m4nu3l

The study seems to be strictly for TV watching. I mostly watch science/math/history/economics related videos on YT. I prefer the more in-depth ones; I also watch gaming/movies related videos sometimes. I don't think it's nearly the same as watching TV. But I don't watch hours a day of those either.

When I find articles like these, I remember I haven't watched TV for almost 12 years, except when at someone else's home.

By this, I mean I never turned on the TV to see what's on the television. I used the TV as a monitor to play games or watch movies from streaming services at times.

Given that I moved to the UK after I stopped watching TV, I barely know which channels even exist on the TV.

I do watch a lot of stuff on YouTube. But it's things I chose to watch because I find them interesting, and I don't find most of the stuff on TV interesting enough.

And the interesting parts, usually, you can find them on streaming services and only watch those whenever you want to watch them. Even scrolling brain rot on Instagram seems less of a waste of time. At least the algorithm knows the type of brain rot I like.

I wonder how many people still watch TV today.

When getting something out on the market, they woudn't take this risk and still have a commonly used port on the side. The consumers as well would prefer to not take the risk of buing a device forcing them to use a port no other device is using.

Like, people didn't buy Apple products before they were forced to use USB-C? So why did Apple not want to use USB-C if that caused them to lose money and sell fewer phones? Also, if this were true, once most devices support USB-C (like they already did before the regulation), the standard would be self-enforcing and require no additional regulation.

I apologize, but I only skimmed the rest of your comment, because I believe it rests on a flawed premise in the first line.

EDIT: Your statements seem to be self-contradictory, so it's not even about facts. "We need a regulation because companies make and sell products with different ports" is in contradiction with "Companies wouldn't take the risk of not having a common port, and consumers won't take the risk to buy them".

Also, mine wasn't a premise. My claims are not statements that follow one from the previous, but a conjunction of negated statements laid out in chronological order. So all of them must be false or not relevant for you to be right.

The point is, if the regulation works as intended, it consolidates USB-C as the standard and slows or blocks new types of ports from being designed and tested. If it doesn't, then it's useless. You can't have it both ways.

Imagine a company that wants to design the next type of port. Normally, it would just do R&D and engineer the product, then put it on the market with that type of port. If the device only has that type of port, people must use it and provide feedback by choosing to keep buying the product (maybe they'll also make it explicit that they like the new port). If this phase is successful and the company opens the specs and other companies adopt it, it might become a de facto standard.

Now consider doing it with the current regulation. You need to do R&D, but the design will require higher costs because you have to make the device work with the old USB-C, too.

Maybe it's not a high cost for the company, so they do it anyway. People might use the port much less because some may not even try the new port and stick to the USB-C for simplicity, or because they are accustomed to it.

So the company won't have the same strong feedback. But let's assume they manage to make most users happy to use the new one because it's so much better. Now they open the standard. Other companies have to pay the additional engineering costs to add the other port. Some might be able to afford it just fine, while others might not want to add the complexity and costs of two ports.

Let's say, however, it spreads anyway. Now you hope the EU will accept it as a new standard so you can ditch the now-old USB-C standard. But the EU might just say "NO". It's very hard to predict if the government would be happy with it.

Given the compounding of these effects, the result is most likely that the company won't even think about wanting to develop the next standard.

The probability of a new standard happening is much reduced. And as I said before, if it weren't reduced, then the regulation would be useless to begin with, as people would use and test different connectors regardless of the USB-C support.

As I said in the root comment, I don't care too much about the connectors not evolving, but it just goes to show that people don't realise that there is no free lunch. Add constraints, and you add costs and slow down progress.

You can't force companies to add value with no costs, and value is also subjective, so the government often doesn't know what is valuable to people. At most, the government might know what some people say is valuable to them. But this is not the same thing.

Very few people would have said smartphones were the future, and they would buy one in 2007. Democracy is a very bad way for economic and technological progress to happen - unless it's for some military technology for which the government is the only customer.

What's interesting to me is that this is a bit like how the USSR worked.

They were relying on the West for high-tech tractors and even to build factories (I know Ford helped them build some factories for a part of the factory output). I also know they used to look at the allocation of goods in the US as a starting point to decide what to produce, as they were basically running blind to what people needed or wanted.

I replied to a similar question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711705.

If I wanted to buy a device with a different type of connector, including a different form factor or a totally different charging mechanism, I should be able to do so without additional costs or additional holes drilled in the case of the device.

you just have to provide USB-C option as a fallback.

