ninjagoo

The “Platform” is just the website

Arduino is the platform, not the website.

  From the same terms and conditions, in the first 2-3 paragraphs where they define the terms:

  "The use of the Arduino Platform and the Services (each as defined below) available on, from, or through Arduino.cc (“Site”) ..."

  "By using the Site, the Platform, or the Services, you declare to have read and accepted ..."

  "If you are under 18 years of age, you may use the Site, the Platform, and the Services only with the consent and supervision of your parent or legal guardian."

  " ... and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms ... "

Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version

Ah, cultural nuances. The title "Who's Afraid Of Chinese Models" is a riff on "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf" which itself is a play on the song "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf".

The title essentially means that the chinese models are being portrayed as the big bad wolf; but are they really the threat or are american frontier labs afraid of competition and commoditization?

It's also somewhat ironic because the author says that there is something to be feared -that western innovation will become dependent on chinese models, especially for cyber, if the american ones are restricted or unavailable.

From Arduino's Terms & Conditions [1], Section 8.2:

"8.2 User shall not:

- translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements; or

- extract or make copies of the information contained in the Platform (except with respect to Content owned by other users), make derivative works from the Platform, reuse the Platform, or make any other use of the Platform other than as set forth in these Terms or as permitted by applicable law."

Does anyone really want to use an "open-source" maker/tinkering platform with such egregious rules against tinkering?

[1] https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions/

The examples posted on their launch blog page are quite impressive, especially for fine details, multi-panel/multi-page and text rendering.

But: not open-source/open-weights, and no indication that weights/source will be released either.

There is no such thing as a certification that data was deleted. If someone presented such a thing I would assume they're trying to cover something up.

I have news for you. There are standards around data destruction [1]. Courts also order data deletion, to be carried out by forensic experts [2], who trace data in computer systems, and delete what is required, and certify accordingly. This can be done even in cloud-scale compute [3][4][5] - corporate systems especially have routine extensive logging and traceability that allows for this to be accomplished. The companies that I listed earlier specialize in this compliance capability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure#Standards

[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ohnd-5_17-cv-02...

[3] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/paravision_comp...

[4] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Amazon-Proposed...

[5] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Edmodo-Dkt15%28...

They claim to have deleted or will be deleting all the data they exfiltrated.

There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.

No such certificates have been presented.

Nothing less is trustworthy.

That's how polls showed the happiest people earn around 60-80k a year, and both the people below and above that threshold, reported to be less and less happy the less they made and also the more they made.

This is a myth. The original 2010 Kahneman-Deaton study showed that how favorably people judged their overall lives continued to improve beyond $75k. Daily emotional well-being appeared to stop improving around that level. [1]

A larger 2021 study by Killingsworth using real-time reports found no happiness plateau at $75k; instead, well-being continued increasing with income, including above $200k. The relationship was logarithmic - going from $40k to $80k mattered more than going from $160k to $200k, but the benefit didn't disappear. [2]

So of course, in 2023, Kahneman and Killingsworth jointly re-analyzed to resolve the conflict, leading to more nuanced conclusions: in the least-happy 15-20%, unhappiness declined as income went up but eventually leveled off; for the majority of people, happiness continued rising with income beyond $75k; in the happiest people, the association sometimes became stronger at higher incomes. [3]

Science, baby!

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107

[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118

[3] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

Don't blame your leader for how your society looks, blame your society for your leader looks.

Hard disagree. There's a reason collective punishment (a.k.a blaming society) is a war crime and a violation of human rights. Kings (Ghenghis Khan is the most [in]famous example) used to hand out collective punishments to relatives and villages, and that's why human societies had to eventually get rid of them as a collective, leading to the modern era.

Leaders, as autonomous adults, are responsible for their own actions and how they look, not anyone else. They don't even have the disallowed excuse of 'following orders'.

Additionally, Leaders have an outsize impact on human organizations because of hierarchy and power differentials. Society reflects their adult leaders because of this power differential, not the other way around. More specifically, individuals susceptible to influence perpetuate that power differential ('following orders') and diffuse the leadership behaviors into wider society, making that society a reflection of its leadership. And I'm willing to wager that the proportion of folks susceptible to influence far outstrips the proportion of independent thinkers in any society.

Even in democracies (which are mostly representative-based republics), there is a hierarchy with power differentials, and a strong individual can work those hierarchies to remake society.

