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The broadly open internet is probably not long for this world. If you scrape using fake accounts, that clearly violates ToS you agree to. Whereas for public pages it's less clear how courts will rule.

With companies increasingly viewing their defenseability and value as their data, their online presence will become more gated, and curated through their managed experiences. Social media, news, reddit, etc are already like this, and it's not inconceivable that companies like Amazon, Ebay (who are fighting their own scraping battles) move the direction of sign in to visit more than a few pages.

This would mean that we'll all be forced to use accounts to see anything substantial within a site. And it'll be harder to view things across sites.

I know that this particular case is about scraping personal data, but I think it's a catalyst for many upcoming lawsuits that will broadly shift the internet in an undesirable direction

Can't speak to Germany, but one thing I like in the Netherlands is that if you approach an empty intersection the light will automatically turn green for you. Have never seen anything like that in North America.

And the roads themselves are good in NL (huge contrast when I moved to Montreal, where we'd have a metal mesh underneath bridges to catch falling concrete)

> This is a major problem at an intersection near me that I used to have to drive through frequently. Two intersections, only about 500 feet between them

In San Francisco (as well as other cities I've lived in) they put police in the middle of intersections during rush hour to guide traffic (i.e., stop cars before they drive into an intersection that they'll get stuck in the middle of). Seems woefully inefficient

I feel fortunate that today's distractions didn't exist when I was younger (or I probably wouldn't read many books).

Nowadays I "turn off" all the distractions that I can before bed to get a few pages in. Reading during the day is still pretty challenging if the book has dull bits (I recently finished the 3 body problem series. At it's peak, its some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. But some parts of the books were such a slog to get through. During those sections I often found myself reaching for my phone, just out of habit)

english is my second language, but I learned it early enough that I didn't have to study the rules (and it more or less replaced my mother tongue).

Years later a friend who was learning english asked me the difference between "a" and "an" and I realised I had no idea. I know when to use each, but not the rule governing why.

Fascinating how different the experience learning a language can be when do you explicitly, through learning the structure and rules, versus via immersion where you know what's right, but perhaps not why.

I'd assume the algorithm has changed over the last 13 years. And they're probably better off not sharing exactly how ranking (and penalties) work.

It's clearly easy to mobilize armies of users (or, these days, agents) to upvote submissions or warm up an account. I receive emails all the time offering this kind of service across virtually every website I have any presence.

But without explicitly published rules, it's harder to figure out what works through trial and error, especially if account history plays a role. Agents will clearly optimize around the rules, so I it's probably more important than ever that they're vague. X "open sourced" its algorithm (sort of...), and the bot problem there is as bad as its ever been.

S3 has 11 9s of durability

(excluding the geopolitical incidents)

added

The Meta model (of cheaper hardware, highly subsidized) is probably not long for this world, with the recent increase in component costs.

Lower volume with consumers fully covering the device cost will probably become the norm, which doesn't bode particularly well for this industry (at least in the short term)

Many systems are explicitly built around a certain level of friction. Things can be easy and transparent (but not *too* easy or transparent).

Agentic AI collapses that in ways that threaten existing business models, especially in retail (but also credit card points, discount retailers, mail in rebates and sales, cheap flights, etc).

Either it'll be forbidden, or businesses will have to adapt in ways that may not be favorable to Amazon, etc.

is he broadly known? Sure, his books have done well - but have they really reached a very broad set of people?

As a science educator, I think the only true household name at present is probably Neil deGrasse Tyson

He's a very underrated science communicator. We need more people like him pulling physics into the cultural zeitgeist through a positive lens.

Too much of the science that breaks into the mainstream (AI being the obvious example) is framed primarily from a negative viewpoint (or, remember the "LHC will spawn a blackhole that engulfs the earth" talk, instead of a focus on the incredible science behind it)

I would probably still have my iPhone 12 mini if not for what happened to its battery. Loved that form factor, but the battery went from bad to worse in just a couple of years.

Hopefully these models have a longer lifespan before the battery life forces a replacement. If they truly offer 36 hours, there's more runway before they hit the < 18 hours point at which many people need a refresh

I have no idea which iPhone version I have anymore. It doesn't feel as though it's missing anything, though.But I'd upgrade immediately if the new models truly offered better AI experience.

Forgive my skepticism that Apple will get it right. Even the lauded latest version of Siri is far worse than the labs' offerings or Android at voice dictation (I now have to fix 1 word per sentence instead of 4, previously)

The only thing I really want is significantly improved battery life (that could last for an entire flight).

But in the end, it'll be the desire to eradicate the lightning port from my life that forces my hand on the upgrade

Yeah, I wouldn't purport to use this as a measure of intelligence as it applies to humans. I'd leave that to the philosophers, but my intuition is that models are still a long way off of true human-like intelligence (though benefit from certain unfair advantages).

