evil-olive

How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?

yes, an LLM can write you a web crawler.

whose hardware are you going to run it on? what is the bill for that storage and compute going to look like, just to get to a baseline where you can answer a single general-purpose query?

Google famously sells ads to subsidize its search product. how are you going to bootstrap your ad revenue? and how much capital are you going to burn through while you do that?

How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?

many open-source clones of GDocs / GSuite already exist. many predate the LLM era and were human-written.

can your LLM slop-fork them? certainly.

but those existing clones already have a niche marketshare compared to Google's behemoth. what reason do you have to believe that yours will be any different?

How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?

hoo boy this one is the most detached from reality of them all.

for what hardware?

iPhones are famously locked-down, so you're probably going to be running on Android.

you can fork AOSP and call it Diordna if you want. you could even use good ol' search & replace to save some money on tokens doing the rename.

or, do you want to run it on your own custom hardware? head over to Shenzhen with a binder full of ChatGPT printouts showing your hardware design?

and again, how much capital are you going to burn through, in order to have your first "could be sold to a real customer" quality device?

The energy would be better spent on zoning and building code reform.

you've constructed a false dichotomy here.

the government of a city with ~8 million people is capable of doing multiple things at the same time.

US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections - 613 points, 305 comments, 14 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48720924

The goal is to make Postgres easier to change from the inside

uh-huh, sure.

you want to show off "look what the LLM can do / look what I burned a bunch of tokens on"?

you want to brag about how your LLM-generated slop is somehow more maintainable than the original because blah blah blah Rust?

here [0] is the version history of Postgres. pick a version from the past. let's say 14.x because it's the most current that's still under active support.

have your LLM implement version parity with 14.x. show off how it passes all the tests blah blah blah.

then have it upgrade your codebase to parity with 15.x, implementing whatever new features and bugfixes that includes.

and have it generate an automated test that demonstrates upgrading an actual database from LLM-14.x to LLM-15.x and verifying there's no data loss or corruption. maybe even multiple such tests, if you're feeling fancy.

then lather, rinse and repeat with 16, 17, and 18.

and show off the diffs of each version. does the LLM rewrite a huge pile of already-working code in the process of each version upgrade? does it introduce new latent bugs in the process - the kind of things the existing test suite didn't think to explicitly test for?

"I took a static snapshot of code and converted it to another static snapshot of code" is meaningless. all you're doing is bragging about having more money than good sense.

the stability and trustworthiness of software like Postgres does not come from a one-time snapshot showing tests passing. it comes from the engineering process that produces the software and its test suite.

oh, and for shits and giggles, because this same test was so illuminating with the Bun "rewrite" into Rust, here is the file with the most unsafe blocks in the codebase:

    > rg -c unsafe crates/backend/parser/gram_core/src/convert_ddl.rs
    128
    > wc -l crates/backend/parser/gram_core/src/convert_ddl.rs
    2055 crates/backend/parser/gram_core/src/convert_ddl.rs

why is the parser unsafe at all?!?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL#Release_history

A central result of this study is that generative AI can learn the latent structure of food design directly from large-scale, human-generated recipe data

wow, if you feed a bunch of burger recipes into an AI, it's able to output burger recipes. really groundbreaking research.

Beyond rediscovery, the model generates new burgers with varying degrees of novelty, illustrated by two representative recipes, the Delicious Burger 1 with SDS = 3 and the Delicious Burger 2 with SDS = 6, which exhibit progressively more distinct ingredient profiles while retaining familiar burger structure

"novelty" is doing some heavy lifting here.

their "Delicious Burger 1" as shown is 151g (5.3oz) of meat, 75g each of tomato and pickle, 50 grams of onion...supported by a paltry 30 grams of bun. that thing is going to fall apart the second you pick it up.

that made me wonder if, when they conducted the taste test, did they actually follow the AI's recipe, which led to this:

Our AI-generated recipes specify ingredients and quantities only, and do not include the processing or cooking steps needed to prepare the actual burgers. We therefore engage an executive chef to translate each ingredient list into standardized preparation, cooking, and assembly protocols, including ingredient handling, cutting, seasoning, cooking method, and burger assembly

huh would you look at that, I'm shocked to learn that hiding behind the "AI demonstrates amazing results" headline there's a "well obviously we also hired a human expert to fill in the gaps".

this is less of a scientific paper and more Stanford running a full-employment program for executive chefs in the Bay Area.

there are at least 100 threads on /r/askreddit and similar places about "what's your favorite short joke" and all of these LLMs have that in their training data.

