Hasz

Very impressed at net cost. I used to run a small ecom business targeting total prices in the range of $3-10. At $3, payment processing is nearly 11-12% of costs, which is absurd, more if you amortize the occasional chargeback/fraud. Lightning can do it for <<0.1% net cost even at the low end, which is incredible. There are plenty of these kinds of vendors on eBay, Aliexpress etc that would be willing to adopt with a bit of help.

For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken

Because it isn't about CSAM, IMO. You see this with plenty of social issues, notably firearms ownership. The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc)

The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.

feature velocity >> feature stability.

Core libs/software have never been better, eg I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before.

If it has a UI and targeted at consumers though? Bug city.

Holy smokes is the browser versions of PPT, OneNote, word etc buggy, I could not believe that was an actual released product. Random page crashes, refresh loops, etc, all for the crime of using firefox on a mac. The bottom of their test matrix sure, but not exactly netscape on windows XP.

Here's an idea for you -- property evaluation. It's not hyper-specific to your monitoring system, but it would be very interesting to understand before buying a house:

1. How loud the neighbhorhood is over time periods, eg sat night vs tues morning 2. air quality, enviromental factors, etc. 3. What percentage of vehicles/people/devices are net-new (over a time period) versus recoccuring, as identified by MAC.

I would personally pay in the low hundreds to understand overall loudness levels for a house I am about to buy, although I am fairly sensitive to sound. My wife would probably pay for the new-new people metrics.

IMO, you could charge a per-device report and deploy a unit for a week, much like a home inspector report. It would give you a revenue stream on the buy or sell side, and let you own your devices as you iterate on the sensor package.

Anyways, just my 2c, gl with your PoC.

found this showing the grooming process, apparently actually getting the mite is tricky!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpdmDr7da6U

anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

close enough imo

any apparently 400 voters too.

Agentic loops are being promoted by the same people selling tokens, abstracting away the cost per token, and doing everything in their power to obfuscate costs.

I think a senior dev/architect + some good models is still the goated combination.

Generating code and building features, even before AI, was never the issue. Stability, knowing what to build when, and boring business problems (licensing, distribution, sales, etc) were the limits.

So the only ingredient that’s doing anything in that bottle of DayQuil makes up just 2% of the bottle: the roughly 8 grams of acetaminophen

this argument makes very little sense. Plenty of very potent drugs are in the single digit mg range in a tablet that weights hundreds of mg.

More importantly, as always, it is a problem of incentives. There is no strong, commercial entity focused on removing ineffective drugs from the market, but plenty of commercial pressure to keep them. The FDA has zero incentive to clean house. The magic hand of the market is supposed to be consumers choosing not to buy these drugs because they are ineffective, but for many reasons (choice, placebo effect, basic scientific literacy) this does not happen.

I don't know what the most effective entity is. I cannot personally imagine a commercial structure to support this, but perhaps one could be built.

Disappointing to see you downvoted on hacker news of all places. Cmon, have some ambition.

A bunch of people here have no idea how bad the water crunch is. The oogala has been overdrawn for decades, and is a major source of agriculture water for much of the west and Midwest.

CO, UT, AZ, CA, NV etc all dramatically overdraw the Colorado river snopack and will have a reckoning soon enough. The west is also prone to mega droughts, making the problem much worse

Building a $100bn pipeline to irrigate the west absolutely should happen. We can pump it with miles of solar power, build enormous desalination plants, dramatically increase agricultural productivity and provide water to fight the heating effects of global warming.

bah, bait.

You Can Only Change Yourself

This is a good reason to argue with people! Forcing yourself to look critically at your own positions via debate is a key self-improvement method. Simply not engaging and never having a back-n-forth is no way to improve. Feedback, critical self-evaluation, and more feedback.

Ofc, that's not encouragement to flame people on the internet or in-person.

An unpopular opinion for this site probably, but all the same arguments apply to gun control and civil liberties in general.

In the united states, the first amendment (what this post is primarily concerned about) and the second amendment are equally important rights, and we should be just as judicious about applying restrictions to the second as the first.

Instead, you see attacks on the 2nd in the name of "safety, verification, age assurance. A small step to protect children". The exact same playbook used against civilian gun ownership will be rolled out against the first amendment, the 4th amendment, etc.

Civil rights and protections should be expanding, not contracting, and the primary focus point for the last 30 years (and the playbooks that will be used elsewhere) are being tested on the second amendment.

Mitchell Hashimoto, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. What a cool dude. Much respect!

you should be putting in conduit -- either smurf tube, emt, sch40, or similar. can pull whatever, and more importantly, if a cable is damaged by an overly zealous gorilla during installation, it can easily be fixed and replaced.

In terms of ICP, there is a wonderful underbelly of scraper/drop/deliberate automation evasion resellers for basically every consumer product niche -- think shoes, watches, anything limited-edition, etc. These people mostly are building bots and constantly in a coy cat and mouse game with the sites they buy from to avoid blocks.

Not only could this help them keep up with the new security features and redesigns, but they are more than willing to pay for a product that meaningfully improves overall success rate. You should look on twitter/discord for these kinds of groups, they are "reseller"-type communities.

I think this is fine? Code used to be very expensive to generate, now it is cheap. Building glue logic between well-defined, well-documented APIs has never been easier or faster. There is a time and place for throwaway code that quickly automates a task. It is fast food to fine dining -- not everything needs to be a Michelin star experience.

