lacewing

Personally, I do not know a better alternative.

For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading. You wouldn't be picked to lead a particular domain unless your academic track record made it clear that you're level-headed.

But I think that AI, just like your X friend anecdote, actually illustrates an interesting point: most of the time, when we consult some sort of an online reference, we're not doing anything important, so the accuracy is not critical. Quite often, we're just trying to validate our beliefs or win online arguments. An LLM that's 90% accurate but sounds 120% authoritative (and almost always willing to support your priors) is perfect for that.

The page mentioned in the article seems to focus on "AI Data Centers". Looks like it's a much smaller set of hyperscale stuff, not every telco building with a bunch of racks.

However, "user reports" on that map clearly conflate the two, also reporting small, established sites in urban areas, etc.

I don't know what you're saying.

This is the second or third HN post I'm seeing this month along the lines of "how dare AI companies flag my code as AI-generated". I just don't remember similar complaints about the iPhone footer. Not many HNers complain about The North Face putting the text "The North Face" on their hoodies either. Or Honda putting their logo on the car.

The reasons for this difference are interesting. The fact that companies put their logos / brands on stuff is a lot less interesting to me. You can call it bad, but again, why is this instance worse?

"Sent from my iPhone"

But of course, owning an iPhone early on was seen as prestigious. Using an LLM is... not? Many people really don't want the world to know. For blogs in particular, the urge to have an LLM generate the entire thing and then post it under your name seems to be really difficult to resist.

I'm old enough to have owned a number of homes in a number of jurisdictions, so I'd caution that these numbers will differ significantly depending on where you live. For example, insurance is hugely influenced by fire risk, so a rural or semi-rural home can easily cost 4-5x as much to insure (and some insurers will give you "please go away" quotes, so it's important to shop around).

Similarly, taxes will depend on the locality, loan costs depend on the lender and the loan amount. Utility costs in SFBA can be easily 4-5x higher than elsewhere in the US, etc. So your totals could be easily 30% or 300% of what's outlined in the article.

The one important point that the article makes is that your ongoing costs will also vary dramatically depending on how much work you're willing to do yourself, especially in high-regulation, high-labor-cost areas such as SFBA. A basic job, such as replacing a leaky flush valve, can be hundreds of dollars in plumber costs, or $19.95 if you go to Home Depot. Hiring a painting contractor can cost thousands. Etc, etc.

I've also seen several homeowners outright taken advantage of. My main example in the US are various "mold remediation" contractors, who can help you in some really bad situations, but they're just as happy to charge you $20,000 to do nothing of value based on vague fears.

This is an AI-written story. It exists to get upvoted and reshared, so overly-dramatic language is the point.

US real estate in many desirable metro areas is bonkers too. And yet, Canadian engineers want to move to the SF Bay Area...

On some superficial level, sure: you have to follow the rules because if you don't, it won't end well for you. But the reason for these rules isn't just self-aggrandizement.

Ultimately, the court is there to implement a procedure. The procedure wasn't invented by the judges; in criminal cases, it's there to give you some protection from the rest of the government, which could otherwise use its police powers to put you in prison based on a whim. The protection isn't perfect, but it beats the alternative.

The court would not be able to carry out that procedure if, for example, anyone could just constantly talk over the judges and not let them get a word in. So there is a pecking order in the courtroom, but mostly because you couldn't have courts without it.

Commendable accuracy, too: https://godbolt.org/z/s9haz611Y

Tricky things like privately held companies, maybe we solve that one later

So I spend 30 minutes to set up an LLC and then transfer my assets to that LLC. Now, I don't hold the assets; I hold a stake in a privately-held company.

Ultimately, the solution you come up with needs to be at least somewhat airtight; otherwise, it just penalizes people who spend less money on tax advisors. The generation of income is a fairly well-defined point where assets change hands and you can apply some quasi-clear rules. Ongoing taxes on the potential to make money are a lot harder. So I buy some gold bars or valuable paintings and stash them in the attic. Gold / Picasso appreciates. How do you tax me on that? Do I submit an inventory of everything I own to the government every year? How does the government check - do they get to rifle through my stuff every December?

And hey, here's a cool one: if my parent owns a company and puts it in their will that it's mine when they die, is that promise an asset I owe taxes on every year? It's clearly worth something: it's potential money down the line.

I don't think there are many people in the West who profess love for the UAE. But there are several reasons why it's not as disliked. First, it's a monarchy, and monarchies are harder to parse, given that many European countries are notionally monarchies too. Second, it's not by any stretch of imagination a serious geopolitical or economic threat to the West. Third, although it is authoritarian, by most third-party assessments, it's not nearly as authoritarian as China.

Not being a single-party, notionally communist dictatorship may be helping with the image too? I don't know, spitballing here.

I think the default approach in the West - and that's not a US-specific thing - is to treat exotic faraway lands with a mix of curiosity and awe. But China is a geopolitical rival with a political system that rightly makes many Westerners queasy, so it doesn't benefit from that anymore.

I have been thinking this for quite a while now, electric planes will kill a lot of rail routes

Why? If you have an existing rail network, trains are bound to be cheaper than planes and can get to more places (including convenient centrally-located stations in most major metro areas).

Plus, air travel is generally miserable unless you have a private / chartered plane. Crowds, long lines, security screenings, opaque and abusive pricing models, etc. This is not something we couldn't fix, but over the past 30 years, it's gotten a lot worse, not better; electric planes don't automatically change that. In contrast, rail travel in Europe is almost universally pleasant and hassle-free.

