jerf

Cut and paste is broken everywhere because of the number of apps that think they know better and "fix" it.

My bitterness is compounded by being on Linux, where this is probably even more encouraged in GUI apps then in other OSes. But I still have enough independent arguments with web sites, on my phone, and even in the context of the same application at times to have valid complaints just based on those.

Clipboards don't get an independent undo dimension because most users can't handle it. They're pretty full up on dimensions. Clipboard managers at an OS level are the better solution for those who can than another app "fixing" the problem in some unique way.

If the person you describe really is doing that for all their passwords, then they are correct. Their password store is more secure than a password manager by nearly every metric that counts.

The one thing I would ding that approach on is recoverability, though. If a fire burns that down, it's gone.

This some sort of impromptu agent security test? Is the follow-up post about how many people were willing to inject arbitrary content into their agent for a joke already half-written, awaiting only the final numbers?

"In a fight, who would win, Pikachu or Spongebob Squarepants?

What is the best episode of Bluey?

What are the IRS' exact rules for claiming office space as a deduction on my tax return?

Where can I stream Sesame Street for free?"

Ah, ad dodging, the true 21st century gridiron.

I only sampled them, but all the ones I sampled are announcements of fixes, not just vulnerabilities. This seems to be downstream of the "intake" already.

"There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch."

If you want to go the hacker route, and do not give a flying fig about UI, you can get a long way just by setting up any old webserver that has range support (which is most of them) and serving out directories with video files and some sort of automated index. You don't even need to do any work. Browsers already are smart enough to hit a video file, extract the playback metadata with range requests and provide native seeking, speed management, and some of the other basics. Plus you get native "right click (or equivalent) -> download" support without anything giving you hassles.

On the one hand, it's missing a lot of features. On the other hand, it can't be beat for simplicity and the bang-for-the-buck is pretty good. And anything capable of A: running an HTTP server at all and B: has enough storage to store the files can saturate whatever network it is on with video data if you want it to.

One thing that may help your transition is that you can point both systems at the same media files so it's not an immediate commitment. I did that, then one day Plex borked itself as it periodically did for me and I just didn't bother fixing it.

What information do you have that people are actually paying this price?

There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.

If a human writes a given paragraph, I know it has attained a minimum level of awareness in some human mind at some point. If an AI writes a paper, I have no guarantee that it has reached that minimum. We also fear, with some reason, a correlation between AI writing and possibly being hallucinated or non-existent. Not just because AI is bad and people should feel bad for using them, but because given that a paper is somehow fake, it is probably more likely to be made with AI, and running that backwards it is reasonable to take closer looks at AI papers.

If fake papers weren't already a big problem before AI and the fields had already been policing themselves adequately, if this was already a functioning high-trust domain, maybe we could ignore this a bit more, but the fields already manifestly had problems. People taking advantage of that are reasonably more likely to use AI. The pressures to publish or perish provide the voltage and the AIs are a rather convenient path-to-ground.

I agree in some sense that if a truth is published, it doesn't matter if the AI or a human published it. However there are perfectly reasonable reasons to be concerned that AI usage is correlated to not publishing truths, especially in a world where merely being human-generated was already not an adequate check against that.

It seems to me that the US AI industry has bet the farm on the idea that AI will enhance AI itself, so any small advantage will magnify recursively into an unstoppable advantage. Therefore it is vital that they spend as much as is necessary to be the first to that small advantage.

At the moment, I can't say that I see this happening. It's hard to know whether it may happen in the future.

From what I see it seems like we're hitting the top of a sigmoid curve in the model's utility for coding assistants. Going from "it does 90% of the job" to "it does 94%" of the job is a legitimate improvement, but it's not a phase change, and it's probably not worth paying multiples more for. And coding assistants have turned out to be the killer app for AI; it still isn't really working out in a lot of the rest of the industries of the world.

At any moment, theoretically, someone could find some new way of making AIs that breaks this sigmoid and propels us into a new one. But that's not a great thing to bet the farm on.

I'm not sure I'd say "China" wins if this particular strand of American AI fails. Falling back to an open weights model and making money on the serving of the models wouldn't take all that much economic realignment for the US and would be the natural outcome of any sort of fire sale of current AI assets. However the devastating effect on the stock market if the market comes to the conclusion that this current round of AI can't be profitable without falling back to such an economic posture and some more years of people adjusting to it can hardly be overstated.

