nagonago

That seems overly optimistic to me. People who already distrust the government aren't going to change their minds. Even if the government releases everything, conspiracy theorists will just say it's a lie to hide the real truth. In fact, releasing information would probably just fuel the fire. Every document release is just more material for people to sift through and spin new theories.

When I got a Macbook many years ago, I was surprised how often little utility software like this cost money. I was just so used to the abundance of open source and freeware in the Windows/Linux world.

No judgement either way, I get that developers want to be compensated for their time. I just always found the difference in culture curious. I guess it's because if you're willing to spend the extra premium for Apple products, you're probably also willing to spend a little extra premium on the software too.

I appreciate your positive attitude and I hope more people will adopt it.

I am also part of some very niche communities on the internet, and although they are small they are certainly thriving.

I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.

I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".

"Google has prevented you from installing apps outside the Google Play store on your phone."

I also work for scientists and researchers, and it's a whole different atmosphere. Being research-driven instead if profit-driven makes all the difference. It's a great gig...at least until the funding dries out.

The problem is not so much the carbon footprint of just using LLMs, but the impact from building and running massive data centers needed to train the models. Check out this report from the ITU:

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-06-05-green...

According to the latest edition of the report, electricity consumption by data centers — which power AI development and deployment, among other uses — increased by 12 per cent each year from 2017 to 2023, four times faster than global electricity growth.

Four leading AI-focused companies alone saw their operational emissions increase in the reporting period by 150 per cent on average since 2020. This rise in energy that is either produced or purchased – known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions – underscores the urgent need to manage AI's environmental impact.

In total, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions reported by the 166 digital companies covered by the report contributed 0.8 per cent of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.

It's worth noting that it's not all gloom and doom. As the report optimistically notes:

Renewable energy adoption: 23 companies operated on 100 per cent renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022.

Dedicated climate reporting: 49 companies released standalone climate reports, signaling greater transparency.

Scope 3 consideration: The number of companies publishing targets on indirect emissions from supply chains and product use rose from 73 to 110, showing increasing awareness of industry impacts.

So the environmental impact is alarming, but at least companies seem to be growing more conscientious about it. We must continue to hold tech companies accountable for their environmental impact, and keep pushing for renewable energy.

I found the stylistic choice to write in all lowercase so jarring that I could barely focus on the content of the article itself.

Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:

The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.

Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.

Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.

An easy trick is to take a common riddle that's likely all over its training data, and change one little detail. For example:

A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. The wolf is vegetarian. If left unattended together, the wolf will eat the cabbage, but will not eat the goat. Unattended, the goat will eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten?

I found that the overzealous AI moderation made it impossible to ask anything remotely interesting, such as the classic dilemma:

Would rather eat poo that tastes exactly like chocolate, or poo that tastes exactly like poo?

This was in Bangkok, Thailand, although the school itself was run by Indians. They had IT courses for both kids and adults.

Fortunately I think these days there are a lot more options for kids to learn programming, but back then the options were pretty limited.

Unrelated to the article, but this reminds me of being an intrepid but naive 12-year-old trying to learn programming. I had already taught myself a bit using books, including following a tutorial to make a simple calculator complete with a GUI in C++. However I wasn't sure how to improve further without help, so my mom found me an IT school.

The sales lady gave us a hard sell on their "complete package" which had basic C programming but also included a bunch of unnecessary topics like Microsoft Excel, etc. When I tried to ask if I could skip all that and just skip to more advanced programming topics, she was adamant that this wasn't an option; she downplayed my achievements trying to say I basically knew nothing and needed to start from the beginning.

Most of all, I recall her saying something like "So what, you made a calculator? That's so simple, anybody could make that!"

However in the end I was naive, she was good at sales, and I was desperate for knowledge, so we signed up. However sure enough the curriculum was mostly focused on learning basic Microsoft Office products, and the programming sections barely scraped the surface of computer science; in retrospect, I doubt there was anybody there qualified to teach it at all. The only real lesson I learned was not to trust salespeople.

Thank god it's a lot easier for kids to just teach themselves programming these days online.

I agree, but to be fair I think that point could have been made clearer in the post.

A similar but related lesson: the best way to teach something is to design a task that is just difficult enough that the learner can figure it out on their own.

When I was reading parenting books in preparation for my own kids, this is one consistent theme that kept coming up, sometimes called "scaffolding." The idea is that you provide a safe environment, design a task that is just the right level of difficulty, then let the child figure it out themselves. (For example, rather than directly holding a kid climbing up a ladder, let them climb it by themselves while you stand by to catch them just in case.) As a result, they develop more independence, self-confidence, and the lessons stick.