They used to be. They are not. Try Pangram, you'll be surprised.

Would it shock your conscience to learn that Microsoft security operations probably have contacts with the Redmond PD and that they occasionally discuss concerns?

The existence of a mailing list or something of that sort isn't particularly worrying. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a firewall between police departments and local businesses any more that it would be reasonable to expect one between PDs and local residents.

I would be alarmed if it turned out that Amazon was giving the Seattle PD direct, warrantless access to data about their consumers, or something like that. But there's no evidence presented here of anything particularly sketchy going on.

And as much as there are still people on HN who insist that AI text can't be detected algorithmically, it's worth noting that the original story is marked 100% AI by Pangram. So it's not just this person seeing things.

Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.

Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.

There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one.

Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.

Right, if you're a software engineer, the realization that the two theorems are nearly-equivalent really takes the air out of a lot of the existential philosophizing around Gödel's incompleteness.

Gödel's argument basically says that any system of mathematics powerful enough to implement basic arithmetic is a computer. This shouldn't be surprising to software engineers because the equivalency between Boolean logic and arithmetic is easy to show. And if you have a computer, you can build algorithms whose outcome can't be programmatically decided by other algorithms.

This is, quite obviously, just one person's perspective on life. But it's a call to action, so let me ask you this: what do you propose?

From your response, I see two takeaways: don't try to be creative because this only helps AI, and don't be spontaneous because the society wouldn't want you to. Is that it, or is there more? To be clear, I'm not trying to be overly snarky, but we don't get the option of doing nothing. If you don't like what this person is selling, what's your trick?

Anthropic and OpenAI don't do PR this way. This is not a side project for a publicly-traded BigCo. The bulk of their valuation hinges on being first to AGI / best at AGI.

The AI answers provide tons of source links.

A lot of the time, the answer itself is good, but the links are spam blogs and Tiktok videos. I don't think there's a real connection between how the text is generated and what "references" are picked for it. I just searched for a math history topic and the reference was a literal TikTok video that's an advertisement for a sketchy mobile calculator app?

So yeah, these references are boosting web content, but it has nothing to do with the high-quality sources used to train the LLMs in the first place.

Why?

It's clearly not yet a tool that can deliver new math at a scale. I say this because otherwise, the headline would be that they proved / disproved a hundred conjectures, not one. This is what happened with Mythos. You want to be the AI company that "solved" math, just like Anthropic got the headlines for "solving" (or breaking?) security.

The fact they're announcing a single success story almost certainly means that they've thrown a lot of money at a lot of problems, had experts fine-tuning the prompts and verifying the results, and it came back with a single "hit". But that doesn't make the result less important. We now have a new "solver" for math that can solve at least some hard problems that weren't getting solved before.

Whether that spells the end of math as we know... I don't think so, but math is a bit weird. It's almost entirely non-commercial: it's practiced chiefly in the academia, subsidized from taxes or private endowments, and almost never meant to solve problems of obvious practical importance - so in that sense, it's closer to philosophy than, say, software engineering. No philosopher is seriously worried about LLMs taking philosopher jobs even though they a chatbot can write an essay, but mathematicians painted themselves into a different corner, I think.

There's no one correct way to parse integers. Do you want to support 0x prefixes? Is a leading zero an indicator or octal, a zero-padded decimal, or a syntax error? Are you willing to accept a leading "+"? Are leading whitespaces OK? Trailing ones? Is 0x0c a whitespace? What about all the weird Unicode ones? Do you allow exponential notation (1e1)? Etc, etc.

In every language, the standard library makes some assumptions about this. In JavaScript, an empty string parses to zero.

The standard C library, which dates back to the stone age, does the simplest thing you can do without range checking, because, well, that's kinda the C paradigm. If you want parsing that handles edge cases in a specific way, you do it yourself. It's just digits.

These cloud providers need to step back and observe how terrible they've made these products.

They don't, because the allure of effortless scaling is hard to resist: everyone thinks of themselves as the next tech unicorn. And if you actually become an unicorn, you're already too dependent on AWS / Azure / GCP to easily move somewhere else. At best, your strategy is to become "multi-cloud".

No one is surprised that Google is putting AI in more places. Yes, the bar is high: announcing a new video generation tool or another personal agent doesn't sound amazing because both Google and its competitors already have that tech in some shape or form.

And smart glasses are something that every other company has been toying with for a long time. Google Glass, Meta Smart Glasses, Snapchat Spectacles, etc. Maybe they nail it this time around, but you've heard that announcement a dozen times before, so it's hard to go "OMG THIS IS BIG".

This is a weird, evidently AI-generated article that is a middling taxonomy of how open-source projects die, but none of this strikes me as "dumb". They're just things that can happen if you're coding as a hobby. Yeah, you might end up getting a job or getting bored or whatever. So?

The LLM-author is also apparently unaware of the #1 reason why open-source projects die: they don't generate enough interest / use. I created a number of OSS projects that some people liked in theory, but that weren't taking off and weren't worth getting chained to for life.

Again, I don't think any of this matters. People were not coming there to have "information communicated to them". They were coming there for the satisfaction of knowing the results before everyone else. And FiveThirtyEight couldn't realistically deliver on that.

I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results.

In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.

It's worse than that. They train their models preferentially on what they consider to be high-quality data. But if you look at the usual "references" on search queries, they're often just a post-hoc BS justification that links to spam blogs or Tiktok videos.