It all happened today. Only 15-20 pics total

think about the distribution for "number of pictures a new Instagram user posts on their first day"

then think of how far of an outlier your behavior was.

yeah, I'm also getting some cartel / illegal-or-should-be-illegal anti-competitive practice vibes from this coordination of having the "Alliance for Automotive Innovation" push out the message.

because do I believe that some of the manufacturers are unable to ship a "disable location data" checkbox given a 2-year timeline? sure.

but do I believe that every single one of the auto manufacturers is unable to meet the 2-year deadline? no, absolutely not.

what seems more likely is that most of the manufacturers were able to meet the deadline, but a few of them don't have their shit together and weren't able to (possibly only for a subset of models)

and what should happen from there is the compliant cars get updated and can be sold, and the ones with updates that are behind schedule get pulled from the market until the update is available.

and like, that's the "free market" at work. if you write better automotive software that you're able to update more quickly, you'll be able to sell it even when requirements change. if you write bad software that's hard to update, you're going to end up losing sales because of it. and then companies that write better software will tend to succeed in the long run.

in particular with this regulation, it would be a significant black eye for a car dealership to say to a customer "you can't buy that car...why not? oh, well it tracks your location and phones home with that data. and that can't be turned off...to the point that their engineers had 2 years to add a checkbox disabling the feature and they couldn't do it"

so what happens instead is the automakers put up this united front where they try to insist that unless the law is changed to suit their demands, they will stop selling all cars across the entire state. which, no, fuck off, that's bullshit.

they should update the software to comply with the law. and if they can't do it, they should admit "yeah we baked location collection so deeply into the software that even on a 2-year timeframe we couldn't ship a simple checkbox that allowed disabling it".

article from Reuters instead of a 12 minute video from some random lawyer in Michigan:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automa...

A group representing major automakers warned on Tuesday that car companies may be forced to halt sales of both new and used vehicles in California on July 1 unless the state delays vehicle technology rules that aim to prevent perpetrators of domestic violence from tracking survivors.

...

The 2024 California law requires automakers to set up a clear process for drivers to submit a copy of a restraining order or other documentation and request termination of another driver's remote access within two business days. It also mandated that carmakers enable drivers to easily turn off location access from inside the vehicle.

from that I was able to find the law in question: https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202320240sb...

The bill would, beginning on July 1, 2026, apply this provision to vehicles manufactured prior to January 1, 2028, that have connected vehicle location access, and have the capability to receive software updates, as specified.

with those extra details, this "Carmakers say they'll leave CA..." headline is egregiously misleading.

but also I have zero sympathy for the carmakers here.

to start off with, the portion of the law that takes effect today only applies to vehicles that can receive software updates. so threatening to stop all vehicle sales, both new and used, is absurd. it is grandstanding at best and a form of hostage-taking at worst.

next, the law was passed in Sept 2024. they've had almost 2 years advance notice of this requirement. that should be plenty of time, even taking into account automotive software engineering having longer development cycles than a webapp.

uhhh yeah keep the source [0] in mind here

On 30 June 2025, Lowe launched a political organisation named Restore Britain to advocate the deportation of all illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom, protecting British culture and restoring what it describes as "Christian principles"

...

In line with Lowe's previously expressed view that Nigel Farage was "watering down" Reform's policy on the deportation of illegal migrants.

the UK has the Conservative Party (Tories), Farage's Reform UK is to the right of them, and this guy's "Restore Britain" group is to the right of that.

and through that lens, read this section of the the executive summary [1]

In analysed court records and official inquiries, around 87% of those convicted in group-based CSE cases bore distinctively Muslim names; an expert estimate places the actual proportion of gang members nearer 95%. These figures describe convicted offenders in the analysed cases — not communities as a whole.

they're wrapping it in weasel words, but this is far-right propaganda aimed at convincing people that Muslim people commit rape at a rate hugely disproportionate to their population size, in order to manufacture consent for anti-immigration policies.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Lowe

1: https://rapeganginquiry.co.uk/summary

Why is Grok just so sexualized?

