thinkingemote

There was no mention of this on hacker news (at least I cant find anything via the search at the bottom) but the story of Thomas Kurian's office break in / sit in was in 2024 so not that long ago: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ryldympec

"Google employees arrested following protest over Israel ties at executive’s office. The employees were arrested during a sit-in at the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in California, during a day of company-wide protests by Google employees at offices across the US in protest of Google’s Project Nimbus deal with Israel"

Nothing remains here - only walls.

Most of these tombs have already, since ancient times, been looted and desecrated and most things inside including any human remains have long since been removed. It looks like this tomb is also in this category as all that remains of note are on the walls which cannot be easily removed.

I seem to recall a story that even at the time when they were building pyramids in ancient Egypt that they had a problem with looters of the older tombs.

Additionally: The use of the word "Sealed" in the title is not present in the text and I propose is click bait for attention and an emotional reaction. Looks like that strategy still works.

"Synthetic Slop" is a new term for me, I quite like it, more accurate than "AI Slop"

Allegedly these techniques are being used by Google on YouTube to delete slop videos.

You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s.

I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!

Most articles that people want on HN are about LLMs and most of those are written by LLMs. The submissions are always horrible to read and usually have no gems to inspire, so if relevant I will at most skim it but the comments on HN about the submission is where the real jewels are likely to be.

If you can easily detect the pattern of LLM writing here's something for you to look at: I was reading some pre-consumer-LLM papers by AI researchers and founders and the way these are written are incredibly similar to existing LLM prose!

We employees need to remember that most software projects fail. So the work we produce should have lower value than we give it.

We also need to be motivated to stay in our jobs.

Most developers like their projects and value their work. But the chances are that it's for nothing.

Many developers know they work on bad products (gambling industry, military, surveillance, whatever) and so it's here that they focus on their technologies, tools and frameworks rather than the work they produce.

"Agentic engineering" for example.

Id be curious to see what and how Googlers are doing with their 20% time.

CoMaps is a fork/spin-off of Organic Maps, which in turn is a fork of Maps.ME

Although advocating to have less empathy generally isnt considered good there are ancient and modern schools of thought that explicitly says that empathy can be bad.

To understand the enemy is to some extent to start to love the enemy and that's bad because the enemy is bad. The idea is that you can only have empathy for certain people.

Worth also pointing out that there's also a more modern but uncommon idea that empathy towards someone or a group may weaken and shutter their own "truth" or identity stories but this is for the moment only heard in radical academia not on the street.

Generally there's also a large amount of people who don't know what "empathy" means with the ever present confusion of it with "sympathy", endorsement and alignment.

Agreed. It's telling that the ads for speed upgrades all seem to focus on families: when all are uploading and streaming maybe at the same time. The marketeers know that 1 individuals and couples are not the target market and 2 they want everyone to be using as much as possible.

I'd be interested in the rabbit hole of flow state. Also with regards to the dopamine rewards of solving a bug as motivation.

Sometimes using a LLM can assist these and sometimes it can feel like cheating myself out of a good thing and I'm not entirely sure where the borders are. It could also be related to a sense of ownership or pride in ones work and seeing the value in doing quality work.

If you like videos, I saw an interesting video yesterday about systems thinking, software as ecosystem particularly with AI. More of an overview but gives an insight into seeing where we might be able to experiment with different ways Its more focused on teams and companies than individual developers but I think it could be applied to the single dev.

"Software engineering at the tipping point" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n41YjR5QfU

Godot's new contribution policy: https://godotengine.org/article/contribution-policy-2026/

1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?

Yes, there are a very great many!

The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.

Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.

So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.

David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.

These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.

To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.

Given this.

2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.

They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.

On HN many comments under many threads are about whether the submission was written by AI. You could say I have noticed a pattern in Hacker News comments!

In these comments there's a common pattern where some users argue that they do not agree that the submission was LLM written and they often focus on specific details to refute it (e.g em-dashes) and some users see the overall pattern clearly that it's totally obvious. For me it's a kind of smell, it's off putting and it's obvious. The article says to "trust your gut". But it's also something that comes with practice and time, it's not some innate thing. People may have better things to do than expend mental energy noticing patterns in a bunch of social media posts. The more I see it, the more I see it.

The take away I get is that it's okay to notice patterns and it's okay to not notice patterns. Remember that other people may be noticing patterns and associations in things that you might miss. Be charitable.

