simplyluke

Not really. The US has widely legalized gambling of various forms (sports, prediction markets, etc) in recent years. I'd argue that even more so than nicotine there is zero benefit to gambling.

I redid my home network this year largely to be able to get off of cloud-based cameras and properly VLAN untrusted devices.

The UK is not proposing disallowing 16-17 year olds (or any children) from carrying smart phones on public transit, though, which makes the entire article fall apart.

The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.

The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school.

No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.

It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.

The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"

Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday

This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.

We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.

How many people are arrested for social media posts and other speech in each country?

I’ll toss $10k in the s&p and you buy the rig and we’ll see who feels like they made a better call?

"Token salesman finds conclusive evidence that more tokens = more better"

We have decades upon decades of hardware getting dramatically cheaper year over year for the same performance, and ~1 year of the inverse due to dramatic buildout for AI.

It's a surprising example of the recency bias to me to assume anything other than the market returning to its historic norm, even if the AI buildout doesn't slow, producers will scale factories to meet that demand.

Anthropic's own models perform differently under the same version depending on how much they've decided to quietly downgrade them.

I've been using it for a week via opencode in a large, mature codebase for some moderately ambitious feature development, and a bit of debugging. Explicit purpose is evaluating if it may be a good substitute to save money for many tasks. For several tasks I've had both it and opus 4.8 attempt the same task and compared them.

In general, it's comparable across the board. Claude is less "verbose" -- GLM really likes to comment a ton. There were a few things where I think claude would have needed a little bit less back and forth. So opus still has an edge, but it's marginal, very much unlike previous open/competitor models where benchmarks looked good but actual day to day performance was pretty bad. I'm sure fable is "better" but it's so expensive + data retention policies are such that for the moment it was generally available I couldn't use it for work. This is still notably better performance than when claude code took the industry by storm.

I'm understanding why Dario is trying to regulate open weight models away.

That's probably more precise.

I honestly don't get the hostility against local models in this thread

Consider that there are literally trillions of dollars being wagered on this not being the future state of computing. Not even speculating that HN is being astroturfed (though I see no reason it wouldn't be by interested parties), but many of the US tech employees here have direct financial incentives in various forms to be rooting for the failure of open source and optionally local models.

I really think giving it a year for the hardware market to come back to earth and spending a fraction of that for API access to the same models is a better use of the money.

The open source models have gotten heavily conflated with local development. While that is cool and I'm excited about the future of local LLMs, it is not necessary to play around with these models. Without shilling for companies I don't have a relationship with, there are a number of companies who will give you an API just like Anthropic/OpenAI and you pay per token, albeit much cheaper than the frontier labs.

I've been using the full GLM 5.2 model this way (through opencode) at work for the past week. It's quite impressive.

will likely be resale-able for what I paid for it for the next 7-10 years

There is not a period in the history of computing where this is true of consumer hardware over a decade for anything other than hardware already at the very bottom of its depreciation curve. It is surprising to me that you state that as an obvious assumption.

I suppose if your base case is Taiwan war that may be true, but there's a lot of folks who seem to be assuming the current hardware crunch will go on indefinitely when the natural state of hardware is getting cheaper over time.

I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.

Prices have gone down for the entire history of computing reliably with the past year being an extremely notable deviation from that trend line.

I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.

US standards are bad at considering everyone outside the vehicle in general. Headlights are another great example. I've seen videos of headlight designers bragging about how they can put a dim spot in the exact place the regulators measure glare to cheat the test. Most pedestrian deaths are at night.

With many new vehicles on the road with their low beams on coming at me head-on I have no chance of seeing a pedestrian for hundreds of yards because I'm so blinded.

The times article goes very in depth on this. Yes, it is an issue, but it explains at most 10% of the increase in fatalities.

Getting hit by any vehicle over 20mph is going to be a very bad time, it is going to be somewhat worse if it's a large vehicle with a high bumper.

Americans are twice as likely to think it's fine to use a cell phone while driving than Canadians or Europeans, and while illegal in most places it's effectively unenforced - our cops spend half their shifts driving around messing around on a mounted laptop. If you want to improve outcomes, start holding American drivers to the standards that peer nations do.

I can't speak to Australia, and yeah, western Europe has a lot less big trucks, but Canada has as many large 4x4 trucks as anywhere in the US in my experience and has seen decreasing deaths. The times article touches on this but the most they can explain of the increase in deaths from vehicle size is 10%. It's a problem, but it's far from being able to explain the full issue.

Read the linked article (or even the quoted portion). Americans have a very different attitude of the acceptability of using those phones.