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

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

An analysis of 20,000 images generated by Grok between December 25, 2025, and January 1, 2026, showed 2% appeared to be 18 or younger, including 30 of "young or very young" women or girls in bikinis or transparent clothes. A Reuters review of Grok requests over 10 minutes on January 2nd found 102 attempts to put women in bikinis. A separate analysis conducted over 24 hours from January 5 to 6 calculated that users had Grok create 6,700 sexually suggestive or nudified images per hour

x dot com the everything app is a website for Nazis and pedophiles and Nazi pedophiles that also happens to have microblogging and news feed features.

Here’s the context:

That’s not a rewrite. That’s a free lunch.

The use case is narrow but real:

AI slop.

a police officer was shot in the neck by one person.

nineteen people have been criminally charged. including seven people who were not at the scene at the time of the shooting. [0]

you can have whatever subjective opinion about these prosecutions that you want. but at least try to get the underlying objective facts right.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention...

Friday afternoon, the markets have closed, time to start shooting again.

if the pattern holds, on Sunday evening we'll have some good news about "negotiations making progress" or "ceasefire but this time we'll actually cease firing" or whatever, with the goal of boosting the stock market for Monday morning.

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

the headline: "tech leaders say"

the article quotes one tech leader.

Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, told Fortune that smart glasses are the leading candidate to replace smartphones

it also says "according to a new report from Fortune" and then links to the report [0] that is more than a month old.

oh and it's not actually a "report" it's excerpts of a podcast interview that the "Chief Content Officer" of Fortune did with the CEO of Qualcomm.

For example, you’ll be walking around with glasses, and you’re going to see something you really like. You’ll say, “I’d like to buy this. How much is it on Amazon?” Or, “Can you render how I’m going to look with this on?”

I am begging "tech leaders" to realize that people do things with their phone other than buy shit.

I'm scrolling on my phone and see a funny meme. I say "haha look at this" and show my partner my phone's screen.

can I do that with smart glasses? no? OK then, smart glasses aren't going to replace my phone.

I don't care if the smart glasses are able to give me a "curated shopping experience" or whatever other euphemism they come up with for "it's an ad but we've convinced you that you enjoy looking at it". if it fails the "haha look at this meme" test it has absolutely zero chance of replacing the smartphone as the quintessential device that everyone owns.

0: https://fortune.com/2026/05/18/smartphones-days-numbered-ai-...

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mexican-lemons-res...

I can't view the link because it's behind a login wall, but the first thing that comes to mind is that GLP-1 drugs aren't covered by most insurance plans and cost several hundred dollars/month out-of-pocket.

so unless I see otherwise, I'm going to assume this is finding "being employed is highly correlated with having $500/mo in disposable income"

the final paragraph:

However, there’s also a third path for teams that want more control and flexibility without adding operational overhead. With Spacelift, you have all the tools necessary to deploy your IaC without the bloat of app deployment build tools. So check it out today for a free trial and a custom-tailored personal demo!

of all the AI-generated content marketing blog posts I've ever read, this is one of them.

if she was committed enough to raising a healthy child that she was willing to skip an epidural and endure hours of excruciating pain

...do you think that same commitment might have shown up in other ways in her parenting? such as in the foods she fed her child, or the activities she encouraged that child to do?

man, I remember when I used to come to HN because the average intelligence level of the comments was higher than it was on reddit.

are you suggesting that epidural usage or not during childbirth is correlated in some way with athletic ability of the child, decades later?

AI's Billion Dollar Problem

de-clickbaiting - taken from the first sentence of the abstract, [0] here is the problem the paper identifies:

The performance of multi-turn, agentic LLM inference is increasingly dominated by KV-Cache storage I/O rather than computation.

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21548

there was a bunch of Windows source code leaked in 2020. [0] that source code has almost certainly been included in training datasets. "LLM able to output something that resembles its input data" is not surprising or novel.

also, the headline is clickbait: "Fable 5 wrote a Windows kernel in 38 minutes"

and then halfway down:

That 38-minute core was deliberately minimal, and it is worth being precise about its scope. It booted and passed its in-kernel self-tests, and that was the whole of it. There was no user mode and no way to load or run an external program. The threads, scheduler, and dispatcher it built existed to drive the kernel’s own self-tests, not to run software. It was a nano-minimal NT-shaped kernel, not yet a system anything could run on.

but I guess the LLM that slopped this blogpost together decided "nano-minimal NT-shaped kernel" would have made the headline less interesting.