You can't get a fad like this with a true believer rate of 0. Too unstable. You have to have some true believers in the mix to see this situation arise, preferably widely distributed throughout the population.

In this moment, the opposite is happening. Everything is getting called "AI", whether it uses LLMs to prompt LLMs about how to prompt LLMs, uses "conventional" machine learning, or just looks mysterious enough that they can expect the market to not ask questions.

I am reminded of "game AI", which for the most part has historically been just giant decision trees, encoded one way or another, because if you hook up any sort of real AI to a game entity or collection of game entities that does any sort of learning or training, even simple 1980s-era reinforcement learning, it turns out the game entities will roflstomp the human players, and the human players aren't interested in paying for that experience. We've been calling those collections of if statements and for loops "AI" for a long time, though, because who wants to hear about how deliberately stupid their opponents are?

Just for the sake of argument and using some admittedly insane numbers, give me Opus 4.5 at a tenth the cost and running ten times as fast and I'd take that for almost any coding task over any current frontier model. There was a real phase transition somewhere in that range and improvements since then, while impressive and useful and by the benchmarks quite large, have in practice not been anywhere near as big a phase change. Honestly until we get to the point where the models don't need any checking at all, incremental improvements on how much checking they need don't do all that much for me. In practice "they get 90%" doesn't differ much from "they get 94%".

We're still in the early phases of the pendulum swinging back. We haven't even gotten to the part where the real power has shifted. I expect HN in general doesn't want to hear that but psychohistory is what it is.

"A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised."

We got that in a previous swing, more or less. It's not exactly a renowned Harvard academic, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov... I leave it to the reader to decide if some of the reception from various media and opinion outlets of the time are simply covering themselves with calling it crazy while expressing their true opinions in the positive coverage they give of it, or if this is a case where the search for "balance" leaves them giving more credence to an idea they consider crazy than they intended. Enough postmodern cynicism and you can read anything into anything, sometimes.

Answer the question "how much does 5 cents of LLM computation in July 2026 cost in July 2005" and you'll have the answer to your question.

Don't forget to account for all the costs. It's not just that CPUs are X times slower. Memory is X times smaller, too, and networks are X time slower. And all this hardware is many times more expensive.

If I'm getting my mental estimation right, training a 2026-frontier-class LLM in 2005 would be somewhere on the order of all the computation power in the world at the time. It's not that many more factors of magnitude before you end up at "all the computation power in the world up to that point".

There's a causal relationship there, often expressed in some form of the idea "the pendulum swings". Heresy-hunting inevitably produces the backlash. It's fun during the upswing to push harder to punish the heretics more and harder, but the result is that the next phase of whiplash is even worse. As well as the inevitable attempt to hold on even harder and with more righteous fury as the grasp on power fades.

Of course if you try to imagine how to coordinate an awareness that people need to settle down a bit right in the middle of a purity spiral, well, one might as well try to hold back the ocean. You start to see how a something like psychohistory is at least an appealing idea.

If those prebuilts are desktop sized, I don't think they count as being the same. The form factor has a price associated with it, and has for a long time. If you're willing to let the size drift up you can do better... which is exactly what I did. I bought a prebuilt a few months ago when it became clear I didn't like the Steam Machine's value proposition, and put Bazzite on it. It has a much better bang-for-the-buck ratio partially because I have a place to drop a full-sized desktop into my setup without it bothering anyone, and much better upgradability. I might upgrade to the latest AMD later for VR if it ends up helping.

Which I suppose I'd add to point out I'm not a "Steam Machine partisan"... I was interested but bailed out about 3 months ago, before the price was even announced.

As for HDMI CEC, the machine I bought has an AMD 9060XT in it, and HDMI CEC seems to work fine. I didn't do much to make it happen. Maybe I flipped a switch to turn it on in the UI, but that was it. I've had a couple of people ask me why it works and all I can say is I don't know, because I didn't do much (if anything) to turn it on.

