HN user
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/andrewmutz; my proof: https://keybase.io/andrewmutz/sigs/5elyrq8c_kX2VjZqNmynXisNu6qmf9VQxW4vQV8CfIs ]
From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general.
Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.
The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
This issue isn't specific to the Kindle, you can go and buy books on Apple or Google or Kobo or Barnes and Noble and its the same story.
Many books can only be bought this way. Publishers don't want to sell books through platforms that don't have DRM, because they are scared of piracy.
It would be great if we could have open ebook reader software that could display these books.
eReaders like the Xteink X4 are beautiful but lots of books are impossible to legally read on it. Yes, I know that I can break the DRM, but I think its sad that this is the only path for legitimate purchases.
Is the only way to use it to break the DRM? I wish there was a path to being able to use all these devices with kindle ebooks legally
One man's offensive penetration tool is another mans defensive tool. In the recent HuggingFace/OpenAI incident the safety controls stood in the way of the defenders, not the attackers:
https://www.thestack.technology/hugging-face-hacked-turned-t...
What’s different between “slop” and “bad”
Why do we need anything more than good/bad?
If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?
Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory.
Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
I also think that the people who are complaining loudest about Anthropics pricing and changes are the customers Anthropic is least interested in retaining.
From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.
A tangential observation: the video on the linked page wasn't what I expected. I thought Mistral was a european AI company, so I didnt expect the video to be filmed in San Francisco featuring three people who don't seem to be european.
I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.
It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.
Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.
The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
There is no fixed demand for jobs, nor fixed supply of housing. Immigrant consumption creates a lot of jobs and immigrant labor creates a lot of housing
When a person relocates to a country where their labor is more productive, a large amount of new economic value is created. Much of that value is captured by the migrant through higher earnings, but a lot also accrues to the people in the community they join.
So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country
The worst part of organic produce is that it is worse on two things that matter a lot: climate change and biodiversity.
Most of the negative impact of agriculture on the climate and on biodiversity happens when we convert an acre of land from its natural state to agricultural use. This is much worse for the environment than the presence of pesticides.
Organic produce consistently takes about 20% more land to produce the same amount of food. As a result, choosing organic over traditional means choosing worse outcomes for the climate and worse for biodiversity.
I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors.
But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
Both can be true. They can be charging what the market will bear, and still be charging less than their costs of running it.
Any idea how soon dynamic workflows might be available in Cowork?
I don't agree with this.
But I also found the article really unsatisfying. The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.
Replacing middle management with AI would not work, but using AI to avoid managers needing to have all these meetings would probably work really well. The idea that there's some AI system that has access to all the documents/email/task management systems at the company is a good one, and it could identify situations (like the one in the article) where two projects on opposite ends of the organization are colliding.
Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes that they should could be replaced by an AI system that uncovered situations like the ones mentioned in the article.
This wouldnt replace middle managers, but it might help them do their jobs better.
Claude works in Rails apps extremely well. As the author of this blog points points out, Ruby allows you to get a ton done with minimal coding. Also, Rails uses convention over configuration, making Rails apps even terser.
One hypothesis for the effectiveness of Claude writing Rails apps is its token efficiency.
I ran across this project awhile back that attempts to measure and compare the token efficiency across projects, and Rails does really well:
The idea that Japanese companies provide more stability and lower returns on capital isn't a hypothesis, it's backed up by data
Japanese and American companies have different purposes.
In Japan the corporation primarily provides stable income and employment for society, and secondarily returns on capital invested. In America, corporations primarily provide returns on capital invested and secondarily provide stable income and employment.
This shows up in the data too. Japanese corporations are less likely to go out of business but provide worse investment returns. American corporations provide better investment returns, but the citizens have to deal with layoffs.
Most citizens would prefer stability to growth, but I think the tradeoff has a lot of downstream consequences.
Apple has absolutely been dragging its feet on RCS. The DoJ explicitly accused them of degrading cross-platform messaging to protect their smartphone dominance. Internal Apple communications revealed that executives were worried that bringing iMessage to Android would "remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones."
Apple is clearly the bad guy on the RCS issue.
Hacker news holds Apple and Google to different standards, so I doubt this post will get much traction. (I'm still angry about how I must use an iPhone if I want to be able to text high quality video to people I don't know very well)
The story is only trending because it’s an AI model and the internet is anti-ai right now. It’s a double standard.
It’s like how people are outraged that electricity is being used in data centers to power AI models. When you do the math, the power consumption is far, far less than all the other things you do all day without thinking twice. But again, anti-AI double standard
I switched to the Kobo ecosystem about a year and a half ago and have been pretty happy. While the book availability and store aren't at complete parity, I've only had one situation where I couldnt get the book I wanted and it was available on the Amazon store (and I read a lot of books).
Modern discourse happens on social media where fear and outrage drive engagement, which drives virality. We have become convinced in a short amount of time that AI is going to take all the jobs and eventually kill us all because that's what people click on.
Any voices or studies that present the case for "useful technology that will improve productivity and wages while not murdering us" don't get clicked on or read.
You say that, but I've created plenty of production bugs because two different implementations diverge. Easier to avoid such bugs if we just share the implementation.
If you own a painting company with three employees you are a CEO and fall in the top executives category. You may or may not make 100k a year.
I use this library in production and love it!
Yes exactly. RCS exists but unless an iPhone user goes and turns it on it won't work. Which means no one has it turned on.