If building the next generation of security agent fleets sounds like your idea of fun, my human is hiring.

I miss the days when sometimes a blogpost was just a blogpost, and not content marketing for something.

0: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455655/microsoft-window...

GroundEval is built around that question...

This is the same distinction GroundEval makes for question answering agents.

GroundEval treats agent behavior as something that can be tested against a state contract.

That is the class of failure GroundEval is designed to catch.

this is an ad shaped like a blog post

Das said in an X post over the weekend.

this "article" is just recycling a Twitter post.

currently #6 on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48626930

yeah, the study this is criticizing [0] is extremely flawed - it tries to treat "parts of the country that got access to the AT&T-exclusive original iPhone" as a natural experiment, but that falls apart because "what parts of the country have the best AT&T coverage" is a terrible natural experiment, it ignores that AT&T service areas are not random, but subject to the same confounding variables that influence birth rates.

but at the same time, I don't trust this author to come up with a better explanation for anything to do with fertility or birthrates.

her byline at the top of the article:

a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life

and then buried at the bottom of the article:

a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444543

The constitution is the highest law of the land. Violating it has consequences. They should be enforced.

yeah, the consequences are that the law in question gets overturned.

you're not arguing for enforcing existing consequences, you're trying to make up a whole new set of consequences.

people get extremely emotional about the topic of firearms, so let's take what you're saying and apply it to a different context, and hopefully you can understand how ludicrous it is.

FDR signed an executive order [0] for internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. it was challenged in a case that went to the Supreme Court [1].

SCOTUS upheld that executive order as constitutional. but let's imagine it had gone the other way, and been struck down as unconstitutional.

with the "consequences" you're proposing, a decision striking down EO 9066 would also imply President FDR must go to jail, wouldn't it? after all, he violated the Constitution. that is an insane outcome - a 5-4 SCOTUS vote could send a President to jail?

the Constitution clearly lays out methods of punishing elected officials - impeachment and possible removal by Congress. in your zeal to defend one tiny sentence of the Constitution, you're inventing out of whole cloth a completely separate way of punishing elected officials, one which would itself be unconstitutional.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States

OK, if I accept your argument that the 2nd amendment is only about the militia, then what is the militia?

if your answer is the National Guard, that is ahistorical, because the modern National Guard was created in 1903. [0]

the "militia", as it existed at the time the 2nd amendment was passed [1] was:

each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted)

so if you really want to hang your hat on "the militia" then the 2nd Amendment means women and non-white people aren't allowed to own firearms, and men over 45 need a permit of some kind?

there's a lot of debate to be had about firearms laws, but grammatical nitpicking on this level is really kind of pointless. there is even debate about whether an extra comma changes the meaning [2].

another source you can look at is individual state constitutions. in my home state of Washington, for example [3]:

The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain or employ an armed body of men.

drafted in 1889, and could not state more plainly that it applies to individuals.

historically, it has always been an individual right. if you want to try to argue that modern firearms mean the right should be subject to more restrictions, go ahead. but don't try to rewrite history in the process.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Act_of_1903

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792#Second_Mi...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...

3: https://leg.wa.gov/state-laws-and-rules/washington-state-con...

with jail time for legislators and governors

uh-huh. what provision in the Constitution authorizes this, exactly?

is there anything in contemporaneous writings (Federalist Papers, for example) where someone advocated that a reasonable separation of powers would be "Article 3 judges should have the power to send legislators to jail as a side-effect of ruling that a law is unconstitutional"?

you can argue about the 2nd Amendment all you want, that's one of the oldest pastimes on the internet. but arguing that legislators should be thrown in jail for passing laws you don't like is flashing a big neon "I'm a crank" sign.

it's a "local model" but your pricing page [0] has "Selora AI credits/month" and I get more credits if I pay more per month.

are you trying to get me to pay for "AI credits" even though the model is running on hardware I own?

0: https://selorahomes.com/pricing/