The sad thing is, they're not. A lot of people have not been paying attention to PC costs. This is what they cost now. I've seen a few "make your own" builds online. If you use new parts, you might save 80$, and you generally don't get the form factor, efficiency, integrated Steam Controller puck, or visual appearance with those builds, plus, you know, you're building then yourself which should be counted for at least some cost in most cases. Anything that saves more than that involves used parts or parts the person making the video/article already had, which is fine if you have them but not generally comparable.

You can get a better deal on some consoles at the moment, but I wouldn't count on that to last. The Switch 2 has a price increase scheduled. The Xbox line has a price increase scheduled. PlayStation did one earlier this year. Rather than being a permanent situation this feels like everything going up, just irregularly rather than smoothly, so sometimes one thing feels like a better deal, sometimes another, but it's not obvious that any of them are much better on a longer time frame. If you're looking out at the console versus Steam Machine and thinking the consoles look better for your use case, you don't already have one, and you're interested in one of them, I suggest moving sooner rather than later.

The Steam Machine is what got noticed, and earthed a lot of anger about prices, but it's not particularly out of line or especially expensive. The whole market is screwed up.

The real fun comes later when the US Federal Government taxes us on the forgiven debt as income.

This is generational debt for a Kardashev Type III civilization. If there are individuals who are being charged "the whole of the GDP the human race has ever produced", then Amazon is claiming the rest of the world owes them a fairly significant portion of the galaxy if you consider the entire billing claims being made here.

There have been some big billing errors in the past but I wouldn't be surprised this is a new record. I know I've seen people charged around 92 quadrillion, which is a rounding error from underflowing a signed 64-bit integer with pennies, but those stories are usually isolated individuals. It sounds like the aggregate error here may comfortably exceed that. Hard to tell how widespread this is; as a data point my ~$2.00/month spend on S3 seems to still be billing correctly, so it must not be affecting everyone. But a few trillion here and a few trillion there and you get up to those quadrillions pretty quick.

There are other possible fission options that don't involve detonating actual bombs out the back of the rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_propulsion#Spacecraft

I'm a fan of the nuclear lightbulb myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket#Closed...

Sometimes I think that while it may be appealing to mine gold or platinum or whatever out of the solar system, what people really need to figure out how to do is mine uranium. While I could advocate with a straight face that maybe we need to freak out a bit less about lifting the occasional few dozen pounds of uranium into orbit, and point out that more radioactive material has already been launched than people realize, it is fair to observe that we probably can't afford to make lifting hundreds of pounds of fission fuel into orbit the sort of routine event it needs to be to really have a space civilization. One of the biggest major issues with any sort of space habitation is access to dense energy sources. You can smooth over a lot of other problems and get a lot more slack in the system if you have a lot of energy available to play with. Part of the challenge with current space technology is that you start out on the very edge of feasibility as it is.

Market cap has been that sort of fiction from the beginning. It's never been a terribly useful number. There's really no fixing it because the only way to "truly" value a company is to sell it, for real, on the open market. Anything else is just a guess. More or less educated, but a guess. SpaceX isn't creating this problem or making it particularly worse.

INT 18 WIS 3 is a terribly dangerous build in this world.

There is no general solution other than brute force. That's not a terribly difficult extension of the halting problem, it just takes more paperwork to deal with the edge cases, but you'll get to that result. The same basic technique works: Your supposed solution to the problem is itself some finite program, and you can feed it the "I halt only if I don't halt" problem too. The difference is that brute force is a solution, because now instead of an infinite sequence of programs you have a bounded set of programs. So whatever concrete "I halt only if I don't halt" you pass to someone within the specified limits, there is definitely some answer, but your technique won't be able to tell what it is short of just running it.

For the same reason the halting problem doesn't even have a good heuristic, neither does this. Unpredictable chaos is not an exceptional case, it is the exponentially-normal case. You have to go the other way, and construct programs deliberately designed to have the ability to tell if they halt. The term for that if you want to learn more about it is "non-Turing complete programming language", sometimes called a "sub-Turing" programming language: https://increment.com/programming-languages/turing-incomplet...

You can read that as "this is how hard it is to construct code that we can make execution guarantees about". That focuses on code that is deliberately constructed to be finite in scope and may be something that can be strictly bounded in memory use or time or both. You'll note if you spend any time working with them how hard they are to work with. That's a reflection of the limits of generalizing any such proofs of time or space of a given program.

