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The job of an operations team is to keep all of this in steady state. They know which racks run hot in summer, which cooling loops have been flaky since the last firmware update, which jobs to re-route when a node degrades but has not failed yet. None of that knowledge is written down. It lives in the team.

Hmmn. All of this information should live in the monitoring system, in which case any frontier model will be able to get to grips with it in short order. It feels like the author doesn't really fully understand the changes brought about by the systems they are writing about.

Because it's correct but irrelevant. It tells you about as much about the utility of LLMs as the statement "humans are just overpowered tree shrews" tells you about us.

After 15 minutes of confusion, it turned out Cloudflare had put a crazy robots.txt on my site without my consent (Cloudflare, love you guys, but this needs to stop).

That's a hard one for Cloudflare, no? They got to where they are by being (if you want to be cynical, playing the role of) the benevolent, neutral guardians of the internet, a one-stop shop that makes most of the bad nonsense go away without much effort on the part of the developer. Continuing that stance probably does mean some basic AI crawler blocking by default, unfortunately. At least they document it [1].

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurat...

I don't disagree, but remember the lesson of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 -- historically, people have been willing to pay for convenience.

To me it seems like a first-year physics scaling laws problem. To get linear improvements in capability, you appear to need need exponential (or at least superlinear) increases in model size. We have no technical nor business solution for that kind of scaling, so the long-term outcome is obvious.

You're not using them wrong at all. Part of the reason LLMs are good at writing code is that they're good at understanding code. You're just not using the full menu of capabilities -- which is totally fine.

You're looking at the status quo and ignoring the trajectory. The best current open models are about as good as closed models from ~1.5 generations ago. The rate of improvement of all models is converging to zero. It follows that in a few generations, open models inferencing will be about as good as closed model inferencing.

The problem is going to become that there's no incentive for anyone to run the stupidly-expensive training phase. May God have mercy on the stock market.

Working regularly with AI is like managing a small team of unbelievably knowledgeable, very smart, and occasionally crashingly naïve junior developers. Because they're so knowledgeable and smart, they can get a lot done very quickly. Because they make a proportion of howling errors, you have to keep a close eye on them -- or carefully train another agent to do it for you, in which case you now have to keep a close eye on that agent as well.

So, overall, you get more done that without AI, at the cost of spending almost all of your time writing specs and doing code review and almost none of it writing code.

Do you get 3.3x the work done? Probably not. Do you get 2x the work done? I think maybe, if you can hack the dynamics of the new job as a manager of eager robots. For me the jury's still out on the second point.

That article says calendar ageing was the dominant ageing mechanism for batteries in their test vehicle, because said vehicle spent 96% of its life stationary. Unless I'm missing it, the article doesn't put a number figure on the rate of calendar ageing.

Real-world observations suggest batteries are likely to be serviceable for around 20 years, which is around the same lifetime of an average ICE car. Users who can tolerate a much reduced range (which is most of us) can likely extend this even further.

I think we can't rule out the explanation that all the ideas of space data centers could have been connected solely to a desire to pump SpaceX's IPO.

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

If the leadership of a company aren't the right people to make decisions about what that company does, who is?

Are you advocating for legislation? How would that work?

Ah yes, Pierre will surely have no issues paying for his baguette et croissant by filling in the boulangerie's IBAN on his mobile phone and waiting 15 minutes for them to check receipt.

Is BYD beating Kia here in the UK? It's hard to tell from the SMMT figures [1] but it looks to me as if Kia sold just under twice as many vehicles as BYD. Given that so much of Kia's lineup is now BEV, I'm not sure who is winning.

Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.

[1] https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/

That statement from La Liga is nothing short of embarrassing. Raving about child pornography, in a simple copyright infringement case? And the repeated focus on "IPs" is incredibly disingenuous; Cloudflare's multiplexing of half the internet onto a small number of IP addresses is not exactly a secret in the tech community.