Even in direct democracies, would you say a 50.1% result in one direction reflects that society as a whole? Mathematically, that's a ridiculous conclusion. And yet, that tiny advantage can result in wholesale changes to society (Brexit cough cough). So where does one draw the line? 51%? 60%? 75%? 95%? What about the 5% that disagrees? Do they deserve any collective punishment for the actions of the 95%? Or are you going to lean on 'collateral damage' as a defense?

Don't blame your leader for how your society looks

One can blame the leader for their actions, and therefore by extension how the society looks post-action, because those actions are on the society.

To be fair, pre-action one can blame the supporters of the leader for making bad choices, but post-action responsibility is on the leaders.

The real problem is the hierarchical nature of societies and organizations. A leader at the "top" is a winner-take-all situation. Even direct democracies that apply majority rules is a winner-take-all situation, defective from the start. A different construct is needed - effective cooperation without leadership.

Bitcoin is a start towards that effective-cooperation-without-leadership, but it also suffers from the 50.1% problem.

US office culture is generally pretty high trust. It has relatively high autonomy, authority, and low surveillance norms.

Unless you're black, or other disadvantaged minority

Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.

For an adult, I would attribute this more to internal mental makeup than anything else. I've seen individuals exhibit these positive and negative behaviors irrespective of whether they were in a high-trust society or a low-trust one, a wealthy society or a poverty-riddled one.

Additionally, based on what's going on in the world, I would say that there are very clear signs that a high-trust society is formed when adults with positive behaviors are in power, and a low-trust society is formed when adults with negative behaviors gain power.

Indubitably, there are individuals whose behaviors are moderated by what type of society they're in, but that split between moderated individuals and self-driven individuals is, IMHO, unknown, or at least, unknown to me.

most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so

Do you have any evidence to support this? Feels like this opinion is made up, for unknown reasons.

In reality, psychopathic tendencies are about 4.5% in the general adult population, a far cry from 'most people', with the gold standard assessment being only 1.2%. [1]

From that same article, "The construct of psychopathy is understood generically as a type of personality disorder characterized, among other important features, by the presence of behaviors that conflict with the social, moral, or legal norms of society, giving rise in many cases to clearly criminal behaviors ..."

There's also the bagel experiment described in Freakonomics. [2]

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

[2] https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/WhatTheBagelM...

Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials.

Is this a huge concern? According to NASA [1], about 44 metric tons of meteors and meteorites enter the atmosphere daily, or about 16,000 tons annually, or about 35 million pounds. Of which 5000 tons is estimated to reach the ground. [2]

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ [2] https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial...

We are joined by Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler

A lot of open source folks are going to be very skeptical, rightly so, of this group of players.

... to find, fix, and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software ...

How this is implemented is going to be key. Are they going to contribute through (a) existing channels, pull requests etc. or (b) are they going to fork the projects under the guise of 'security' or (c) offer bug bounties or (d) contribute financially?

Approach (a) brings the community along. (b) alienates the community, splits resources, and in the long term will likely cause many open-source projects to die. (c) has potential but timing and speed can be unfavorable for critical bugs, and doesn't mesh with 'responsible disclosure'. (d) can be ineffective for critical bugs unless paired with support for maintainers, which can be incredibly helpful for the opensource ecosystem.

An LLM is a predict the next word algorithm.

This is what's known as a category error; an LLM is a 'model', not an algorithm.

It's not even an accurate claim; LLMs predict the next token, not the next word.

AI is essentially copy paste with more steps

What about when AI creates a limerick about a kubernetes cluster run by Buddhist Monks? Or any number of other novel creations?

Fortunately the courts recognized the transformative use involved in making a model, which is fair use of copyrighted works, in kadrey v meta platforms.

The most infurating thing however is how AI companies sidestep the IP rights of authors

transformative use falls under fair use, permission from authors is not needed to use legally acquired copyright works for training. Kadrey v Meta Platforms and Bartz v Anthropic.

but then claim to own those IP rights when their own generated output leaks.

Corporations gonna do corporate things. Blatant hypocrisy is par for the course. Organize and take them to court.

Open source ai will win.

Anthropic just kneecapped themselves, and possibly OpenAI and Google as well, with their FUD strategy that got fable shutdown by the government.

But that doesn't impact Chinese providers. Then can US companies get investments for expensive model development if they can't actually sell those models-as-a-service?