Given you must have a USB-C port, the design would still be limited by the USB-C form factor and adding another port would even further increase the complexity, costs and weight of the design. This will still strongly limit the spread of new designs, and I'm pretty sure it's effectively equivalent to mandating just USB-C for smaller devices.

On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand

I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again). I find the premise quite capricious.

It doesn't really matter to me, because even if that's true for Apple (or it was at the time), it still means other companies can't test new technologies. They might as well be OK with that, but it still means that consumers won't get new standards. The first attempt at enforcing such a standard in the EU was made with mini-USB.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...

It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.

I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!

No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.

Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.

You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology.

All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.

The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.

It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.

The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.

I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.

Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.

Not sure what you are referring to. Can you elaborate?

Just to be clear, my definition of free-market is just that there is no centralised authority that can use force to set prices/quantities/quality/type of services offered. Of course, the fact that the employer has to offer health insurance in some cases is part of it not being a free market. But there are more fundamental things that make the US healthcare very far from being a free market. The first one is that the supply of doctors is capped in quantity, not just in quality.

You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.

You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities.

US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality. It literally predicts the US situation.

It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.

This is a very bad analogy. Markets behave like an imperfect optimisation algorithm, and you can prove that, under some conditions which are most often met, they give people what they want. In fact, you can almost always expect governments to be less effective and less rational than markets in allocating resources to satisfy the desires of people, even when democratic. You can prove it either by using the same logic that tells you when markets fail (externalities, information asymmetry), or empirically by looking at what was basically the most perfect A/B test we had on society over the 20th century. Although it was a comparison between mixed economies and fully centralised ones, there is no reason to expect the optimum mix of centralisation/distribution to be closer to the worst-performing one (the fully centralised one).

A more realistic estimate of the total number of addressable things should take into account that for anything to be addressable, its address should be stored somewhere at least once.

If it takes at least Npb particles to store one bit of information, then the number of addressable things would decrease with the number of bits of the address.

So let's call Nthg the number of addressable things, and assume the average number of bits per address grows with Nb = f(Ntng).

Then the maximum number of addressable things is the number that satisfies Nthg = Np/(Npb*f(Ntng)), where Np is the total number of particles.

It's not just about intentions. To convince me that the Government can improve things through regulations, you'd need to do a few things:

1) You must convince me that optimising for some utility function you defined is the right thing to do.

2) You must convince me that the Government can effectively estimate the utility function.

3) Finally, you must convince me that the Government can predict how the utility function will change after the policies are implemented.

For 1) I'd have problems with any utility function you could come up with. If you want to maximise total utility, for instance, does it mean that I get to assault someone as long as I gain more utility than the other person loses? What about the "Utility Monster" thought experiment?

For 2) and 3), I'm pretty sure the Government has no idea of how to measure and/or predict the result. Does the scrolling addiction of a teenager cause more loss in utility than the loss of friends to a teenager with disabilities?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/06/ive-l...

Because of these basic philosophical principles, the burden of proof that some regulation is required is always on the Government side, and the standard of proof should be much higher than it is today.

I don't believe that the concept of utility is entirely useless, though. I believe that by respecting people's individual freedoms and allowing for voluntary arrangements, you'll also get more utility in the long term, whereas if you try to force your utility optimisations, you might, maybe, get utility increases in the short term, but much worse utility in the longer term.

There is a problem with this comparison. The agent had access to open-source browsers in its training set. So you'd need to compare the cost of creating an equivalent browser for a developer who has access to them, too. If all you need is standard browser functionality, you just use an existing browser. If you want to change some features or parts of the implementation, you fork it. A new browser written from scratch would be valuable if it had a novel implementation that resulted in a faster/more secure/robust/memory efficient or simply easier-to-use browser. So even if this had implemented the standard correctly, it wouldn't be worth more than the time it takes a developer to fork Chromium and change its name. Don't get me wrong, it's impressive, but not as impressive after you think that an LLM that regurgitates verbatim the code of Chromium when tasked to build a browser would have effectively succeeded at the task.

EDIT: About the rendering speed. It doesn't really make sense to compare it with a fully functioning browser, as you could potentially drop features or make bogus optimisations to go faster.

What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.

With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.

Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.

Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.

The first one is basically some glue code using pipes. The ones I'd say are not trivial are the VMs in Python. However, I'd say they are entirely useless, and not too complex either (although somewhat tedious to implement).

