abixb

Glad to see a fellow Madisonian make it to HN frontpage. Great work!

I feel it's strategic, like a massive DDoS/"shock and awe" style attack on competitors. Gotta love it as PROsumers though!

Insightful paper. Policy/lawmakers needs to take much more input from high-quality, publicly funded (aka unbiased) research and make informed decisions on restricting content type. The social media companies rn are akin to tobacco companies selling products/services to kids (and adults!) with zero meaningful restriction or warnings. There's a mountain of research showing cognitive performance impacts from content consumed through smartphone, especially fluffy, low quality "algorithmic feed" content.

BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0]

When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal.

Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remov...

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-...

[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-co...

Okay, Gemini 3.0 Pro has officially surpassed Claude 4.5 (and GPT-5.1) as the top ranked model based on my private evals (multimodal reasoning w/ images/audio files and solving complex Caesar/transposition ciphers, etc.).

Claude 4.5 solved it as well (the Caesar/transposition ciphers), but Gemini 3.0 Pro's method and approach was a lot more elegant. Just my $0.02.

We might be on to creating a new crowd-ranked LLM benchmark here.

>Qwen 2.5's clocks, on the other hand, look like they never make it out of the womb.

More like fell headfirst into the ground.

I'm disappointed with Gemini 2.5 (not sure Pro or Flash) -- I've personally had _fantastic_ results with Gemini 2.5 Pro building PWA, especially since the May 2025 "coding update." [0]

[0] https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-2-5-pro-updates/

As someone with barebones understanding of "world models," how does this differ from sophisticated game engines that generate three-dimensional worlds? Is it simply the adaptation of transformer architecture in generating the 3-D world v/s using a static/predictable script as in game engines (learned dynamics vs deterministic simulation mimicking 'generation')? Would love an explanation from SMEs.

Some of the best AI researchers and labs have been from the EU (DeepMind, Alan Turing Institute, Mistral, et al.). We in the US have mature capital markets and stupid easy access to capital, of course, but EU still punches well above its weight when it comes to deep, fundamental AI research.

Applying Occam's Razor -- "smart" people generally are a lot more aware of the ways of our world and its operating mechanics, and a lot of it is not pretty. Therefore, they're able to see behind the veil/'maya' of blissful ignorance, leading to "unhappiness."

With LLMs, I'm viscerally aware that it's a bot generating output from its pre-trained/fine-tuned model weights with occasional RAG.

With reddit, folks go there expecting some semblance of genuine human interaction (reddit's #1 rule was "remember the human"). So, there's that expectation differential. Not ironic at all.

I do check the RAG sources from deep research, but you're very right in that it's easy to start taking mental shortcuts and end up over relying on LLMs to do the research/thinking for you.

Yeah, I'm a bit young for bulletin boards. I did use classic forums (LTT and similar tech/pc building ones), but the old reddit was just far too convenient and far too addicting.

Just wanted to add this -- reddit was the perhaps the tool that I had access to growing up (I'm an older Gen-Z, the oldest) that equalized the power differential for me when it came to researching a new product or a service. The ability to hop on to very niche subreddits discussing the very thing I was going to make a purchase decision on -- with some of the posts being written by folks who genuinely knew what they were talking about -- made a huge difference, aside from the general good vibes of feeling part of a community (monthly megathreads, stickies, etc.).

I use AI tools now and run lots of 'deep research' prompts before making decisions, but I definitely miss the 'community aspect' of niche subreddits, with their messiness and turf wars. I miss them because I barely go on reddit anymore (except r/LocalLLaMA and other tech heavy subs), most of the content is just obviously bot generated, which is just depressing.

I'm sure lots of "readers" of such articles fed it to another AI model to summarize it, thereby completely bypassing the usual human experience of writing and then careful (and critical) reading and parsing of the article text. I weep for the future.

Also, reminds me of this cartoon from March 2023. [0]

[0] https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

>What happened wasn't just carelessness on the part of Big Tech. It was a power move. They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.

Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content.

Dead internet theory in full effect.

We should still wait around to see if Huawei is able to perfect its Ascend series for training and inferencing SOTA models.

My roast summary with referrer field disabled:

"Brave of you to arrive here directly from nowhere like a digital hermit, flexing 16 CPU cores just to run Edge 132.0.0.0 like it’s a beta-testing crisis hotline—enjoying Wisconsin’s -40° wind chills so much you’ve even got your browser set to "arctic Blink engine." At least your 2560x1440 screen lets you see exactly how lonely that empty referrer field looks."