Far more interesting questions are:

1) If you cant see the patterns of LLM writing, does the idea that the thing you liked was written by LLM worry you?

2) If you can see the patterns clearly is the fact that it's LLM written worry you?

Because in our comments there's many who do not care that LLM's are writing content and theres many who do care. But are these correlated with those who can see the LLMs or who are blind to them?

Can these colours be replicated or captured using ink, paint or traditional film photography?

Alternate Reality Game - Basically a kind of online mystery game that pretends (with a wink) to be a real mystery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

It's easier to take a look via change of dates in google street view, they have almost 20 years coverage. You can see how the data ages and decays or doesn't because it's tied to the place it represents.

Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.

If things right now are hard to tell, it will be easier in the future to tell looking back. So, in the future lets say 2030 we can look back at the things people write in 2026 and that they swear are "my own words" and that fool almost all of us and see clearly that they were not actually their own words after all.

It's going to be like when we all used cat meme pictures in our slide decks - in the future it's going to be obvious and cringe and a liability now.

It's like postponing a major credibility and trust failure event to yourself by a few years in the future for some feel good attention now.

"Do you people all have brain injuries? AI writing is almost comically easy to detect"

Some can't and that's fine. I also find it comically easy to detect, but it's a kind of pattern recognition, a skill that takes a bit of investment of time and energy on some internal disposition. It also operates on the unconscious: if it feels off it might well be off. Like map reading, or like listening to jazz, some people just don't can't seem to do it and that's fine. Most people around me can't read code and thats fine.

Also: some others don't care about what they see or how they write and levels of literacy are also lowering, and some others are enthusiastic users of the new technology so have to protect their investment.

You should set up an actual company for this. It doesn't inspire confidence having it be just you a person and legally it's worse for you too.

From the article: "When tasked with coding, writing, editing, or summarizing, ask the user up to three targeted clarifying questions. Proceed with the task once you've received answers and understand the prompt fully. If the task is a simple factual question or conversational message, respond directly."

Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".

My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?

(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)

counter intuitively criminal ransomware gangs operate on trust. They have to ensure that we believe they really will shred it, otherwise no victim will ever pay a ransom ever again.

Therefore one way to weaken these criminals would be to weaken this trust factor. In a way therefore comments like "can we actually believe they will really shred it" goes towards this aim.

I have to wonder what criminal hacking gangs that do not operate on trust would do. Would it be like the replacement of organized crime (mafia) with the arguably wider damaging unorganized violent drug gangs?

Yes its more difficult now they are not students.

Would you say that the same students who are protesting AI have used AI to graduate? Its ok either way.

Edits - condensing the questions:

1) Are these protests reflective of the majority of students?

2) Do the majority of students use LLMs regularly in education?

Given the above questions what change in education and change in personal AI use might we see?

There is a dissonance here, can anyone help. It's weird. Doesnt anyone else see this?

To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want?

I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time? But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves?

Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant.

Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype.

Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport?

So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?

Up to 80% of software projects fail. Most startups will fail. VC's and bankers know this.

Does using AI increase or lower that failure rate?

Does seeing a project that uses AI fail mean it wasn't going to fail if it didn't use AI?

To try to answer it with my gut: I imagine that we could see more projects failing, but the percentage that fail would be the same. Most projects that use AI will fail because most projects generally will fail, but the time and cost to get a successful project will lower.

For the big McMurdo US base they have flown in a few times in the winter for extremely important life or death medical reasons (last year: Aug 25 [1]) For the smaller other country bases it tends to be too dangerous and impossible. They are not able to use mcmurdo and the americans cant help either.

The general rule is that the Americans don't fly during the winter but they do tend to downplay and not publicize the times when they do fly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/mcmurdo-statio...

One of those eye opening moments for me was learning about how these criminals work on trust. They need to be trusted to not release the data or to unencrypt when paid, and by and large they do.

One way to weaken any group that works on trust would be to make them less trustworthy. That way victims wouldn't be as confident paying the criminals and thereby making the effort by the criminals less attractive.

How should we be communicating with this in mind? Assuming there's some higher intelligence, or future humans who can decrypt our private streams?

It's like hearing that yesterday your Grandma got scammed by a basic Nigerian Prince email scam of 20 years ago sophistication.

Poor chap, we will see an increasing number of people we once respected get fooled.

But looking at it another way: this should make us seriously think what the chat interfaces to LLM are doing to many people.