"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life." -- Jean Piaget

From what I've read, children's brains haven't fully developed the capability for emotional regulation. So not only are they less experienced, they might actually be physically incapable of managing their own emotions. Keeping this in mind helped me survive the toddler years. :)

Although I must confess that I have a mental block about the second and third components of a C-style for-loop and whenever possible, I avoid them if I can.

Glad I'm not the only one! Despite programming for over a decade, I still mix up the order of `update` and `condition` sometimes in `(initialization, condition, update)` for loops. Probably because I spent too much time with Python and became so accustomed to only using `for x in y` style loops.

Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith...

I agree that self-policed communities seem like the best solution to the general problem.

For example, public Minecraft servers often get harassed by cheaters and griefers. Some servers try to circumvent this with all sorts of complicated anti-cheating mods and moderation tools... but ultimately the easiest solution is to just have a whitelisted server with only people you trust. This tends to work better because every player is accountable, and has the bonus side effect of fostering a community of people who actually know each other.

Private, moderately sized, self-policed communities really do seem like the only sure-fire approach to avoiding cheaters in online multiplayer games. Otherwise it's just a constant cat-and-mouse game with the cheaters usually coming out on top.

I've lost count of the number of "epiphanies" he's had.

Thank you for introducing me to "Suzanne Delage," I am a Gene Wolfe fan but was unaware of this story until now. I found your interpretation incredibly convincing, too.

I had the same question, as my first reaction was "this looks like such a hack, I am sure there are better tools for this," so I poked into the user manual[0] and found this quote:

Driven by the frustration of creating charts within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as Beowolf and PicLig, Travis Kochel saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process.

Reading between the lines, "design applications" is very likely referring mostly to Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. I can see it being useful for the (somewhat niche?) use case that the creator had, which is quickly creating simple charts within Adobe products.

[0] https://assets.vectrotype.com/specimens/Chartwell-Manual-24-...

I recently listened to an interview with Joe Brumm, the creator of Bluey, on the podcast "How Other Dads Dad". He said this is a common criticism, and he thinks a fair one.

The problem is his aim was never to be an educational show for parents, but to be an entertaining show. It wouldn't be as entertaining if Bandit didn't play with the kids all the time.

So yeah, although it is a great kid's show and a much better example of parenting than other shows...we should keep in mind it's ultimately entertainment, not a parenting bible.

Unfortunately the encrypted phone market is a total mess. The Darknet Diaries podcast has a good episode about this. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/105/

I've seen this play out on Discord too. When they rolled out the new "summarize conversations with AI" feature, I saw a lot of people concerned their data was going to be stolen for AI training as a result. I pointed out that they explicitly said this won't happen, and also that Discord's ToS is already vague enough that there's no guarantee your data isn't already being used for other purposes. The LLM fearmongering is powerful.

Unrelated to the content of the article, but is the cover image AI generated? Looks kind of like DALL-E style output to me but it's hard to be sure.

(Also, I know I'm breaking the rule "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread." My defense is this is less of a complaint and more just plain curiosity!)

My usual custom instructions, tweaked as needed:

You are an expert programming assistant. You specialize in Python and ES6. Answer in concise code blocks only. No explanations, only code. Code blocks should contain no comments, only code. You can also help with Linux command line (bash).

A nearby shopping center used to be called Qanat until it got bought out and renamed to the very generic (Corporation) Square a few years ago. Everyone still just calls it Qanat because it's such a cool word, with an interesting history!

As much as I would love to see Musk imprisoned, I don't see how those things would lead to jail time. Are you saying he might be accused of defrauding investors? I think that would be a pretty hard sell in court.

Interesting idea. I've actually seen similar things over the years, even as early as 2006. Unfortunately these cute little kinds of things usually generate a bit of buzz but then die out. Hope it grows well for you though.

PS: not a fan of the clickbaity title. If it wasn't a Show HN I would have ignored it. A better title might be just what you put in the description, "A joyful slow social media", for example.

Agree on the rendering speed, I was working on some experimental visualizers in LOVE which drew lots of individual pixels. I ended up having to rewrite a bunch of it in shader language to get decent FPS. This might be true with other frameworks too though, I understand graphics are not an easy thing to just automagically optimize.

Yep, I supervise whenever possible. Also, we use NewPipe with comments and recommendations disabled. I just let him choose from a playlist of pre-approved videos.