I'm most interested in these problems as a relative measure of performance for successive model generations. If the prior generation couldn't solve a problem but the current one can, that's useful information, especially when we take into account what the proofs look like.

It's not a perfect benchmark, but I prefer it to many others that I see floating around.

What does this mean?

There are 1217 problems that Erdos proposed, 595 of which are open: https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems

Unlike traditional benchmarks, it's difficult to overfit your models to produce flattering results to unsolved problems. The open problems very likely do not have published solutions (the initial batches were merely models surfacing data that wasn't published in obvious places, but we're past that now). New models will exhibit something novel by adding solutions. And the matter of solution is interesting as well (contradiction versus a positive proof).

I would venture to predict it'll take years to decades to get to 0 open problems. But I'd be very happy to have this comment look foolish in retrospect as models continue to improve

I like Erdos problems as a benchmark. Models continue to solve them, but a pretty tepid rate now that the low hanging fruit has been taken.

From https://epoch.ai/latest/announcing-frontiermath-erdos

> Only GPT-6 Astra solved anything: 2 of the 68 problems. It disproved problem 74 by finding a counterexample, at a cost of $218 and 15 hours of working time, and it proved problem 126, at a cost of $247 and 16 hours

> Across all attempts, GPT-6 Astra solved 5 of the 68 problems at least once: the two above, plus problem 1, which it disproved, and problem 548 and problem 571, which it proved. Most of the remaining problems were attempted between two and five times in total (172 attempts), and none was solved. Reaching these five solutions took over $220,000 of compute across all attempts, compared with roughly $20,000 for the benchmark run itself.

Which implies a genuine improvement in capability, but there's a still a very long tail ahead that models will continue to need to improve to capture.

I do miss that mall.

When I first moved to SF I'd go for dinner and then watch movies there with friends. Became a bit of a ritual.

After those options disappeared, I'd still go regularly to peruse the Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, among other small stores.

When those disappeared I'd still visit regularly, to get some exercise (I lived nearby) or visit the food court.

Seems it's simply too large for anyone to want to take another chance on it. And yet it feels insane that a mall in the center of a major city is sitting there, abandoned while politicians discuss turning it into a soccer stadium.

I could dream up so many ways to use that space

for how long were you in this career? How did your job change (if it all) during that time?

I think FF is in a difficult place.

The only community they have any penetration in is the developer one (in its prime non-technical people would tell me they used Firefox since IE was insecure. Their techy friends would tell them to use it and the message carried some actual weight back then).

Today they are a large organization that needs to make money to sustain itself, while facing declining usage, and less favorable terms for search engine integrations.

And our community (developers) is the least likely to take kindly to the increasing monetization slop (promoted articles, pestering about pocket and their VPN offering, continually requiring accepting new ToS, reminders to use new features, etc).

I mostly use FF, because I think we'll lose something if it disappears (for example, DRM will become intolerable, web inspectors will become more opaque, and generally future web standards may be much more controlled by a small set of large orgs with their own interests).

But I use FF with less enthusiasm every passing day

I'd let the dust settle rather than trusting benchmarks. But in general a third competitive frontier model would be great.

I still think that it's very possible Gemini gets its act together and becomes the true competitor to the existing frontier models (on more than just cost). But they sure are taking their time with this one, and recent org changes don't exactly signal confidence

I've asked it before to write in a style similar to Orwell (either directly, or by following his published rules for writing). I do hope that continues to be supported.

I just can't stand to see any more "Why It Matters.", and this trick seems to strip out the worst offenders

But then how will I possibly know that someone in my network achieved a new highscore in puzzle solving??

I’d be interested these stats broken down between domains associated with operating companies and personal or hobby domains.

The latter are likely to adopt much more slowly simply because of less perceived risk, lower payoff (no vendor reviews), and less dedicated technical expertise.

Just like personal sites were slow to adopt HTTPS. Mass HTTPS adoption happened once browser warnings and SEO incentives rendered sites mostly useless without it.

Thanks for the extra context!

I didn't see a published date, but taking another look, I suppose that "Copyright © 1995-2012 nycsubway.org." is a giveaway that some of this information might be stale.

Doesn't feel much like it day-to-day in the NYC subway, but glad things are indeed continuing to change

Moving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility

Thanks, I'm glad it helped! I still think it's too long, but kudos to those that made it through

Agreed on all of these points. I think that this will happen (...eventually)

I think this is part of a recurring pattern in tech of pushing boundaries around copyright.

In the last few years, we had Google scanning books, Google threatening to shut down News in Canada rather than pay publishers, LLMs summarizing articles on social platforms, crawlers bypassing paywalls, and so on.

Each time, the industry frames it as their interpretation of the current law, which were usually not written with these specific future use cases in mind.

In my view the current discussion regarding Gen AI is similar.