HN user
www.robotsinplainenglish.com
we don't only encounter art in a museum
True, but the TFA's first line reads:
Most of us walk through museums reading the little labels and nodding.
To your point, yes, one can learn to appreciate art, but the TFA is far from useful for this purpose, too.
spitting out verbatim text
The New York Times lawsuit is resting on the point that large chunks of undigested articles can be vomited out. OpenAI tried to have the lawsuit thrown out but the courts permitted it to continue.
The Times... alleged that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot had produced near-verbatim replicas of copyrighted articles, that the chatbots generated hallucinated content falsely attributed to the Times, ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_v._Microsof...
Museum labels are supposed to be designed to deliver the take-away point that the curator wants to make. Asking museum goers to learn how to read paintings is a poor workaround.
The classic guide to writing interpretive exhibit labels is Beverly Serrell's book [1].
TFA has very little content and a terrible LLM stench. I work in this field, so I was attracted to the clickbait title. My advice is not to read TFA, just read a summary of Serrell's book if you can't get the book itself.
[1] Exhibit Labels, Beverly Serrell, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024 edition.
TLDR; a Chicago-area schoolteacher was able to find the rights to the old Backyard Baseball PC game from the 1990s, and she commissioned a software game development company and a still-live fan base, to recreate the source code (because the original source was lost).
She founded a company called Playground Productions. Thanks to her efforts, nostalgic Millennials and their kids can purchase and enjoy this old game.
A nice, feel-good story. But I have two questions:
1. The story doesn't mention how this schoolteacher got enough "private investors" so she could quit her job and pursue this. Sounds like an important detail.
2. Would have liked to know more about the source code. What happened to the original code (it wasn't in escrow somewhere?) and how did they recreate it? It says some fans had old CD-ROMs with the game on it, and the game dev company in Pittsburgh worked with them to rebuild the game.
Wow, that's a great article about color! It answers many questions. Thanks for the link.
From the article:
Risk is rising as big tech companies like Oracle — the ultimate financial source of the Ellison media empire — need to turn to the bond market for staggering sums to finance data centers.
STOP spending on immigration programs... to improve situation for kids of the people who built out the western civilization
The common misconception that the US Government is wasting money on immigration is pushed by Trump and FOX News, who both lie regularly. For example, see [1] about how Trump rejected a report produced by Federal researchers. The report is available [2].
Overall, the refugee resettlement program gives the country back many times what the government spends. And even if you just focus on the expenditure, the bulk of it is on border enforcement and imprisonment, which goes to domestic private companies.
As to your love for "the people who built western civilization", I'll just leave it up there. Your connotation is clear, and it doesn't reflect well on you.
[1] Trump administration rejects report showing positive impact of refugees
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/refugees-reve...
[2] Rejected Report Shows Revenue Brought In by Refugees. SEPT. 19, 2017: A draft of a study rejected by Trump administration officials that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/19/us/politics/d...
I think parent is referring to the film in the novel, also named Infinite Jest. The film is so compelling that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die.
I would've liked to read more about what they're doing, but their website fab2.com is unhelpful. Very little info, presented in pointless swirling animations that hijack your scroll action.
The article is only a brief summary that cannot do justice to the incredible story of the Koh-i-Noor diamond. I have been doing some research on it, and IMO the most modern and accurate take is the book by Anand and Dalrymple [1].
The following is an excerpt from a review of the book, written by Maya Jassanoff. The book is also very engagingly written. Highly recommend.
"If Koh-i-Noor sounds like a magical history tour, that’s less because of the stone’s putative properties than because – as the authors so pervasively recognise – the history of imperial power is always at base a history of violence. This is no book for the squeamish. There are noses rotted by disease, eyes punctured with hot needles, live cremations, slow poisoning and a torture victim crowned in molten lead."
[1] Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond, by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. Bloomsbury, 2017
https://williamdalrymple.com/books/kohinoor-the-story-of-the...
A wise article! It's not about Bourdain at all, but about all of us--- how we live a life unexamined, and how to stop doing so.
From the article:
"Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said... “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”"
"Since arriving at the White House, Mr. Trump and appointees have curtailed regulatory oversight of the industry, including policies related to memecoins."
"Despite the cratering prices, Mr. Trump has faced few consequences from his ventures, because federal regulators have largely abandoned crypto enforcement."
Yes, it's an outstanding book, well worth reading:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner, Penguin Books, 1986, 1993.
