacy of installed fibre.

The 2000 crash left a lot of broken economies worldwide. Many non-US stock markets benefitted from the tech stock feeding frenzy without the investment actually being used to build anything.

If the AI bubble pops, a handful of US megacorps may be left with good models, datacentres and other assets, but the economic shocks will be felt around the world.

https://minireference.com/

"The No Bullshit Guide to Math and Physics"

Oh the sad irony!

I have to work with ISO-purchased pdf documents that are heavily DRM-controlled. I can only open them on two PCs with a plugin that only works in Acrobat reader. It is so closed and unusable.

I am surprised that people are surprised by this finding, and support your position.

Anecdotally, doctors get things wrong quite frequently. Almost everybody has a bad medical diagnosis/advice story. The amount of reference material that a doctor needs to know off-hand and the data that they are given to make a diagnosis makes it a really difficult job. They also seldom have the ability to know whether their diagnosis/treatment worked, so have a limited ability to 'learn' from outcomes. (I did some work for cancer research and one of the most difficult problems was trying to get 'end of treatment' data because the end of treatment was often an unknown, to the researchers, death).

The ability to have a 'prompt' that includes lab data is likely to be better than the opinions of a doctor that only has one person's professional experience, limited ability to interpret 'prompts', and needing map it to an in-memory conditions database.

Our company made a 'bet' that energy management, sustainability, clean energy and whatnot would become a big thing. This was around the time of COP26 (2021) where there seemed to be a societal drive for reducing carbon emissions and a general acceptance that climate change was a thing. We employed young and enthusiastic sustainability consultants, we run a successful project to reduce energy consumption in polymer manufacturing, we build product that worked. That part of our business has shut down completely.

Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.

The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.

There is a little bit of a political kerfuffle underway in the UK regarding police being overcautious in banning a group of supporters for a football (soccer) match. The political focus has brought some awkward evidence gathering to light that may not have been noticed with something more mundane.

What is interesting to HN is that the police may have used AI summaries to determine the risk, and the AI/Search gave them the wrong information. Essentially they relied on Google or copilot (it is not clear which) to inform them of a riot at a match that didn't even take place. Police intelligence relying on public search and AI that is hallucinating is probably as common as it is worrying.

Money, mostly

In my experience, marketers wanted quick and catchy copy to post on linked-in and copywriters obliged. It reached a point where the content was irrelevant. You just had to get something posted on linked-in and get engagement. It was all slop long before AI came along. Nothing useful is posted (to linked-in) because the quality of the posts has been so low for so long that you don't even notice that it is turned into AI slop. All corporate 'news' and 'blog' pages are the same. Copywriters left us a long time ago.

This is how the world ends. Administrators on both sides being replaced by AI and consuming all the worlds available compute arguing with each other about healthcare bills.

The 'unrestricted web' from your youth did not have you uploading 8k video of you performing sexual acts that both landed up on pedo sites and was used for blackmail (the threat sending to the whole school). Children are getting roped, not into gramps' porno collection, but sophisticated networks that financially exploit naivety of children in a shocking manner that simply did not exist 10+ years ago. My daughter tried to commit suicide as a result of getting caught up in pedo rings that trawled Roblox. For visibility, I'll spare you the downvote, but you are wrong... things are very different from 'back in the day'

We would expect the 'city' to police the illegal cigarette sellers, and vote them out if they didn't.

I try to comment on Roblox whenever it comes up as my daughter was pulled into a grooming pedo gang through Roblox.

Read some of the comments from a HN thread from 3 years ago where HN parents insist that they are able to properly educate and self-censor. Enough people don't care (enough), despite Roblox being called out all the time by people with big platforms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754#32015542

I am shocked that Roblox has not been shut down, not by regulators, but by parents flat-out denying access. All evidence suggests that yes, it is that bad.

I think that a lot of people will still support Brexit. Leaving the EU allows a (future) government to do a lot of stupid things. Throwing out good fiscal policy, eroding human rights, aggressively stopping boats or changing migration rules, reversing climate change regulation. A lot of people believe, or will be led to believe (because previous governments were hamstrung by the EU), that those stupid ideas are actually quite good ideas.

Brexit was necessary for those ideas to be implemented. An individual's view on whether those ideas are good or not will correlate with their continued support of Brexit.

It is the financial risk that is obvious. The big players are struggling to show meaningful revenue from the investment. Because the investment is so high, the revenue numbers need to be equally high, and growing fast. The 'correction' is when (ok, if) the markets realise that the returns aren't there. The worldwide risk is that AI-led growth has been a large chunk of the US stock market growth. If it 'corrects' US growth disappears overnight and takes everyone down with it. It is not an issue about the usefulness of AI, but the returns on investment and the market shocks caused by such large sums of money sloshing around one market.

Also reported in the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/08/bank-of-eng...

For non-brits, Bank of England the UKs central bank and is a lot like the US Fed. Their comments carry a lot of weight and do impact government policy.

Not enough central banks were making comments about the sub-prime bubble that led to the 2008 crisis. Getting warnings about a possible AI bubble by a central bank is both significant and, in performing the functions of monetary and financial stability for a country, the prudent thing to do.

I agree. You have to be a certain age to remember that a big part of Microsoft "Longhorn" was WinFS (Windows File System), which was intended to completely rework storage into a relational file system (or object-oriented depending on your view). "Longhorn" was supposed to do away with NTFS and failed miserably at that objective. I believe that WinFS delayed things considerably and eventually didn't ship with Vista.

Microsoft Longhorn's failure to be the next big thing was largely due to the bad implementation of a storage subsystem. The result was Windows Vista, which was derided as a bad OS (at least until Windows 8). Due to that history, I would not name any file system 'Longhorn'. It may not be the same as naming a cruise ship 'Titanic', but you wouldn't name it 'Iceberg' either.

Putting in roundabouts as a default so many years ago (as described in the article) makes a huge difference the the road infrastructure in the UK. They take up a lot more space, but the lack of stop-start traffic light intersections makes a completely changes how people move around. Bigger, more complex roundabouts do have traffic lights, but straight-up road intersections with traffic lights are the exception.

Upvoted. I would assume so, because male politicians like buying guns and stuff. They need data to know where to point them.

Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.

The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."

Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is more of a study on economic development, and not really useful for personal or localised health advice. It observes that economically developed population groups may be more sedentary, but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) than daily activity.

In Excel formulas everything is a function. IF, AND, OR, NOT are all functions. It is awkward and goes against what software devs are familiar with, but there are probably more people familiar with the Excel IF function than any other forms. Here is an example taken from the docs... =IF(AND(A3>B2,A3<C2),TRUE,FALSE)

OpenAI is locked into _someone's_ compute resources... the one that is the cheapest. AFAIK OpenAI doesn't have much (any?) of their own hardware. With the mega-clouds buying up all the GPUs and building datacentres, you have to 'partner' with someone. Most likely the one that gives you the biggest discounts. The amount of compute that OpenAI needs dwarfs almost any other consideration.

memmaker - a cheat, but it is still in my quick-access memory.