AftHurrahWinch

"Dolly Parton isn't interested in living on through artificial intelligence.

The "Jolene" singer was asked about AI technology during a press conference in London where she appeared to promote her upcoming album "Rockstar."

She went on to say that ... she'll "have to decide on how much of that high-tech stuff I want to be involved in because I don't want to leave my soul here on this Earth."

With a laugh, Parton said she feels like with that kind of technology she'd be "grounded here forever, so when I'm gone I want to fly with it""

> Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper.

Fascinating!

The Cairo Genizah

Located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, this particular Genizah was a massive, windowless attic room built high into the structure. To put papers in it, the synagogue's caretaker had to climb a tall ladder and drop the documents through a hole in the wall. Because the local community never got around to burying the papers, this high, hidden room acted like a time capsule for over a thousand years. When it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it contained nearly 300,000 manuscript fragments.

The headline makes this seem like they're labeling AI music, but it's actually just a scammer filter. Spotify is just making their internal anti-bot flags public-facing.

The "cat" command always exists with code 0. You need to exit with code 2.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks#exit-code-2-behavior-p...

I regret to inform you that is the preferred spelling in British English.

I think you could just ship generic robot dogs in a container and have local contractors straw-purchase firearms, 3d-print cradles, and combine them. None of the contractors would need to know what they were doing.

"It takes infantry to hold territory" is still true I guess, but now it's a single operator in a bunker.

"Office, messaging and verbs" was excellent, thanks for the recommendation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579407

Saw this for the first time when @dcre mentioned it.

Really enjoyed this quote:

> a clerk in a large insurance company in New York, and so here you see his office - drones laid out at desks almost as far at the eye can see. Each desk has a telephone, rolodex, typewriter and a large electro-mechanical calculating machine.

> In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person. The links between cells are made up of a typewriter, carbon copies ('CC') and an internal mail system, and it takes days to refresh whenever someone on the top floor presses F9.

Great questions, I will reinstall Factorio for research purposes and get right back to you.

The Revolution allowed a new system to be built, but it is a teleological fallacy to point to the current system as the result. Centuries of trial, error, and institutional hardening led to the system current Americans would judge.

The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.

Phew, I'm glad "inserting them into your nostrils and braying like a walrus" isn't on the list.

Agreed. The United States had an election in 1864, while the states were literally at war with each other.

Really enjoyed this:

> In the centuries after Archimedes invented the Archimedes' screw, developments of propeller design led to the torus marine propeller... it was invented in the early 1890s

"the centuries" indeed. :)

Yes, they are. Like any standard API, it is an orchestration layer that, given a specific input should always execute the same logic and produce a consistent output. Its job is deterministic execution.

The agentic system that uses MCP (e.g., an LLM) is fundamentally non-deterministic. The LLM's decision of which tool to call, when to call it, and what to do with the response is stochastic.

MCPs are deterministic, SKILLS.md isn't. Also run.js can run arbitrarily generated Node.js code. It is a trivial vector for command injection.

This might be sufficient for an independent contractor or student. It shouldn't be used in a production agent.

Is the BLS reported labor supply contracting?

This is what the prelude to stagflation looks like - no job growth, yet prices rising.

If the administration pressures the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates, say, right before November 2026, then we lock in a stagflationary cycle. An initial stock rally then long-term bond yields rising on inflation fears. A weakening U.S. dollar, and a Federal Reserve that has no tools to fight inflation in the medium-term.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/KDp6z

This was found posthumously in a rented garage. Imagine yourself walking in to a windowless room, turning on the lights, and seeing this.

"chuck some paint" is a deliberate misrepresentation.

It misleadingly describes the scale, coordination, and intent. It uses a minor detail to trivialize an act explicitly intended to reduce military capacity.

I should have included the quote I was responding to: "some of them did chuck some paint on some planes."

Aladdin's lamp would have been an olive-oil lamp. Flammable vapor lamps are comparatively modern.

Before the Renaissance, rock-oil/petroleum was used mostly for waterproofing as tar, with a few other medicinal and military uses.

They destroyed "drone and aircraft machinery" [0] at APPH and at Teledyne "damage to the clean rooms could halt production for up to 12 months" [1].

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-57403049

[1]: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/pro-palestine-activists-dama...

This: https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/doc/dslabs/po...

Isaac Newton dedicated over thirty years to the study and practice of alchemy, writing over one million words on the subject. Comparable in scale to his writings on mathematics and physics.

I'd rather GDP be $1B smaller right now if it meant that Newton had spent another 30 years on physics and math.

> That gives order-of-magnitude accuracy without claiming site precision.

> I’ll add a compact table of constants + ranges + citations in the Methodology page

This is a worthwhile project. HN and 'the discourse' needs a reliable, citable source for these metrics. Adding a table of citations is a crucial step towards that.

Your confidence intervals are probably more precise than an order-of-magnitude (LeBron James is the same size as a six story building, within one order-of-magnitude), and I'm excited to see the ranges as your site evolves.

> "We aim to inform debate with clear, sourced numbers while avoiding sensationalism."

This is a great aspiration, but it seems to be contradicted by the rest of the page, which provides unclear numbers from unsourced categories.

> CO₂: $AI_{CO_2e} \approx (AI_{electricity} \times grid_{emission\_factor})$

How are you accounting for Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and Renewable Energy Credits (RECs)?

> Water: $AI_{water} \approx (DC_{water\_per\_kWh} \times AI_{electricity}) + (PowerGen_{water\_intensity} \times AI_{electricity})$

Where do the values for $DC_{water\_per\_kWh}$ (the Water Usage Effectiveness, or WUE) and $PowerGen_{water\_intensity}$ come from? These vary wildly by cooling system (evaporative vs. closed-loop) and energy source (hydro vs. nuclear vs. gas).

> Electricity: $AI_{electricity} \approx (IT_{load} \times utilization \times hours) \times PUE$

How do you estimate $IT_{load}$? Is this based on TDP of GPUs? A specific list of GPUs? Market share estimates?

What is the assumed $utilization$ for inference vs. training?

Which $PUE$ is used? A global average? A regional one? A company-specific one?

As usual, the facts are in the linked report not in the journalist's summary.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nrMSJOxI6Iqw6HRKtnvWjOkj3tp...

It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:

Faith-based -> Community-based -> Evidence-based -> Plant-based -> Science-based

Or some other hypothetical inheritance chain.

If a parrot squawks, "1,345 multiplied by 785 equals 1,055,825", you would be logically and factually incorrect to say 'Well, that's wrong because how would a bird know".

The historical meaning of the word 'hominem' isn't crucial to the universal logical principle of 'ad hominem'. If xenoorganisms beneath the ice-sheets of Titan are dismissing each other's ideas out of hand, they too may be committing this fallacy. The fallacy is the rejection of an argument based on its source rather than its content.