In the meantime, open source will continue its march onward because while slower, it's completely open source, and the models are already good enough to improve their own work as well as build out the next gen of models.

This might be the pin-prick that bursts the AI "bubble".

All those $Billions of investments in AI Datacenters? Up in smoke if the models that are capable of replacing humans can't actually be used.

I wonder if 2008 style bailouts will be needed, soon.

That trillion-$SpaceX valuation based on $14B+$10B infusion from Anthropic and Google? Heard they have short-notice cancellation clauses.

Either this rule is rescinded quickly or the bubble bursts. Which shall it be? I know which one I'm betting on; do you?

Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is an ai-model, if it can't speak?

I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be.

They should have consulted their own models about the ramifications and unintended consequences; based on their actions over the past few months I think it is safe to say that the models are smarter than the decision-makers at anthropic, lol. I know the models are smarter than I am and even I could have told them that they were taking paths, FUD for example, that would lead to grief.

As the begetter of the AI, the German court held Google liable for its AI's doing. Common sense ruling.

The ruling also lessened the free speech rights for AI. This is a big one. In conjunction with holding an operator liable for its AI's doings, that will lead to interesting cases where conduct that would have been previously protected under free speech rights will become a liability. Basically, machine-based cognitive capability becomes a liability when it is customer-facing.

We may yet discover that Malthus was right.

We may also discover that einstein-rosen bridges exist [1] or that aliens exist or that magic is real or that astrology works. Hopefully none of these things are keeping you up at night.

Also, broken clocks, twice a day right, etc etc. Clocks still broken.

Then what??

Plenty of dystopian sci-fi available for your reading/viewing pleasure. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature

There's a calculable limit to the population an area of land can sustain. (Yes, some agricultural practices can mitigate that, but that should also be weighed against culture and history, and how much change is acceptable.)

Ah yes, folks fighting the good Malthusian fight since 1798, and yet to see a win. LoL. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Criticism

Why does it need to be? Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today?

Freedom of movement for labor is absolutely critical to counterbalance the freedom of movement that capital has, otherwise it leads to mass exploitation of labor and rising levels of inequality, which leads to, well, the French approach to the bourgeois problem.

could be circumvented by setting up a shell company that owns your devices.

Hard LOL. Doesn't apply at borders. Any country borders.

Also https://xkcd.com/538/

Transition to f-ing what though?

The future is a bit fuzzy, always. That said, here's my take on it.

Transition to f-ing what though?

Not jobs. Those will be gone once ai can do them cheaper than humans. ai can already do many (most?) of them better than humans. The jury is still out on the cost aspect. Judging by r/LocalLlama, the lower cost is not that far off. There may be some structural adjustments around compute pricing before that happens, though.

In the EU, humans will probably be ok. They have a strong tradition of focus on human needs. Because of lower average salaries [1] than the US [2], human employment will likely carry on longer as well.

In the US, those folks that have capital will likely be ok. They'll be able to purchase services from ai companies and invest in ai companies and corporate armed forces (ai-populated, not human) to protect the Haves. Those that don't have capital? Who knows? America hates poor people, women and minorities.

China? No idea. Though I hear that their demographics are upside-down, so there'll be fewer people to support over the long-term. That they'll supply the robotics and goods for the rest of the world is not in doubt: cheaper electricity from solar/wind, advanced ai and robotic tech, science and industry moving forward while the US regresses, hard.

India? Hard to say. No social net of any consequence. Not enough capital to go full ai/robotics, human labor way cheaper than ai/robotic labor at the moment, so maybe they'll survive as that last major bastion of human work for some time to come. But their economy is growing, and they have a lot of people, so at some point they'll come to that same fork in the road. Hopefully they'll have serious social safety nets by that time.

Africa? In a lot of ways, they're similar to India on the human labor costs side, so their future hasn't been written yet either. India can probably fend off an invasion by rapacious US corporates with ai/robotic armies looking for resources because of sheer numbers, but Africa, fragmented, is a different story. Maybe China will be their friend? If you think this scenario is outlandish, look into the history of European companies colonizing the world. You didn't think the East India Company with its massive private armies were government-owned, did you? Likewise with the Spanish/Dutch/Portugese expansions. The govt. takeovers didn't happen until much later, tens of decades later.

South America? They're an interesting case. Brazil may take a trajectory similar to the EU. Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay too. The others are a ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

This article seems to completely miss the significant compounding effect of real growth over 13 years.