All of the linked apps look trivial to me. Also, the first one, the UI has no feedback once you click the answer (plus some questions don't really make sense as they have the answer in them). There is more on the website, so there could be something interesting, but I'm having trouble finding it among all the noise. Not saying simple apps have no value. Even simple throwaway UIs can have value, especially if you develop them quickly.

I believe the problem with democracy is that it's affected by various problems analogous to the ones of markets, but often amplified.

In this case, to me, it really seems a matter of extreme information asymmetry as you'd never see in a regular market.

Does he actually mean those things, or is that some sort of joke? How do you even know? BTW, he didn't actually use Nukes, and I don't believe he will. On the other hand, he said he wanted to end wars and sounded like he was against starting new ones.

I've seen people regretting voting for Trump because of tariffs, even though they supported tariffs in the first place. They had no idea that Trump's "tariff" would mean some blanket tariffs at those rates. They thought it was some small tariffs on "key industries".

A further confirmation of the information asymmetry is that after a year, support for Trump is far below what would be needed to elect him.

I'm not sure what the solution is.

It seems it was her wife who pushed for that. By reading the article, it doesn't sound like he believed any of that.

"If it makes you feel better, go ahead and do it," she quoted the president as saying.

Also

Both the president and Nancy Reagan denied that any policies or decisions were based on astrology.

So we can't really tell to what extent, if any, those consultations affected the actual policies.

In general, I don't trust politicians by default. Still, I also don't trust astrologers (and even less so), so there is no reason for me to believe the astrologer more than the president.

What you are actually doing here is moving allocation logic from the heap allocator to your program logic.

In this way you can use pools or buffers of which you know exactly the size. But, unless your program is always using exactly the same amount of memory at all times, you now have to manage memory allocations in your pool/buffers.

I think the stochastic part is true and useless. It can be applied to anyone or anything. Yes, the models give you probabilities, but any algorithm gives you probabilities (only zero or one for deterministic ones). You can definitely view the human mind as a complex statistical model of the world.

Now, that being said, do I think they are as good as a skilled human on most things? No, I don't. My trust issues have increased after the GPT-5 presentation. The very first question was to showcase its "PhD-level" knowledge, and it gave a wrong answer. It just happened to be in a field I know enough about to notice, but most didn't.

So, while I think they can be considered as having some form of intelligence, I believe they have more limits than a lot of people seem to realise.

I remember reading about this or a similar problem before. I think it was posted on HN, but the solution was much different. They entirely removed the branch and instead marked the requests in such a way that the packets would be discarded by the network adapter. I can't remember the details. That only works for that kind of network transactions, though.

Ultimately, I think such a separation as you describe will be stable only when all natural resources are controlled by tier 1 and tier 2 gets by with either gifts or stealing form tier 1.

For that to happen tier 1 would have to buy all of the resources from tier 2. Would you sell your house and be homeless so that you can have a highly efficient humanoid robot? I don't think so. And sooner or later, what tier 2 would want from tier 1 is what they need to build their AIs, and then they'd be more similar to tier 1.

So if tier one needs something from tier two I don't think they need to even ask

You mean stealing? I'm assuming no stealing.

But this also means probably there will be no way way for tier two to extract any of the resources which tier one needs at all bc the marginal cost is determined by tier one

If someone from tier 2 owns an oil field, tier 1 has to pay them to get it at a price that is higher than what the tier 2 person values it, so at the end of the transaction, they would have both a positive return. The price is not determined by tier 1 alone.

If tier 1 decides instead to buy the oil, then again, they'd have to pay for it.

Of course, in both these scenarios, this might make the oil price increase. So other people from tier 2 would find it harder to buy oil, but the person in tier 2 owning the field would make a lot of money, so overall, tier 2 wouldn't be poorer.

If natural resources are concentrated in some small subset of people from tier 2, then yes, those would become richer while having less purchasing power for oil.

However, as I mentioned in another comment, the value of natural resources is only a small fraction of that of goods and services.

And this is still the worst-case, unlikely scenario.

I'm assuming no coercion. In my scenario, tier 1 doesn't need any of that except natural resources because they can self-produce everything they need from those in a cheaper way than humans can. If someone in tier 1, for instance, wants land from someone in tier 2, they'd have to offer something that the tier 2 person values more than the land they own.

After the trade, the tier 2 person would still be richer than they were before the trade. So tier 2 would become richer in absolute terms by trading with tier 1 in this manner. And it's very likely that what tier 2 wants from tier 1 is whatever they need to build their own AIs. So my argument still stands. They wouldn't be poorer than they are now.