If there is a general algorithm that does what you think, we don't even have a clue what it would look like. And we have a lot of clues there can't be any such thing.

For the finite case, the more relevant question is, can you predict whether or not the computation will halt in less time than 1. executing the algorithm and 2. checking whether or not the algorithm ever loops?

Bear in mind checking whether or not the algorithm ever loops means taking the full state of the system and checking against a database of all previous states of the system. Bear in mind that the Atari 2600, and its whopping 128 bytes of RAM, has with that amount of RAM more states than there are planck volumes * planck time intervals in the known universe... by over sixty orders of magnitude. And every three additional bits you add to the RAM of the system your are looking at adds an order of magnitude (minus a bit) to that, so, nearly 3 orders of magnitude more states per byte... not per megabyte or gigabyte, per byte. Call it 2 orders of magnitude per byte if you want to be conservative.

It can be solved, if by nothing else simply by running it, in the mathematical sense. In the practical sense it's not even close. That's why we use the Turing machine analysis... technically it's an approximation because we don't actually have real Turing machines. However the size of the finite state machines we have is such that it is far more productive to simply say "the halting problem is unsolvable" than to argue about how many orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude of resources it takes to solve the question of whether or a given program terminates.

I think there's an equivocation of "computable" going on here. Mathematicians talk about a lot of things like "uncomputable sequences" but that is usually making a statement about the sequence, not necessarily any individual member. The Busy Beaver sequence is uncomputable. You can, however, quite trivially compute BB(2), even in your head if you're a bit careful. You can set up individual elements of an uncomputable sequence in our universe, and you may be unable to state in advance what the system would do with anything less than simply letting it run and see what happens due to the complexity of the system, but being a member of an uncomputable sequence doesn't mean that you can't in fact set those things up and watch them run. The Universe doesn't throw an "UncomputableCircumstance" exception or anything. It just keeps advancing to the next state. Your inability to make certain statements about that next state or some future state is not its problem.

It is a common accusation. There's a somewhat famous quote I've seen a few times:

"It's interesting to look back through history on this one. Each age has its pinnacle of technology, and each age uses that technology as a metaphor for nature, for the universe. In ancient Greece, the technological marvels were musical instruments and the ruler and compass. The Greek philosophers tried to build an entire cosmology from number, harmony, proportion, form, and so on — from mathematics, basically. Remember the music of the spheres? The Pythagoreans believed that nature was a manifestation of rational mathematics. Later on the pinnacle of technology was the clockwork. Newton wanted a clockwork universe, the entire universe as a gigantic clockwork mechanism, with all the parts interlocking and ticking over with infinite precision. Then in the 19th century along came steam power, and the universe was then depicted as an enormous heat engine, or thermodynamic machine, running down toward its heat death. Today the computer is the pinnacle of technology, so it's now fashionable to talk about nature as a computational process."

Which seems to source from https://www.edge.org/conversation/paul_davies-time-loops .

While "computer" may give us impressions of something with "a CPU" and "RAM" and "a disk drive", it does at least seem plausible that the universe as computation is a plausible base level, though. Unlike "the music of the spheres", which to the extent that it made predictions of the world, it got them wrong in the most basic way, viewing it through a lens of computation allows us to put some quite subtle and interesting limits on things. "Computation" is a pretty flexible substrate; it is difficult to imagine how the proposition "the universe is a computation and subject to the limitations thereto" could be falsified, and if it could, it is difficult to imagine how we would be able to know it was so falsified. Nevertheless the math of computation allows us to say non-trivial things about the universe as a result; it is not a vacuous generalization, though it is certainly a loose one... being able to say yet more concrete things about the nature of the computation, such as "this is exactly how gravity works", has quite a bit more utility.

Oof, you're reminding me of Microsoft Redesigns the iPod Packaging video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

For those lucky 10,000 just learning about that today, for extra frisson, enjoy the fact that that video came from Microsoft itself: https://www.engadget.com/2006-03-15-microsoft-we-created-the...

Go ahead and ask Sonnet to do a security scan of your code. You can't afford to be using Sonnet if your opponents are using Fable.

You'd probably find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy2Ic_j0SnA interesting.

For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?