dewarrn1

If AI writes your code, why fuss about the language it writes in?

I'm hopeful that new efficiencies in training (Deepseek et al.), the impressive performance of smaller models enhanced through distillation, and a glut of past-their-prime-but-functioning GPUs all converge make good-enough open/libre models cheap, ubiquitous, and less resource-intensive to train and run.

The premise for this research question is related in part to work from Dr. Eleanor Maguire (who I just learned died last year at only 55) and her team on hippocampal anatomy and careers involving spatial navigation, including taxi drivers. A connection that may be of interest to HN readers: Demis Hassabis was one of Maguire's doctoral students, although he does not appear to have worked on the project most relevant to this study.

Hail u/cperciva.

If you're not interested in the new sets, the core product is readily available. Moreover, enjoy the fact that you can get that bucket of bricks for cheap partly because the expensive shiny high-margin SKUs provide a subsidy.

$499 through Apple Edu: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-neo.

The real question: did he have Claude write this for him?

Had the same thought. NASA already cracked this nut with Apollo; if you’re gonna crack it again and differently, be real sure your solution is better.

Tangential, but Darknet Diaries has been running a "hacker history" series to kick off 2026, starting with this one: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/168/. The "Hackers" movie gets a few call-outs.

Ah, the other AI: Actual Italian. (w/apologies to Davie504)

Presumably with apologies to Steinbeck: “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”

Not your question, but 4xxx-series work seamlessly.

This is a fun example, but now you've got me wondering: has anyone checked on folks who might have been in an Amazon Go store during the outage?

Slightly hyperbolic, gpt-image-1 is better on at least a couple of the text metrics.

Claude Code is^W^W^WEvery LLM is a slot machine.

Yes, it's the Firefox version of Python's GIL.

A “dead airspace”, perhaps?

It's not my area of expertise, but I have seen other estimates that American adults, especially men, are likely to have and report numbers of friends such that the median is in the single digits.

So, in reference to the "reasoning" models that the article references, is it possible that the increased error rate of those models vs. non-reasoning models is simply a function of the reasoning process introducing more tokens into context, and that because each such token may itself introduce wrong information, the risk of error is compounded? Or rather, generating more tokens with a fixed error rate must, on average, necessarily produce more errors?

It sounds like a compelling film. Seeing now that it's produced by Penn & Teller's team, it makes me wonder about this fits into their "juggler vs. magician" dichotomy. The implication of that duo producing the film suggests that they might believe that Vermeer's reputation as an extraordinarily skilled artist ("juggler") might in fact be the result of Vermeer's use of a sophisticated apparatus that tricked patrons and viewers into thinking that he had extraordinary abilities, thus making Vermeer a master faker ("magician"). Or maybe they simply wanted to spur debate.

It's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory.

[0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707

LTX-Video isn't quite the same quality as Wan, but the new distilled 0.9.6 version is pretty good and screamingly fast.

https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video

I'm not saying you're wrong about the EFF's support, but I'm not finding a lot of information that says you're right, either. I tend to think of the EFF as generally (not always) being on the right side of issues in their domain, but if that's not true, or if their donor list makes it seem less likely that it's true, I would be interested to know more.

For reference, I found the following descriptions of EFF's major donors, and I looked at their most recent IRS filing. Nothing jumped out at me, but maybe I don't know where to look.

https://www.eff.org/pages/thank-you-public-foundations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation... https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donee.php?donee=Electronic+F...

A Bond villain.

This is a wonderful project. Many thanks to Jan for sharing it.

Separately, regarding dementia, it is both less and more complicated than many commenters suggest.

From UCSF Neuroscience’s excellent Memory and Aging Center resources:

“Dementia is a general term for any disease that causes a change in memory and/or thinking skills that is severe enough to impair a person’s daily functioning… There are many different types of dementia… Most types of dementia cause a gradual worsening of symptoms over the course of years due to progressive damage to nerve cells in the brain caused by the underlying disease process…” [0]

Even more briefly: dementia is an umbrella term, many diseases can cause dementia, and those diseases may or may not be progressive.

0: https://memory.ucsf.edu/what-dementia

Thanks!

I'll bite: what quantum things can they run on it? Or, what is its utility as a quantum computing device?

Or even non-hereditary information transmission methods...

McConnell, J. (1962). Memory transfer via cannibalism in planaria. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 3, 1-42.

This is cool! We visited the Rijksmuseum while they were doing the photography: automated but still painstaking work.

Creators may disagree.