sealeck

It’s interesting to claim that the ‘tech bros’ oppose hardware attenuation and age verification when this will massively benefit them; everyone will be forced to use their operating system and the government will have exercised its power to protect Microsoft’s god-given right to make money, Peter Thiel’s age verification startup’s ability to collect people’s data and their ability to trace the identity of any critics through identity-based age verification.

That’s why large tech companies are lobbying in favour of this!

There are few occupations in which a man can be more innocently employed than the pursuit of devising asynchronous network protocols?

And we can also ignore model law; we should require OpenAI/Anthropic to provide unrestricted access (at standard API rates) to their competitors so they can use this to train new models.

I think this comment is quite disingenous -- it's like if there's a rule that says "nobody can walk on the grass" that you object to because you'd like to have a picnic with some friends; your claim is that if someone gets out a bulldozer and drives it across the lawn to make a parking lot followed by an army of lawyers that anyone who wanted to picnic is objecting purely because it's a convenient way to criticise the bulldozers.

lack of the path taken from one point to another limits your ability to train models that can efficiently recreate the work

Isn’t this the problem inference (training) a model is designed to solve :)))

Have we reached the limits of scaling? Sadly it appears that larger model still equals better model

As in cum-"captain of industry"

I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively.

Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).

Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.

Allegedly OpenAI's contracting model is much more vicious than Anthropic's; at work (admittedly a little IP-protective) we have unlimited Claude, but no Codex subscription because OpenAI won't give us sufficient guarantees around data retention.

We are also concerned that it may not be possible to bind OpenAI using contract terms and/or the US legal system.

The technologists who create it believe they should control it

I think there's an interesting phenomenon where it is _not_ the people who control it, but instead a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) who does not create the technology and yet has ended up wielding the levers.

Why does the false positive rate matter if you have a verifiable oracle? You can just disregard anything that fails the oracle

Dystopian present

Surely the other way around? Phone QA process >>> disposable vape QA process...

Yes and making a horse drawn cart drive itself was thought to be impossible so why don't we have faster than light travel yet...

I found an (as of yet not-root-caused) error in sqlite (no crash or coredump, just returns the wrong data, and only when using sqlite in ram-only-mode).

You should report this to the SQLite developers - they are very smart and very interested in fixing SQLite correctness bugs!

Stallman has always been right. It's mind boggling just how right he was about everything.

Mind boggling right about not allowing GCC to be used as a library, his comments on Jeffrey Esptein, a refusal to in any way compromise (e.g. the GNU/Linux meme), etc...

Oh and a recognition that free software, while nice, does not in any way solve the underlying issues he claims it does. Similarly to how letting everyone walk around their local water treatment facility and perform chemical tests doesn't really work and instead the state regulates and hires experts to monitor the water supply...

Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling

How does Jane Street skim money from those who hold passive index funds?

The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.

Um, no?

I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...

I had to look this up - in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin "ecosystem"! Truly bizzare to stake your company on this...

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/55ca61a...

Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited

Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.

It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).

laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now

I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!

instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?

Probably because this is not Block's business strategy. If they could do this, then they would...

probably the most honest message you’ll ever see

Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.

"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!

there will be copyright issues

Next.js is MIT-licensed. Cloudflare's rewrite is... also MIT licensed...

There are many really excellent papers out there - the kind which will save you hours/months of work (or even make things that were previously inviable to build viable).

That said, it is amazing how terrible a lot of papers are; people are pressured to publish and therefore seem to get into weird ruts trying to do what they think will be published, rather than what is intellectually interesting...

Why is this LLM spam?

Its like going 70 mph in a sleepy subdivision because a road sign on the interstate says you can go 70 there.

Trump is taking an law that says "You can do X if Y" and saying "I can do X"

I think it's more like going 70mph downtown because there's a sign saying "if onn an interstate you can do 70mph" -- the "if on an interstate" is pretty important there!

Do you have examples of deadlocks/livelocks you've encountered using SERIALIZABLE? My understanding was that the transaction will fail on conflict (and should then be retried by the application - wrapping existing logic in a retry loop can usually be done without _too_ much effort)...

I think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!

Even when you build cool things it's respectful not to plant them in HN comments :)

I think the usual solution to this is to talk about cool stuff you've done that is only incidentally relevant to the product you're selling. For example, some detail on how you built a technical system or solved a problem, etc...

Converge towards what though... I think the level of testing/verification you need to have an LLM output a non-trivial feature (e.g. Paxos/anything with concurrency, business logic that isn't just "fetch value from spreadsheet, add to another number and save to the database") is pretty high.