A recent perspective on this excellent book by Ryan Cooper is also very good. He says that journalists in the 1970s and 80s were infected with Reaganite ideology and made some mistakes. Worth reading:
https://prospect.org/2025/12/12/cadillac-desert-reconsidered...
My human-written summary:
Most people are ego-driven and won't listen to your logical arguments. They will only get angry with you even if you're right. So don't argue with them. Give advice only if they ask.
If you really know something others don't realize, maybe that's a valuable edge for you to profit from. Use it.
And don't hesitate to ask others for advice when it might help you.
From the article:
"Financial surveillance by law enforcement is far from unheard of, but it wouldn’t be normal to see agents use it in this way. For instance, ICE in particular once had widespread access to something called the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), used to surveil immigrants who wired money, but much of that access was clawed back last year amid public scrutiny and accusations of illegality."
technically... you can be sure there's ed
Unfortunately, ed has been omitted from the default installation of recent debians, at least. I had to install it manually.
Since I don't see it mentioned yet in the comments:
In 2011, movie studios created a digital ownership service called Ultraviolet. You could own titles in your "UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker" and access them from multiple devices via third-party streaming services. [1]
"The UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker will keep track of all of the consumers’ UltraViolet digital purchases, whether they bought a movie or television show on Blu-ray disc or digital download. UltraViolet does not store the actual content. When a consumer logs in, UltraViolet will verify that the consumer has purchased a film, and will then allow the consumer to stream or download their movies from a participating UltraViolet service." [2]
This was an attempt to separate the technology of streaming from the legal ownership of the asset.
But Disney never signed on, and the member studios eventually got tired of it for some reason. The whole service was shut down in 2019.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(website)
[2] Interview with CTO Mitch Singer, https://web.archive.org/web/20110717234132/http://www.homeme...
negative productivity
Every indicator says that shareholders or managers have no idea what improves or degrades productivity, unfortunately. It’s all based on vibes. Executives get the benefit of the doubt.
tldr; $70,000 (minus $40,000 in vehicle expenses)
On the one hand, you say AOC's claims are BS. And then you say that Facebook is:
making money in ways that at least a substantial number of people don't think are "earning" money, such as monetizing users' data.
Is this not a contradiction? Or are you splitting hairs between a "true startup" and an enshittified bigCo?
102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Seems to be a strike against LLM-based programming systems like Claude.
cumin smells like disgusting body odour
You're not wrong. If you smell pure cumin (without any other spices or herbs), particularly if you grind and mix it with yogurt to make a salty lassi, you get a whiff of body odor. My kids called it "the BO drink".
It's a weird thing, but the smell becomes quite different in combination with other smells. It's an ingredient in many expensive perfumes, believe it or not! [1]
[1] https://www.fragrantica.com/news/CUMIN-Polarizing-Note-of-Sw...
That Sam Kriss article is a wonderful read!
"If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you"
Thank you for posting.
Dipa Chaudhuri and Puneet Gupta, who undertook the epic translation project, tell us about the many challenges they faced, and the fun they had along the way.
The entire commencement program is here. Woz speaks at around the 42-minute mark.
I thought this was a thoughtful take by an American based on a trip to China. The author's New York Times feature was also worth reading in full.
Great read about a niche topic!
I know almost nothing about Vietnam, but this article felt like I had visited.
One more fact that might be interesting about natural diamonds: not all of them are extracted by digging mines; the oldest way of extracting diamonds is by sifting through alluvial deposits.
This method originated centuries ago in India. In fact, until the 18th century, this was the only known method. The most famous origin of alluvial diamonds is the Godavari-Krishna river delta in the old Golconda Sultanate. This particular site was exhausted about 200 years ago, making Golconda diamonds especially precious now.
Ha, ha! I thought the same thing: LLM slop. But soon I remembered having seen this Linotype ad before. It's a genuine image. Almost 140 years ago, some human writer came up with short, punchy copy.
Look what these AI companies have done to us. We see the shadow of slop everywhere.
For understanding this type of question, I highly recommend the C FAQ compiled by Steve Summit based on Usenet discussions in the comp.lang.c newsgroup.
You should start here:
https://c-faq.com/expr/evalorder2.html
I cannot recommend the C FAQ enough. It is written in an accessible way and contains proper references to textbooks and standards.
Disclosure: I was one of the contributors.