snowwrestler

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Tons and tons of sites have annoying popups. As such, complaining about it is usually off topic; that is, the complaint has nothing to do with the substance of the specific article that was posted for discussion.

The best place for such a complaint is to send it back to the website publisher. Then at least they will know their audience doesn’t like it.

The atmosphere is the lowest possible value for your inhaled CO2. So it might be useful to think of this more in terms of impaired recovery rather than direct harm.

Imagine a healthy person with a healthy lifestyle and 8 hours of sleep every night. But every year, they are awakened 5 minutes earlier. So after 6 years they are only getting 7.5 hours of sleep every night. After 12 years, it’s only 7 hours. Will this have a health effect over time?

Obviously that example is a pretty big impairment. But the concept is what I’m getting at. Small persistent changes compound over time if there is no relief for recovery.

It’s a bit silly to be so sensitive to “AI tells” in phrasing. If you go look for them in original human writing, you are guaranteed to find them—just like the AI training did! That’s how they became “tells” in the first place.

I know of people who bought property in western North Carolina with this mindset. It’s higher elevation, far from coasts, near fertile farm land, with lots of surface water to drink and use. And far from other geo hazards like volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. On paper it checked a lot of boxes for long-term safety.

Then a hurricane went where it had never gone before and wrecked their entire neighborhood.

It’s hard to know exactly how a complex chaotic system is going to react when inputs change. And it only takes one outlier to cause a lot of harm on a local human scale.

This is why so much effort goes into computer modeling of the climate BTW. We know our emissions are changing the climate. But predicting local effects is damn hard.

What does this have to do with their insurance business? As far as I can tell this is just a random complaint about USAA.

And it doesn’t even make sense financially. The “brand” of your mortgage provider adds absolutely nothing to the utility. When shopping for a mortgage, just pick the lowest possible rate, it does not matter from whom. Loans get sold all the time and that is a good thing as it helps minimize rates through raw competition.

USAA at one time had aims of being a comprehensive financial company and they gave those up years ago. Brokerages got sold to Schwab, IRAs to Victory, etc. Again, this is a good thing as there was no way they were going to be able to compete in all those categories. Specialization is good.

It’s not in Endgame, it’s actually in Infinity War, but everyone knows The Snap. It’s a generationally iconic movie moment that seeped into the entire U.S. culture. I had 65 year old lawyers referencing it in work meetings, and these were not MCU people at all. Sort of like how everyone knows who Darth Vader is even if they know nothing else about Star Wars.

If anyone is still following this, it is July 10 and my GizmoHub app is still connected to my kid’s watch, and the map and messages still work fine.

And the bank of pay phones is one of the coolest little scenes in the book.

Put me on team “don’t update the text.”

Books are written in their contemporary cultural contexts. LeGuin said speculative fiction is about today even if the story is set in the future, and I agree.

So when you read Neuromancer, in some ways you’re reading a book that is about the 1980s in the U.S. So there are more fundamental anachronisms than just RAM and payphones, like a belief that east Asia had a lock on the future of advanced technology. Or that punk culture was cool and edgy and would endure.

Here’s another fun nitpick from Neuromancer. The opening line says the sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel, which in Gibson’s day would have been analog static that looks like a messy grey from across the room.

But later, with computerized channel tuning, a dead channel was shown as a screen of solid bright blue, and even later, solid black. So different generations of kids have grown up with very different mental images of the background lighting for the opening of Neuromancer.

At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.

You can tie the same knots without cutting the string. Just grab the two sides, pull them snug, then tie the knot. The fact that the “free ends” are connected at a distance doesn’t prevent the knot from holding like usual.

The advantage of the continuous loop is that it can’t end up inside the waistband during laundry.

Nah, this is not correct. The Gizmo watches work fine with the GizmoHub app, but not the new Verizon Family app. You have to authenticate in both apps.

I have Verizon service and use a Google Voice number as my MFA and it has worked fine for many years: in the GizmoHub app, in the Verizon website, and in the My Verizon app. The only place I can’t properly authenticate is the new Verizon Family app. They just screwed up that new app.

A vector against a standardized XML+ZIP document format?

