MostlyStable

Cool concept. As they mention, more work needs to be done on long term durability, although they saw no degradation in their (very short) testing period. To me, the humidity control seems more worthwhile/useful than the power generation, although that could be a useful solution for small IoT devices like door and window sensors that don't need much power.

I like it as a proof of concept, would love to see a more serious engineering effort to demonstrate what real world costs, durability, and aesthetics might look like (if significant portions of indoor walls are going to be covered in this stuff, it needs to be able to look decent).

What's the end goal of this "build ugly things and depress land values" strategy? If it's to drive out current residents and buy cheap, to what goal? If, once you have bought cheap, you stop building ugly things and start doing high value things.....then land values go back up and you have defeated your own purpose.

See: Nuclear power for an example of this.

The decision to not require seats is one of the best regulatory decisions I have ever heard of, and I wish this kind of thought process was more present in all kinds of places. The funny thing is that, I bet if it were used more broadly, given the absolutely enormous safety advantage that flying has over basically any other mode of transportation, there would be a non trivial number of other flight safety regulations that would get reconsidered.

They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people.

Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.

Ich glaube, dass Deutsche buchstabieren es "aktuelle", eigentlich.

(apologies for my broken learner German, I decided not to use a translator).

Wow, I expected it to be a DNA based split or something like that, but a genuinely new to science mammal is pretty cool!

I'm pretty wary of mass public surveillance. I'm much less concerned about companies monitoring the inside of their private property

As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.

I'm honestly curious about the "market keeps rejecting it" part. Yes, they sold far fewer units than the other models....but did they really not make money? I have made variations on this comment many many times. I completely buy that the opinions about phone form factor and features expressed on HN/reddit/online, and my own idiosyncratic preferences probably even more so, represent somewhat of a niche, and that your median phone consumer isn't interested in what we/I want. But the phone market seems like it's so large that it should be able to support a lot of niches! A tenth of a percent of the total market (~1,300 million in 2023 according to [0], 0.1% of which would be 1.3 million phones) should be totally viable as a business! I get that, maybe for Apple there is opportunity cost. Having more product lines adds overhead, and if the profit margin on those extra product lines isn't enough higher than the main lines to justify that overhead, they kill it. But why doesn't some smaller company (so yes, this mostly applies to Android) try to steal that fractional market share? I simply don't understand why it doesn't work to the point that now, when the market is so much larger than it was in the past, we have so much less hardware diversity.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.

That's how several major AI advancements have happened. I have seen no evidence that that is the fastest way to make progress right now. I expect that, much like chess engines, it will not take too long before AI is significantly better than AI + human. But right now, my bet is that we are still safely within the window where an AI + human mathematician team is still better than AI alone (at least for the case where the human has learned how to work effectively with the partner....something that this event could possible be good for teaching).

The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.

Even if they don't figure out how to exfiltrate weights, someone will intentionally do this with an open model once open models are capable enough. If you ever think "no one would be so stupid as to...", you are wrong. Yes, someone absolutely would, and will.

Independent models living "in the wild" is approx. inevitable.

I think this has historically been true and is still approximately true now. But I think in the relatively near future (less than 5 years) there's a really good chance it won't be true anymore.

Once open models catch up to the current frontier in vulnerability exploitation, the cost to target people will go way down. In the past, the cost to hack a random individual person was generally high enough that if there wasn't some special reason to hack you in particular, it wasn't worth it. That may no longer be the case in the near future. The floor of what is acceptable security for the General Public probably needs to rise quite a bit over the next few years.

I don't think he's complaining about having a lot of apps, or the ability to have a lot of apps. He's complaining about being required to use apps for hundreds of small interactions every day that don't, or shouldn't, require an app. And he's correct. Companies are doing this not because they think it's better, but because they believe that if they can worm their way onto your device, and insert their cloud service (even if it's initially free), that they can turn you into a more reliable and/or recurring revenue stream in the future, either because you feel locked into their ecosystem so you will buy other products from their lineup, or, even better, buy a subscription service.

No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm

(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).

honestly curious question: do you expect this to remain true? If so, for how long? I can think of two potential reasons why it might not stay true.

1. The very best humans remain able to understand/check the proofs, but we go for so long with every proof checking out that society more broadly just decides to trust. We are already doing that with human mathematicians. I can't verify what Terence Tao tells me is correct, I just trust that it is because he (and other human mathematicians) tell me it is. How many proofs/years of them checking out before we reach this point? I don't know, but history suggests that eventually, humans might keep checking, but they will do so only as a hobby. For any purpose that actually matters, we will just start to trust and use it.

2. The proofs that AI comes up with become too difficult/complex for even the very best human mathematicians to understand, and our options become to either trust or to not use at all.

Obviously it's possible that neither of these happens if AI capabilities stall out not too far beyond where we are now, but if they keep progressing at the current rates for another few years, I expect at least one, and maybe both, to eventually come to pass.

I do not have a single hobby where I'm very far beyond the median hobby-haver in skill (that is to say: if you took all other humans who share my hobby, I'm likely somewhere near median for all of them). This may put me in top whatever percentile among all humans, since most humans don't share my hobbies and so are terrible at those things, but there are enough humans out there, and enough humans who share my hobbies, that I have always known that there are people who are vastly better at them than I am. Now yes, if I was constantly being followed around by one of the top 10 hobby-havers, pointing out to me all the mistakes or sub-optimal decisions I was making, that would indeed be annoying and reduce my enjoyment in the hobby. But why do you expect AI to be like this? I would love if I had one of those top 10 hobby-havers on call to answer every one of my (often inane) questions with infinite patience (and who would only talk about the hobby when I specifically initiated the topic). I'm already under no illusions that I'm the best, but it's now easier than it has ever been (for some hobbies, I expect others to join them over time) to get better at them....if one so desires.