This is the most fun post/link I've interacted with across social media all week, haha. I'm going to test this from all of me and my SO's personal devices of various form factors. Thanks OP!

## Edit:

Here's the roast from my iPhone SE 3 device on 5G cellular (thinks I'm in Atlanta for some reason, lol):

"Roast: Oh, an iOS 18 beta user in Atlanta—how bold of you to test Apple’s unfinished bugs while flexing that three-core “supercomputer” like Georgia’s tech scene peaked with a fax machine. Your screen’s so tiny (375x667) it makes Hacker News look like a MySpace page, which tracks, since you clearly clicked here mid-procrastination scroll to avoid finishing your side hustle. Congrats on being the NPC who still uses “Mobile Safari” unironically—your cookie-enabled loyalty to Apple is almost as tragic as your referral from a site where everyone’s arguing about TypeScript."

Deeper research pointed to Apple's "Displays" kb page for UIKit Size, and it tracks with my device type, as SE 3 is based on iPhone 8 [0]

[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/De...

Given sama is a Bay Area native now, I think he might not feel as connected to Chicago or St Louis or the Midwest in general.

Totally nothing bad happened in the decade following the last perfect square year in 1936. :')

US Central Time here, so still a couple hours to go, but HAPPY NEW YEAR to y'all fellow HN-ers -- HN is probably the least guilt-ridden procrastination I do on the whole wide internet. Thank you to every one of you who has made HN among the most intellectually dense places on the web -- I wouldn't be where I'm today without reading all the insightful comments, submitted links and perspectives of all the HN-ers over the last 7 years.

My wish for the new year: hopefully, AI singularity is still a few years away and doesn't happen in 2025!

I agree. A good chunk of the tech trends in the last decade were indeed rent seeking, but silent revolution was happening in the transformers and the neural network architecture domain, which made today's products possible.

And I'd wager that there are silent revolutions happening all across colossus that's the tech industry that will become apparent in the next decade.

Jeff Bezos put it best during his recent interview at the 2024 NYTimes Dealbook Summit, "We're living in multiple golden ages at the same time." There's never been a better time to be alive.

Student here, and this has to be the most satisfying 20 minutes I spent cloning a GitHub repo in a while.

Here are a few things I encountered which might probably help others:

    # Version mismatch: 
    The install version of node.js I had (v12.22.9) was too old to meet the project's requirements (>= 18.13). 

To fix that, I used nvm to install the right Node.js version (>18.0)

    # Version check before install: Used the following to check version to verify before proceeding ahead with building it:
    node -v
    npm -v

It ran successfully, and I've been playing around with built-in Python3 and C scripts and pushed the modified repo to my personal GitHub. Thank you, dev!

I clicked on this thread to type that exact thing, holy smokes.

You're referring to Hooli's streaming of UFC fight that goes awry and Gavin Belson totally loses it, lol. Great scene and totally relevant to what's happening with Netflix rn.

Yeah, the ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of Facebook and Instagram (post-acquisition) as an open platform for advertisers versus mostly for early adopters/enthusiasts really killed the "fun" of the internet.

Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.

Here's another ADORABLE one I found of a little kid almost getting the soccer ball into the net (MVI_1012.MOV) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6eYAxaXijc

Commercialization and infiltration of advertising-dollars-seeking "influencers" ruins social media sites.

I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.

For those lacking context: https://x.com/anthropicai/status/1848742761278611504

From the Anthropic tweet (X post?):

"Even while recording these demos, we encountered some amusing moments. In one, Claude accidentally stopped a long-running screen recording, causing all footage to be lost.

Later, Claude took a break from our coding demo and began to peruse photos of Yellowstone National Park."

>Claude really likes Firefox.

I don't mind being reigned over by AI overlords that'll choose FOSS over proprietary.

I wonder why they didn't choose a "point update" scheme, like bumping it up to v3.6, for example. I agree, the naming is super confusing.

What has been -- in your personal experience as well as in the experience of some of your lawyer colleagues -- some of the 'hardest' cases wrt employment authorization for US-based startups and YC? And why?

Also, how are you anticipating the immigration landscape to change especially if President Donald Trump returns to the White House in January 2025? I'm asking this in the context of the 2017-2021 Trump administration's massive clampdown on Specialty Occupation visas through executive orders. [0]

[0] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/tr...