Not sure if joking, but if this product is not republishing the text of your contributions (to which you hold copyright), you’re probably not going to convince a court to do anything here.

Generally speaking it is not a violation to scrape, index, and analyze web content as long as you don’t republish copyrighted content without a license, or violate access controls. For example: search engine indexes.

I think you’ll be sad if you look up Hayden Kennedy.

No serious legal consequences to them from this climb, though, and the route remains clean. There was a wonderful film in this year’s Mountains On Stage film tour called Patagonian Chimeras, about a team of women who climbed the new variation by fair means.

Birth rates auto-recover because the denominator is the entire population, and old people die off first.

As long as some people are still having kids, the birth rate will eventually reach replacement rate.

But Simon is not trying to get good at CSS debugging, Simon is trying to learn about AI systems and produce content about them. So giving the AI agent a trivial task to go crazy on is a feature, not a bug.

For $12 implied cost, he got a front-page post on HN with 500 comments. What is that worth? :-)

Tariffs would not stop the screw worm, which lives half of its life as a winged fly.

Nah, this is the same self-congratulatory dismissive mindset humans have been having about each other for years. “Wake up, sheeple,” “NPC,” etc.

We’re not lacking for opportunities to believe the worst of each other. It’s not something TikTok invented.

The legal and political theory was that the Congressional vote count was a moment of power that could be interrupted and seized with relatively few people. No need for tanks in that case.

Most people attacking the Capitol were unorganized protestors, who were gathered as cover for the real effort, which was quite well organized. It was well described in Congressional hearings; people were convicted of conspiracy; lawyers have been disbarred, etc.

In the U.S., birth rates fell pretty much continuously for at least 150 years until WWII and the Baby Boom. Now they are slightly declining again. Many industrialized nations have a similar graph.

So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.

Cloudflare is fantastic at marketing, and pretty good at technology. I evaluated them twice for enterprise contracts and both times picked a competitor. The first time, it was DosArrest for DDOS protection, which was a much better value per dollar (but they sucked at marketing.) The second time, we needed a CDN with particular features and Fastly was a better fit.

My point is that it’s very very hard to know in advance that a startup is going to be awesome at marketing. Their tech was not, on its own, a giant moat or a “must have” standout. So I can see why some VCs shrugged.

That’s very interesting, but the analogy is not wrong, because the mattress is analogous to space-time, not just space. Essentially it is a 2D analogy for a 3+1D reality.

I don’t understand how lines of code matter at all for scary LLM core capabilities. Does the transformer architecture get better with more lines of code?

My impression was that LLM training codebases were 99% resource management and only a few lines actually implement the core training algorithm, which is where 100% of the intelligence comes from. Data, not lines of code, are the constraint.

After training you can adapt the intelligence in various ways, and that takes a bunch of lines of coded too. But you cant raise the intelligence ceiling again without another training run. So where is the scary recursive part?

If they actually have concerns they can communicate them directly and privately. There are less than 10 companies, in only 2 countries, with advanced enough AI programs to qualify for this type of concern. And Anthropic has the phone numbers for all of them.

Companies do tons of communication and work directly, without press releases or blog posts. If a statement is released publicly, it is done for a PR purpose.

Sure but some people own like 30 guns. There’s more going on with gun ownership than just basic self defense.

It’s a great episode of TV because Data is a main cast character who is obviously conscious. We know before the episode starts who is right and who is wrong in this particular argument. This episode is not about consciousness, it is about civil rights: resisting bigotry and power.

Note that the episode is NOT about the ship’s computer. They all know it’s not conscious, despite also being a machine that can converse and do things.

Our LLMs are like the ship’s computer.

Apple has never been a luxury brand. It’s a label lobbed at them by critics and fans of competing products. But it’s never been supported by their price points, volumes, marketing, or operations. The few times they have tried to play in the luxury market, like their gold $10k Apple Watch, it went pretty much nowhere and they quickly stopped.

They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim for top-5 market share. That’s not a luxury product strategy. They are a lot more like Honda or Volkswagon than Lamborghini.

Access billions in federal funding, obviously. Which is something!

It may also be salient post-2028, is the thing.