Why are Spain's courts allowing this injunction to stand? It's clearly being used to bring the court system itself into disrepute at this point.

Where is the Land Rover supposed to sit on this scale?

There are current Land Rovers with market positioning suggesting they're "better" than Mercedes, and there are historic Land Rovers which were arguably not much better than camels.

I'm also enthusiastic, it's not often you see people find a genuinely underserved niche and you have.

I don't know if I would pay £19 for a general state-of-the-area report. I would almost certainly have paid £100-300 for a service that took my planning application, critically reviewed it and told me which aspects were and were not likely to pass, with references to specific examples within my local area.

Deterministic scrapers are almost certainly the right answer for this task, because once those special snowflakes have paid for their bespoke IT system, they'll never change it.

On the grind, why not get an agent to help you build the long tail of deterministic scrapers? Claude etc is really shockingly good at this kind of moderate-complexity iterative work, it will just keep going around the fetch/parse/understand loop until it has what you're looking for.

As a political post the formulation in the article is crass in the extreme, misrepresenting both the motivations of red and blue voters and also the and the long-term consequences of those parties' policies. There's no progress to be made in a conversation held so close to the surface.

Is there actually a real-world version of this game, that the author is alluding to buy not explicitly mentioning?

Otherwise all I'm taking away from this article is that people don't think deeply about survey questions before answering them.

Unfortunately, if your employer uses a "scheme" then the middleman creams off the 15% that the employer would save, then jacks up prices well beyond the market because they have a captive audience.

If the employer leases the car themselves and provides it to you as a benefit, it can be good value -- but then someone has to own the risk of you changing jobs.

This only works for business leases. The employee sacrifices part of their salary in return for being provided a lease car, and both the employee and employer save tax on that money (up to 45% employee, ~15% employer).

For an ICE car the government claws this money back through hefty "Benefit In Kind" taxes placed on employer-provided vehicles, but as an incentive to drive adoption the rates on EVs are only 3% of the car's nominal purchase price (and you only actually pay up to 45% of that 3%).

It doesn't work out "free," but it's typically as cheap to lease a new EV through this scheme as it is to pay the depreciation on a used ICE.

Apparently, when Steve Wozniak first got his hands on an ACE 1000-series machine, “he felt that Franklin had even copied the circuit-board layout, right down to how the chips were arranged.” Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications. And while I couldn’t verify this claim anywhere else, one retro hardware forum had a comment claiming “they outright stole the Apple BIOS code, including -- bad move -- the copyright notice, itself.”

Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.

A contract is toilet paper

It isn't, but you can't get blood from a stone and squeezing costs money.

It sounds like the entity that the contract is with has no real assets and/or is based in a jurisdiction which is hard to enforce judgements in. That's a case where you need to get paid up-front, which is the real lesson in this article.

That's likely, but only if it's possible to materially articulate some specific negative ways in which age verification data is actually being used.

You and I can strongly suspect that there's a significant downside to these providers having so much sensitive personal data but, until that is proven, the voting population will only see the upside.

Age verification is highly unpopular amongst heavily online users, but the voting population overall is in favour: https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20250731-91334-2

The NHS's actual current annual budget is £195.6B in 2025/2026 [1]. The contract value declared at the link given above is £182M over 5 years. So:

100 × ((182/5)/196000) = 0.019%

Which, to me, still seems too high a number for a data management function: I make it about 1000 persons-worth of per-capita GDP.

[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/financial-performance-u...

Access is not conditioned on approval.

The Zen Koan of T&C's.

Which does nothing to block 4chan, because everyone knows what a VPN is and how to get one.

Speaking as a UK citizen: you're exactly right. If the UK wants to prevent 4chan from being imported into the UK then it needs to block it at the border as it would for physical goods.

The fact that's technically hard to do (at least without going full-on CCP) doesn't change the situation. Attempting to fine a foreign entity for doing something that breaks no laws in the foreign entity's jurisdiction is just risible.