China liberalized their economy in the 70s: 1976 Mao dies -> Cultural revolution ends -> 1978 Deng Xiaoping launches 'Reform & Opening Up'.

India liberalized their economy in the 90s: 1991 Rao and Singh come to power -> eliminate tariffs, dismantle the License Raj.

The difference is at least that of compounded growth over time. At 7% real growth, in 13 years an economy gains about 2.4x. In PPP terms, China's economy is about 2.4x India's [1].

Additional factors to consider are that China liberalized more aggressively through state directed experimentation, and India liberalized more gradually, and within a democratic legal system. Also, on the Chinese side there were periods of slowdown (1989, others), and on the Indian side the economy would have been about 20% larger but for the right-wing/fascist policies of the BJP government [2][3]. But policy failures on both sides are probably a wash, bringing us to today's gap.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/...

[3] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/ill-conceived-demo...

Maybe we need to strengthen civic/philanthropic infrastructure around Science and Technology to reduce reliance on government funding cycles.

Science and Educational purposes are valid 501(c)(3) purposes. A donation to a 501(c)(3) that funds open-source scientific software, public STEM education, basic research, science grants, or public-interest tech research can be deductible.

Up to 60% of Adjusted Gross Income can be tax-deductible as charitable contributions to a qualified 501(c)(3) with itemization, depending on the contribution type.

This would create a non-partisan defined/dedicated non-profit funding layer with serious governance that will benefit all sides. Might be possible to go global.

This would need serious structure: independent board, conflict-of-interest rules, grant review, public reporting, no private benefit, and probably fiscal sponsorship first.

Maybe this deserves a separate Ask HN to avoid derailing this thread: would people here actually support or help design a 501(c)(3)-style vehicle for public-benefit science and technology funding?

  > Norway is the 5th largest weapons and defense manufacturer

  > while the so called Oil Fund doesn't directly invest in them, Kongsberg is 50% state owned.

  > Glad Norway's oil fund has some sense and is above the virtue signaling of the Danes.

  > so called Oil Fund

  [1] https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/fs_2603_at_2025.pdf
  [2] https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2025-11/fs_2512_top_100_2024.pdf
  [3] https://nordicdefencereview.com/operating-in-more-than-40-countries-kongsberg-norway-2024-performance-review-and-growth-outlook-kongsberg-norway-2024-results-and-growth-trajectory/
  [4] https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/6052795/aerospace-and-defense-in-norway
  [5] https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/sipri-top-100-arms-producers-see-combined-revenues-surge-states-rush-modernize-and-expand-arsenals

  > Sadly, education does not correct psychopathic traits, which might be overrepresented in c-suites, and selected for in politicians.
  >> Seems to me the venn diagram of "congress and c-suites" vs "educated people" would have one circle wholly inside the other.

  > look no further than the massive amount of debt we saddle on kids.

  > I didn't learn a _thing_ in college that I haven't learned better either at $dayjob, or from reading.

  > College/education lost the plot. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we can fix it.

What alternative do you propose? For humans, and AI?

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_higher-learning_institutions
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation

can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans.

Sadly, education does not correct psychopathic traits, which might be overrepresented in c-suites, and selected for in politicians.

It might be critical for humanity to identify and edit out these traits in ai, while we can.

AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out.

Remember when the frontier labs found out that curated high-quality training was critical to making better models?

Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average, I think we can expect quality education to turn out better ai, on average, and with better repeatability than with humans because of better control over the initial conditions and environment.

Seems like the key elements in this are the use of a neuromorphic autoencoder (instead of a 'regular' one), plus Fowler–Nordheim annealing dynamics and Ising energy minimization so that the system is not just passively settling, it's being taken through a controlled search process designed to avoid premature trapping and scale to higher-order combinatorial optimization problems. [1]

A 'regular' autoencoder is a neural network trained to compress data and then reconstruct it.

A neuromorphic autoencoder is instead implemented using brain-inspired computing elements like spiking neurons, event-driven updates, local interactions, sometimes specialized hardware. In this paper, looks like the autoencoder is being used as a structured energy-minimizing circuit for an Ising optimization problem. The architecture manipulates Ising clauses rather than only pairwise spin interactions.

Ordinary artificial neurons compute matrix ops such as y=f(Wx+b), while this uses artificial neurons that accumulate input, which emit a spike when they cross a threshold, like biological neurons (event driven neural dynamics).

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-71937-4