However, as always, AI usage is a matter of taste. Including your style rules in the prompt matters. Introduce new paradigms/tools/code into the main codebase because they solve a business problem, not because they are technically interesting. Careful development does not break 7 things to introduce one new feature, etc.

new session. It's easy to lead a model into getting the response you want, deliberately or accidently.

The point is not to literally win an argument (it doesn't matter), it is to use the model like a partner to poke holes in your own understanding. Once it's poked a hole, it has served its purpose. Plus, you eventually run out of context or the model trails off into babbble.

Advertising is fine (not great), especially when highly targeted and relevant. Spam, misleading, or predatory advertising is not.

Counterpoint, I think this is true for some archetypes of people, but certainly not everyone. I personally use it like the socratic method. I am an intermediate user, I spend a ton of time with LLMs at work and personally, both prompting and letting some crappy agents try to automate boring work. I primarily use Gemini and ChatGPT models, along with some Chinese smaller weight models (eg qwen) locally.

If you treat the model like an excellent bluffer, it has never been more fun to challenge a model. To me, there is something deeply intellectually satisfying about "proving" it incorrect, and I like being deeply critical of what the model spits back out. I find that refinement process (with the constant sycophancy turned down in the system prompt) creates a really good loop of critical evaluation that would be hard to get in anywhere else. You can treat it just like the Socratic method, but instead of a benevolent teacher, you get a probabilistic bullshit artist. Lots of fun, highly recommend.

save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill

Mentioned in the article, but it cracks me up that both openai and anthropic are utilizing fairly traditional enterprise GTM plans segmented by verticals.

So many startups trying to automate sales, but somehow the two biggest frontier labs have decided that the best GTM strategy is firmly human-in-the-loop.

Cadence and Ansys have entered the chat. A bunch of other highly-specialized engineering software has entered the chat. Licenses are on the order of 10-100k/seat.

For a pretty funny comment about pricing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/chipdesign/comments/1ajrli2/cadence...

I have UC and will get colonoscopies to confirm it is well-controlled for the foreseeable future. It also increases risk of colorectal cancer, something I am actively thinking about. Rates of UC, IBD, and similar digestive issues are up across the board, also for a mixed and seemingly inscrutable set of reasons.

IMO, the fundamental issue for preventative screening is there is basically no amount of money I would not part with (of my money, the insurer's money, or private debt) to not die. I expect this is true for most people, and it makes preventative screening a tricky topic. In recommending screening for those >x age, you will miss some detectable, preventable and treatable cancer risk for those <x age, purely for cost. No one wants to be explicit about that though!

I think the only way out of that uncomfortable conversation is making screening so cheap via automation that you can basically run it for very low incremental cost as often as individual risk tolerance permits. This would be paid for on the back of earlier interventions vs late-stage, expensive interventions.

Aw man, what about hashcat or LOIC? Maybe a bit too new for this article

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

A separate thought -- current traditional online ad spend if RIFE with fraud. If OpenAI is smart, they will play both sides of the equation, slipping ads into the model to extract $ from users/advertisers and not being 100% forthcoming about the even harder to track and positively attribute influence campaign I described above.

Agree, there does not have to be a smoking gun. Current and previous attempts are just ham-fisted.

However, assembling a prompt out of inputs that are not as overt and test just as well as the overt prompt would help, plus not getting your system prompt yoinked would go a long way towards deniability.

Lol I am sure OpenAI has a crack GTM team that's already in deep with the 3 letter agencies.

DARPA has probably been going after this since Attention is all you need.

How do you say if an LLM is biased? I don't think there is any way to explain (in a way comprehend-able by humans) how the various weights shake out.

So you test it like a black box, but IMO that suffers from the same pollution any of the other tests (coding ability, math ability, w/e) that currently suffer from, except it's even harder to evaluate objectively.

huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor

I don't think so. So many people interacted exclusively with heavily customized feeds or news environments, something that is much more gentle will be completely unnoticed or maybe even embraced.

most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda

See all the people unironically using "@grok is this true?" It doesn't have to just be government propaganda (eg did Nixon break into Watergate?), it is more about shaping the boundaries of a conversation, framing, etc.

You seem to be envisioning some kind of a world where people don't access the news or social media directly, but it is somehow passed through some kind of LLM transformation filter.

I envision a world where most people take the path of least resistance. They will not explicitly sign up for it, but will gradually shift to reading the easily digested stuff first. Look how popular tiktok is, the popularity of summarized info, etc. In that summarization and aggregation, there is plenty of room to steer a conversation or influence thought, especially over a large audience.

There is nothing here that will be an overt smoking gun, just a systematic bias towards a particular idea, thought, etc. Hard to prove and even harder to know it's happening.

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda.

It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.

If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me than being able to control the discussion, the overton window, and the prevailing narratives. LLMs are a very low cost way to do that, can be tailored at the individual level (unlike most current TV news, personal "feeds" etc) and have the benefit of a huge volume of context.

The models are effectively black-box weights and are resistant to bias-tests. IMO, a key development will be having an "overlay" of weights to apply on top of a "clean" world model that is tailored to whatever interests can pay for it. Being able to serve that overlay dynamically, or atleast per-user is the killer app.