The problem is that other countries have seen nearly identical trends in vehicle market share trending towards larger vehicles and have seen sustained declines in pedestrian fatalities. John Burn-Murdoch went deep on this in the FT a couple of years ago (archive link at bottom).

Most of the explanations commonly put forward for why US roads remain so deadly focus on broad structural factors such as vehicle size or time spent on the road, but a review of the evidence suggests this may be mistaken. Last year’s improvement is a case in point. Two reasons often cited as key causes of poor US performance both worsened: the total number of miles driven by Americans increased, and US cars continued to grow larger. Yet fatal collisions still declined.

Adding to the evidence that this is not a dominant factor, car sizes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand have traced similar paths to the US without resulting in a spike in fatalities.

Another theory is that the rise of homelessness in the US may be pushing pedestrian deaths higher. A recent study found that there had indeed been a marked rise in traffic-related deaths among the homeless, but this, too, can only explain a small portion of the overall rise.

Instead, an underrated factor seems to be not American cars but American drivers [...] The determining factor seems to be different attitudes to safety, with Americans twice as likely as Canadians or Europeans to say they find it acceptable to use a phone while driving.

https://archive.is/Lggyg#30%

The times article hand-waves away distracted driving by saying that other countries haven't seen a similarly large increase. The problem with that is that vehicle sizes in all other countries have also been increasing, and other countries like Canada and Australia have seen almost identical market shares of those large vehicles without the surge in pedestrian fatalities.

The large factors are phone use (more prevalent among american drivers and there's data to show this), and homelessness - the homeless are dramatically overrepresented in US pedestrian deaths and the population has increased dramatically in the US over the past decade. Even more so though it appears to be attitudes, Americans are twice as likely as Europeans or Canadians to say using a phone while driving is acceptable. Though no single factor is a smoking gun, vehicle size is one of the least convincing. Getting hit by a 4000lb car or an 8000lb truck matters much less than how fast the vehicle's going (let's all remember our high school physics class).

This blog post is the best deep dive I've seen on the data: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/more-on-us-pedestrian...

As people are correctly pointing out, WA is reclassifying certain e-motos as motorcycles, which is to say they'll require a license and insurance to be used on public roads - two things that are already required for all SUVs and trucks on public roads.

Being local to WA and spending a lot of time on bikes, the easiest thing we could do to improve the situation would be for law enforcement to aggressively enforce existing distracted driving laws. The number of drivers with their face buried in a phone during any kind of slow traffic is terrifying if one looks around.

There's some of that, a lot of it though is e-dirtbikes that can pretty easily do 35+mph stock and 50+ with light modifications. A friend of mine has one and I've ridden it. It's a motorcycle with mountain bike brakes. I don't think they're bad vehicles, but I do think they should be treated as motorcycles as opposed to bicycles, and 13 year olds shouldn't be riding them on public roads.

You don't even need to run them locally for them to be a threat. Plenty of companies are looking at paying third party companies to host these models and they come in at fractions of the price of the frontier labs.

Yes but many of the challenges directly contradict the idea that "coding is a solved problem"

I'm not really sure how this is exactly pertinent to a discussion on books being banned. A copyright holder can choose to cease publication for any reason, that's categorically different than a ban. Perhaps it's a point in a broader argument about copyright.

Zero books are banned by name in the USA. Certain content is: Classified documents (although this is just illegal to share as the one with the original clearance, not to publish/read/possess after), child abuse material, and copyright violations all come to mind.

The majority of "banned books" are books that a random school district/religious school in a conservative part of the country elected not to include in their library at some point. Many of them are required reading in many other school districts and some of the most well known books of the 20th century.

The closer-to-banned ones are generally not included on banned-book-reading-lists and are banned on major retail platforms and long out of print and tend to be racist and/or genuinely subversive to liberal democratic principles. Most of these tend to be some of the most-downloaded-books-on-the-internet, and are also in no way illegal to own in the US - though possession of many is illegal in much of the EU.

An interesting case is United States vs Progressive inc [0] in which the US dropped a lawsuit to prevent a magazine from publishing a how-to guide on building an H bomb and Defense Distributed vs United States Department of State [1] in which the US federal government settled and allowed for the publishing of 3d printed gun files online, previously prevented under arms exports claims.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Progressive,_.... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Distributed_v._United_...

I think the technical part went fine but the interviewer was clearly frustrated by my low regard for LLM safety. I didn’t get the role.

Anecdotally I've heard this is weighted as much as the technical interviews.