alwa

They also use flock to find and accuse people who did commit crimes and accuse them of having done so.

They also find and accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit without using Flock.

They also use Flock to skip accusing people who they might have suspected if it weren’t for Flock evidence that exonerates them.

It seems like any meaningful analysis needs to consider the rates of all four combinations of {true|false} {accusations|exonerations}, and compare that matrix to the matrix for the status quo techniques.

Maybe so, but four physical trucks, interpreting physical radio waves in their immediate vicinity, allocated across the whole state of Texas… that’s “targeted,” not “mass.”

Are we talking about the app operationally day-to-day, or the app vis a vis the way it helps end users flash encrypted firmware images OTA to the ESP32 (like Chip alludes to in gp comment)?

If there are no more app updates, presumably there are no more firmware updates either, so the flashing part probably doesn’t matter (and you can probably flash the last published image to an authentic device by other ESP32-y means if you really need to).

As to the day-to-day: Pretty sure the hardware still records regular ol’ MIDI files to the SD card. The app seems incredibly well-thought-out and ergonomic but, at the end of the day, nonessential to the device’s core function.

Somebody could presumably build and sell their own “MIDI Recorder Loop Nonstop Device Digital Piano Upgraded New 100%,” but it wouldn't be a Jamcorder, you couldn’t flash Jamcorder firmware updates to it just by slapping an ESP32 in a case, and the official Jamcorder companion app would not talk to it. Which… fair enough, right?

For that matter it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody could write their own client for the real Jamcorder, if they felt so inclined… but with the official stack so absolutely perfect from a design perspective, why would they?

What’s more, it’s precisely that genuine love of the game that makes your thing so appealing to the others. Authenticity’s hard to fake!

Sometimes when I feel that way, I take it as a sign that there must be something about it that I’m missing.

I try to take that feeling of “why is this here” as my cue not to reflexively kick the thing in front of me, but to reflect more deeply on what it is that the others are seeing in it.

Sometimes I figure out what that is, other times I stay puzzled. Sometimes I get it and it’s just not for me, but I can learn something from the way the others appreciate it. Sometimes it’s just not a room I want to be in.

But over my life I’ve learned by far the most—at least in terms of big coarse new ways of looking at things and of understanding other people—from the rooms I fit in least naturally, and from the phenomena whose appeal most confuses me at first glance.

YMMV, Chesterton’s Fence, etc.

I like that you like it, and that you did it because you like it. That’s reason enough.

I’m not sure what’s bringing out all the meanness in the sibling comments here, but I hope you’re able to tune them out. For what it’s worth I think their criticism is misplaced.

I don’t like that people are punishing you for taking creative and technical risks in public. Doing “the right way” for its own sake, especially in your personal space, is the path to mediocrity—especially at your age and stage (as indicated on your about page).

Please keep trying what speaks to you. You’ll get truer to your vision and stronger at executing on it with every effort you make.

And personally, I find the aesthetic proposition provocative, I feel like there’s something meaningful down the path you’re thinking. Illegitimi non carborundum!

I noticed this the last time it came through; it seems very interesting, and I'm glad it's in the second-chance pile.

But I don't have a History Today subscription, the usual workarounds aren't working for me, and I'm not so interested as to initiate a £99/year relationship (and/or jump into a "trial subscription" trap) blindly on the basis of a single paragraph.

At the risk of nudging the boundaries of site etiquette--would anybody happen to know of a lower-commitment way to engage with this piece?

You are reading gp’s comment correctly as it was written, but it omits the next line in the source study:

> Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income.

They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.

Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t tend to bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.

I think about it like Google Earth or something. I happen to have much-higher-res imagery of London than of the Cotswolds. That doesn’t mean my view, when zoomed out to “the whole United Kingdom,” is necessarily misleading. It does mean I can additionally make more detailed claims about Piccadilly Circus than about the sheep fields or whatever.

To echo your point—the “from the dawn of existence, up to this moment” framing seems to me a fairly familiar way for amateurs to reach for gravitas, in wedding speeches in particular, and especially between partners both of a certain social milieu…

I wonder how much creativity matters for this type of work.

I’m reminded of iPhoto’s little chintzy auto-generated reminiscence movies. Nobody confuses those “Ken Burns Effect” auto-slideshows with, well, Ken Burns’ work—much less art or creativity—but I still find myself moved to see my memories all hookered up in that format sometimes.

Love this so far! From the mechanic perspective, sure; but even more from the sheer degree of Philly love and whimsy that shines through. Can't wait for the Show HN.

Or, for that matter—the whole thing where Quechua folks chew coca leaf all day, and have for eons, without obvious ill effect…

Coca : cocaine :: kratom : the stuff that just got listed, right?

