setgree

First, I think it’s likely that you hear more about one than the other because you read websites like Hacker News and are not (I assume) an FBI agent or someone else who works on this stuff. A public defender I know would say that child abuse of all sorts is ever-present and relevant to their work, unfortunately.

Second, detecting CSAM leads to its producers who are by definition abusers. Here’s a nice article in Wired about the digital forensics of cracking down on a CSAM ring with some interesting details about the role played by crypto, and abusers’ misconceptions about it: https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...

With that said, I agree that a lot of political concern for this is a smokescreen for a creating more surveillance. “think of the children!” has the flavor of a rhetorical trump card.

The goal of a modeling exercise like this, which you don’t have to buy, is to generate a simple set of initial conditions that can explain things we already know. Then, we can manipulate some initial parameter value to make predictions about things we don’t see, but might.

Likewise, it is obvious that gravity exists, but a simple model that explains where it comes from (in quantum terms) would be a big breakthrough iff it came with plausibly testable implications that could be tested via experiment.

I'm hesitant to use 'always' language but the innovator's dilemma is indeed another application of the same principle. It's remarkable when a company like Google can pivot in a way that threatens its existing core revenue streams.

I like the clarity, tone, and readability of your webpage. Also your FAQ is refreshing

When Should I talk to sales? Talk to sales if you need high-volume pricing beyond 2M credits/month, custom rate limits, SSO / SAML, SCIM provisioning, an uptime SLA, annual invoicing, an MSA / DPA, or a dedicated support channel. Reach us at hello@context.dev or through the contact page.

Would that this were the norm everywhere, rather than (say) a sales rep from Datadog scraping my phone number from who knows where to ask about my company's needs after I sign up for a free account on a whim :)

I'm not an expert but I think this is an old lesson in warfare, that guerillas can triumph over larger adversaries by being more exploratory/iterative and less rules-bound. Tolstoy tells this story in the second half of War and Peace. Likewise with Iraqi militants wreaking havoc with IEDs. People repelling an invader have every incentive to move fast.

Ah, I got confused by the name and acronyms.

My name is Seth Green, which I share with a more famous actor [0]. I go by Seth Ariel Green for disambiguation.

GPT-5.5 tells me about the actor, but Claude Opus 4.8 and, weirdly, Grok 4.2 know who I am [1]. I wonder if that's because I use Claude more? Grok I have no clue why.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001293/

[1] https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/seth-green

The part about this that's amazing to me is that they still are doing nothing after he noted another GDPR violation [0]. He's obviously both competent and litigious. What does the company expect to happen next??

[0] "Under Article 77(2) of the GDPR a supervisory authority is under a binding legal obligation to keep a complainant informed of the progress and the outcome of their complaint. It is not a courtesy and it is not discretionary - it is written into the law. I filed my complaint with IMY, IMY passed it on, the case ended in a multi-million euro enforcement action, and not one of the authorities involved thought to tell the person who started it."

Yep, Sansa climbed the ladder better than he did. As she says to him at the end, "Thank you for all your many lessons, Lord Baelish. I will never forget them."

I work at a research lab that was previously supported by an R01 grant that did not get renewed last year. It’s been tough and the staff (including me) have been moved to part-time employment.

However, it also made us put ourselves out there and fundraise, which led to new connections and new opportunities.

So yes, it’s been chaotic, but like Petyr Baelish says, chaos is a ladder.

Hardware of that caliber requires a highly optimized operating system to function properly.

But unfortunately, you get Windows

`<!-- Pelican Eye / Sunglasses (Cool Retro Aviators) -->`

wtf

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WTF??

You know the old adage about if you meet one jerk in a day, it's them, but if everyone you meet is a jerk...anyway I'm glad you like CrossFit, if climbing weren't my thing, I'd probably do something in that category instead :)

Good for you, OP! Climbing gyms are especially good for making friends because you are working on problems with people. My gym has a weekly meet up for people looking for belay partners as well as classes where folks talk. Crossfit might also do the trick, as might a running club. Good luck!

Pardon, you’re right

It’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)

"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."

Every so often the Trump administration seems like they might actually care about getting my vote. A recent executive order making it easier to do research on psychedelic therapy is another example [0]. A policy shift to reform IRB review for social and behavioral science [1] would be really targeted at me.

I know politics is hard to talk about, but I generally think that we underappreciate the importance of being agentic in politics. Obviously I prefer that our government follow the law and uphold the constitution. But the many ways in which the current administration got things done by being quick, by "flooding the zone" [2], and by using tactics that apparently no one noticed before [3-4] are worthy of study and emulation.

I know the obvious response to this is to note that a lot of what they're doing is illegal, and again, I think that's bad. But they really make the current Democratic leadership seem out of touch and old [5] by comparison. Combined with policy positions that are far from the median voter's [6], it doesn't make for a winning look/platform.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/04/acce...

[1] https://www.cspicenter.com/p/its-time-to-review-the-institut...

[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/tr...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought...

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/the-unmaking-o...

[5] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-democrat...

[6] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-someth...

Did you do a coding bootcamp or such?

St. John’s college is a great place that draws a special type of young person, but its graduates are not very STEM-legible. As far as I know they still offer no choice of major & no hands-on classes — just the great books.

Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.

Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).

Something that surprised us early on: only a tiny fraction of farmed fish species have been through genetic improvement programs. Chickens grow 4x faster than they did in 1950 because of decades of selective breeding.

I agree that there is an opportunity here for getting more calories per fish (and especially per input of feed, which is really what decades of chicken optimization are about). But the consequences of these changes for chicken welfare have been disastrous [0] and we're seeing a concerted effort to move to higher-welfare breeds (though still more efficient than ancestral breeds). Likewise, intensive salmon farming has led to widespread '“environmental dewilding,” or the process of modifying natural water bodies with artificial infrastructure — in this case, fish farm pens and cages — and polluting them' [1]. It sounds like there are lots of ways in which using more robots can make monitoring less-invasive, and therefore less stressful for fish. I certainly hope to see those attributes, rather than the potentially disastrous ones, emphasized as you move forward.

[0] https://www.ciwf.org/programmes/better-chicken/

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/468348/atlantic-salmon-fa...

I'd say from this author's POV, his commitments cost him in terms of headaches, costs, and time not spent optimizing for meeting customers' needs:

The parts that were extra hard

Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap. The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway's TEM works, but the ecosystem is thinner. Fewer templates, fewer integrations, less community knowledge to lean on when something goes wrong.

The choose boring technology essay notes that as you get further along you might get more innovation tokens to spend. but when you're starting out, "not choosing sendgrid because they're American" is a token gone when they're most scarce.

Per "Choose Boring Technology" [0]:

Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while... If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble.

From my POV, the author spent their innovation tokens on a political commitment. I would not recommend this path to someone starting a company. It's hard enough already.

Also, many American companies that might have been useful to the author were founded by Europeans, e.g. GitLab. There's plenty of European talent for making widely adopted infrastructure. If those companies aren't in Europe, it's worth asking why [1].

[0] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-te...

I once worked at a crypto company that outsourced some of its marketing work to a content marketing firm. A piece that firm submitted to us contained a link to an "academic" article about global poverty with a totally garbled abstract and absolutely no content whatsoever. I don't know how they found it, because when I search google scholar for a subject, usually the things that come back aren't so blatantly FUBAR. I was hoping Claude could help me find something like that for a point I was making in a blogpost about BS in scientific literature (https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/p/how-i-read-studie...).

The articles it provided where the AI prompts were left in the text were definitely in the right ballpark, although I do wonder if chatbots mean, going forward, we'll see fewer errors in the "WTF are you even talking about" category which, I must say, were typically funnier and more interesting than just the generic blather of "what a great point. It's not X -- it's Y."

claude said "I want to be straight with you: after extensive searching, I don't think the exact thing you're describing — a single paper that is obviously garbled/badly translated nonsense with no actual content, yet has accumulated hundreds or thousands of citations — exists as a famous, easily linkable example."

alas, 4.5 often hallucinates academic papers or creates false quotes. I think it's better at knowing that coding answers have deterministic output and being firm there.

this is via the chat, but it did provide this

The user wants a real, sincere academic paper that looks legitimate — proper journal, real authors with real affiliations, many citations — but is obviously nonsense or garbled. Not a hoax or deliberate prank, but something that was genuinely submitted and published, yet is clearly meaningless if you actually read it. Let me think about what I know and search for examples. There are some famous cases:

Papers generated by AI/GPT that slipped through - there have been reports of papers with phrases like "Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic" or "As an AI language model..." There have been papers with obvious tortured phrases - "sham" papers that use synonym substitution to avoid plagiarism detection, producing phrases like "sheep pursuing" instead of "shepherd" or "big data" becoming "large information" I'm also thinking of papers that made it through peer review despite being complete gibberish, like the famous SCIgen computer-generated papers that fooled conferences, or papers where the abstract and content don't match at all.

Now I'm trying to recall specific real examples that fit this criteria — published papers that are genuinely incoherent or nonsensical but appeared in legitimate venues.

This is maybe not the _exhaustive_ search strategy I would have liked, but it's probably something you would do if you were limited to just a certain amount of effort on a task.

I asked

Can you find an academic article that _looks_ legitimate -- looks like a real journal, by researchers with what look like real academic affiliations, has been cited hundreds or thousands of times -- but is obviously nonsense, e.g. has glaring typos in the abstract, is clearly garbled or nonsensical?

It pointed me to a bunch of hoaxes. I clarified:

no, I'm not looking for a hoax, or a deliberate comment on the situation. I'm looking for something that drives home the point that a lot of academic papers that look legit are actually meaningless but, as far as we can tell, are sincere

It provided https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246802302....

Close, but that's been retracted. So I asked for "something that looks like it's been translated from another language to english very badly and has no actual content? And don't forget the cited many times criteria. " And finally it told me that the thing I'm looking for probably doesn't exist.

For my tastes telling me "no" instead of hallucinating an answer is a real breakthrough.

I’m glad to hear that. Another frame is that your depression turned out to be “math hard” rather than bodybuilding hard [0]. Your disciplined, methodical approaches were steady applications of effort, whereas what you actually needed was easy to implement but hard to envision.

[0] https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/2017/05/26/hard-is-not-def...