Lump of Labor fallacy

Still works for me (although I always use it logged in). If they kill old.reddit, I may finally abandon the site. It's been slowly losing value for a long time and being forced to use the hot garbage of the new UI might be my tipping point.

What? No this is completely incorrect. old.reddit is a way of viewing reddit with the old (in my opinion far superior) UI, but includes new posts and comments. As for whether or not it requires an account, that appears to be something that they are A/B testing.

If streaming through a browser/open source / not the locked down app supported 1080p I would be a lot happier. My understanding from the last time i looked is that it actually only supports 720p

I had a whole long response typed out and I realized that it probably wasn't worth it. I think that I just have to admit that I find your view and understanding of the world completely incomprehensible. Thanks for humoring me, and have a nice day.

Who is this audience that thinks unasked-for and un-controllable felonies is a good message, or who wants to fund that?

I find the juxtaposition of "can't stop bragging" and "is not a good marketing term" to be fascinating. Have you considered that they know these recent reports aren't a good look for them but that they feel compelled (either because they know it would be far worse when it inevitably got out on it's own or maybe even from some moral sense) to report somewhat truthfully?

I actually don't think we should expect artists to be something bigger or more than their art. He is right that the fix needs to be consumer driven, but I think it just needs to be that we care a lot less about celebrities of all kinds outside of whatever it is that made them famous. We shouldn't be arguing about whether whatever thing an artist or sports star did or said that wasn't related to their art and/or sport is good or bad....we should all just collectively not care. Read the book, listen to the music, watch the game, and beyond that treat these people like any other stranger: someone whose actions and opinions you do not care about.

Celebrity themed oreos shouldn't be a thing, but not because we demand our celebrities think of themselves as above crass commercialism, but because no one would consider "celebrity themed" to be anything even remotely close to a selling point for oreos, and that therefore there is no value in them being hired by Nabisco.

But I may as well be pissing in the wind. Celebrity worship seems to be incredibly deeply ingrained in human psychology. Maybe he's right that we can't get rid of it, we can just change the norms around it.

I apparently have a very uncommon viewpoint on this, given the flavor of the comments.

I won't try and say that this situation is totally fine, or ideal, or anything close to it, but I think that in order for us to know how to feel, we need one very important piece of information that is missing: was the actual BIOS update itself bad in some way, or was this just the kind of error that happens sometimes, especially as hardware ages.

If it was the former, then this becomes quite bad: Framework released (even if they were not the ones who made it) a software update that bricked someones computer, and it is incumbent upon them to fix it, even out of warranty.

If it's the latter, then, I'm sorry, but that's the kind of thing that happens sometimes. Yes, having dual bios chips or some other way to recover from a failed flash would be nice, but I don't know the engineering trade offs to make that happen. Lots of desktop motherboards have it, where space is not at a premium, but do any laptop motherboards have it? My guess is that, at the bare minimum, it's much much less frequent.

I think that, in the latter situation, the main thing that I would like to have seen from a company like Framework, with their ethos, is to provide the pogo pin reflashing tool (at a reasonable price), along with the necessary instructions and files, either for the user, or for a local, inexpensive computer repair shop (depending on the users preference). So even in the latter situation, I do think that Frameworks support is lacking here. This seems like the kind of thing that, with the proper tools (which seem cheap) and instructions and files, that this wouldn't actually be that hard, especially for the type of consumer that would buy an upgradeable, modular laptop.

But, in the case that the BIOS itself was not bad/caused the bricking, then I think the rhetoric around this is overblown. I'm not sure that any laptop I've ever had before has ever told me that I needed a bios update (aka: provided that level of support post purchase).

Again, if the BIOS was in fact bad, and caused the brick (and no, a thread of people who experienced the problem is not enough to conclude this), then that's a very different situation, and the level of failure exceeds even what is described here. And even if it wasn't bad, I don't think think that "buy a new mainboard" is the appropriate service response when "buy these $20 dollars of parts and tools, and follow this guide" would likely have solved the problem.

But, as I understand it, BIOS updates are always somewhat dangerous. If Framework is on the hook for every time a BIOS goes bad outside of warranty even in situations where nothing they did directly caused the issue, then what they will do is just stop offering BIOS updates outside the warranty window. We can hold two ideas in our heads at once: Are they completely and perfectly living up to their ideals? I think that the answer here is obviously, even in the least bad case, no they are not. But are they providing better service than other laptop manufacturers? I think that as long as the BIOS file wasn't bad, the answer is yes. No laptop manufacturer would have offered to fix this out of warranty if they even provided continued BIOS updates, and for most manufacturers, their answer would have been "buy an entire new computer", and your only alternative would be third party resellers or used parts on ebay to get a new motherboard.

-edit- After doing a bit more research, BIOS recovery paths in laptops, while not universal or as common as in desktops, are also not exactly rare, and not having one, in a company with Frameworks ethos and stance, is worse than I initially assumed.

I think that, even if this isn't due to a bad BIOS or updater (which, again, would make them, in my opinion, liable for fixing it), then this is a very significant oversight, and the fact that they don't provide the support necessary to route around it (reasonably priced tools and clear, well written instructions) is even worse.

That would make sense if we already knew that, for these kinds of tasks it was significantly worse. The tests that I'm aware of for these tasks show it as still performing near the top.

Curious why you didn't try Gemini 3 pro? That is the model I've been using for OCR entry of handwritten datasheets (JPGS of datasheets, structured JSON output). At my scale, the cost of 3 pro is basically not an issue, but if there are improvements in quality, I'd definitely be willing to explore other models