Feels a lot more like an offer than a hard sell to me.

I do sense the same thing you do, though; that there’s something of a religious revival swelling, at least in the West that’s overwhelmingly represented here:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/10/20/growing-shar...

Economist via archive: https://archive.ph/M7NW0

I feel like that presumes that neurodivergence is in fact the “problem” or the underlying concern.

Which it might be, and it might not be—any more than we can conclude that the solution to “my throat hurts” is “take antibiotics.” (If it’s bacterial, that could cure it near-instantly; if it’s viral, it won’t do anything and might hurt in the aggregate)

In that analogy, to my thinking, church is maybe like “gargle some salt water”—the underlying biological processes may or may not be addressable by modern medicine, and you should probably talk to the doctor too—but the salt water may well make you feel better regardless.

And some people hate salt! More power to them! But I’m not coming at the folk remedy person for offering “have you thought about it.”

For that matter “church” can take many forms, even ostensibly secular ones. My raver friends, for example, speak of the dance floor as “church,” and think about it rather explicitly in terms of spiritual reconnection.

Sometimes the secular and the organized churches even cross paths…

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

Definitely! In fact that seems to be a central aspect of the proposition:

> Above all, a GA should amplify the principal, and not simply substitute for them for someone else’s purposes or benefit.

[…]

> A GA must be aligned with its principal. It should not be designed to manipulate or control or guide the principal in any way which does not derive from the principal themselves. “Constitutional AI”, “Terms of Service”, “social harmony” etc. may all have their place, particularly for widely deployed superintelligent systems—but inside the privacy of a GA, the principal must have freedom from optimization pressure.

…I read this to suggest that it should amplify a scammer’s scamming, a thinker’s thinking, a tinkerer’s tinkering, a cop’s sleuthing… and I’d imagine it implies amplifying a person’s capability to avoid being scammed, too…

One man’s scam is another man’s “pro-social nudge” and another man’s “attractive opportunity” and another’s “advertisement for a delightful consumer wonder” and another’s “patriotic duty to sustain demand to prop up the too-big-to-fail ideas we bet the whole economy on.”

When you fix and operationalize all values centrally, universally, and externally to the principal… that’s current-gen frontier chatbots, not Gwern’s GA concept.

Seems wise to experience at least a little bit of “functioning as an adult in the world” independently of phone habits…

It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…

Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.

I come back to Babel and the Bruegel image too, although taking from it a little less optimism.

I feel these systems rising and sprawling with wee myopic agents developing out their little corners of this unknowably vast whole… a tower with 50 parapets on one side and some wacky cantilevered maiden tower on the other, and a very serviceable adobe roof over some patio for god-knows-why, and thatch over the landing next to it…

Some grotesque fatberg of designs that make sense at the level of individual design efforts, but that lack the fractal sort of levels of policy and judgment that unify the overall enterprise.

The overall language, as it were.

And language takes discipline to establish and maintain through any sufficiently large group of people—witness the company-speak or army-speak of pretty much any successful organization.

We feel like we’ve conquered the problem of talking the same language as our “Gastown Mayors” (who in turn are talking the same language as their “polecats” and so on all the way down the chain of golems)… but it’s only when it’s all built that the good Lord will humble us… that we’ll realize the understanding we thought we’d transmitted perfectly from our thrones wasn’t quite so shared as we’d imagined.

And stored in the specific forms the machine can exploit.

Over a long enough timescale, though… really, really slow solar trickle charge to a space-capacitor bank? A thousand years’ suns, culminating in a glorious orgy of smelting?

The ones that strike me are the ones exaggerating certitude, to an inappropriate degree and with a certain degree of excitement:

“Exact” “Honest” “Load-bearing” “Root cause”

I know there are more that are slipping my addled mind. But what stands out to me is a sense of a junior who’s very proud that they’ve conquered the murk and messiness and achieved True Certitude in their pursuit of their task. Compensating, with emphatic tone and bravado, for the uneasy feelings and self-doubt of battling chaos with the tools of reason.

…Even as it’s usually my job to let them down gently as I puncture their tidy analysis and reintroduce complications… you want a root cause analysis, Claude old boy, let’s make a root cause analysis…

I mean

Honestly from a BoM and version control standpoint, the fax might work out to be superior… they come timestamped; pop them in a filing cabinet, and…

I think that’s right, yes… from TFA:

> It's two times stronger than steel, three times stronger than aluminum, and twice as strong as the same alloy made in a conventional way.

The source paper in Science, fwiw:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec4995

And as a personal exercise in intellectual humility, I cast my eyes over the supplementary materials (as those are free-to-the-public)… I’d recommend it:

https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aec4995/su...

I get a huge thrill out of looking at serious work outside my expertise. When I’m tempted to imagine the proposition is as simple as it seems from the headline (or the article, or the editor’s note, or the abstract), it excites me to remember just how deeply and carefully and thoroughly people think through things I barely understand.

I try not to hold strong opinions, and to be equinanimous, but—don’t let location be the guide. As an Old, let me assure you… 2-3 years is so much less time than it seems to you now. You can live anywhere for the duration of a Master’s program.

If you’re the sort of human who is weighing a choice between locations now (meaning, I assume, major cities; informed mainly by your personal preferences rather than, say, an obligation to stay close to family) then you’ll be able to choose between locations afterward too.

Your career will be fine. It will reinvent itself constantly over the years of your working life anyway.

Amazon’s barely as old as you are; your professors at Cambridge will—themselves, individually—have been thinking seriously for twice that long, about aspects of the human condition that have proven durable over orders of magnitude longer.

The best preparation to stay oriented through rapid change is a firm grounding in the unchanging. Your choice now will change who you are. And as wise as “The Amazon Way” may be, humanity’s collective experience offers a much more diverse intellectual toolkit than just that way of working.

Cambridge. Train the human, not the machine.

Amazon will still be there, if that’s what you decide for your soul afterward. If you made the cut now, you’ll make the cut again in future.

The world is so much bigger than commerce. Even if you choose to work the world of commerce, you’ll have a richer experience of it, and bring more subtle value to your professional career, entering into it with eyes that can see other hues in the outside world.

Plus relationships with a cohort of smart thoughtful humans who are engaging with the world from other perspectives, as you all go into the decades ahead.

I think the engineers tend to say nuclear makes much more sense than solar for baseload right? That, and “most of the cost and delay is in these obscenely overcautious regulations?”

Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient.

So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.

What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?

And payment method, presumably. At least until they get the KYC stuff revved up…

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver...

> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.

Shiver.

Rumor is that you do in fact get a black mark [0]… or, conversely, a “vetted” mark [1]… tied back certainly to your payment method and increasingly to your government name [2].

[0] e.g. https://docs.bswen.com/blog/2026-03-21-detect-claude-hidden-... , https://www.anthropic.com/news/building-safeguards-for-claud... , https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319415/20260701/claude-co...

[1] e.g. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-real-time-cy...

[2] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver...

I didn’t get the sense from TFA that STRICT is strictly better, only that it’s how this person prefers to operate in their time and context and experience.

At some level, shouldn’t choices where one option is strictly better not surface as configurable choices at all?

If I have to memorize sets of behaviors by “compatibility version,” don’t I now have to remember lots of sets of particular footguns, across time and across systems that I work on (or parachute into)?

Is it better to learn that it exists through surprise, by way of an engine upgrade suddenly changing the behavior of the software you wrote while in the bliss of your ignorance?

I'm timer-ambivalent--at the very least, I'd like to be able to continue through the sequence after getting stumped on one.

Maybe distinguish perfect/timely runs with the "trophy" you mention, or a "rank" from a scale (Bracket City's [0] "offices in a hypothetical city government" scale is cute). Or even a simple daily score. But I prefer to complete the daily puzzle even if I don't do it perfectly—and I find that "streak" oddly motivating despite myself. I dunno: "completed" and "completed perfectly" are two different flavors of reinforcement, both motivating.

As it is now, it feels like the game is punishing me for getting stuck on a single early puzzle, by withholding the other X puzzles in the set. And I feel like a consequence is that the game doesn't have a fixed "serving size" in my mind: it's either a 30-second single-clue game, or a 9-minute 18-clue game, and I don't know going in whether I'm getting the single cracker or the full afternoon tea today. I have to make 9 minutes of potential time for it, but I might only get 30 seconds of fun if I screw up.

As to your question 1), I'd like to see two things:

* A "shuffle" button. Often rearranging the letters helps me see it. I feel like I should be able to hit shuffle as much as I want with no cost in terms of the game mechanic--kind of analogous to playing with my (physical) Scrabble tiles.

* As far as a more helpful/"costly" chickening-out for when you're stumped and ready to give up... With Bracket City fresh on my mind, I like their approach with a single, progressive "help" mechanic. Hit it once, you get the first letter; hit it again, you reveal the full word and move right on (at some cost to your score, but blunting the disappointment by immediately giving you the fresh energy of the next clue).

[0] https://bracket.city , now at The Atlantic Magazine. Bonus feature I didn't know about until recently: they have a public-facing puzzle builder ("suburb builder") at https://builder.bracket.city . Thank you @brgross! [1]

[1] Bracket City's Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43160542